Deep thinking while mowing the lawn

So, I love this joke I once heard on A Prairie Home Companion. Q: "How many Catholics does it take to change a light bulb?" A: "Change?"

Early last week, I had seen on NPR's Fresh Air Facebook page, a promo for a show asking the question, "Can you be Catholic and have a questioning mind?" I sure hope so, I thought, because I am. I do. This, I had to hear.

A little background first. My brothers and I were raised fiercely liberal and Catholic. Probably in that order. We grew up attending Mass weekly, completing all our sacraments, going to CCD (as we called it back then). We also bore witness to my mom storming out of church in frustration from time to time when a priest would utter something she deemed ultra-conservative or offensive. My upbringing heavily informed my political and religious viewpoints as an adult.

In my college years, I didn't think much about my faith. But after Mark and I married, and especially after we started a family, it came back to the forefront. We felt that it was important to introduce our kids to the faith with which we were both raised. We had the boys baptized, attended church weekly, enrolled them in what is now called faith formation. With kids, I reasoned, you have to make a firm decision about religious teaching. It sends a confusing message to attend church sporadically, I thought. So we were in. Are in.

Over the years, I suppose I've become ever more like my mom, though I have yet to storm out of church. I've watched the priest abuse scandal unfold with sorrow and disappointment. I've witnessed the Church becoming more and more conservative. When I hoped for change for the Church, the recently introduced new Mass translation was not what I had in mind. As Catholics, we're asked to accept the Magesterium, the infallible teaching of the Pope and bishops. In the face of mistakes the Church has made, ranging from small to huge, I simply cannot buy into its infallibility. I struggle with that. A lot.

That brings me back to the present. As I set out to mow the lawn on Friday, I decided that while I did my work I would listen to the Fresh Air episode, which featured an interview with Sister Pat Farrell, president of the Leadership Council of Women Religious (LCWR). I expected an interesting program, but I was stunned to hear someone, speaking with tremendous grace and intelligence, echo, almost verbatim, my views about the Catholic Church.

The LCWR represents 80 percent of the nuns in America. According to the program, "Four years ago, the Vatican group responsible for enforcing doctrine, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, began an assessment of the LCWR, motivated by the Vatican's concerns that the group expressed radical feminist views and challenged core Catholic positions on contraception, homosexuality and the ordination of women to the priesthood."

It goes on, "The final assessment was released in April, and it orders the group to conform to the teachings of the church. The archbishop of Seattle, assisted by two American bishops, have been appointed to oversee the group and work with it over the next five years to revise its statutes and review its programs."

Throughout the interview, host Terry Gross addresses with Farrell many of the issues that are important to me. For example, Gross points out that the LCWR was criticized for its stands on contraception and gay rights. Farrell explains that those criticisms are more a result of her group's refusal to speak against contraception and gay rights, saying further, "There are issues about which we think there's a need for genuine dialogue, and there doesn't seem to be a climate of that in the church right now."

The abortion debate is one I'd prefer not to touch with a 49-and-a-half-foot pole. But I will say that I heard great wisdom in Farrell's synthesis of the Catholic position on right to life. Here it is in its entirety, because I thought it was so good.

"I would say that all of us have a limited repertoire of what we're capable of talking about, and I think its absolutely valid that we choose to emphasize certain things over another. The bishop's conference itself selects certain issues to talk about and, understandably, would have to not be talking about everything.

"So I think the criticism of what we're not talking about seems to me, again, unfair, because religious have clearly given our lives to supporting life, to supporting the dignity of human persons. Our works are very much pro-life. We would question, however, any policy that is more pro-fetus than actually pro-life. You know, if the rights of the unborn trump all of the rights of all of those who are already born, that is a distortion too, if there's such an emphasis on that.

"However, we have sisters who work - all of our congregations have sisters who work in right-to-life issues. We also have many, many ministries that support life, who - we dedicate our efforts to those on the margins of society, many of whom are considered kind of throwaway people: the cognitively impaired, the chronically mentally ill, the elderly, the incarcerated, the people on death row. We have strongly spoken out against the death penalty, against war, hunger. All of those are right-to-life issues.

"And there's so much being said about abortion that is often phrased in such extreme and such polarizing terms, that to choose not to enter into a debate that is so widely covered by other sectors of the Catholic Church - and we have been giving voice to other issues that are less covered, but are equally as important."

Catholics who hold views contrary to the Church sometimes are labeled with the pejorative "cafeteria Catholics." But as Farrell so astutely points out, we're all "cafeteria Catholics," choosing to focus on the issues that are important to us, maybe remaining silent on others.

This program was so full of insight that I don't feel like I can adequately cover it, but if this interests you, give the program a listen or read the transcript. http://www.npr.org/2012/07/17/156858223/an-american-nun-responds-to-vatican-condemnation. And consider listening this week when Gross interviews Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo, the Vatican's delegate for the assessment.

At the end of the program, Gross asks Farrell why she would want to stay in an institution that doesn't think of women as equal? That doesn't think of her as worthy of being equal. Her response: "I have faith that the church can respond and change, but I would answer that in the same way I would say why would you stay in a country in which you severely disagree with the leadership of a president? I'm an American, and I am the church. I'm a Catholic. I am the church.

"So I will continue to work for the rightful place of women in the church, but it's easier said than done to just talk about walking away, because I also feel some responsibility, as the church, to bring that corrective to the church for the sake of the whole."

I feel much the same way. I think of the Church as my family. I will love it always. I'm often angry with it. When those outside my family attack it, I will defend it. In the way of familial loyalty, only those in the family can criticize it and get away with it. Speaking as a family member to my family, the Catholic Church, though, I've got to say, brother, it's time to make some changes.