Sister Wendy Beckett On Gay Marriage And Condoms

Sister Wendy Beckett
Wikipedia Article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Beckett

Wikiquote Entry
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wendy_Beckett

Sister Wendy's Story Of Painting
(All 10 episodes on YouTube)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBv0HezlOBw

In an interview for the Huffington Post in May 2007, Verena von Pfetten asked: You've spoken out about gay marriage. How do you balance what you believe with what you have sworn to uphold? Sister Wendy replied as follows: "I believe in loyalty. We should respect our church, but never believe that the church has the last word. The church is saying 'this', but I believe that sooner or later 'this' will change. 'This' is not the mind of our Lord. God is all love. It's a delicate balancing thing. The Church has changed its position over the years, and because the spirit is with the Church, in the end the Church will always get it right. But in the end. The spirit of the Church is the meaning of love, which hasn't yet, perhaps, been fully understood."^[6]

Alan: Conservative Catholics accuse liberal Catholics of cherry-picking those components of Catholic culture that accord with their personal preferences, as if liberals were unique in making selections from a "menu." 

Given the rigid nature of conservative Catholicism, especially as rigidity manifests in sexual matters, it is not surprising that they champion Pope Paul VI's encyclical, Humanae Vitae (as it relates to artificial contraception), making it a litmus of sine qua non orthodoxy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanae_Vitae 

But why do conservative Catholics gloss their own "cherry-picking" by ignoring (to take one example) the teachings of Pope John XXIII in his 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacem_in_Terris

Here is a list of notable quotations from that document. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/11/pacem-in-terris-and-world-government.html

I imagine conservative Catholics defend their dismissal of Good Pope John, claiming he does not address "matters of faith or morals" but rather "matters of custom and discipline."

The Etymology of "Morality"

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=moral

By my lights, quibbling over the definition of "morals" is no more credible than arguments between royalists and revolutionaries in the American Civil War, each accusing the other of such grotesque impropriety that they were obliged to upbraid them as unsuitable for leadership. (I often wonder what percentage of today's flag-waving patriots would have supported England during the American Revolution. My sister tells me that when George Washington's troops were starving at Valley Forge, neighboring farmers had ample stores but would not share them with disorderly upstarts challenging The Divine Right of Kings.)

The matter of doctrinal mutability receives rigorous treatment in "Why The Church Must Change: A Necessary Conversation." http://www.amazon.com/Why-Catholic-Church-Must-Change/dp/1442220783# 

In "Must Change," theologian Margaret Nutting Ralph cites passages from diverse encyclicals (and other magisterial documents) that are in frank contradiction of one another. 

An insightful review of "Why The Church Must Change" is available at the National Catholic Reporter - http://ncronline.org/books/2013/10/catholic-exodus-spurs-call-change .

"If Only Sister Wendy Beckett Had Taken Her Lead From Bishop Egan When Talking About Condoms On The Radio 

Sister Wendy Beckett, the art critic and contemplative nun who lives the life of a hermit in a caravan next to a Carmelite convent, was on Desert Island Discs just before Christmas. I enjoyed listening to her – but, like the curate’s egg, only in parts. Asked by the presenter, Kirsty Young, about her interest in art, she replied that “If you don’t know about God, art … can set you free.” She believes that we are all born with an instinct for art, “a kind of disguised God”, and she hopes that in her small way she might have helped some people “find God in beauty”.

I agree with all this, but I also recall reading the 19th-century French art critic, the Abbé Brémond, who pointed out that the humblest prayer is more significant and enduring than the greatest poetry ever written. Beauty can be seductive as a supreme cultural experience yet unaccompanied by what we call “grace”.

Towards the end of the programme Kirsty Young asked, as presenters usually do when confronted by a Catholic, what were Sister Wendy’s views on “condoms”. At this point I assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that Sister Wendy might talk about another kind of “beauty”: that of marital, self-giving love. She didn’t. After a long pause and choosing her words carefully, she implied that the wheels of the Church turned very slowly and that therefore it would take a long time before it would change its stance on this subject. What was one to make of this? It was confusing to the listener as nothing was quite spelt out – but the implication was as I have indicated: that in the passage of time the Church would change her teaching on birth control. If this is what Sister Wendy intended to imply, she gave some scandal to her listeners, including Kirsty Young who appeared quite satisfied with what she said.

What she should have stated, simply and clearly, was that the Church cannot alter her fundamental moral and ethical teachings as they are not hers to change; her task is to re-present them to each new generation for the beauty, truth and goodness they contain. A friend who also listened to Sister Wendy and who is very well up on Church teaching, emailed me to say she could not make head or tail of the nun’s response. My view is that Sister Wendy should stick to art, about which she knows a great deal and about which she communicates very lucidly – and leave questions about the “c” word to those better qualified than her to explain.

One of those so qualified is the new bishop of Portsmouth, Philip Egan. On the Sunday after Christmas, the Feast of the Holy Family, he actually circulated a pastoral letter on Humanae Vitae, a subject he agreed was “challenging and controversial” (which is why Kirsty Young raised it, naturally). He pointed out that the two big debates in our society today revolve around “sex and authority. What is the truth about human sexuality? And who can tell me how to live my life?” He described Humanae Vitae as a prophetic document for emphasising that the “two aspects of sexuality – love and life – cannot be divorced”, and pointed to the “catastrophic consequences” for society, 45 years on, now that sex has been reduced merely to a “leisure activity”.

As Bishop Egan says, Pope Paul’s encyclical has become the “elephant in the room” that no one mentions and he urged everyone in this Year of Faith “to discover again the Church’s wonderful vision of love and life, as expounded in the Catechism”. I think Kirsty Young should invite Bishop Egan to be a guest on Desert Island Discs and that Sister Wendy should ponder his pastoral letter. More even than the contemplation of great works of art we need, as the Bishop writes, “an outpouring of the Holy Spirit on our land [so that] the people of England find their way to salvation and happiness in Jesus Christ, true God and true Man, ever present and active in his Church”.

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Catholic Herald

  Link: 

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2013/01/02/if-only-sister-wendy-...