The opinions or facts expressed in personal reflections do not necessarily reflect the opinions of, or constitute an admission of fact by, the pastors or staff members of the Catholic parishes in Waterloo or the Archdiocese of Dubuque.
• • •
"We know that our Redeemer lives"
By Nuala Kenny SC
There is no quick-fix drug or device to address the pathologies manifested in the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The profound pain and suffering to the Body of Christ from this crisis demands deep conversion and reformation to a Church of disciples of Jesus Christ who are courageous in speaking truth to power and protecting the vulnerable. Deep conversion in the Church, along with real structural reform, is required to build resilience to withstand future infection and disease and to heal from this dark night of the Church's soul.
Patients who are sick are concerned with very basic questions: "What is wrong with me?" "What is the treatment?" "Can you fix it?" "Am I going to die?" Giving a prognosis about outcome is the most risky of all medical acts, even with a correct diagnosis and available effective treatment.
I have loved and prayed for Pope Francis from the moment he stepped out onto the balcony in Rome, greeted the crowds, and bowed his head for their blessing before he gave them his own. He has been a witness to care and concern for the vulnerable and those on the peripheries. He has also provided brilliant diagnoses of many of the pathologies in his identifying the temptations of the Church and diseases of leadership. He has made it clear that conversion of mind and heart should precede structural change. He has called for a missionary impulse that can change "everything" for the new evangelization and mission.
In light of the global crisis of the Church mortally wounding some and paralyzing others, I am bewildered and disappointed at his inaction on some crucial issues that he could change. He needs to walk the talk, particularly the concern for the vulnerable, the role of women in the Church, and the importance of dialogue and discernment. The Church needs…action while Francis is still Pope because the resistance to conversion and reform is powerfully present in the Church.
There are other challenges to healing. Church leaders are manifesting a "tragedy fatigue" which is well known in field hospitals and other situations of ongoing crisis. The silence of the clergy and their difficulty in sharing their pain with others is a significant impediment to healing. Remember Fr. Donald Cozzens's observation…: "what really scandalizes countless numbers of the faithful is the church's readiness…to deny and minimize the depth, scope, and pastoral implications of issues that cry out for analysis and action." We cannot minimize the harm and pastoral implications of the clergy sexual abuse crisis.
My prognosis for conversion, healing and repair is determined by my belief in the power of the Resurrection. Human institutions and organizations have a natural life cycle. After crisis, many will die out; some need to. Others return to the true foundation and reform and renew. The Church as the Body of Christ is a Resurrection people. We may be in a Calvary time of desolation and pain, but we know that our Redeemer lives. If only we can turn to the Lord and trust in him.
Sister Nuala P. Kenny is a member of the Sisters of Charity of Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is a medical doctor specializing in pediatrics. She is the author of Healing the Church (Novalis, 2012). This article is excerpted from her book Still Unhealed--Treating the Pathology in the Clergy Sexual Abuse Crisis (Novalis/Twenty-Third Publications, 2019).
• • •
"This is not the time to leave; it is the time to stay and fight"
By Bishop Robert Barron
I know many Catholics are sorely tempted just to give up on the Church, to join another religious group, or perhaps to become one of the religiously unaffiliated. But this is not the time to leave; it is the time to stay and fight….
The sexual abuse of young people by some priests and the countenancing of that abuse by some bishops is more than a moral problem; it is a rot, a disease, a threat to the great principles of the Church that we hold dear. Yes an easy option is to cut and run, to give up on the operation. But if you believe, as I do, in those doctrines and practices and convictions,…if you think it is indispensable that the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ abides as a light to the world, then…stay and fight!
Fight by raising your voice in protest; fight by writing a letter of complaint; fight by insisting that protocols be followed; fight by reporting offenders; fight by pursuing the guilty until they are punished; fight by refusing to be mollified by pathetic excuses. But above all, fight by your very holiness of life; fight by becoming the saint that God wants you to be; fight by encouraging a decent young man to become a priest; fight by doing a Holy Hour every day for the sanctification of the Church; fight by coming to Mass regularly; fight by evangelizing; fight by doing the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.
God is love, and he has won the victory through the cross and resurrection of Jesus. Therefore, we inhabit what is finally a divine comedy, and we know that the followers of Jesus are on the winning side. Perhaps the very best way to be a disciple of Jesus right now is to stay and fight for his Church.
Robert Barron is Auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles and founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. He is well known as a Catholic evangelist and for his video series Catholicism--Journey to the Heart of the Faith. This article is excerpted from his book, Letter to a Suffering Church--A Bishop Speaks On the Sexual Abuse Crisis (Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, 2019).
• • •
"A letter to Jesus--'Lord, I'm getting so disgusted'"
By Elizabeth Scalia
Well, Lord, here we are again. This crap just never stops coming, and God, I’m getting so disgusted with it all....
Yeah, I know it’s a minority of our clergy indulging themselves in every worldly way, and with seeming impunity, but it’s a powerful minority, isn’t it? It’s a minority that seems to be a pretty well-established and impenetrable boys club, with too many spoiled princes and too few true servants….
Sometimes, Lord it is awful being a Christian, you know that? I want to hate these men. I want to hate them and punish them for all the damage they have done to the church, and therefore to you and your body. And to the whole world, because a world without the church—a world where the church becomes irrelevant, in-credible and unequal to the task of balancing the secular world and all of its influences for good and bad—that’s a world where the lights are getting ready to go out, and all the candles snuffed....
All I know, Lord, is that I’m grateful that Pentecost is here. I’ll miss the Easter alleluias at Mass, but I’m good and damn ready for a mighty wind to blow through your church. Maybe, as with the Apostles, it will terrify some too-proud bishops and humble them a bit, and maybe change a few hearts for the good. Lord, that’s what all of this feels like—a chaos and tumult, a roaring strain of noise and destruction bearing down upon us, wrecking everything in sight because the job of the Holy Spirit isn’t to make us comfortable but to shake us up, to send us out of our safe, comfortable places.
Is that what’s happening here? Is all of this revealed horror a kind of Pentecost for us? If so, God, please help us live through it. I mean, it’s better that these stories are out, that these crimes and sins are revealed, than for things to continue hidden and entrenched as they have been...but Jesus, that just means we’re in for more of this, for a while yet, until all the revelations are through….
But the Holy Spirit comes on the wind, and brings fire, and action. And we’re told that all things work, ultimately, toward your purposes, even though we can’t see it in real time. And I do believe that, Lord, I have to or what sense does anything make? I’ve seen the truth of it in my own life, and I’ve seen the truth of it through your Cross—the most unjust and torturous murder in history, permitted to happen because it was necessary to God’s great purpose of saving us, and loving us. How do I say it? How do I pray it? I thank you, God, in good times and in bad, for by your cross and resurrection, we...well, we’re not free yet, are we? Your church on earth has a ways to go and we’ll be picking through the debris of this storm for a very long time, and it’s feeling to me like we may yet be left with little more than your grace upon which to rebuild, going forward.
And maybe I won’t live to see what new paths will be revealed after the winds have settled. But you’ve told us that your grace is enough. All we have to do is figure out how to cooperate with it to your purposes, right? I wonder. I hope. I pray, Lord, that we’ll be able to do that....
Elizabeth Scalia is a Benedictine Oblate and the author of the award-winning books, Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols in Everyday Life and Little Sins Mean a Lot. She is Editor at Large for Bishop Robert Barron’s “Word on Fire” website and blogs online as “The Anchoress.” Her comments were posted on America magazine’s webpage June 8, 2019, and are available here.
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"This is a liminal space I'm lingering in--neither in nor out"
By Mary M. Doyle Roche
In the wake of the sex-abuse scandals that continue to rock the Catholic Church, conversations about staying or leaving it are more prevalent than ever.... Catholics...are understandably wondering if they’ve finally reached the breaking point. But as I listen to them and reflect on my own faith, I have come to wonder if the language of staying or leaving, of being inside or outside the church, is failing to capture the experiences of many people who live with these tensions.
In almost every aspect of my life as a theologian and ethicist, spouse and parent, friend and colleague, I have been challenged to think beyond binary categories to imagine new ways of understanding our identities, relationships, and responsibilities.... But it’s been the time I’ve spent thinking and praying with LGBTQ young people that has prompted me to explore another dichotomy: in/out. Are you in the closet or out?... The answer is rarely a simple yes or no. People come out to different people at different times and in different spaces. LGBTQ young people also challenge the simple claim that being “out” is morally superior or necessarily truer to self. Living safely and well is much more complicated than that. So too is navigating membership in the church....
For as long as I can remember, my strategy during the times I’ve been especially frustrated with the church has been to stay and work for change from within it.... That strategy has mostly worked, but I increasingly question what it means to do all this “within” the church.
These days I find myself lingering on the edges of the church. Sometimes it is too painful to be present at the liturgy, so I don’t go to Mass. Sometimes, when I do go, I just can’t bring myself to put a check in the collection basket. Sometimes I wonder if I’m betraying those I love who have never been welcomed for who they are or who they are becoming by not resolving these tensions and just leaving. So I continue to linger—and keep praying, keep seeking out community, keep finding church in unexpected places.... This is a liminal space I’m lingering in: a space of transition, of walking along boundaries, of being neither in nor out, of neither staying nor leaving.
What, after all, really is the geography of the church? Where are its borders? Is it possible that I have been more “outside” the church than I knew while sitting in a pew? Am I more “inside” the church than many would recognize as I seek Christ in new places with those who have long been on the margins of the church? Does going to the margins actually take you to the center of the church?
It all makes me think of the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is speaking to me in new and fresh ways. It poses the deep question we all know: Who and where is my neighbor? It’s telling that the Good Samaritan found his neighbor not in Jerusalem or Jericho, but in between them, on the road, during his journey. Did the Good Samaritan ever get where he thought he was going? Did he realize that lingering on the side of the road, where he found a broken and bruised body, was what really mattered?
Mary M. Doyle Roche is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, where she teaches Christian ethics. Her comments appeared in the June 14, 2019 issue of Commonweal magazine; the full text is available online here.
• • •
"Do not let the darkness of this moment prevail"
By Most Rev. Joseph C. Bamberg
When we last gathered for this Mass of the Holy Chrism, not one of us could have imagined the scope of the tragic consequences of the clergy sex abuse crisis in our Church. Consider for just a moment what this crisis has left in its wake.
The number of survivors of this catastrophe – both locally and worldwide – is staggering. As a Church and a people, we owe them support – we owe them care – we owe them love – and we owe them gratitude for their steadfast efforts to make their voices heard and to tell their stories, so that finally – at least in this body of believers that so boldly proclaims its belief in the sanctity of human life – every life will be safe, secure and respected.
While some of us are tired of focusing upon this chapter in the history of our Church, far too many of us continue to suffer with conflicting feelings. They range from anger and disillusionment with priests and bishops, to confusion and despair, to hope and a resolve to be Church, the people God has called us to be through baptism – more than ever before.
And look at what this crisis has done to countless numbers of good and faithful priests throughout the world and in this very cathedral today. So many of you are weighed down by actions that you did not commit and for which you grieve and suffer in your own way. Brothers, I implore you: do not let the darkness of this moment prevail!
Sometimes we can be so overwhelmed by the brokenness of our lives and our world that we underestimate God’s power to transform us. Never forget for an instant that God’s love can turn everything upside down. Jesus’ cross and resurrection are more than proof of this fact. And because of his cross and resurrection, there will never be a time when Jesus will not love and sustain you!...
To doubt the dynamic presence and power of God at this moment in our Church’s history – to doubt that God’s call is still extended to searching, struggling souls like ourselves – is, sadly, to yield to evil and to give that reality a power that it neither warrants nor deserves.
Brothers and sisters, we are not the sum of the tragedies that have been committed by bishops and priests. No, we are baptized followers of Jesus – disciples called to mission and ministry to a broken world “today.” …[W]e are the Church – the body of Christ – wounded and redeemed souls – who continue to be the world’s greatest hope because of the living presence of Jesus in our midst.
A few years before he died, the great theologian, Karl Rahner, shared these words with his fellow Jesuits. They apply to all people of faith, especially during these challenging times:
Our faith must be such that even the unbeliever cannot deny that here a man believes who is like himself – a man of today – on whose lips the word “God” does not come easily and cheaply, who doesn’t think he has mastered everything, and in spite of all this – rather, because of all this – he believes.
For Christianity is not a formula which makes everything clear, but the radical submission of myself to an incomprehensible Mystery Who has revealed Himself as ineffable love.
Brothers and sisters, … [f]or all of your uncertainty, go forth, boldly proclaiming the Gospel of life. And may the light and love of the risen Christ shine brightly in your hearts and bring you peace. Amen.
Bishop Bambera is bishop of Scranton, Pennsylvania. The full text of this homily, which he delivered at the Chrism Mass on April 16, 2019, is available online here.
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"Remember Who the Church is, rather than what the Church is"By Colleen Campbell
I was raised Catholic and attended Catholic school from kindergarten through eighth grade and Catholic universities from my undergraduate years to my current pursuit of a PhD in Catechetics…. For most of my life, my love of the Church has remained untested. “Catholic” was the most important part of my identity and the way I’d immediately describe myself to anyone who asked.
Last summer, the sexual abuse crisis challenged this core component of my life and identity…. I felt betrayal and sadness—things I had never before felt about my own Catholic identity. When the details of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report came to light later in the summer, I was shocked and in pain; the Church that had become the core part of my identity was being destroyed. While the events of the report happened years ago, it still angered me that they not only had taken place, but that this was also the Church I had inherited….
…I attended panels and round-table discussions held by my university, and also spent time processing the events of the crisis with friends, colleagues in ministry, and professors. While it helped to acknowledge my own anger and know that I was not isolated in my emotions about the crisis, these conversations often made it harder for me to find any peace in the midst of the crisis. I heard others blame “the gays” for the crisis, priests who expressed confusion at the anger of the laity, and priests and laity accuse Satan of attacking the Church through the accounts of sexual abuse survivors. Frequently, I had conversations with people who tried to reassure me, by appealing to the embattled history of the Church, that the crisis would pass….
During this time, my love for the Church had morphed into anger and confusion. I wrestled with the idea that, as a future catechetical leader and theologian, my task would be to form individuals to be more engaged, more bound up with this deteriorating Church…. Struggling to hold the tension of my vocation to catechetics and my strained relationship with the Church, I reached out to a former colleague and mentor in ministry. In our conversation, she did not appeal to Church history or blame a certain “side” of the Church; rather, she challenged me to remember Who the Church is, rather than what the Church is.
…[B]ecause of the conversation with my former mentor, my own healing and peace have started to come from Jesus’ question to Simon Peter and the disciples…: “He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” (Matthew 16:15). Jesus establishes the Church on the shoulders of Simon Peter after his recognition of Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God. A question of who, rather than what.
As the stories and reports of the crisis continue to flood Catholic consciousness in the United States even today, I hold the tension of my love for the Church and my pain at her discord by rooting myself in Who the Church is: Jesus Christ. In order to remain, although with difficulty, faithful to the Church, I have to allow my love for her to be shaped by who rather than what. The Church is Jesus Christ, but it is also my grandmother who taught me my prayers, my parents who raised me in the faith, the Dominican sister who fostered my love for the Church in middle school, the wonderful pastor and lay women I worked alongside in a parish in graduate school, my friends and colleagues in ministry, the Jesuit and diocesan priests in my doctoral cohort, and the Carmelite community here in DC who have embraced me.
Though the entire Church has been ravaged by individuals who have perpetuated a systematic problem of power in the sex abuse crisis, I return to my own experience of Who the Church is to gain strength and continue living out my own vocation.
Colleen Campbell holds a BA in Pastoral Ministry from the University of Dallas, an MA in Theology from the University of Notre Dame, and is currently a second year PhD student studying Catechetics at the Catholic University of America. The full text of her reflection was published February 6, 2019 by the Millennial blog and is available here.
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"Real healing cannot take place until we acknowledge the truth of our past."
By Bishop Michael G. Duca
Today I have the sad and profoundly humbling task of publishing the names of all priests, and in our case, a bishop and one seminarian, against whom there are credible allegations of sexual abuse of minors and/or vulnerable adults in the Diocese of Baton Rouge….
When I committed myself and the Diocese to this task soon after my arrival, my first concern was and has been for the persons victimized by this abuse who have often felt betrayed and unsupported by the Church. It has been my hope that this will be an important step that will help those men and women whose lives have been so deeply violated....
Some have asked why must we do this. As I said in my Sunday letter, the fact that this wound will not heal tells us that we must continue to bring everything into the light. This is not easy. I have listened to some victims share their stories, and there are no words to express the depth of sadness and shame that was experienced in our Church and is part of OUR diocesan history. It is hard to lay this list out for all to see, but real renewal and healing cannot take place until we acknowledge the truth of our past....
In the process of creating this list of names I have heard from some, and even felt this myself in the beginning, that once this is done we can move beyond the crisis mode and get back to normal. But I have come to see quite clearly that in this thinking there is already a return to an old standard to once again “sweep it under the carpet.” This list is not the end but an attempt to open the door on child sexual abuse that none of us want to open. In every case of abuse on this list I am sure that the victim was told, “don't tell anyone.” They heard this from their abuser, but also from the Church, sometimes overtly, “Okay, we will take care of Father and you just keep this a secret,” or they felt an unspoken institutionally expressed rule of the Church that you just are not supposed to talk about these things. Unfortunately, to keep the status quo the victims of abuse must bear the pain for others’ peace of mind and must do this alone.
My hope is that this list is a concrete sign that we do want to talk about this. Hopefully a victim of abuse will see a name on this list and say, that's me, and this will give them the courage to go to a trusted friend, counselor, family member or come talk to me and share their story and no longer bear the pain alone. We must be willing to share their pain, admit our part in this tragedy so that we can help ease their burden and be for the victims of sexual abuse a support and not a barrier on the path to healing.
So this list is not the final piece of “dealing with this” but rather I see it as a beginning step in a foundational change in our Church’s way of acting that will renew all the programs we have in place to protect our children with a focus on the healing of the victims of abuse rather than the protection of the status quo.
Michael Duca is bishop of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. This statement accompanied the release on January 31, 2019 of the list of clergy credibly accused of sexually abusing minors or vulnerable adults. The complete text of the bishop's statement is available online here.
• • •
"I want to have hope, but...hoping is hard"
By Benjamin Hawley SJ
...We are called by Jesus himself to be hopeful. But we are also called to be thoughtful, discerning good and evil around us. I find myself seesawing between hope and doubt, between hope and fear, between hope and no-hope, as I reflect on the good and evil. I want to have hope, but I have to admit that having hope is hard, sometimes nearly impossible.
It is true that Jesus grew up and became the Messiah. But Herod's murdering a generation of children went unpunished, as far as I know, and the historical record on mass murderers or mass abusers isn't promising.
I am grateful for what the bishops and Francis are now doing. But I keep asking myself why it takes so much external pressure to get them to do the right, decent thing that seems so obvious and not even that hard.
Some days I feel like Candide, returning from his hero's journey to cultivate his own garden. In my garden I can be hopeful. But I can't live a solitary life. And when I re-engage, I become discouraged when I find the bishops' response so slow and so begrudging….
Jesus began his life in his mother's lap in the stable, as the great artists have shown us, but surrounded by the blood and death of children and the corruption of the Jewish king. Jesus ended his life in his mother's lap, as Michaelangelo shows us in the Pieta, still surrounded by the blood, death and the corruption of civic and religious leaders.
My question to myself is always, Does it really have to be this hard? And the answer seems to be, No, it doesn't have to be. But, Yes, it is going to be this hard as long as people, especially people in positions of power, make self-serving choices. The blood, death and corruption are constants in human life. And yet he is the Prince of Peace and the source of our hope.
On this great Feast we can come to realize that, if you and I have to live on the seesaw, then at least we can remain anchored to hope there, because Jesus, the source of our hope, accompanied by his Blessed Mother, has the power to anchor us there in love.
So, in our Eucharist today let's share divine love and hope with one another in communion and leave here, imbued with new hope to share with our world, so the world too can find hope and peace.
Fr. Hawley delivered this homily at Holy Trinity Parish in Washington D.C. on the Feast of Epiphany, 2019. The text of his homily was entered into the Congressional Record by Senator Patrick Leahy on January 9, 2019, and is available here.
• • •
"It must not be imagined that authority knows no bounds"
By Pope Francis
In recent years, the Church in the United States has been shaken by various scandals that have gravely affected its credibility. These have been times of turbulence in the lives of all those victims who suffered in their flesh the abuse of power and conscience and sexual abuse on the part of ordained ministers, male and female religious and lay faithful. But times of turbulence and suffering also for their families and for the entire People of God.
The Church’s credibility has been seriously undercut and diminished by these sins and crimes, but even more by the efforts made to deny or conceal them…. The hurt caused by these sins and crimes has also deeply affected the communion of bishops, and generated not the sort of healthy and necessary disagreements and tensions found in any living body, but rather division and dispersion (cf. Mt 26:31)….
Combating the culture of abuse, the loss of credibility, the resulting bewilderment and confusion, and the discrediting of our mission urgently demands of us a renewed and decisive approach to resolving conflicts…. Loss of credibility calls for a specific approach, since it cannot be regained by issuing stern decrees or by simply creating new committees or improving flow charts…. That kind of vision ends up reducing the mission of the bishop and that of the Church to a mere administrative or organizational function in the “evangelization business”….
The loss of credibility also raises painful questions about the way we relate to one another. Clearly, a living fabric has come undone, and we, like weavers, are called to repair it. This involves our ability, or inability, as a community to forge bonds and create spaces that are healthy, mature and respectful of the integrity and privacy of each person…. This requires not only a new approach to management, but also a change in our mind-set (metanoia), our way of praying, our handling of power and money, our exercise of authority and our way of relating to one another and to the world around us…. The programmatic aspect of our activity should be joined to a paradigmatic aspect that brings out its underlying spirit and meaning…. Without this clear and decisive focus, everything we do risks being tainted by self-referentiality, self-preservation and defensiveness, and thus doomed from the start….
In a word, a new ecclesial season needs bishops who can teach others how to discern God’s presence in the history of his people, and not mere administrators. Ideas can be discussed but vital situations have to be discerned. Consequently, amid the upset and confusion experienced by our communities, our primary duty is to foster a shared spirit of discernment…. It is about finding a collegial and paternal way of embracing the present situation, one that, most importantly, can protect those in our care from losing hope and feeling spiritually abandoned….
A personal and collective awareness of our limitations reminds us, as Saint John XXIII said, that “it must not be imagined that authority knows no bounds”. It cannot be aloof in its discernment and in its efforts to pursue the common good. A faith and consciousness lacking reference to the community would be like a “Kantian transcendental”: it will end up proclaiming “a God without Christ, a Christ without the Church, a Church without its people”. It will set up a false and dangerous opposition between personal and ecclesial life, between a God of pure love and the suffering flesh of Christ. Worse, it could risk turning God into an “idol” for one particular group. Constant reference to universal communion, as also to the magisterium and age-old tradition of the Church, saves believers from absolutizing any one group, historical period or culture within the Church….
...[A]wareness of our being sinners in need of constant conversion…will liberate us from the quest of false, facile and futile forms of triumphalism that would defend spaces rather than initiate processes. It will keep us from turning to reassuring certainties that keep us from approaching and appreciating the extent and implications of what has happened. It will also aid in the search for suitable measures free of false premises or rigid formulations no longer capable of speaking to or stirring the hearts of men and women in our time.
Affective communion with the feelings of our people…urges us to exercise a collegial spiritual fatherhood that does not offer banal responses or act defensively, but instead seeks to learn…. This approach demands of us the decision to abandon a modus operandi of disparaging, discrediting, playing the victim or the scold in our relationships, and instead to make room for the gentle breeze that the Gospel alone can offer….
Let us try to break the vicious circle of recrimination, undercutting and discrediting, by avoiding gossip and slander in the pursuit of a path of prayerful and contrite acceptance of our limitations and sins, and the promotion of dialogue, discussion and discernment. This will dispose us to finding evangelical paths that can awaken and encourage the reconciliation and credibility that our people and our mission require of us. We will do this if we…dare to come together, on our knees, before the Lord and let ourselves be challenged by his wounds, in which we will be able to see the wounds of the world….
What is being asked of us today is a new presence in the world, conformed to the cross of Christ, one that takes concrete shape in service to the men and women of our time…. This attitude is not concerned with respect or success and garnering applause for our actions; instead, it requires that we as pastors really decide to be a seed that will grow whenever and however the Lord best determines. That decision will save us from falling into the trap of measuring the value of our efforts by the standards of functionalism and efficiency that govern the business world….
The call to holiness keeps us from falling into false dichotomies and reductive ways of thinking, and from remaining silent in the face of a climate prone to hatred and rejection, disunity and violence between brothers and sisters…. Our communities today must testify in a concrete and creative way that God is the Father of all, and that in his eyes we are all his sons and daughters....
How sublime is the task at hand, brothers; we cannot keep silent about it or downplay it because of our own limitations and faults! I recall the wise words of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, that we can repeat, both as individuals and together: “Yes, I have many human faults and failures… But God bends down and uses us, you and me, to be his love and his compassion in the world; he bears our sins, our troubles and our faults. He depends on us to love the world and to show how much he loves it. If we are too concerned with ourselves, we will have no time left for others”….
Pope Francis sent this letter to the U.S. bishops as they prepared for a week-long retreat for prayer and discernment in January, 2019. The full text of the letter is available online here.
• • •
"The church is the locus, not the focus of our faith"
By Fr. William Grimm MM
The never-ending exposures that bishops up to and including a canonized pope have abetted and sometimes even perpetrated the sexual abuse of children, women and young priests and seminarians under their control has produced, at least in the English-speaking world, a new genre of literature, the "Why I'm leaving the Catholic Church" essay.
...[A]mong those who write, the disaffected have not been merely nominal Catholics. They have been involved in their parishes and dioceses. They have taught catechism. They have served in soup kitchens. They have been liturgical ministers. They have joined campaigns for human rights and peace. They have contributed financially. They have struggled to raise their children as Catholics in the face of young people's disaffection not just with Catholicism but with all forms of Christianity or any religion.
But now those people have finally given up. Their stories starkly illustrate the saying that one should never push a loyal person to the point where he or she no longer cares.
The reasons those writers give for walking away make sense. A person can put up with only so much betrayal before having to make the choice between being a dupe and taking a principled stand. And let there be no mistake about it: people who still give credence to or who are at least willing to put up with bishops' ever-repeated assurances that this time they get it and will fix the problem are dupes.
So, people's decision to walk away in disgust or sadness from the Church that has been so important a part of their lives is not just understandable. On its own terms, it is laudable. Joining them is tempting as their example provokes the question, "Why stay?"
However, in reading "Why I'm leaving" articles or when involved in such conversations, I am struck by an unusual absence.... Authors talk about the Catholic Church, about their past loyalty, about abuse, about cover-ups, about betrayal, but not often about Jesus Christ. For the most part, they do not say they are leaving the Catholic Church in order to remove obstacles to knowing and growing closer to Christ.
There seems to be something lacking in their view of what leaving or staying offers them. And that lack is, or should be, the most basic element in faith, a relationship with the Lord. It appears possible that one can be an active Catholic and yet never be led to Christ.
Why is that? It is easy to blame those people, but I suspect that the fault is not with them. In fact, they may be showing us a problem with the church that we have not sufficiently noticed before and which may be even worse than the abuse crisis because it may be one of the underlying causes of the current mess.
The problem is illustrated by the opposition to Pope Francis. Much of that opposition arises from the fact that rather than enforce the rules and traditions that the Church has stressed, he tries to discern how Jesus might respond to people.
Of course, even a cursory familiarity with the Gospels shows that Jesus was not a stickler for rules or even the commandments. However, the Catholic Church has often seemed to stress rules (many of which find no warrant in the actions and teaching of Christ) as the measure of one's faithfulness.
A result is that many people see the Church as the primary focus of faith. That seems to be the case with many of those who leave. But the Church is a locus, not a focus. It must act as Christ rather than as an enforcement agency.
Of course, institutions are a normal part of any human endeavor, including the Church. It is among those who strive with varying degrees of success and failure to be Christ for the world today that we encounter the Word of God, experience a community of believers and share the sacrament and the vocation of the Body of Christ.
So, though I am disgusted by and alienated from the Catholic Church's management (it does not deserve the title "leadership"), I have not joined the leavers. The Church is not an ideal or even generally effective means of meeting the Lord. However, I cannot find another.
I hope that those who have not found him through the Church might meet him as they leave, as I hope to meet him as I stay.
Father William Grimm is a Maryknoll priest and the publisher of UCANews based in Tokyo. His comments were published in the December 19, 2018 edition of the French Catholic journal LaCroix and are available online here.
• • •
"The reality of Christian mission has always been to walk trustingly in the midst of demons, knowing they are ultimately rendered powerless"
By Fr. Frank DeSiano
...What has kept the Church together all these twenty centuries, and what keeps the Church together now, is the experience we have of the presence of God through Jesus and the Holy Spirit. This experience—a saving experience—happens when we come together as Church, receiving the sacraments that mark us as members of the Kingdom, and hearing a Word that slowly liberates us from the various slaveries of our lives….
We evangelize because we carry this promise of victory and glory to a world that feels, even at its best, beaten up. We evangelize because we offer people a way to understand their personal experience through the lens of Jesus’ death and resurrection. We evangelize because we are the Church, the forefront of the Kingdom of God, leading in the proclamation of peace, justice, and mercy, and supporting us as we struggle to bring these long-sought values into reality. We evangelize because Christ has encountered us in our sin and begun the transformation of humankind through the gift of his Spirit.
We dare not take our eyes off of this central core of our proclamation and lived Catholic life. We dare not do this because the world, whether it realizes this or not, desperately needs this vision of hope engendered by the Kingdom of God. We dare not look away because we are the Sacrament through which God continues to work in the world—a Sacrament whose reality cannot be effaced even by the most scurrilous behavior of its members. To proclaim Christ is to proclaim the One who triumphs even in his brokenness and death.
Far too many have sinned and committed horrific, unspeakable crimes—the Church is full of the same humanity as every other institution—but many more have not. Some have violated their vows, but many more do not. Some have serious doubts, but many more have hope. Some have questions and complaints, but we have far more than those: we have the gift of Jesus—a gift given to us to be given to the world.
Indeed, we wish we could evangelize without opposition, whether from within or without the Church. We wish the beauty and mercy of our message could spill out, unimpeded, into the desert of human longing. We wish that the clarion proclamation of God’s salvation in Jesus would not be muffled by the sins, crimes, errors, and blindness that so often attend our lives. But this is not our reality. Our reality is a Person given to us, both scarred by our sin and triumphant in resurrection, who continues to pour his Spirit upon us, despite the multiple ways we obscure God’s love. The reality of Christian mission has always been to walk trustingly in the midst of demons and darkness, knowing they ultimately are rendered powerless. The reality we have is Christ living in us, calling us in judgment, and calling us to redemption.
Fr. Frank DeSiano CSP is president of Paulist Evangelization Ministries and a nationally recognized author and leader in Catholic evangelization. The full text of his comments, posted on the organization's website, is available here.
• • •
"I do not stay because I have decided to stay. The church stays in me"
By Massimo Faggioli
The sex abuse crisis is the greatest scandal in modern Church history, and we do not know yet what kind of Church will survive this protracted moment of public shame. This crisis has understandably caused many to question whether they can stay in the Catholic Church. A number of Catholics known for engaging in public issues have written articles to explain why they remain.
No question, it’s becoming harder to justify the reasons why. But despite the shock and disgust over the revelations of historic cases of abuse – and revelations that will continue to arise for a long time – I have never thought about leaving the Church and I cannot think about leaving it now….
It’s not just the sacramental argument – that baptism made of me a member of the Church and that I need the sacraments of the Church in my life. It’s not even the ecclesiological argument – the Church has always been made up of both saints and sinners....
Compared to Christians in most other countries, Americans tend to be more inclined to move from one Church to another or formally leave the Church and renounce their faith altogether. Elsewhere, being Catholic is not always measured by Mass attendance and participation in the life of the Church. And, yet, Catholic identity seems to be culturally more resilient, even though in a disguised and almost subconscious way. This is the type of Catholicism I grew up in and it is one of the reasons I never thought about leaving the Church.
But there is also something more personal to explain why I stay. I mean no disrespect towards those who feel it is impossible to remain in a Church devastated by the abuse scandal or those who feel the need to justify why they do not leave. But this is not my experience. In fact, the opposite happened to me in a certain sense.
My Catholic faith has become stronger since moving to the United States…. Being a “resident alien” with a green card is a limited form of belonging that makes other identities stronger. I started to see my Catholicism as a form of insurance against other de-humanizing aspects of the American and cosmopolitan way of life.
Catholicism keeps a lot of elements in my life in check. It balances the secular and religious parts of my identity. It helps me avoid the temptation to become mono-dimensional and fall into the trap of a certain kind of secularism where one owes nothing to no one and is tethered only by his or her own personal past…. It is Catholicism that helps me avoid the temptation to reduce Christian faith to politics, to personal or political morality, or to social issues. It is not about joining a cause or becoming a cause. The Church is not a cause or an agenda…. The Church is not a club I decided to join. Nor is it something I can decide to leave. In some sense, I feel that not even the institutional Church can decide that I should leave or that I have left....
I also see my remaining in the Church as a remedy from the virtualization of the world and from the illusions of “enhanced reality,” which often shapes our dreams and expectations of the Catholic Church. I need mediation, and the flaws in the various forms of ecclesial and ecclesiastical mediation remind me of my own flaws – the ones I know and the ones I do not even want to know.
The abuse crisis is pushing us to rethink many aspects in the life of the Church, and even our theology…. In the abuse crisis we have discovered a cancer in the Church. It is up to us to find a cure for it and do everything possible for the victims and survivors. We do not know what kind of Church there will be after this, but we must assume that it will probably get worse before it gets better.
Still, I am not among those who are torn over whether to leave or stay in the Church. I do not stay because I have decided to stay in the Church. It’s the Church that stays in me.
Massimo Faggioli is an Italian Catholic historian and theologian who teaches at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. His comments were published September 24, 2018 in the French Catholic journal LaCroix and are available online here.
• • •
"We stay because we long for what the Church proposes to be true"
By Paul Baumann
I understand how someone could leave the church because they were repulsed by the revelations of sexual abuse, and appalled by the hypocrisy of priests and bishops, who claim an authority conferred on them by God but act like buck-passers and company men.... What is harder to understand is why this would suddenly hit home…now, sixteen years after the scandal broke wide open in Boston.
The Pennsylvania grand-jury report, as horrible as the details are, does not provide any evidence that sexual abuse continues to be epidemic in the church. On the contrary, only two credible accusations were reported after 2002, and both cases were turned over to law enforcement…. The reports by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice issued in 2004 and 2011, which are the most comprehensive independent analyses of the church’s failures, concluded that in the half century after 1950 between 4 and 5 percent of priests were sexual abusers. At the time, bishops were no better at dealing with these predators than headmasters or Scout leaders, although there is good evidence that major improvements occurred during the 1990s, and that the 2002 Dallas Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People was a turning point....
Those facts are no consolation for the thousands of people who were abused, but neither do they support [the] conclusion that the institution as a whole is repulsive and filled with repulsive people. By [that] reasoning, the list of repulsive institutions would include the Boy Scouts, USA Gymnastics, elite prep schools, Evangelical Protestantism, Orthodox Judaism, and on and on. I am not trying to excuse what happened in the church. There is no excuse for it. Nor am I opposed to further investigations by secular authorities. But this plague is not unique to Catholicism, although there is no denying that the church’s claims for its own moral authority make the public’s outrage understandable.
…In my mid-twenties, I was getting reacquainted with Catholicism. One day I was waxing poetical about the church in the presence of my maternal grandfather, who had been educated by the Jesuits at Boston College High School and Boston College. I don’t remember his exact words, but his skeptical tone has stayed with me. He was a worldly man, but he had been raised in a thick Irish Catholic culture and was scrupulous about Sunday Mass and observing other “markers” of Catholicism. He warned me in a vague but unmistakable way about the clergy and the church. He said in effect, “They’re not as bad as some people claim, but they aren’t as good as they want you to think.” In other words, although we owe a certain loyalty to the church, what priests and bishops say should get the same scrutiny we give to the pronouncements of others in positions of authority. Skepticism is warranted.
...How can we justify staying? I think the answer is similar to the one you might give when asked to justify allegiance to the United States of America, a nation founded as a slave state and established by the virtual annihilation of its native population, a country that killed several million Vietnamese in an unprovoked and unjust war and now threatens the peace of the entire world by putting nuclear weapons in the hands of a clearly repulsive and disturbed individual. You remain because, despite the nation’s manifold sins, you still want to believe in the truth of the propositions put forth in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address. You stay in the church, despite its sins, because you long for what it proposes about the nature and destiny of human life to be true as well.
Paul Baumann is former editor and currently senior writer for Commonweal Magazine. His comments appeared in an article published online September 23, 2018 here. Baumann was responding to an article by Damon Linker in This Week, available here.
• • •
"In the church, frailty and sin never eclipse the grace of God."
By Fr. Ron Rolheiser
Carlo Carretto was an Italian monk who died in 1988…. Carretto wrote a book…called I Sought and I Found… [which] combines his deep love for his faith and his church with his refusal to not turn a blind eye to the very real faults of Christians and the churches. At one point in the book he gives voice to something which might be described as an Ode to the Church. It reads this way:
How much I must criticize you, my church and yet how much I love you!
How you have made me suffer much and yet owe much to you.
I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence.
You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness.
Never in this world have I seen anything more obscurantist, more compromised, more false, and yet
never in this world have I touched anything more pure, more generous, and more beautiful.
Many times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face – and yet how often I have prayed
that I might die in your sure arms!
No, I cannot be free of you, for I am one with you, even though not completely you.
Then, too – where would I go? To build another church?...
No, I am old enough to know that I am no better than others.
I shall not leave this Church, founded on so frail a rock, because I should be founding another one on an
even frailer rock: myself....
This is an expression of a mature faith; one which isn’t so romantic and idealistic that it needs to be shielded from the darker side of things and one which is real enough so as not to be so cynical that it blinds itself to the evident goodness that also emanates from the church.... Many people have left the church because it has scandalized them through its habitual sins, blind spots, defensiveness, self-serving nature, and arrogance. The recent revelations (again) of sexual abuse by priests and the cover-up by church authorities have left many people wondering whether they can ever again trust the church’s structure, ministers, and authorities. For many, this scandal seems too huge to digest.
Carlo Carretto’s Ode, I believe, can help us all, whether scandalized or pious. To the pious, it can show how one can accept the church despite its sin and how denial of that sin is not what’s called for by love and loyalty. To the scandalized, it can be a challenge to not miss the forest for the trees, to not miss seeing that, in the church, frailty and sin, while real, tragic, and scandalous, never eclipse the superabundant, life-giving grace of God.
Fr. Ron Rolheiser is a nationally syndicated Catholic writer and author. The full text of this column, released for publication on September 3, 2018, is available online here.
• • •
"Indignantly separating ourselves from this is not the way of Jesus"
By Fr. Ron Rolheiser
"Sometimes all you can do is to put your mouth to the dust and wait". That’s a counsel from the Book of Lamentations and while perhaps not the best response to the recent revelations of clerical sexual abuse and cover-up in the Roman Catholic Church, it seems the only helpful response available to me as Roman Catholic priest today….
…[A]s a Roman Catholic priest, I do not distance myself from this by morally separating myself from those who have done wrong by declaring: “They’re guilty and I’m not!” The cross of Jesus doesn’t allow such an escape. Jesus was crucified between two thieves. He was innocent, they weren’t; but he didn’t protest his innocence, and those looking at three crosses that day didn’t distinguish between who was innocent and who was guilty. The crosses were all painted with the same brush. There are times when one does not protest one’s innocence. Part of Jesus’ mission, as our liturgy puts it, was “to become sin for us”, to risk having his innocence mixed in with guilt and be perceived as sin so as to help carry darkness and sin for others.
Beyond our apologies, all of us, clergy and laity alike, are invited to do something for the church right now, namely, help carry this scandal as Jesus did. Indignantly separating ourselves morally from this sin is not the way of Jesus and the cross.
Like Mary standing under the cross, we must not replicate the anger and darkness of the moment so as to give it back in kind. Instead, like her, we must do the only thing possible sometimes when standing beneath the consequence of sin, that is, let our posture, like Mary’s, speak deeply through a voice that, unlike bitterness or collapse, says: “Today, I can’t stop this darkness, nobody can. Sometimes darkness just has its hour. But I can stop some of the sin and bitterness that’s in the moment by absorbing it, not distancing myself from it, and not giving it back in kind.” Sometimes darkness has its moment and we, followers of Jesus, may not self-servingly distance ourselves from the sin but need to help absorb it.
Sometimes all we can do is put our mouths to the dust … and pray … and wait. Knowing that, at some future time, the stone will again roll away from the tomb.
Fr. Ron Rolheiser is a nationally syndicated Catholic writer and author. The full text of this column, released for publication on August 27, 2018, is available online here.
• • •
"How to survive--the Catholic tradition has some advice"
By Holly Taylor Coolman
For American Catholics, it feels like a dark time. For many of us, the current presidency represents a broader national moment of anger and division, a resurgence of pettiness and hatred, a loss of thoughtfulness and magnanimity.
And now, the stomach-churning news of new tales of sexual abuse. Frankly, it has left some of us wondering how to put one foot in front of the other.
As it turns out, the Catholic tradition has some advice to offer.
1. Do your work. The old monastic saying is “age quod agis”.... “Do what you’re doing” is actually what it says. At a moment when our attention ricochets constantly from one crisis to the next, this is a lot harder than it sounds. If you are teaching, teach. If you are organizing, organize. If you are farming, farm. Attend to your own unique calling with patience and care. We are all relying on you to do your own part well. If you want to discern a path to something new, that’s fine, but not too often.
2. Rest from your work. Reclaim Sabbath and the joy that comes with crossword puzzles and music-making and all the things that may ”produce” nothing in particular, but allow you to rest your heart and your mind. Reclaim evening as a time when, tired from the day, you give yourself over to these things.
3. Eat well. There’s been a lot of talk about a revival of fasting, but a revival of feasting would be no less revolutionary. Remember feast days in your home with fanfare and with sweets. Cook the food, and tell the stories, slowly. And when you are feasting, remember what “hospitality” looks like in the Christian tradition: scooting your chair over and wiping off the placemat with your elbow so there is room for one more.
4. Have mercy. On the ones who have hurt you, sure. And on the people around you who need you to see them and care for them. But on yourself, too. If “Catholic” means anything, it means that the the most real thing, the thing at the center of all of reality. is Love. Even as we demand accountability, we can continue to seek the mind of Christ. If we come to imitatie it fully, mercy will be our natural state. There is still no better habit to form yourself in this way than the habit of the communal liturgy of the Eucharist.
5. Meet a friend for a beer. Or a dance party. Or a long walk. The work of love is part of your work, too. If there is no time for real friendship or real conversation, you can’t do any of the above well.
None of this is meant to advise that you put on rose-colored glasses. There very well may be even worse news coming. And you may be called to to do something about it. Whether politically or ecclesially, there may be very hard work of questioning and accountability to come. But this is how you’ll be ready.
This article originally appeared on the Catholic Moral Theology blog on August 27, 2018, and is available here.
• • •
"The heart-wrenching pain of these victims...cries out to heaven"
By Pope Francis
“If one member suffers, all suffer together with it” (1 Cor. 12:26). These words of Saint Paul forcefully echo in my heart as I acknowledge once more the suffering endured by many minors due to sexual abuse, the abuse of power and the abuse of conscience perpetrated by a significant number of clerics and consecrated persons. Crimes that inflict deep wounds of pain and powerlessness, primarily among the victims, but also in their family members and in the larger community of believers and nonbelievers alike.
Looking back to the past, no effort to beg pardon and to seek to repair the harm done will ever be sufficient. Looking ahead to the future, no effort must be spared to create a culture able to prevent such situations from happening, but also to prevent the possibility of their being covered up and perpetuated….
In recent days, a report was made public which detailed the experiences of at least a thousand survivors, victims of sexual abuse, the abuse of power and of conscience at the hands of priests over a period of approximately seventy years.... The heart-wrenching pain of these victims, which cries out to heaven, was long ignored, kept quiet or silenced. But their outcry was more powerful than all the measures meant to silence it, or sought even to resolve it by decisions that increased its gravity….
The Lord heard that cry and once again showed us on which side he stands. Mary’s song is not mistaken and continues quietly to echo throughout history. For the Lord remembers the promise he made to our fathers: “he has scattered the proud in their conceit; he has cast down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty” (Lk 1:51-53). We feel shame when we realize that our style of life has denied, and continues to deny, the words we recite….
While it is important and necessary...to acknowledge the truth of what has happened, in itself this is not enough. Today we are challenged as the People of God to take on the pain of our brothers and sisters wounded in their flesh and in their spirit. If, in the past, the response was one of omission, today we want solidarity.... And this in an environment where conflicts, tensions and above all the victims of every type of abuse can encounter an outstretched hand to protect them and rescue them from their pain (cf. Evangelii Gaudium, 228). Such solidarity demands that we in turn condemn whatever endangers the integrity of any person….
It is impossible to think of a conversion of our activity as a Church that does not include the active participation of all the members of God’s People. Indeed, whenever we have tried to...reduce the People of God to small elites, we end up creating communities, projects, theological approaches, spiritualities and structures without roots, without memory, without faces, without bodies and ultimately, without lives. This is clearly seen in a peculiar way of understanding the Church’s authority, one common in many communities where sexual abuse and the abuse of power and conscience have occurred. Such is the case with clericalism, an approach that “not only nullifies the character of Christians, but also tends to diminish and undervalue the baptismal grace that the Holy Spirit has placed in the heart of our people”.3 Clericalism, whether fostered by priests themselves or by lay persons, leads to an excision in the ecclesial body that supports and helps to perpetuate many of the evils that we are condemning today. To say “no” to abuse is to say an emphatic “no” to all forms of clericalism….
It is essential that we, as a Church, be able to acknowledge and condemn, with sorrow and shame, the atrocities perpetrated by consecrated persons, clerics, and all those entrusted with the mission of watching over and caring for those most vulnerable. Let us beg forgiveness for our own sins and the sins of others. An awareness of sin helps us to acknowledge the errors, the crimes and the wounds caused in the past and allows us, in the present, to be more open and committed along a journey of renewed conversion….
May the Holy Spirit grant us the grace of conversion and the interior anointing needed to express before these crimes of abuse our compunction and our resolve courageously to combat them.
Pope Francis's "Letter to the People of God" was released on August 20, 2018. The full text is available online here.
• • •
"Cling to hope, for Jesus has already conquered sin"
By Archbishop Michael Jackels
• • •
"Jesus never abandons us, especially in our darkest hours"
By John Gehring
By Rabbi Jeffrey K.Salkin
When I read the accounts of the grand jury report, accusing three hundred Roman Catholic priests in western Pennsylvania of abusing a thousand children, I felt nauseous."I will ask you to stay because it is your church"
By Rev. Mr. Frederick Bauerschmidt
"You are no where near as sad or as angry as you need to be about this"
By Sherry Antonetti
Catholic writer, blogger and author
If the Church were merely a worldly institution, a club with rules and regulations, I’d be demanding all the money I’ve given, all the time, all the work paid back with interest for the abject failure of so many over so many years, to recognize evil must be opposed. I’d be screaming and suing to run the whole thing to the ground leaving not even dirt alone, for holding the laity to a standard they ignored themselves. People who followed the Church and gave willingly, lovingly, earnestly of their time and treasure, who obeyed the rules to the letter and beyond, if this were merely a worldly thing, are the greatest suckers in a sad long history of suckers....
I know I’m sick at heart, sick of trying, sick of hearing about reform, sick of hearing how good everyone normally is, because I don’t see it anymore. I can’t trust what I see. I can’t trust what I hear. I can't trust what I read once. I can’t trust what I used to know or rather, believe. We need more than policy and procedure. We need action, we need more than the usual, it’s just a few bad actors, and ordinary letters and interviews and tweets saying “we’re all saddened and angry.”
No. You are not yet. You are nowhere near as sad or as angry as you need to be about this, because you still know, if we want the Eucharist, we can go nowhere else. We’re stuck knowing the sacraments are here, knowing Jesus is here, and knowing, everything else is also still here....
This sin needs to stop. The cleansing and clearing of the temple is a severe mercy, because it will require removing people from positions, even though they might be gifted at what they do. A priest is first and foremost, a servant to God, and to the face of God in all others. If the priests cannot serve without being slaves to grave sin (either of omission or commission) they cannot stay. They will have to walk a more humble path, stumbling with the rest of us, wanting always the Eucharist, and not always being able to partake. God wants all of us in Heaven, but we cannot get there clinging to sins or pretending we don’t sin, or pretending the sins we commit aren’t serious....
This hurt hurts, because the Church isn’t just a club. It isn’t an organization of the world. It is the Bride of Christ. It is the Body of Christ, and we have wounded it grievously, by what we have done and what we have failed to do, and many will feel tempted to wound the Body of Christ still more, out of wrath, revenge and a sense of righteousness. We will be wrong because it will be very difficult not to get caught up in the dark joy of rage. We won’t be able to stop, and we will hurt the Church and good servants within it in the process.
This article originally appeared in the National Catholic Register on August 7. 2018. Read the full article online here.
• • •
By Pope Francis
The pope's letter to the bishops of Chile was published by the Vatican on April 8, 2018. The text is available online here.
• • •
By Pope Francis
For those who have been victims of a pedophile it is difficult to talk about what they have been through and describe the trauma that still persist after many years. For this reason, Daniel Pittet’s testimony is necessary, treasured and courageous.
I met Daniel at the Vatican in 2015, during the Year of the consecrated life. He wanted to promote on a large scale a book called “To love is to give everything”, which collected the testimonies of religious men and women, priests and consecrated persons. I could not have imagined that this enthusiastic and passionate Christian man had been the victim of abuse by a priest. Yet this is what he told me, and his suffering struck me very much. I saw once again the tremendous damage caused by sexual abuse and the long and painful journey that awaits the victims.
I am happy that others can read his testimony today and discover how far evil can enter the heart of a servant of the Church.
How can a priest at the service of Christ and his Church cause so much harm? How can someone who devoted their life to lead children to God, end up instead to devour them in what I called “a diabolical sacrifice” that destroys both the victim and the life of the Church? Some of the victims have been driven to suicide. These deaths weigh on my heart, on my conscience and that of the whole Church. To their families, I offer my feelings of love and pain and humbly, I ask forgiveness.
It is an absolute monstrosity, a horrible sin, radically against everything that Christ has taught us. Jesus uses very harsh words against those who harm children, “If anyone causes one of these little ones–those who believe in me–to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea” (Matthew 18: 6).
As I recalled in the Apostolic Letter of June 4, 2016, Our Church must take care and protect with special love the weak and the helpless “as a loving mother”. We have stated that it is our duty to be extremely strict with the priests who betray their mission, and with their hierarchy, bishops or cardinals, who might protect them, as has happened in the past.
In adversity, Daniel Pittet also met another face of the Church, and this allowed him to not lose hope in men and in God. He also tells us of the power of prayer that he has never abandoned, and that has comforted him in the darkest hours.
He chose to meet his tormentor forty-four years later, to look into the eyes of the man who has hurt him in the depths of his soul. He lended him his hand. The wounded child is now a standing man, fragile but standing. I’m very impressed by his words: “Many people fail to understand the fact that I do not hate him. I have forgiven him and I built my life on that forgiveness.”
I thank Daniel, because testimony like his break down the wall of silence that covered scandals and suffering, shedding light on a terrible dark area in the life of the Church. They open the way to a just mending and to the grace of reconciliation, helping pedophiles to become aware of the terrible consequences of their actions.
I pray for Daniel and for all those who, like him, were wounded in their innocence, may God lift them and heal them, and give us all his forgiveness and mercy.
The Pope's comments appeared as a preface to "I Forgive You Father," a book by sexual abuse survivor Daniel Pettit. The text was published online here.
• • •
"The answers...will come from creating a new vision of a healing church"By Diarmuid Martin
Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland
We need to develop a new awareness that what has happened has wounded the entire Church and that now the entire Church is called to put right what has happened. The only Church response must be one which attempts to bring healing to a wounded Church through robustly responding to all those who have been wounded by abuse.
The healing of the Church comes through how the Church works to heal survivors. The Church must not just be transformed into a place where children are safe. It must also be transformed into a privileged place of healing for survivors.... The Church can and should ensure adequate counseling for victims and their families. But it must do more. Healing cannot be delegated. The Church must become the bosom of Christ which lovingly embraces wounded men and women, with all the brutality and unattractiveness of wounds. Wounds cannot be sanitized from a distance. The Good Samaritan is the one who carries the wounded man in his own arms....
The answers to all these multiple wounds will not come from slick public relations gestures or even from repeated words of apology. They will come from creating a new vision of a healing Church. A healing Church will not be from the outset a perfect Church. The Church must first of all recognize within her own life how compromise and insensitivity and wrong decisions have damaged the witness of Church. The art of healing is learned only in humility. Arrogance is never the road towards healing. Healing is not something we can package and hand over safe and sound to someone else and then we can go off safely and happily on our own way. Healing involves journeying together. The healer needs humility and personal healing if he or she is to journey really with those who are wounded. The duration of the process of healing is not measured by the time on our watch, but by the watch and the time of the other.
The crisis of the sexual abuse of children over these past decades has wounded the Church of Jesus Christ. The response must come from the entire Church which will only attain the healing it desires when it welcomes our brothers and sisters who have survived abuse as Jesus would have welcomed them. We are not there to tell the survivors what they have to do, but together to find new ways of interacting with respect and care.....
Excerpted from Archbishop Martin's address to the Anglophone Conference at the Pontifical Irish College in Rome on July 7, 2014 online at: http://www.dublindiocese.ie/content/anglophone-conference-address
• • •
By Stephen Mattson
We trust that our church communities will befriend us, relate to us, and connect with us.
We trust that the church will care for us when we’re in need.
We trust that people won’t abuse our vulnerability.
We trust that they’ll forgive us.
We trust that they’ll love us.
Inevitably, our trust will be broken ... and we’ll blame God.
The truth is that our faith and spirituality is often dependent on hundreds of different relationships, factors, institutions, and circumstances that we directly correlate with God.
When our Christian expectations are shattered, it’s easy to blame God. We mistakenly idolize the things that are associated with God, and assume that if one of these aspects failed then God failed.
“Christianity” will fail us. Our churches will attack, our pastors will lie, our mentors will manipulate, our friends will betray, and when this happens, our beliefs will be shaken to their core.
We often unfairly judge God based on expectations of perfection, and if something in our life goes wrong, it’s hard to reconcile with our perception of an all-loving, all-caring, all-powerful, all-knowing, ever-present God. How could God let something bad happen? And to us?!
The danger is that we place unrealistic expectations on our faith and assume that if we’re in God’s will, our spiritual lives will be ideal — this isn’t reality.
In the New Testament, even Jesus’s disciples lived lives that were messy and full of doubt, pain, suffering, and confusion. Following Christ meant that struggling was part of the routine instead of the exception — we must start bravely accepting this.
Stephen Mattson is on the staff at Northwestern College in St. Paul MN. Although these comments do not directly address the issue of sexual abuse in the Church, they speak to an important aspect of our response. Excerpted from an article posted on the SojoNet blog here.
• • •
By Regis Martin
I will not be outdone...in the contempt department when it comes to the depredations of those who either betray their calling, or others who cover-up their crimes…. On the other hand, is it entirely fair to blame an institution for those who betray its mission? Do we close the local constabulary because there are bad cops on the take? Or ban libraries because not enough good books are being read? Of course not.
Then why should we punish the Church for the sinfulness of its members? Especially not when the survival of the things we value most, like the Mass and the Sacraments, depend upon the maintenance of that very institution which we are so inclined to revile. Go ahead and jettison all that you find odious and unjust. And when you’ve succeeded in completely leveling the thing for its many iniquities, where will you then go to hear God’s Word proclaimed, his Sacraments celebrated?...
…[W]hen the Church is seen through an institutional prism only, it is awfully easy to find fault with anything; in fact, a reductionism of that sort is interested only in the parts, particularly when they mal-function. But what if the Church were not finally an institution at all, but a Woman, She who is both Virgin and Mother, who in the purity and simplicity of her response to grace, to God, is Mary Immaculate? Under that sublime aspect, it is not so easy to hate the Church.
“Christ warns us that we must answer for what we have received,” writes Francois Mauriac. “When it is himself we have received, what shall we not have to answer for?” How the web of complicity is widened now! In other words, it is too easy to demonize bad priests who trash their vows. How much harder to hold all the baptized accountable for the evil that we do. No one who belongs to the Body of Christ will be given a free pass into Paradise. That should at least keep us from becoming pharisaical, which has got to be a good thing.
I cherish the reply Flannery O’Connor once gave to a friend who, appalled by the shortcomings of the Church she had just joined, resolved to take leave of it altogether. “The Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable,” she snapped. “The only thing that makes the Church endurable is that she is somehow the Body of Christ and on this Body we are fed.”
Please note that Miss O’Connor did not dispute the fact that the human face of the Church is something all our sins have helped disfigure. Only that we mustn’t wrest from the evidence of so much weakness and sin the conclusion that God cannot use crooked pencils to write straight lines. That would be a counsel of despair….
Unless we see the Church as having truly begun with Mary, in whose blessed womb the Word first took on flesh, we shall not see her as God’s sees her. Not that we shut our eyes to the awfulness of what is happening around us (indeed, how can we when the media report it so gleefully?), anymore than God himself did, who, after all, suffered his Son’s flesh to be flayed and crucified so as to redeem it. What else then is the Eucharist if not evidence of God’s love for a fallen world, a world hungry for such wholeness that he will break himself to become its bread?
Regis Marten is Professor of Theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. These comments were excerpted from an article in Crisis magazine, published online here.
• • •
By Bishop R. Daniel Conlon
Chair of the U.S. Bishops' Committee for the Protection of Children and Young People
...For the last few years I operated with the conviction that consistent implementation of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, coupled with some decent publicity, would turn public opinion around. I now know this was an illusion …. Many Catholics in this country and elsewhere remain hurt, angry, cynical and confused. Their trauma is not something that will just go away with time…. There is an additional complication in our Catholic trauma: those partly responsible for causing it are the ones trying to heal it. …[B]ishops are seen by many as an even larger part of the problem because of the perception of how they handled abuse cases brought to their attention....
The thing is, at this point, nobody cares about explanations and excuses. Something awful happened for which no explanation or excuse will do. We are beyond the realm of carefully constructed reason. We are in the realm of trauma....
St. Gregory the Great compares the Church to dawn, that moment between night and day. “The dawn intimates that the night is over;” he writes, “it does not yet proclaim the full light of day. While it dispels the darkness and welcomes the light, it holds both of them, the one mixed with the other, as it were.” He continues from Scripture: “When he writes, ‘the night is passed’ Paul does not add, ‘the day is come’. But rather, ‘the day is at hand’.…It will be fully day for the Church of the elect when she is no longer darkened by the shadow of sin….Paul was hastening to the place which he knew the dawn would reach when he said he wished to die and to be with Christ.” (From the Moral Reflections on Job)
Because we live as the dawn we cannot succumb to discouragement. We must be the light of Christ, even if only rising weakly over the horizon. Yesterday’s victim/survivors deserve our understanding and support. Today’s young people require our protection and guidance. Our brothers and sisters in Christ want assurance that the light is getting brighter not dimmer.
Bishop Conlon, who is bishop of Joliet, Illinois, made his remarks August 13, 2012, to a conference of diocesan staff people responsible for implementing child safety programs in U.S. dioceses. The text of his remarks is available online at:
http://www.nccbuscc.org/issues-and-action/child-and-youth-protection/upload/Sec-Vac-Conference-Talk-120813.pdf
• • •
"We Must Have the Courage to Ask Humbly for God's Pardon”
By Cardinal Marc Ouellet
Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops
I come here with the specific intention of seeking forgiveness, from God and from the victims, for the grave sin of sexual abuse of children by clerics. We have learned over the last decades how much harm and despair such abuse has caused to thousands of victims. We learned too that the response of some Church authorities to these crimes was often inadequate and inefficient in stopping the crimes, in spite of clear indications in the code of Canon Law.
In the name of the Church, I apologize once again to the victims, some of whom I have met here in Lough Derg.
I repeat here what the Holy Father told to the victims in His Letter to the Catholics of Ireland: “It is understandable that you find it hard to forgive or to be reconciled with the Church. In her name I openly express the shame and remorse that we feel. At the same time, I ask you not to lose hope. It is in the communion of the Church that we encounter the person of Jesus Christ, who was himself a victim of injustice and sin”….
The tragedy of the sexual abuse of minors perpetrated by Christians, especially when done so by members of the clergy, is a source of great shame and enormous scandal. It is a sin against which Jesus himself lashed out: “It would be better for him if a millstone was put around his neck and he is thrown in to the sea than for him to cause one of the little one’s to stumble” (Lk 17:2).
As members of the Church, we must have the courage to ask humbly for God’s pardon, as well as for the forgiveness of those who have been wounded: we must remain close to them on their road of suffering, seeking in every possible way to heal and bind up the wounds following the example of the Good Samaritan.
From the context of this International Eucharistic Congress, I reaffirm the commitment of the Catholic Church to create a safe environment for children and we pray that a new culture of respect, integrity, and Christ like love would prevail in our midst and permeate the whole society.
May the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints help us all to eradicate the evil of sexual abuse and set us free toward a deep and lasting spiritual renewal of the whole Church.
Cardinal Ouellet gave this homily at a Mass in Lough Derg, Ireland, following a meeting with victims of clergy sexual abuse, in June 2012.
• • •
By Pope Benedict XVI
...Only by examining carefully the many elements that gave rise to the present crisis can a clear-sighted diagnosis of its causes be undertaken and effective remedies be found. Certainly, among the contributing factors we can include: inadequate procedures for determining the suitability of candidates for the priesthood and the religious life; insufficient human, moral, intellectual and spiritual formation in seminaries and novitiates; a tendency in society to favor the clergy and other authority figures; and a misplaced concern for the reputation of the Church and the avoidance of scandal, resulting in failure to apply existing canonical penalties and to safeguard the dignity of every person. Urgent action is needed to address these factors, which have had such tragic consequences in the lives of victims and their families, and have obscured the light of the Gospel to a degree that not even centuries of persecution succeeded in doing. (#4)
To the victims of abuse and their families -- You have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry. I know that nothing can undo the wrong you have endured. Your trust has been betrayed and your dignity has been violated…. It is understandable that you find it hard to forgive or be reconciled with the Church. In her name, I openly express the shame and remorse that we all feel. At the same time, I ask you not to lose hope. It is in the communion of the Church that we encounter the person of Jesus Christ, who was himself a victim of injustice and sin. Like you, he still bears the wounds of his own unjust suffering. He understands the depths of your pain and its enduring effect upon your lives and your relationships, including your relationship with the Church. (#6)
To the children and young people of Ireland -- …We are all scandalized by the sins and failures of some of the Church's members, particularly those who were chosen especially to guide and serve young people. But it is in the Church that you will find Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today and for ever (cf. Heb 13:8). He loves you and he has offered himself on the cross for you. Seek a personal relationship with him within the communion of his Church, for he will never betray your trust! He alone can satisfy your deepest longings and give your lives their fullest meaning by directing them to the service of others…. (#9)
To my brother bishops -- It cannot be denied that some of you and your predecessors failed, at times grievously, to apply the long-established norms of canon law to the crime of child abuse. …[I]t must be admitted that grave errors of judgment were made and failures of leadership occurred. All this has seriously undermined your credibility and effectiveness…. Only decisive action carried out with complete honesty and transparency will restore the respect and good will of the Irish people towards the Church to which we have consecrated our lives. This must arise, first and foremost, from your own self-examination, inner purification and spiritual renewal…. (11)
To all the faithful of Ireland -- …In confronting the present crisis, measures to deal justly with individual crimes are essential, yet on their own they are not enough: a new vision is needed, to inspire present and future generations to treasure the gift of our common faith. By treading the path marked out by the Gospel, by observing the commandments and by conforming your lives ever more closely to the figure of Jesus Christ, you will surely experience the profound renewal that is so urgently needed at this time. I invite you all to persevere along this path.
Pope Benedict made these comments, his most extensive remarks about the sexual abuse crisis, in a letter addressed to the Church in Ireland published on March 20, 2010. Read the full text of the letter online at: http://www.zenit.org/en/articles/benedict-xvi-s-letter-to-catholics-of-ireland
• • •
By Msgr. Lyle Wilgenbush
Episcopal Vicar/Archdiocese of Dubuque
I have here the Easter homily I prepared earlier this week. But as the news of the week continued regarding sex abuse in our Church and particularly ‘what our Pope knew and when he knew it’, I made the decision to prepare something different. The news is simply in our face and it isn’t going to go away. Nor should it! This Easter Sunday we find ourselves with conflicting news: the news of the day about sexual abuse and honesty about the crisis, and then the news of Jesus’ resurrection. I hope no one ever told you that following Jesus and being a Christian in the modern age would be easy!
I was led to make this change especially after reading two news articles on Good Friday evening: one was Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s column in Easter edition of The Witness and an article from the Washington Post that appeared in Friday’s Waterloo Courier.
The Courier article referred to Msgr. John Enzler’s reflection on how to approach his own Easter homily in a Washington D.C. parish in light of all the media on the current crisis and the involvement or lack of involvement of Benedict XVI. He says, “Do you slip it into the Good Friday bulletin? Or meet it head-on with an Easter sermon?” …. “The thing is, this is not exactly what people expect on Easter, … yet not to address it could alienate those on the fence …those with doubts, who want answers, honesty and transparency from the church. To say nothing leaves the question hanging in the air, and opening to be filled by critics and negative stories in the news media.” I heard his reflections as a challenge to toss my original homily and go to work again on a different one.
Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s column in The Witness confirmed my decision to do exactly that. His Easter column is how crucifixion was clearly meant to be humiliating. Most all of us have had some sense of how terrible death by crucifixion was. The film “The Passion of the Christ” of a few years ago no doubt strengthened our sense of that. But over the last year’s I personally have learned some things that I never did realize, that for one reason or another no one ever taught me about crucifixion. Those who were crucified under the Romans were crucified naked. The Romans did everything they could to humiliate their criminals. Crucifixion was designed to maximize the physical pain; they made sure the procedure was dragged out over a good number of hours. They even calculated the amount of pain inflicted at any one time so as not to cause the criminal to fall into unconsciousness and thus ease their pain.
And when it was time to actually mount them on the crosses, they stripped them naked, with genitals publicly exposed, for the greatest possible human humiliation. As well, when death came the bowels of the criminal would loosen. That is how our Jesus ended his life; exposed in every way possible. Rolheiser says:
“We have tended to downplay this aspect, both in our preaching and in our art. We have surrounded the cross with roses, with aesthetic and antiseptic wrapping towels. But that was not the case for Jesus. His nakedness was exposed, his body publicly humiliated. That, among other reasons, is why the crucifixion was such a devastating blow to his disciples and why many of them abandoned Jesus and scattered after the crucifixion. They simply couldn’t connect this kind of humiliation with glory, divinity, and triumph”
Rolheiser spends the rest of his column showing how it is in times of greatest humiliation, however, that we come to real and true depth of soul.
…incidences that have made us feel some shame in acknowledging them
…powerlessness from which we could not protect ourselves
…abuses from which we could not defend ourselves
…inadequacies of body or mind that left us vulnerable
…humiliating incidents that have happened to us
If we have any depth of soul to our person, Rolheiser says, it has been born to large extent and probably entirely from such experiences of humiliation. Our only cause for concern is that through such humiliating times we grow deeper in compassion, graciousness, and forgiveness, and not deeper in hate, anger and revenge.
So, my sisters and brothers, it is Easter. The humiliation of Jesus is complete: He himself said, “Father, it is finished!” Ours, however, is not so complete.
I don’t have any answers to the questions posed in the media. I wonder just as you do, ‘what did he know, and when did he know it?” But, my friends, that is the question we have all carried since the sex abuse scandal broke in our own country in 2001: what did our bishops know and when did they know it? An even more challenging: ‘what did we know, and when did we know it?”
Today you do know that Jesus is risen. Today you do know that out of the darkest hour comes the brightest light, and out of the deepest and most painful humiliations can come the greatest depth of soul. It is ours to walk the journey in this hope. In spite of the questions, the anger, the pain, the confusion we live our lives. Mary and the disciples did it then; you and I are called to do it now. As much as you are able, dear sisters and brothers, …. Happy Easter!
Msgr. Wilgenbush is a priest of the Archdiocese of Dubuque and former Episcopal Vicar for the Waterloo region. He preached this homily on Easter Sunday, April 4, 2010 at parishes in Lourdes and Alta Vista.
• • •
By Cardinal Christoph Schonborn
Archbishop of Vienna
In this hour, preachy words are beside the point. They could be not only uncomfortable, but even injurious. Keeping silent would be appropriate. Not that silence which happens all too often: the silence of covering up, of silencing another, the silence of not being able to speak up. It would have to be the silence of the friends of Job, who simply fell silent and sat in silence before the suffering of their friend.
Thanks, that you have broken the silence. Thanks, that victims have begun to trust themselves enough to speak. Oftentimes it takes a long time to break out of the spiral of silence. Much has broken open. There is less looking the other way. But much remains to be done.
I confess that I often have the feeling of injustice these days. Why is it mostly the Church which is pilloried? Isn’t there abuse elsewhere? Is anyone looking into that? Is it being dealt with? And then I am easily tempted to say: Well, the media just plain don’t like the Church! Maybe there’s even a conspiracy against the Church?
But then I feel in my heart – no, that’s not it. Even if that were the case, the mirror which is held up to us reflects something which makes abuse in the Church especially serious: it defiles the holy name of God. It closes off, often for an entire lifetime, access to the God who is with us and makes us free. Abuse which is sexual or physically violent or both, when it is committed by a church representative, by a priest or a professed religious, can become a “poisoning of God.” The people who are supposed to bring the nearness and the name of God become destroyers of the relationship to God. It is this which makes abuse in the Church even worse. Thus, the words of “holy anger” which Jesus uttered are so terrifyingly serious: “To the person who causes scandal to one of these little ones, it would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea.”
Scandal to the “little ones,” the dependent ones, the defenseless, children and youth: this meets God’s anger and woe....
He is not the God who looks the other way and does not listen: “I have seen the pain of my people in Egypt and I have heard their loud lament. I know their suffering.” A God who looks in and listens closely, and who does not remain unmoved by suffering.
How horrible it is when access to this God is closed off by people of the Church. When the name of this living God is poisoned. And then individuals must experience: your pain is ignored, your suffering is not seen, your loud lament is not heard!...
Is it not the tragedy of what we now experience, that a Gospel of liberation has become the Bad News of abuse? From this the Church must repent, all of us. As long as the Church does not look in and listen closely, the Church will only obstruct the liberating, redeeming God. Not only will the Church not proclaim the Good News of liberation from the house of slavery, it will make the slavery even worse.
This is a painful experience for the Church. But what is this pain in comparison to the pain of the victims whom we have not seen or listened to! When the victims now speak, then God speaks to us, to his Church, in order to shake it up and purify it; then, through the victims, that God speaks to us who said to Moses: “I have diligently taken heed of you and have seen what they have done to you.”
Christoph Schönborn made his remarks during a service of lamentation March 31, 2010 in St. Stephen Cathedral, Vienna. Read the full text online at:
www.kath-kirche.at/content/site/minidossiers/article/53660.html,
• • •
By Rev. Timothy Radcliffe O.P.
Fresh revelations of sexual abuse by priests in Germany and Italy have provoked a tide of anger and disgust. I have received emails from people all around Europe asking how can they possibly remain in the Church? I was even sent a form with which to renounce my membership of the Church. Why stay?
First of all, why go? Some people feel that they can no longer remain associated with an institution that is so corrupt and dangerous for children. The suffering of so many children is indeed horrific. They must be our first concern. Nothing that I will write is intended in any way to lessen our horror at the evil of sexual abuse. But the statistics for the US, from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 2004, suggest that Catholic clergy do not offend more than the married clergy of other Churches. Some surveys even give a lower level of offence for Catholic priests....
But what about the cover-up within the Church? Have not our bishops been shockingly irresponsible in moving offenders around, not reporting them to the police and so perpetuating the abuse? Yes, sometimes. But the great majority of these cases go back to the 1960s and 1970s, when bishops often regarded sexual abuse as a sin rather than also a pathological condition, and when lawyers and psychologists often reassured them that it was safe to reassign priests after treatment. It is unjust to project backwards an awareness of the nature and seriousness of sexual abuse which simply did not exist then....
But what about the Vatican? Pope Benedict has taken a strong line in tackling this issue as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) and since becoming Pope....
It is generally imagined that the Vatican is a vast and efficient organisation. In fact it is tiny. The CDF only employs 45 people, dealing with doctrinal and disciplinary issues for a Church which has 1.3 billion members, 17 per cent of the world’s population, and some 400,000 priests....
Angry and hurt Catholics feel a right to transparent government. I agree. But we must, in justice, understand why the Vatican is so self-protective. There were more martyrs in the twentieth century than in all the previous centuries combined.... Many Catholics still suffer imprisonment and death for their faith. Of course, the Vatican tends to stress confidentiality; this has been necessary to protect the Church from people who wish to destroy her. So it is understandable that the Vatican reacts aggressively to demands for transparency and will read legitimate requests for openness as a form of persecution. And some people in the media do, without any doubt, wish to damage the credibility of the Church....
Confidentiality is also a consequence of the Church’s insistence on the right of everyone accused to keep their good name until they are proved to be guilty. This is very hard for our society to understand, whose media destroy people’s reputations without a thought.
Why go? If it is to find a safer haven, a less corrupt Church, then I think that you will be disappointed. I too long for more transparent government, more open debate, but the Church’s secrecy is understandable, and sometimes necessary. To understand is not always to condone, but necessary if we are to act justly.
Why stay? I must lay my cards on the table; even if the Church were obviously worse than other Churches, I still would not go. I am not a Catholic because our Church is the best, or even because I like Catholicism. I do love much about my Church but there are aspects of it which I dislike. I am not a Catholic because of a consumer option for an ecclesiastical Waitrose rather than Tesco, but because I believe that it embodies something which is essential to the Christian witness to the Resurrection, visible unity.
When Jesus died, his community fell apart. He had been betrayed, denied, and most of his disciples fled. It was chiefly the women who accompanied him to the end. On Easter Day, he appeared to the disciples. This was more than the physical resuscitation of a dead corpse.
In him God triumphed over all that destroys community: sin, cowardice, lies, misunderstanding, suffering and death. The Resurrection was made visible to the world in the astonishing sight of a community reborn. These cowards and deniers were gathered together again. They were not a reputable bunch, and shamefaced at what they had done, but once again they were one. The unity of the Church is a sign that all the forces that fragment and scatter are defeated in Christ.
All Christians are one in the Body of Christ. I have deepest respect and affection for Christians from other Churches who nurture and inspire me. But this unity in Christ needs some visible embodiment. Christianity is not a vague spirituality but a religion of incarnation, in which the deepest truths take the physical and sometimes institutional form. Historically this unity has found its focus in Peter, the Rock in Matthew, Mark and Luke, and the shepherd of the flock in John’s gospel.
From the beginning and throughout history, Peter has often been a wobbly rock, a source of scandal, corrupt, and yet this is the one – and his successors – whose task is to hold us together so that we may witness to Christ’s defeat on Easter Day of sin’s power to divide. And so the Church is stuck with me whatever happens. We may be embarrassed to admit that we are Catholics, but Jesus kept shameful company from the beginning.
Fr. Radcliffe is a popular Catholic author, speaker and former Master of the Dominican Order. This article appeared in the April 10, 2010 issue of the British Catholic weekly, The Tablet. Read the full text online at: http://www.thetablet.co.uk/article/1454
• • •
By Elizabeth Scalia
Catholic Writer and Author
The question has come my way several times in the past week: "How do you maintain your faith in light of news stories that bring light to the dark places that exist within your church?"
When have darkness and light been anything but co-existent? How do we recognize either without the other?
I remain within, and love, the Catholic Church because it is a church that has lived and wrestled within the mystery of the shadow lands ever since an innocent man was arrested, sentenced and crucified, while the keeper of "the keys" denied him, and his first priests ran away. Through 2,000 imperfect — sometimes glorious, sometimes heinous — years, the church has contemplated and manifested the truth that dark and light, innocence and guilt, justice and injustice all share a kinship, one that waves back and forth like wind-stirred wheat in a field, churning toward something — as yet — unknowable.
The darkness within my church is real, and it has too often gone unaddressed. The light within my church is also real, and has too often gone unappreciated. A small minority has sinned, gravely, against too many. Another minority has assisted or saved the lives of millions.
But then, my country is the most generous and compassionate nation on Earth; it is also the only country that has ever deployed nuclear weapons of mass destruction.
My government is founded upon a singular appreciation of personal liberty; some of those founders owned slaves.
My family was known for its neighborliness and its work ethic; its patriarch was a serial child molester.
The child molester was also a brilliant, generous, talented man — the only person who ever read me a bedtime story. I will love him forever, for that, even when I wake up gasping and afraid.
I am a woman with very generous instincts, and I try to love everyone, but I am capable of corrosive scorn. Have I been much sinned against? Yes. So have you. Have I sinned against others? Oh, yes. So have you.
Like a pebble cast into a pond, our every action ripples out toward the edges, reaching farther than we intended, touching what we do not even know, for good and for ill. It all either means nothing, or it means everything.
As a Catholic, I believe it means everything.
That doesn't mean I do not suffer for the sins of my church; we people in the pews are roiling with feelings of betrayal, shame, revulsion.
Having survived sexual abuse in the family and the public schools, I identify deeply with the pain, the sense of powerlessness and abandonment that the victims of some of our priests and administers have endured. I grieve for them — and for my church, and for my pope, and for all of the countless good priests and religious who are tarnished by the actions of a depraved minority.
I am saddened beyond words to know that these very real sins of commission and omission will repel people, who will miss the consolations of the church in light, out of concern for its shadows.
But the painful and incomplete news stories that have dominated this Holy Week helpfully illustrate how and why I am able to continue on in faith. Particularly during the Easter Triduum, we are thrust deeply into the crucifixion narrative of the Gospels. There, on the wood of the cross, we encounter Jesus, son of Mary, who knew shame, betrayal, abandonment, scorn, jeering, ridicule, unimaginable pain and sorrow, and submitted to them, in order to draw us into a consoling embrace that says, "I know what you are feeling; I know what you are thinking. You tortured ones, you shamed ones, you innocent ones, you slandered ones; I am the One who knows, and we are actually all in this together, and quite outside of time."
I want my church to shine. But I understand that everything, from our institutions to our innermost beings, are seen through a glass, darkly. Arms outstretched, listening for the Word, and its echoing liturgy, I make my way forward, in bright hope.
Elizabeth Scalia is a contributing writer to First Things magazine and the blogger known as The Anchoress. This article appeared April 2, 2010 online at:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125493179
• • •
By Fr. Jack Wintz, OFM
Columnist and former editor of St. Anthony Messenger Press.
Like many of you, my heart is heavy whenever I read, see or hear media reports and commentaries about clergy sexual abuse and the Catholic Church. Although I don’t feel qualified to comment in an expert way on this complicated issue, I do want to respond to the concerns, frustration and even anger that many of you have expressed….
As others have pointed out, the greatest scandal on the part of the Church is our failure to put the child victims and their families first. In some dioceses, unfortunately, Church leaders have made the cover-up of these scandals and the offending priests their most important priority. How did we get our priorities reversed in this way?
Into our Catholic hierarchical system, at least in some instances, has seeped the tendency and practice of covering up faults. The system seems to give those higher up such importance, dignity and sacredness that their reputation must be protected at all costs. Even those at the bottom often “buy into” this layered arrangement that tends to give special privilege to those on top. If we look at the Gospels, however, we notice that this was not the mindset of Jesus. He often called those in leadership to task for giving scandal or laying oppressive burdens on those in their charge. He told those in leadership to be servants of the others….
One consequence of the clergy sex-abuse scandal is that the faulty priorities of the hierarchical system have now been unmasked for the whole world to see, and changes will have to be made. Structures of privilege, secrecy and protection from blame seem to be unraveling before our eyes.
Meanwhile, the Church majority, made up of laymen and laywomen and their children, are beginning to see their rights and dignity properly recognized. They are more and more seeing themselves not simply as servants of the higher-ups whose only role in the Church is to pray, pay and obey. Now they are more fully aware that their voices deserve to be heard and respected as they claim their rightful place in the Church envisioned by Vatican II….
Despite our failures as a Church regarding the tragic sexual abuse of children, it’s helpful to examine the issue from a wider perspective. Clergy sexual abuse is an issue that extends well beyond the Roman Catholic Church and contains more complexities than meet the eye….
Even an institution as simple as the family tends to be self-protecting and secretive regarding abusive behavior within it own ranks. I think it is generally agreed that most cases of sexual abuse of children happens within the family. The perpetrators often are older family members, relatives, family friends, babysitters. The first instinct is often for the family leaders to keep sexual abuse from going public. We know, of course, that such cover-ups are not right, especially if the victims remain at risk. Yet we all recognize the temptation most people have to cover up mistakes and sins of which they are ashamed.
This is all the more true as we explore more complex institutions—athletic or youth associations (e.g., teams or scouts), educational institutions, police departments, the military, religious institutions of all kinds, political parties, medical associations, psychological associations, big companies like Enron, even news networks and TV conglomerates. Most institutions and power structures try to protect their reputations and keep their secret sins hidden. Again this is not right. Those victimized by such organizations should be protected and the offenders reported and brought to justice. One wonders at times, however, why the media and other groups sometimes go after certain offenders and systems with more fervor and fury than they go after others….
Another observation I heard or read within the last two weeks, which brought me a bit of light regarding the tendency on the part of Church leaders to give priest offenders a second chance, is that the Gospel of Jesus teaches us to be forgiving. It is not surprising that those who have not digested the truth about pedophilia being an incurable disorder and who have been trained to be forgiving could err on the side of being too lenient with sex offenders—a deadly mistake that hopefully is being quickly corrected in the wake of the current scandals.
A final note for us during this Easter season: We do not face these problems and crises alone. The Risen Jesus, who has triumphed over sin and death, breathes the Spirit of forgiveness and healing upon us and walks with us toward Pentecost.
Fr. Wintz’s remarks appeared in his online newsletter, “Friar Jack’s E-Inspirations,” on April 8, 2002. You can read the full text of his comments at:
www.americancatholic.org/e-News/FriarJack/fj040802.asp
• • •
By Fr. Ronald Rolheiser OMI
Syndicated Columnist
…As Christians we’re asked to carry this scandal biblically. What does that mean? Carrying something biblically means a number of interpenetrating things:
1. Name the moment. Not everything can be fixed or cured, but it needs to be named properly…. This scandal, this particular time in our history as a Catholic Church in America, is a moment of humiliation, a moment of humbling, a moment of pruning. We must begin the process of healing by clearly, and with courage, naming that….
2. The call to compassion. …To carry something biblically means, first of all, to re-ground ourselves in the non-negotiables of Christian compassion – respect, tolerance, patience and graciousness…. It’s easy to be selective in our sympathy, offering our compassion at those places where we feel good and clean when we give it and withholding it from those people and places where we don’t get a good, clean feeling when we offer it….
3. Healing, not self-protection and security. …[H]ealing, not self-protection and security, must be our real preoccupation….To protect the innocent and to bring about healing and reconciliation. Everything else (worries about security, lawsuits, and the like) must come afterwards. Part of this is how we must understand the role of the media and press in all of this…. They are not the problem….Granted that sometimes their coverage hasn’t been fair, but that’s ultimately not the issue. Beneath it all, the substance is true.
4. Carrying this crisis is not our primary ministry and not a distraction to our ministry. Carrying this scandal properly is something that the church is invited to do right now for the sake of the culture….There are very few things that we are doing as Christian communities today that are more important than helping the world deal with this issue…. Crucifixions are never easy and they exact real blood! It might well be worth it in the long run if we can help our world come to grips with this.
5. Painful humiliation as a grace-opportunity. Purification and pruning, humiliation leading to humility…. Today the Body of Christ is not just being humbled, it’s being humiliated and we have the chance to come to humility through that. This is an important grace-opportunity for all of us inside the church. Biblically, it’s our “Agony in the Garden.”
6. To carry this scandal biblically asks of us “a new song.” [What is] being asked of us in this scandal [is this]: Can we love, forgive, reach out, and be empathic in a new way? Can we have compassion for both the victim and the perpetrator? Can we have compassion for some of our church leaders who made some blunders? Can we give our money when it seems we are paying for someone else’s sin? Can we help carry one of the darker sides of our history without protesting its unfairness and distancing ourselves from it? Can we carry a tension that’s unfair to us for the sake of a greater good?...
7. We need to “ponder” as Mary did. …To ponder in the biblical sense means to hold, to carry, and transform tension so as not to give it back in kind…. To ponder biblically is to be like a water purifier; it takes in all kinds of impurities with the water, but it holds the impurities inside of itself and gives back only the pure water. That is what Mary did under the cross…. And that is what we are called upon to do…and that is what we are called upon to do in helping to carry this scandal biblically, namely, to hold, carry and transform this tension so as not to give back in kind – hurt for hurt, bitterness for bitterness, accusation for accusation, anger for anger, blame for blame.
8. We must reaffirm our faith in God as Lord. …Our prayer in times of crisis must be a prayer that precisely affirms that God is still Lord of this world…. We need, in the midst of this crisis, to affirm our faith in the lordship of God. God is still firmly in charge…. The church isn’t dying. Crucifixions don’t end life, they lead to new, enriched life.
9. We must patiently stay with the pain. This is a dark night of the soul which is meant, like every dark night of the soul, to stretch the heart. To be stretched is always painful and our normal impulse is always to do something to end the pain…. But the pain won’t go away until we learn the lesson that it’s meant to teach us…. And what is it meant to teach us, beyond a new humility? That there is a terrible pain within the culture right now, the soul-devastation caused by sexual abuse, and we, the church, are being asked to be like Christ, namely, to have our flesh be food for the life of the world so that this wound might be opened to healing.
Fr. Rolheiser is a popular Catholic author, columnist, and president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. Read the complete text of Fr. Rolheiser’s essay online at:
www.ronrolheiser.com/pdfs/scandal.pdf
• • •
By Fr. Michael Ryan
Rector of St. James Cathedral, Seattle
The preacher's challenge is to read the Scriptures not only as narratives of the past but as living commentaries on the present.... I think of this every time I prepare a homily but I thought of it more than ever this week as I reflected on the reading from Acts [Acts 5:27-32, 40b-41] and on the gospel story from John [John 21:1-19 or 21:1-14]. Both are stories of past events but both speak to this moment, too.
In the reading from Acts, we saw the apostles on trial before the Sanhedrin, a body that, for the Jewish people, was like the Supreme Court. After being questioned by the High Priest, the apostles were reminded that earlier they had been strictly forbidden to teach about Jesus. Peter responded, speaking for all of them in a way that must have shocked and started the anointed leaders: "We must obey God rather than men," he said!...
Peter's bold challenge to the Sanhedrin may lose some of its punch for us. We're on Peter's side, after all. We know his importance and can rather easily dismiss the importance of the court of the Sanhedrin. But when Peter stood before them, those men were the ultimate arbiter, the supreme religious authority and Peter dared to stand them down!
It's hard for me not to read all this in light of what is currently happening in our church, and to express the hope that, during this current, painful crisis, our church leaders will hear Peter's words as a challenge to humbly acknowledge that, despite their intentions, instead of speaking for God they have sometimes spoken -- and acted -- all too humanly.
It's hard to be deaf to the growing number of voices (not just from the media but from loyal, faithful members of the church, including some bishops) that are calling for the church to turn this dreadful moment into a graced moment -- a moment of self-examination on a whole array of things: on the way it understands and carries out its sacred mission, the way it exercises power, the way it chooses leaders and holds them to account. These same voices also call for greater transparency in the church; for a greater voice in church governance and decision-making for lay people, including women; and for a greater willingness on the part of church leadership to admit mistakes where they've been made and humbly beg forgiveness. These are voices we should heed….
These thoughts and concerns prompted by today's first reading from Acts connect quite naturally for me with today's gospel passage from John…. "Do you love me?" Jesus asks Peter, not one time but three, and each time Peter assures him that he does. But words are not enough. "Feed my lambs," Jesus tells him. "Feed my sheep...."
Honesty compels us to admit that the church has too often put its own perceived interests ahead of the clear and uncompromising command of Jesus to feed, care for, and nourish his flock. At times it has allowed selfish institutional issues and concerns to eclipse the most basic rights of the flock, especially of some of the weakest, most vulnerable members of the flock. This must never happen again.
And, yes, some of the media attacks have been unfair and unbalanced and, yes, the issues we are dealing with are by no means exclusively the church's issues (they are societal issues), and, yes, the moral quicksand of our secular culture deserves some of the blame, but no amount of spreading or sharing the blame can take away the blame that rests squarely with the church.
After he put his questions to Peter, Jesus told him what the future would hold.... And then he repeated for Peter the first words he ever spoke to him, words that would now mean a good deal more to Peter than they did the first time: "Follow me."
My friends in Christ, I believe that these are words Jesus speaks to the church now -- - all of us in the church, but especially those of us in leadership. I hear them as a call to conversion -- deep conversion, a call to exercise power in a whole new way, a call to lead in the humble, strong, yet gentle way of Jesus and to let go of the need to dominate and to control. With Peter, the church needs to let Jesus take us places we'd probably rather not go.
"Do you love me? Feed my lambs, feed my sheep… Follow me!" My friends, Peter's call is now the church's call. And why should the church -- the whole church, leaders and led -- expect better or easier treatment than Peter got? Why should the church, the whole church, not be willing to let go and follow in Peter's footsteps, confident that, while God may indeed take us to places we'd sooner not go, those places will, in the end be the very places we're supposed to go?
Fr. Ryan preached this homily on the Third Sunday in Easter, April 18, 2010, in St. James Cathedral in Seattle. The full text of the homily is available online at:
http://ncronline.org/blogs/examining-crisis/turn-dreadful-moment-graced-moment
• • •
By Frank Wessling
Former Catholic columnist and editor
At least one group of Catholics is not thinking about the sex abuse scandal affecting the church with new vigor lately. The newly baptized and the thousands of candidates received into the church at Easter through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) have been focused on fundamentals of our faith, not the weakness and sins of its human caretakers.
For the most part, these Catholics are protected from scandal by their excitement over a new sense of wholeness in their lives; by gratitude for places in a community rich with possibilities for all of their best and deepest desires.
They are fresh from an experience with Jesus teaching them to wash the feet of fellow travelers, and by serving the needs of others to carry out the love that identifies them as friends of God.
They may still feel the deep newness of life, the healing, the fresh start gained through the sacrament of reconciliation.
They feel themselves as true church, part of the gathered body of Christ, which expresses humanity rising as it looks for the way of love, the way of God, in every experience, good and bad.
They are this way because the priest they know best is Jesus, not the poor ordained men who couldn't control a sick impulse. They are like those first Christians described in the Acts of the Apostles, living as beacons of light for everyone around. The rest of us can take lessons from them.
The new revelations of clergy sexually abusing children in Europe haven't added anything to what we already knew about this problem. It's a rerun of the story that surfaced in this country more than 30 years ago and exploded in the past decade: A few priests in many places over decades or more sexually abused thousands of children, most of them boys in early adolescence. Bishops, concerned about scandal, kept such incidents quiet and, taking advice from psychologists, sent the priests to places where a cure was expected and then frequently reassigned them to ministry.
Everyone now knows what a tragic mistake that was.
If there is a way to summarize the problem for the church, it might be in the phrase clerical culture. In any organization, a cocoon of self-preservation will tend to grow around the people who manage and control it. The leaders and officers see themselves as the people who guarantee cohesion and continuity in the enterprise, and thus they have a right to special privilege that goes along with their special responsibility. It happens in business, in the military, in clubs of all kinds, and it happens with clergy in the church.
Every priest and bishop knows very well the instruction by Jesus to be servants rather than lords. But none of them, none of us, knows how to perfectly carry out that instruction despite the greatest desire to do so. It seems to be part of our pilgrimage in history to work out solutions as we go, responding to crises with renewed attention to the humble way of Jesus and trying to learn from our latest mistakes.
As we do that again this time, the attitude of those new Catholics is a useful guide. Focus on the fundamentals of our faith, on the Gospel, on the kingdom preached by Jesus, not so much on command and control. A table of organization and manual of operation is necessary because we are human, but it is not primary. Attention to the way of Jesus is.
Frank Wessling is former editor of the Davenport (Iowa) Catholic Messenger. This column was published in the April 23, 2010 Messenger and distributed by Catholic News Service.
• • •
By Fr. Bob VerEecle SK
Pastor, St. Ignatius Parish, Boston
...In the past weeks, I’m sure you have heard, as I have, “I’ve had enough,” from many within our Catholic community. With all the revelations of abuse and questions of the culpability of those religious leaders who did not address the problem in an open, transparent and timely fashion, the wounds of so many that may have begun to heal after 10 years in the Archdiocese of Boston, have been opened up again with similar strains of anger, disillusionment, even disgust, and many are saying, “I’ve had enough.”
Even if the Church is now trying to address more openly the terrible reality of abuse by its clergy, the stories that continue to emerge about the global dimensions of the problem and especially the pattern of denial and secrecy on the part of the hierarchy challenge all of us to ask how we continue to find light and peace and hope in the face of darkness, distrust and disgrace.
Like Thomas, some of us, including myself, may be saying, “I want to believe that in Christ all things are made new. I want to surrender to the gift of peace, joy and love, but look at the woundedness of our Church that continues to be torn apart by scandal and distrust, look at the wounds of our world that continues to be torn apart by unimaginable violence. I’ve had enough! Haven’t you, my Lord and my God?”
I imagine those first disciples after the Crucifixion saying to themselves, “I’ve had enough.” Enough heartbreak, disillusionment. If we look at today’s Gospel with the disciples back in the upper room after the events of the Crucifixion, we may see ourselves reflected in their doubts, their fears, their disillusionment, their hopelessness.
I have always wondered why they found themselves back in that upper room after they had deserted and denied Jesus, had fled for their lives, hiding from the brutal reality that Jesus, who had been their hope, was no more. All their dreams had been shattered. But something draws them to a place where they had experienced life, love, community, a vision of God’s kingdom where peace, healing, forgiveness was at the center of all.
That’s what Jesus had proclaimed and lived, had preached and shown in his actions, had given life to in bread and wine, blessed and broken. Those memories of what had been, the bonds of friendship and community that had been there for them must have been what drew them back. I can imagine each one coming under cover of darkness, not wanting to be recognized as one of his disciples, making their way back to the upper room and finding each other there. Saying, “Oh, you’re here. You came back too. But what do we do now?”
The Gospel tells us it is in the midst of this fear, apprehension about the future, confusion and perhaps despair, that Jesus appears. Unexpectedly speaking, “Peace! Do not be afraid!” His presence and his peace is experienced as a reality that constitutes a new beginning for these men and women who had lost hope in the loss of their beloved friend, Rabboni. For those gathered in the upper room that Easter Sunday, there is no doubt that God has completed the work of creation begun in the story of Genesis. God is refashioning the story of death and disintegration. God is weaving a new tapestry of life, peace, hope, and love. God in Jesus is saying, I can never give you enough of my love, my peace, my life.
But like Thomas — who was not with the other broken-hearted, fearful disciples — some of us, including myself, may be saying, “I want to believe that in Christ all things are made new. I want to surrender to the gift of peace, joy and love, but look at the woundedness of our Church that continues to be torn apart by scandal and distrust, look at the wounds of our world that continues to be torn apart by unimaginable violence. I’ve had enough! Haven’t you, my Lord and my God?”
And like Thomas we hear the words, “See my wounds. Place your fingers in my side. Touch me and see that I carry in my Risen body, not just my wounds, but yours as well, my beloved world, and especially the community of my beloved disciples. Don’t be afraid. Don’t give up. You will know who I am. You will know that I have loved you. You will know who I am.”
Fr. Bob VerEecke SJ is pastor of St. Ignatius Church in Chestnut Hill at Boston College. This reflection was adapted from his homily on April 21, 2010 and published online by BustedHalo.com. The complete text is available at:
http://www.bustedhalo.com/features/had-enough/
• • •
By John W. Martens
Associate Professor, St. Thomas University
There is an important article by Joseph Bottum at The Weekly Standard.com on the recent “odd hysteria,” that is, the media’s response and role in the recent and revived claims regarding sexual abuse by priests and cover-ups of this abuse by some in the Church’s leadership. That Bottum calls it an “odd hysteria” does not mean that he considers claims about sexual abuse in the Church to be concocted nor that he feels there have not been grave errors made by the Church hierarchy, only, in my words, that the Catholic Church has been made to bear far more of the weight of the sin of sexual abuse in our culture than for which it is responsible.
As I read Bottum,...he believes that there is a deep animus against the Catholic Church on display in the “odd hysteria,” that has its roots in the Protestant reformation and that was imported across the Atlantic Ocean to the USA centuries ago. More than that, in the wake of the Enlightenment, the claims that the Catholic Church made and makes concerning the Truth and Tradition put it in permanent opposition to the forces of Progress, which wished and continue to wish for the Church’s end….
…I think he has put his finger on a deep impulse in our culture, that remains more Christian than it knows. I say partially insightful because I am not certain that most people see the Catholic Church as the “last-surviving remnant of the ancient darkness” or that recent newspaper reports reveal "anti-Catholicism." I believe that there is in fact lurking in all of this an inchoate longing for the Truth that the Catholic Church proclaims. If the Church truly bears the Truth, and if we as Christians believe it to be so, how can people, all created in the image of God, not respond in some deep way to the bearer of this Truth?
Our culture is confused in many ways about the very nature of Truth and so the response to the Church, and in this particular case the sexual abuse crisis in the Church, will take many forms, some ridiculous and some unjust, but the reason the Church remains at the heart of the story is that most people expect the Church to live up to its claims to be different, to be better, to be set apart. In fact they need the Church to be better. I think the focus on the Church is not indicative of people considering Catholicism as the “last-surviving remnant of the ancient darkness,” but on the Church being the beacon of light and the Hope of the world, even if this cannot be expressed coherently by many of the Church’s supposed enemies....
Related to this is the other thing that frightens us in our culture: If nothing is true then everything is permitted, especially in the realm of sex.... Again, this sort of cheap hedonism is easy to chirp in cafes, nightclubs and while sharing a joint with a friend, but there are deep concerns regarding the turn our culture has taken with respect to sex and, again, rightly so, if we believe that the Church’s teachings regarding sex are true. If they are, then even when the Church’s teachings are mocked and rejected, they ought to speak at the deepest level even to those whose own practice of sexuality defies the teachings of Christianity….
What I find missing from Bottum’s article and in so much of the writing defending the Church against “anti-Catholicism” is a long view of history and the Scriptures themselves. The desire to explain everything in terms of the past 40, 50 or 60 years misses the very point that Bottum was making. The biblical tradition teaches us that history is a constant battle in which sin and evil vie against God and the goodness which is entirely God. Most utopian movements which emerged in the West are more Christian than they know, as Bottum states, but they run up in their bold visions of a new world against the reality of sin, which most of them want to consign to the dustbin of history. They will try to explain sin as social or economic oppression, let’s say, and so when such oppression is gone, a new world dawns. It is wrong.
Yet, many Catholic commentators, Bottum included, seem to want to explain the recent scandals in the Church as a product of Vatican II, or cultural currents present in the wider culture since the ‘60’s, as if on the list of things the Baby Boomers created is now sin. Read the Bible and the Church fathers: all of these sins, sexual included, were present in the early Church and the broader culture. This is a part of the never-ending battle, which will end only when God makes all things new again, as we heard in the second reading for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, Revelation 7:15-17:
“The one who sits on the throne will shelter them.
They will not hunger or thirst anymore,
nor will the sun or any heat strike them.
For the Lamb who is in the center of the throne
will shepherd them
and lead them to springs of life-giving water,
and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
The world since Jesus’ life, death and resurrection has had to account for him, the Truth of what he said and did and is, or the falsity of it. It is far easier to engage in this discussion as a dilettante when the culture is steeped in the Truth and the behavior of most people is guided more or less by Jesus’ teaching, and you can gain a frisson of excitement by opposing yourself to the teachings of Jesus. But when everyone wants to be a bad boy or a bad girl, all of the sudden, the game gets serious. How far are you willing to go? Is everything up in the air, even your children? Now you need to seriously consider the Truth.
For his disciples, Jesus Christ is that Truth. If the Church does not bear witness to the Truth of Jesus Christ, that is the scandal that shocks the world. The scandal is not “the Vatican,” but a Church that is seen to behave like the rest of the world. The Church has had “success” in worldly terms only to the extent that it bears witness to the scandal of the cross by living up to Jesus’ demands for his disciples. We need to get away from short view discussions of Vatican II priests and JPII priests as the cause or solution to our problems and return to the Hope to which we bear witness in the person of Jesus Christ.
When we do, we will also see the problem with short term analyses of sexual abuse. It is not a product of a certain age. It was current in the Greco-Roman culture of Jesus' day and in fact a normal, accepted part of life. Jesus warned against the mistreatment of children because he knew it would always be a temptation to take advantage of the most vulnerable in our midst. It was a problem in the first century, in the fourth century, every century after, prior to Vatican II and after Vatican II, because it is a problem of sin. What we need to put in place, as I think the Church has done in some jurisdictions, is the best procedures for vetting candidates to the ministry, the best protections for children in Catholic schools and churches, the will to be honest when such abuse happens, not to cover it up, and then to remove offending persons from ministry. It means constantly keeping Jesus' teachings about children in mind, not our own desires and whims.
The “odd hysteria” that Bottum sees is not "anti-Catholicism," but the longings of the world to know that the Catholic Church will not give lip service to the Truth but will live it out. It is the Hope of this world, whether the world wants to admit it or not. I think that in the challenges to the Church from those whom we often see as despisers, we hear the cry of a lost world asking that the bearers of the Truth deliver on the Hope. This side of God wiping away every tear from our eyes it is an ongoing struggle, that began with Adam not in the last 50 years or so, but we can fight harder and better and deep down the world knows it.
John W. Martens is associate professor and director of the MA program in theology at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota and a contributor to America magazine's “The Good Word." This entry was posted on the blog on April 26, 2010 and is available online at:
http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?blog_id=1&entry_id=2803
• • •
By The Editors of America Magazine
As a church we are a pilgrim people making our way together through history. Like Chaucer’s companions on the road to Canterbury, we have a variety of tales to tell and not all are edifying. The latest waves of the crisis of clerical sexual abuse of minors have made Catholics keenly aware that even in high places we are a company of sinners as well as saints, of fallible human beings as well as faithful followers of Jesus—everyone in need of the forgiveness Jesus proclaimed. That forgiveness is one of the religious experiences that binds us to one another along our pilgrim way.
The rituals of confession and repentance remain among the most identifiable practices of Catholic life. Their centrality to the Catholic imagination has made the reluctance of the hierarchy to acknowledge successive revelations of molestation all the more painful for us all. The church’s identity as a community of forgiven sinners makes particularly credible the demands by victims for public confession and open reconciliation. Even the church’s most bitter critics have been unwitting witnesses to that Christian duty. That same Catholic sensibility made the recent encounter between Pope Benedict and the victims of abuse in Malta both necessary and affecting.
The church has known dark times: domination by emperors, co-optation by feudal militarism and modern colonialism, gangland struggles by Roman families for control of the papacy, coercion of heretics and wars of religion. Still, we members of the church make pilgrimage together in hope that the church may be the visible expression in history of humanity’s new life in Christ. To us Jesus is the embodiment of fullest humanity and the model of its most appealing morality. Pope Benedict’s planned visit on July 4 to the tomb of St. Celestine V, a hermit who was elected pope and then resigned the papacy, will hold up for view a penitent form of Christian life marked by meekness, prayer and self-sacrifice, close to the pattern of Jesus that Christians strive to imitate.
One reason Catholics love the church is that it fosters just that sort of holiness. Even as the secular world exposes the hypocrisy of church officials, it acknowledges implicitly that the followers of Christ hold themselves to a “higher law” and try to practice a more demanding love. Some believe that calling is humanly impossible; others, even if they allow the Gospel little direct claim on their own lives, are disappointed upon failing to find holiness where they always presumed it might be found in a moment of need. But Catholics love the church because here we have companions who do strain, in their stumbling ways, to lead their lives by the light of the Sermon on the Mount.
We love the church because here we keep the company of men and women who have lived the Gospel even as they challenged both secular and religious rulers to reform. Among them are figures like Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, Thomas More, Ignatius Loyola, Mary McKillop, Mother Théodore Guérin, Dorothy Day, Franz Jägerstätter and Oscar Romero. Their witness to the Gospel brought them into conflict with the church authorities of their day. Yet attachment to the visible, hierarchical church was intrinsic to their own path to holiness. In an age that experiences mostly opportunistic, transitory relationships, the church fosters high ideals and lifelong commitments. In a culture deprived of depth and transcendence, it encourages searching self-examination, ever more inclusive sympathies and attentive receptivity to the mystery of God. Some of the pain of the present crisis comes from the apparent loss of those practices and sensitivities when they were most needed among those from whom they were most expected.
We love the church, too, because, as can be seen in local parishes everywhere, it embraces the full diversity of humanity: the affluent and the poor, the native-born and the undocumented, conservatives and liberals, the simple and the learned. We also love the church because in every age, but particularly since the Second Vatican Council, it is dedicated to the service of the poor and defense of their human rights. Even non-Catholics see in the unselfish service of the poor the palpable holiness of the church. Asked once how he went from being a promoter of the free market to an advocate of the world’s poor, the economist Jeffrey Sachs answered, “The sisters—who, in so many places, took me to the back country to meet the very poor.”
Chief among the inexhaustible reasons that lead us to love the church is the Eucharist. For when we gather around the table of the Lord, the whole body of Christ in which we partake is made real. We are united with the risen Lord for whom we live, and with one another, not only those around the table but also those around every altar in the world, along with those who have preceded us in faith and those who will follow us, one great communion prefiguring the unity of the one human family in God.
This editorial appeared in the May 10, 2010 issue of America magazine, online at: http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=12279
• • •
"Why I remain a Catholic priest"By Fr. Joseph Nangle OFM
...The Catholic Church is in perhaps its worst crisis ever....
This blight in our church will be with us for decades to come. The harm done to the victims of clergy abuse, their families, Catholics, and many others cannot be undone quickly. People have been hurt, damaged, and disillusioned, and I believe that only serious corrective measures, together with public repentance—especially by Catholic ministers—over a long period of time, will excise this malignancy.
But we will do this only if we clearly understand the gravity of our sin and its devastating effects. I fear that as yet many among us, including and perhaps especially our leadership, fail to comprehend how bad this situation has become....
The preparation of candidates for the priesthood must take more seriously the need for healthy psycho-sexual development. Compulsive behaviors, addiction to internet pornography, aversion to women, and stunted social skills signal that some are not suited for the priesthood. Bishops, seminary rectors, spiritual directors, and confessors will have to exercise “tough love” here.
Bishops can no longer come from the ranks of “company men” who demonstrate little or no capacity for independent thinking. (I once heard of a prominent American hierarch state that his conscience was exactly that of the pope. Infantile in the extreme!)
Above all, our church must consistently act on Jesus’ words: “The truth will make you free” (John 8:32). Only transparency, openness, and truthfulness about past and current aspects of this scandal, at every level of our institution, will bring the Catholic Church out of this dark night.
National and international media have performed a much-needed service in bringing to light the enormity of our scandal. Perhaps some media were motivated by less-than-noble intentions—scandals like these sell newspapers, and the Catholic Church is an easy target. However, had it not been for dogged investigative reporting on this issue, we might still not know its extent.
Finally, where can Catholics find hope? Many have walked away from this institution, and who can blame them? However, I take hope from people by the thousands who retain the capacity to claim the Church as their own despite the disaster that envelops us. They are for the most part Catholic laity who, far from denying our crisis, absorb it and lament it, while still maintaining Christ’s peace at the core of their beings. Their assessment of this tragedy, abiding good will, and determination to remain Catholic inspire me to continue as a priest in our flawed institution. I thank them sincerely.
Fr. Joseph Nangle, OFM, is a Franciscan priest and associate pastor of Our Lady Queen of Peace parish in Virginia. This article originally appeared in Sojourners magazine, July 2010, and is available online at:
http://www.sojo.net/?action=magazine.article&issue=soj1007&article=out-of-the-dark-night
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By Carlo Carretto
in his book Letters from the Desert
How baffling you are, oh Church, and yet how I love you!
How you have made me suffer, and yet how much I owe you!
I would like to see you destroyed, and yet I need your presence.
You have given me so much scandal and yet you have made me understand what sanctity is.
I have seen nothing in the world more devoted to obscurity, more compromised, more false, and yet I have touched nothing more pure, more generous, more beautiful.
How often I have wanted to shut the doors of my soul in your face, and how often I have prayed to die in the safety of your arms.
No, I cannot free myself from you, because I am you, though not completely. And besides, where would I go? Would I establish another? I would not be able to establish it without the same faults, for they are the same faults I carry in me. And if I did establish another, it would be my Church, not the Church of Christ. I am old enough to know that I am no better than anyone else....
The Church has the power to make me holy but it is made up, from the first to the last, only of sinners. And what sinners!
It has the omnipotent and invincible power to renew the Miracle of the Eucharist, but is made up of men who are stumbling in the dark, who fight every day against the temptation of losing their faith.
It brings a message of pure transparency but it is incarnated in slime, such is the substance of the world.
It speaks of the sweetness of its Master, of its non-violence, but there was a time in history when it sent out its armies to disembowel the infidels and torture the heretics.
It proclaims the message of evangelical poverty, and yet it does nothing but look for money and alliances with the powerful.
Those who dream of something different from this are wasting their time and have to rethink it all. And this proves that they do not understand humanity. Because this is humanity, made visible by the Church, with all its flaws and its invincible courage, with the Faith that Christ has given it and with the love that Christ showers on it.
When I was young, I did not understand why Jesus chose Peter as his successor, the first Pope, even though he abandoned Him. Now I am no longer surprised and I understand that by founding his church on the tomb of a traitor.... He was warning each of us to remain humble, by making us aware of our fragility....
And that is where the mystery lies. This mixture of good and bad, of greatness and misery, of holiness and sin that makes up the church…this in reality am I....
Carlo Carretto (1910-1988) was a member of the Little Brothers of Jesus, a religious order inspired by the spirituality of Charles de Foucauld. Like Foucauld, he spent many spiritually formative years as a hermit in the Sahara desert. His Letters from the Desert, published in 1972, was the first of many popular books on spirituality. These comments were not written in the context of the sexual abuse crisis.
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[Last Update: 01.16.20]