THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 11, 1994 TAG: 9409110026
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ELIZABETH SIMPSON
LENGTH: Medium: 59 lines
Sometimes it's hard to be Catholic.
Times like now.
I grimaced when I saw the Vatican leading the holdout on an attempt to stem the world's crushing population growth.
And winced again when I saw it was a woman the church chose to protest a plan that would send young girls to school, boost civil rights for women and reduce the number of unwanted children in the world.
Why is it that the single, celibate men who run the church need to hide behind a woman at the U.N. conference on population in Cairo? It was worse than a hollow gesture.
The Vatican's battle against abortion I can at least understand. The church hierarchy sees abortion as murder and must fight that.
But the church's stand against modern birth control methods is unconscionable. How can they cling to outdated traditions that lead to so many unwanted children. And mothers wracked from yearly childbirth. And a world smothering from the press of people.
Any woman, from a Chesapeake teenager to the wife of a subsistence farmer in Somalia, should have the right to decide if she wants a child. No group of men, particularly those who have no children or the responsibilities that go with them, should take that from her.
And yet, I was born into the Catholic Church. I cannot turn my back on it.
To me, being a Catholic is less about the pontiff handing down declarations and more about the priests and sisters who taught me morals and values in the steam-heated classrooms of the Catholic Church where I grew up.
It's about the faith that carried my mother through life, the worn rosary she caressed daily, the priest's hand she held during cancer's slow death.
The church, to me, is the priest who blessed my marriage, and the one who held my children aloft in baptism as they began their spiritual life. The faith is where I turn every day to wrestle over what is right and wrong.
You can say I'm practicing cafeteria-style religion, that I'm taking what I like and rejecting what I don't. But if you took away all the Catholics who disagree with the pope on divorce, abortion, homosexuality, birth control and female ordination, the church would be a lonely place.
Many of those same people, like myself, believe the church must change, and want to play a role in that. The Catholic Church may not be a democracy. But it can't ignore the voices that make up the church.
I am one of those voices, and I believe in a God of compassion. And can't understand why such a God would want so many children who are unwanted, unfed and, often, unloved. I believe in a God who values women as much as men. And wonder whether this debate would exist if there were women priests and bishops and popes. And I believe in a God who understands change.
I am torn between blind faith and a sense of right. And worry the changes that would square the two will not arrive in my lifetime or that of my daughters.
The place I usually go for answers - the church - is the place where my struggle begins. by CNB