Jewish, Christian, and Moslem clergy, who cannot agree on matters of theology, public funding for parochial school education, or abortion, speak as one voice against capital punishment. A meeting between the New Jersey Coalition of Religious Leaders and Governor Whitman is scheduled for the fall, in anticipation of a report from her specially appointed committee which will recommend ways to limit the three tiered appeal process now available to death row inmates.
Clergy opposition to government sanctioned killing is not news. What is news is the disparity between how churchgoers feel about the death penalty as contrasted with their pastors. Surveys in show that about 79% of laypeople in New Jersey favor capital punishment. The same statistics hold nationally. Why is it that on a whole host of both social and theological issues, laypeople turn away from the moral instruction of the clergy that they hear on Saturdays and Sundays? The disharmony is jarring.
- In one study of Catholic worshippers, 82% hold the opinion that birth control is "entirely up to the individual,"inspite of the church's pronouncements. . ."
- 80% of Presbyterian clergy in the United States favor "preferential treatment of blacks, "to correct past inequities," but only 43% of their parishioners agree with them. The same discrepancy holds on the need to "sacrifice some of the lavish lifestyles of those in wealthy countries in order to improve the living standards of the poorer ones
- Among Conservative Jews, who are told by their rabbis that a child Jewishness is defined through the mother, 67% do not agree, asserting that it should be through the mother or father.
Recently, in Cortlandt Manor, New York, a schoolteacher was dismissed from her job in a Catholic parochial school because she had married a divorced Episcopalian who had not had a previous marriage annulled by the Catholic church. Three quarters of the parents of the classroom children signed a letter insisting that the marriage was a matter "in her private life which has absolutely no relevance to her relationship to the children or her demonstrated success in educating them." They demanded her reinstatement.
Why this disparity? Are laypeople dozing off during the preacher's homily or simply turning a deaf ear?
Of course, on some matters within a denomination even the clergy disagree. Within the Episcopal church, for example, the question of sanctifying homosexual commitment ceremonies elicits different answers from different officials. But on social and religious issues upon which clergy of a particular denomination are generally united, the answer is more than "Different folks, different strokes." After all, the positions that the clergy pronounce week after week are more than opinion. They are the foundation beliefs and social policies of the particular church with which the dissenting layperson has affiliated.
Several years ago, a home was purchased at the end of my block and converted into senior assisted living under the management of the Presbyterian church in Metuchen. When I attended a town meeting on the proposal, a member of my congregation shouted across the room, "Rabbi, what are you doing here?" Others familiar from local churches clapped and nodded heads in agreement. The Presbyterian minister and I were shocked that our shared religious message of attending to the powerless, including the infirmed aged, had been publicly spurned.
The objectors had not heeded our message because they did not appreciate a fundamental role of the ministry. Three functions which all clergy fulfill are:
Pastor - attending to the ill and bereaved, counseling the stressed, consoling the harmed
Priest - executing the rituals which surround life's passages at birth, puberty, marriage, and death
Prophet - criticizing and rejecting what may be commonly accepted policies and practices of both individuals and society and insisting on repentance.
The voice of the pastor soothes and the ritual of the priest stabilizes. The criticism and call to repentance of the prophet stings and annoys.
Two years ago, the bishop of Lincoln, Nebraska, affixed his signature to a decree of excommunication of any Catholic in his diocese who refused to give up membership in any of 12 groups that the bishop deemed "perilous to the Catholic Faith." Among them were five Masonic groups, two abortion rights organizations, the Hemlock Society, and four groups promoting church reforms. The participants in the New Jersey Coalition of Religious Leaders are appealing to proper clerical role and not coercion in their revived efforts to mobilize laypeople against the death penalty. When the parishioner rejects the minister's prophetic function, and ignores consensus opinions on theology and social policy, it is not only the clergy who is diminished. The layperson loses an opportunity to be spiritually instructed and improved. The biggest losers though, are the church and synagogue, whose role as agent to repair a broken world withers away.