Dear Bishop Tobin,

On May 10, you asserted in a public commentary that all drug use is sinful and immoral. You urged state legislators to reject the legalization of marijuana. As a member of the Protestant clergy, I reach a very different conclusion.

We read the same Bible, worship the same God, and seek to follow the teachings of Jesus. What, then, explains where we differ, and why? You acknowledge that a case, which you do not refute, can be made for the recreational use of alcohol. Marijuana is far less dangerous than alcohol, yet you do not attempt to justify this double standard.

You then quote the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “The use of drugs inflicts very grave damage on human health and life.” You cite the words of Pope Francis two years ago: “Drug addiction is an evil, and with evil there can be no yielding or compromise.”

The reality is that we live in a drug-using society. Most of us consume some kind of drug on a regular basis: alcohol, caffeine, tobacco, prescription drugs, or marijuana. The question that challenges us both, then, is how to respond to the possibility that drug use can become addictive. Sadly, your understanding of addiction is incomplete and outdated.

In 1971, Richard Nixon declared a War on Drugs. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan became its general. His wife Nancy was credited with the famous phrase “Just Say No” as the path to avoiding addiction.

We can be grateful that medical science today has helped us to understand more about the complexities of addiction than we did in the era of Ronald Reagan. In light of current knowledge, the War on Drugs is immoral. “Just Say No” seems simplistic, even fatuous.

Addiction is far less about the properties of an individual drug than the inner pain that causes a user to seek temporary relief. This inner pain is, more often than not, the “gateway” to drug abuse, not any particular substance. That’s why not just drugs, but certain kinds of behavior, can become addictive — gambling, sex, the internet, shopping, and even food.

Most people who experiment with drugs move beyond them. You speak of our youth as ‘immune to reality with their electronics – hoodies on, heads down, ear buds in…” But most of the “zombie youth” you deride will outgrow this behavior. It’s this kind of being out-of- touch that leads to youth not paying attention to adults’ advice in the first place.

In December, I participated in a conference in Providence’s Gloria Dei Cathedral. Police, physicians, and clergy addressed the impact of the War on Drugs. One of the panelists, a former president of the Rhode Island Medical Society, noted that about 10% of those who use drugs run a serious risk of addiction. About half of those will avoid addiction through treatment. It is the remaining 5% we must worry about.

Medical experts are determining that trauma and profound stress are the primary, though certainly not only, causes of addiction. Trauma and stress can take many forms, ranging from sexual abuse to acute loneliness and isolation. Pope Francis is correct when he notes a connection between addiction and extreme poverty.

People struggling with addiction are, most often, neither sinful nor weak, as increasingly outdated moral teachings would have us believe. The phrase “self-medication” is not an accident. Arresting people with an addiction is morally wrong and does nothing to alleviate their underlying pain.

My Christian faith also tells me that punishment and “tough love” are rarely the best way to change behavior. We are most likely to reach others when we respond to them with care, compassion, mercy, respect, and honesty. This is what Jesus did. Condemnation was not his instrument of change.

We are living in the dawn of a new drug policy in this country. It is called harm reduction and is based on the tenets that drugs can never be completely eliminated and that we should help drug users without insisting on abstinence. At least 35 states now have needle exchange programs as a life-saving means of avoiding HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C.

In opposing marijuana legalization, you are complicit in the failed and immoral War on Drugs. In Rhode Island, which has already decriminalized marijuana, you are nevertheless supporting fines on poor, most often young people, who can ill afford to pay them, and may face lifetime consequences as a result.

You refer derisively to “benign forms” of marijuana: “cookies, brownies, and mints” in states where it is legal. But isn’t this safer than leaving our youth to sellers in back alleys who sometimes offer toxic, adulterated marijuana, and are happy to provide the harder drugs.

Most importantly, in continuing to focus on marijuana legalization, you are distracting attention and resources from what we both fear most – the dangers of addiction. We share the common purpose of reducing the harm of drugs in our society, but we differ on the means. Your commentary is clever and engaging, but ultimately it is wrong.

Yours in Faith,

Rev. Alexander E. Sharp

Executive Director
Clergy for a New Drug Policy

Tobin hasn’t denied Democratic nominee Gina Raimondo communion, but the Republican bishop did offer a passive rebuke to the Catholic candidate for governor after she won the endorsement of Planned Parenthood. He didn’t mention her by name, but the timing left little doubt.

The very reason Catholics were distrusted in this country in the 1800s and the early 1900s is because Catholics were presumed to be anti-democratic in their allegiance to a foreign king (the Pope) and it was assumed that they would attempt to impose their Catholic values on everyone in the event that they achieved political power. As a result, Catholic politicians invariably hit a ceiling in their careers a few steps before the presidency, unable to convince a majority of Americans nation wide that they could be trusted.

It was John Kennedy who broke this trend, when he gave his famous speech to a meeting of Texas Baptists in which he said that his allegiance was to America, and that the wall of separation between church and state must be high and strong. In bucking the tradition established by JFK, Tobin seeks to take Catholicism back to a time when it was politically irrelevant.

We do not live in a Catholic theocratic state. Most Rhode Islanders, by a factor of 8 to 1, support a woman’s right to make her own decisions regarding her reproductive health care, including abortion. Many religious traditions are not in agreement with the Catholic Church on reproductive rights issues. It would be unconstitutional for government to favor the Catholic heirarchy’s position on this issue, and foolish of us to pay Tobin’s declarations much mind when we can’t be sure if he is expressing himself religiously or politically.

RI Future
Everywhere, RI

Dear Bishop Tobin,

The new movie, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom is now playing at the Providence Place Mall Cinema, starting today and lasting until at least next Thursday. In this movie, Idris Elba, a fantastic actor, plays Nelson Mandela over the course of his astonishing life as lawyer, radical, prisoner and ultimately, the President of South Africa, leading his people to freedom.

Appropriately, the film opened nationwide on Christmas.

Given your recent comments about Mandela, we here at RI Future felt it appropriate to give you the chance to see this movie for yourself, that you might take away a deeper understanding of Mandela’s life and legacy, and not simply view his accomplishments through the narrow lens of the abortion issue.

Enclosed please find a voucher redeemable for one ticket to the movie of your choice at the Providence Place Mall Cinema. If you choose to not see Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, feel free to use the ticket to see any movie you please. For instance, Russell Crowe has an eponymously titled movie about the biblical character Noah coming out in March.

Sincerely,

The RI Future staff

On an icy cold Wednesday morning five local representatives of Faithful America, an “online community dedicated to reclaiming Christianity from the religious right and putting faith into action for social justice” delivered a petition with around 20,000 signatures to Bishop Thomas Tobin’s offices at One Cathedral Square in Providence.

Faithful America started implemented this petition in the wake of comments Tobin made following Nelson Mandela’s death. In a written statement, Tobin advanced some faint praise for the human rights hero before taking the deceased leader to task for his “shameful promotion of abortion” in signing into law one of the most liberal abortion laws in the world.

Gina Buckley O’Toole, an East Greenwich “full-time mom” who attends St. Gregory the Great’s Catholic Church, delivered the petition and a statement.

If Faithful America was hoping for an apology from Bishop Tobin, they were disappointed as Tobin’s office was ready with a boilerplate statement that merely reiterated Tobin’s concerns about Mandela’s legacy and repeated the church’s opposition to abortion.

In his December 5th “Statement of Bishop Tobin on the Death of Nelson Mandela” Tobin showered the great human rights leader with false praise before calling the deceased leader to task for “his shameful promotion of abortion in South Africa.” Mandela earned Tobin’s admonishment by promoting and signing into law a bill that “replaced one of the world’s toughest abortion laws with one of the most liberal.”

It has long been known that Tobin’s anti-abortion ideology has blinded him to the fact that good and decent people can come to different conclusions as to the morality of abortion. That is why most Americans see the issue as a decision best made by the pregnant woman, in consultation with her doctor, and want to live in a society where abortion and birth control are safe, legal and available.

Further, most Americans recognize that if we as a society really want to decrease the number of abortions performed in this country, then we ought to be working to promote the economic well being of women and investing resources into women’s health initiatives. Instead of championing these common sense ideas, Bishop Tobin and his RI Right to Life puppet show work on reducing the public’s ability to access health care by attempting to tear down HealthsourceRI or engaging in silly and unconstitutional theatrics involving license plates.

A while back, the monomaniacal Christian attitude towards issues like abortion was diagnosed as an “illness.”

The faith becomes ideology and ideology frightens, ideology chases away the people, distances, distances the people and distances… the Church of the people. But it is a serious illness, this of ideological Christians. It is an illness, but it is not new, eh?

The person making this diagnosis was Pope Francis, talking about the extremes of right wing religious ideology. Francis opined that such attitudes are worse “when this Christian is a priest, a bishop or a Pope.”

Not that the Pope is above reproach. His recent statements on economic inequality, as welcome as they are in many ways, still ignore one of the greatest obstacles towards the elimination of poverty in the developing world, which is women’s inability to access decent reproductive healthcare, including abortion. As long as women are shackled to the demands of unwanted childbirth, they are less free to pursue economic wellbeing for themselves and their families. Francis might want to take some of his own advice, and reevaluate the Church’s stand on important reproductive rights issues. Even a softening of the rules on condoms and other forms of birth control would have amazing and positive repercussions world wide.

No human is perfect, even a person as universally revered as Nelson Mandela has faults, failings, misdeeds and wrongs easily attached to their legacy. But Mandela’s support for abortion rights in South Africa is not one of them. Guaranteeing South African women access to reproductive healthcare has freed countless families from the kind of crushing poverty large families might face and saved the lives of thousands of women who might have died accessing illegal abortions.

The South African law, according to the NY Times, assures that, “women and girls will be entitled to a state-financed abortion on demand during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy if they have no private medical insurance, and, subject to widely defined conditions, for a further eight weeks.” Even minors are allowed to access abortion under this law, without being mandated to gain consent from their families or, as is the case in Rhode Island, from a judge.

In South Africa, because of Nelson Mandela’s forward thinking respect for the rights of all persons, the decision as to whether or not to have an abortion lies solely with the pregnant woman (or girl).

This is as it should be.

Stanton, a former Providence Journal investigative reporter reports that House Majority Leader Nick Mattiello and Senator William Conley were both punished in their parishes for their legislative positions on marriage equality.

Representative Nicholas Mattiello of Cranston, the Democratic House majority leader, says that he was asked to take a break from serving as a lector at his church after changing his position and publicly supporting same-sex marriage.

“I do think it’s time to concentrate on what unifies and brings us together, what makes us merciful rather than judgmental,” Mattiello said. “The pope’s views are more appropriate than what I’ve been hearing for years.”

State Senator William J. Conley Jr. of East Providence, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which approved the marriage bill, says a diocesan official asked him to resign as a trustee of La Salle Academy in Providence. The pastor of the East Providence parish where he was baptized, Conley says, denounced him from the pulpit as a “Judas.”

Stanton’s blockbuster report on Tobin also has gems like this:

Meghan Smith of Catholics for Choice, calls Tobin “one of the more rightwing bishops” in the United States. His style is at odds with the new pope, she says, as well as his flock in the one of most Catholic states.

Earlier this year, RI Future reported that a Catholic church in Woonsocket had asked gay married people not to receive communion.

Todd Flowerday, writing on the blog Catholic Sensibility, thinks that Tobin might be thinking locally while the Pope thinks globally:

Perhaps Bishop Tobin, recent Republican convert, is thinking too much in terms of American politics. US Catholics make up a single-digit percentage of the flock Francis now pastors. Is it realistic to expect that the man will conform to the American values of the political pro-life movement: confrontation, contention, fundraising, deception, and the striving to yell louder than the other side?

Supporting Tobin, Fr. Z’s Blog goes after the National Catholic Reporter writer Michael Sean Winters saying that “you don’t have to protect Popes from criticism” and “were the Michael Sean Winters types in charge, the college of bishops around Pope Francis would look like a meeting of North Korea’s Communist Party.”

David Cruz-Uribe, writing for Vox Nova, runs down some of this and also notes that some conservative Catholic blogs are seeing Tobin’s statements as a sort of conservative backlash against the current Pope.  However, the main point of the Vox Nova piece is that Tobin has essentially opened the floodgates for sending criticism up the Catholic hierarchy. Cruz-Uribe thinks this is an unintentional and positive development of Tobin’s comments, noting that not inviting open, constructive and respectful criticism smacks of obsequiousness, saying “we can criticize someone even if we love and respect him/her.”

The Vox Nova piece ends with “Let us pray that all bishops have both the courage to speak openly and respectfully, and that they have the humility and openness to listen and reflect when they are on the receiving end of similar critiques.”

Will Tobin be open to such criticism from the priests under his leadership? Tobin, in some way, seems to consider himself a prophet, and prophets historically are good at giving criticism, not taking it. Responding to a question about the heat he took in the aftermath of the passage of marriage equality on the opening episode of Dan Yorke’s State of Mind Tobin said,

Yeah, I did take a lot of heat but that’s part of the challenge of being a prophet. In some ways that is the prophetic role of the church to challenge evil where we find it, where we see it, to challenge those in positions of political leadership. The church has a long history even going back to the Old testament where prophets challenge the kings of Israel, and John the Baptist and Thomas More and many of the great apostles and prophets and saints throughout history have played that role of challenging evil where we think it exists.

I’m reminded of Second Kings, 2:23-24, when the Prophet Elisha was insulted by some children for being bald.

And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.

And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.

The lesson? Watch what you say about prophets or you might be targeted by wild bears.

On the apparent softening of the Roman Catholic Church’s message regarding LGBTQ issues due to recent statements by Pope Francis, Tobin said, “The message hasn’t changed, but the messenger has.” In other words, according to Tobin it’s the same old church with a shiny new boss.

There’s nothing explosive or game changing in the interview, but it does manage to provide a peek into the carefully worded worldview of one of Rhode Island’s most powerful and outspoken religious leaders.

“I am appalled that she is asking the Church to punish so many good Catholic people who support the civil rights of the gay community,” Handy, a Cranston Democrat, said in the release. “Unfortunately, her feelings are very symbolic of the Tea Party and right-wing thinking that is so prevalent within the state’s Republican Party Leadership.

“Although I obviously disagree, I respected the Church’s right to oppose my legislation,” Handy said. “However, it crosses the line for a party leader to call for active involvement of the Church in partisan politics.”

“Representative Costa needs to be reminded that her own Minority Leader, Brian Newberry, whom she supports, voted for marriage equality, as did the entire five-member Senate Republican delegation,” Handy said. “Is she looking for the Catholic Church to punish her own party members who voted in favor of this legislation?”

UPDATE: According to a story in the Providence Journal, Costa said her comments had nothing to do with marriage equality.

It is interesting that Tobin uses the word “context,” which he seems to define as “culture,” that is, American culture in general, which Tobin sees as rather uniform and undifferentiated. I think America is better understood as many different cultures unified and balanced by a series of ideas, laws and mores. Catholics represent just one of many, specifically religious cultures, and a single individual could conceivably be a member of several different cultures at the same time. For instance, a person might be a Catholic, a veteran, a banker and a member of the PTA, and each of these affiliations carries cultural pressures and significance.

Tobin eschews this understanding for something more universal and much less accurate, saying, “I don’t think there’s any doubt that our culture… is becoming more obviously and proudly more secular and atheistic than in the past.”

I would counter that the trouble is that less and less people are identifying themselves as members of Tobin’s preferred culture, just as there are less and less people identifying themselves as members of any religious group, but to say American culture is more or less secular is wrong.

America is just as secular as it has always been.

You see, all the different cultures I talked about above, and hundreds if not thousands more besides, interact in our country without too much violence or mayhem because they are all contained within a larger secular framework. To call this framework “culture” is like calling a large building empty of people and equipment a “hospital.” Tobin sees the secular framework that binds our cultures together and establishes the rules for peaceful coexistence as our culture, but this is inaccurate. Tobin mistakes the cardboard box for the cereal.

I would posit that Tobin intuitively understands this and uses the word “context” precisely because the word “culture” is ill-suited to label the larger secular framework when he says things such as, “…there’s little doubt that the context in which we seek to proclaim the Gospel and share the faith of the Church is as secular and atheistic, and therefore as apathetic, as ever.” (Emphasis mine)

Tobin’s use of the word atheistic is accurate, strictly speaking. The secular framework of American society takes no position on supernatural claims and is “a-” or “without” a position on “-theos,” or gods. It is silent on the issue, because room needs to be made for all sorts of different cultural interpretations regarding supernatural beliefs. The alternative is to construct a non-secular framework, a container for our various cultures that preferences one set of cultures and beliefs over another. The Bishop makes no secret over the fact that he would prefer a framework that favors his beliefs and culture, but surely he must realize that such a system would be deeply unfair to anyone of a different culture, with different beliefs.

—

Tobin routinely slips between the words “secular” and “atheistic” in describing the present state of what he defines as American culture. The two terms are in some ways related but are not synonymous. Many deeply religious people, including Catholics, consider secularism to be an important guarantor of our individual rights of conscience. The Rhode Island Council of Churches, representing a broad collation of Christian and non-Christian beliefs, overwhelmingly voted to support marriage equality.  I know for a fact that many who voted to support the legislation personally believe that acting upon sexual attraction between same-sex persons is sinful and wrong. But these individuals understand the importance of secularism, even if they reject atheism. For Tobin to routinely equate the two terms is disingenuous.

—

In the third section of Tobin’s talk the bishop also fall prey to his habit of insulting atheists. Tobin’s relates the following parable:

A number of years ago, while still in the Diocese of Pittsburgh, I was invited to attend a picnic, a surprise 30th birthday party for one of our former seminarians. When I arrived at the picnic site I got out of my car, and was greeted by a beautiful little girl, about 7 years old I’d say, with blond hair and sparkling blue eyes. When I stepped out of the car she ran to me, looked at me straight in the eye and said, “I don’t know you… I don’t like you… and who invited you anyway?”

Obviously those words have scarred me; have left a permanent mark on my psyche.

But if you think about it, isn’t that what the secular world, the culture says to us whenever we, as people have faith, try to engage in the popular discussion and share our faith and values with others. They say to us: “I don’t know you… I don’t like you… and who invited you to this discussion anyway?”

Note what Tobin does here. Those who oppose the teachings of the Catholic Church and insist on a secular framework do not do so for any kind of valid reasons or with any kind of deep reflection or thought. These secularists and atheists, Tobin says, are like ignorant and selfish seven year olds, lacking in wisdom, maturity, courtesy, and knowledge. They jump to instant conclusions based on instinct and first impressions, and immaturely believe that they have the right to vocalize their narcissistic opinions to their cultural, privileged superiors.

Earlier in his piece, Tobin wondered if the growing irreligiosity of our culture might be due to “the failure of the leaders of the Church to adequately preach and teach.” Tobin should understand that if the preaching and the teaching is couched in disingenuous wordplay, misapplications of facts and insults towards your target audience, then failure is assured.