The Morning Retch: of babies, barriers and human foolishness

From the LA Times:

In 1994, then-Archbishop of Portland William Levada offered a simple answer for why the archdiocese shouldn't have been ordered to pay the costs of raising a child fathered by a church worker at a Portland, Ore., parish.

In her relationship with Arturo Uribe, then a seminarian and now a Whittier priest, the child's mother had engaged "in unprotected intercourse … when [she] should have known that could result in pregnancy," the church maintained in its answer to the lawsuit.

. . . the church. . . considers birth control a sin. . .

The former archbishop is now chief guardian of Catholic doctrine worldwide. The archbishop's new post as prefect of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was last held by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — now Pope Benedict XVI.

Catholic authorities claim that the archbishop probably never saw the argument, leaving defense against the woman's claim to his lawyers. I'm perfectly ready to believe this. And the lawyers had a job to do: save the diocese from paying out money.

Problem is, that's so ordinary. And the US Catholic church is welcome to use conventional secular methods of protecting itself -- but if it does so, it loses any special claim to stand outside conventional secular society and pontificate about whether a woman should be forced to bear a child she cannot care for or who I should be allowed to marry.

Oddly, this dyke really doesn't want to loathe the Roman Church. It is just another a human institution; it carries the ordinary flaws of all human institutions within it, despite claiming to speak for eternity as well. That's exactly what I understand Jesus to have done -- be human. Being a person, he did it better than institutions can, thus showing us God. And he certainly avoided signing on with the lawyers.