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Home Page > News > Poll of U.S. Catholics shows deep disconnect with their bishops, Vatican

Poll of U.S. Catholics shows deep disconnect with their bishops, Vatican

Large numbers in favor of gay marriage, end of celibacy and women priests

JAMES O'SHEA,

IrishCentral Staff Writer

Published Wednesday, March 6, 2013, 7:29 AM

Updated Wednesday, March 6, 2013, 10:17 AM

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Seven out of ten Catholics in the U.S. believe the next pope should let priests marry, allow women to become priests, and allow birth control

Photo by Guardian

Seven out of ten Catholics in the U.S. believe the next pope should let priests marry, allow women to become priests, and allow birth control.

Nine out of ten want the next pope to approve the use of condoms to prevent HIV.

Three quarters believe in abortion in some circumstances while six in 10 believe in the death penalty.

The child sex abuse scandal continues to dog the church with seven out of 10 believing the church and the Vatican has handled it poorly. The sex scandals are the biggest problems the church faces the survey found.

The figures showing a deep disconnect between American Catholics and their hierarchy and Rome were contained in a new poll of American Catholics carried out by The New York Times and CBS.

The survey reveals a congregation far more liberal than its hierarchy though the vast majority say they are happy with their own parish priest and continue to donate money to the local church.
Over six out of ten approve of gay marriage, a figure higher than the overall American figure of five out of ten approval.

Seven out of ten believe the Vatican and Pope Benedict did a very poor job in the child sex abuse scandal, a rise from three years ago.

Despite that four in 10 had a high opinion of retired Pope Benedict with only one in ten disliking him and most having no opinion.

On whether the pope is infallible when he pronounces on matters of faith only 40 per cent agreed with 46 per cent disagreeing.

When asked what was their top priority for the new pope the vast majority said it was to modernize the church.

See more: Vatican , Irish News , Irish Catholic Church , Irish Catholic Priest , Irish American

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78 Comments

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eiriamach | Mar 10, 2013, 08:45 PM EDT

In a ground-breaking 1907 book entitled "Christianity and the Social Crisis," Walter Rauschenbusch told a story about the director of an insane asylum. The director had a simple but perfectly reliable test to figure out whether a patient was truly insane or not. He would take the person to a sink and run the faucet, let the sink fill up with water, hand the person a ladle and a large bowl, and then instruct the person to empty out the water from the sink into the bowl. If the person first turned off the running faucet before trying to remove the water, he or she was sane! Joining the UN's campaign to end violence against women would be like turning off the faucet -- altogether too simple, too uncommonly common sense, too instinctively Christian for the Vatican and the bishops.

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eiriamach | Mar 10, 2013, 08:07 PM EDT

Catholics have a fine conservative web site named "First Things." But they forgot to provide a starting-point site named "First Clues."

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seanomelb | Mar 10, 2013, 06:51 PM EDT

Whilst studying English many years ago the teacher recommended we read a book "uncommon commonsense". Smyrnian and Gearoid could learn from this little gem.

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eiriamach | Mar 10, 2013, 03:28 PM EDT

I know that ignorance is almost always a remediable condition, Smyrian. (As a teacher, I continually witness students discarding ignorant opinions as they grow in knowledge and reasoning skills.) Sometimes, even stupidity (willful ignorance) is remediable, likewise close-mindedness, ideological loyalties, intolerance, and other irrational states of mind. And although I've been (falsely) accused of being anti-Catholic, Catholicism is also not an irremediable or "immutable" characteristic (there are millions of no-longer-Catholics these days). Even some cases of insanity are curable. Although, unfortunately, the appeal to reason and facts also sometimes fails in these cases, we must conclude that they are not in their nature "immutable." By contrast, skin color and gender identity and sexual orientation and genetic conditions ARE "immutable characteristics." How, then, do you figure I fit the olovely's profile of "fanatic": "rejecting other people for immutable characteristics"? I'm curious -- which immutable characteristic do you think I reject?

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Smyrnian | Mar 10, 2013, 08:11 AM EDT

Olovely - I agree with you. I also note that it puts Eireiamach very firmly in the fanatic camp but then again that was always clearly obvious.

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eiriamach | Mar 10, 2013, 06:35 AM EDT

Fanaticism and paranoia! It must be worrisome for far-right-fanatic Catholics to see a professor of Law at Notre Dame and Georgetown Law School, founder and 15-year director of Human Rights Watch, Juan Mendez, speaking out as a Catholic against genocide, torture, and denial of human rights, even to women. Juan Mendez! Juan Mendez does NOT serve on the UN's Commission on the Status of Women and is NOT the author of the UN initiative against violence that the Commission is sponsoring and that the Vatican is opposing and that is NOT pro-choice and that has nothing to do with abortion! Here we have an example of far-right-wing Catholics cannibalizing a Catholic with humane impulses, one who opposes rape, domestic abuse, torture, and coerced pregnancy! And simply because there is one person, Juan Mendez, who's not fanatically anti-choice working for the UN, Gearoid "reasons" that the Vatican must fight every effort by the UN to end violence against women. Rampant Paranoia!

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olovely | Mar 09, 2013, 06:25 PM EST

If you find yourself rejecting other people for immutable characteristics like their sexual orientation that's your first clue you've become a fanatic.

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seanomelb | Mar 09, 2013, 05:49 PM EST

Tell that to "saint Teresa" etc maybe you should tell it to the young woman in Limerick who died because the doctors would not abort the fetus until it had died thus killing the young mother.Gearoid you lack a sense of humanism andf live by a stict doctrine no different to the Taliban and other extreme religious organisations.

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PhlutiePhan | Mar 09, 2013, 04:29 PM EST

Disconnect can be looked at from two different directions. One view is that the Vatican is way out of touch with the American Church. From the other side of the canyon, it can also be stated that the American Church is decadent and run by pariahs out to destroy the Church. Read Malachi Brendan Martin, a Vatican II advisor, and you will know the "true story".

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Gearoid4 | Mar 09, 2013, 02:11 PM EST

No. you are wrong, Eiriamch, I have given a quote from one of the radical lobbyists at the UN, namely Juan E. Mendez, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment, who stated that it would be "torture" if abortion was refused to women. It seems that some people want to get abortion into the text of the treaty by any means which the Catholic Church is rightly opposed to. You go through the whole spiel about certain "rights" being denied to women and that the Catholic Church was no better than a slave-owner possessing the bodies of women. Well tell that to St Catherine of Sienna, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux or St Teresa of Avila who were all declared Doctors of the Church. Women will certainly not be liberated against so-called paternal constraint by access to abortion in the name of rights. In fact, this will be just a delusory "right" which causes death to the unborn child and terrible psychological consequences for a lot of women concerning unresolved grief and regret etc.

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eiriamach | Mar 09, 2013, 01:13 PM EST

Just in case a female visitor understands why I seem "over the top" about the Vatican's politics, she may follow up by researching other Churches' work, for example: Grace Mazala Phiri, national director of projects for the Zambia Anglican Council, organized workshops for the Anglican Church of the Province of Central Africa to honor International Women’s Day. She said, "This is a breakthrough! We [are] ... among the few that have taken such an initiative. The Anglican Church has taken the lead in advocating against gender-based violence.'” And on 3/5, Ambassador Anwarul Chowdhury praised the Anglican Communion's work to end violence against females: He "spoke to many issues at the heart of the growing Anglican movement to end violence against women and girls. The Anglican Church of Southern Africa and the Church of North India have already shown how effective partnerships can tackle sex trafficking in the areas of prevention, protection, and the care and rehabilitation of survivors." God's work continues, despite the roadblocks.

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eiriamach | Mar 09, 2013, 12:57 PM EST

No, Gearoid, you're wrong. There is no "pro-abortion" reference either "implicit" or "explicit" in either document I referenced. The burden of proof is upon the person who thinks it's there, not on anyone else to prove that it's not there! Quote the "explicit" or "implicit" pro-abortion language, or face the fact that the Vatican's and bishops' opposition to human rights for women and girls is based upon nothing more religious than rank bigotry, misogyny, and an unholy lust for power over the females in the pews. There can be no moral justification for opposing the protection of the law for victims of violence! Your Church's sophistic rationale is that human rights derive from "traditional values" -- you know, like thousands of years of slavery and "ownership" of women, tribal wars, ostracizing of the racially and sexually "different" -- all these were "traditional values" for centuries of human history. Do you think the Lord of History is waiting for us to reclaim these traditions?

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Gearoid4 | Mar 09, 2013, 11:23 AM EST

I should have stated that first crusade was in the 11th century and not 12th. As for your point concerning discrepancies as pointed out by some authors on the personal accounts of the apostles concerning the life of Jesus, one only has to remember how people struggle to recall the minutiae of events when they are called to court to give evidence for crimes that have happened decades before. The core truth of events remain in their head but certain memories can get distorted over time. The same with the gospels which have the consistent recalling of the birth, ministry and resurrection of a man called Jesus. Some gospels differ for example in the birth narrative. The birth of Jesus is narrated at the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke, but is not mentioned in Mark, and referred to very differently in John. But again it does not really undermine the authenticity of the account. We are all human and can remember the same events but with different emphases on certain aspects of them. It does not mean that they did not happen even if certain discrepancies occur but which are not enough to invalidate them. My logic is certainly not circular as I've used it in a linear and lateral fashion to demonstrate that one can make a reliable case for the reality of the claims of Christianity

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Gearoid4 | Mar 09, 2013, 11:17 AM EST

The black legend of the Spanish Inquisition was invented by protestant apologists in England in the 19th century to blacken Catholicism. Recent research shows that the death penalty and torture were seldom used and only sparingly. This does not excuse the use of these methods but we must be objective in our appraisal of those times. The Crusades contained some very unsavory events and these happened on both sides of the conflicts. The first Crusade which began in the 12th century was carried out to protect Christian pilgrims and places of worship from Muslim encroachment and it was a reaction to events rather than an initiation.

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Gearoid4 | Mar 09, 2013, 11:16 AM EST

@HorsesInMdstrm, I apologize if I took you up wrong on your very legitimate questions concerning the factual basis for the claims of the bible and Christian religion. It just seemed to me that your mentioning of the occupational status of the original apostles before they were called by Jesus is not really pertinent to the subject at hand. If you want to throw this reasoning i.e. lack of education into the general mix, then on the flip-side, one might query why Einstein one of the true giants in the history of Science recognized a creative impulse behind the celestial bodies and physical laws of the universe. You list the usual list of suspects when it comes to historical events that critics often cite in relation to nastiness that the Catholic Church was involved in. You are right that at times representatives of the Church have not acted in accordance with gospel values and in fact betrayed them. But events like the Inquisition and Crusades have been revisited by historians and the anti-Catholic myths and legends associated with them often dispelled. The Inquisition period lasted roughly from 15th to 19th centuries and often it was the secular juridical authorities who applied the harsh punishments rather than the Church. In fact the Church courts were often more lenient than their secular equivalents and rarely applied the death penalty.

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