Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

When sinners repent, we are informed by the highest authority, the angels in heaven rejoice.

Michael Anthony Rodriguez paid a hit man to kill his wife because he was infatuated with a young woman. He was imprisoned in Texas, and with the Texas Seven escaped on Christmas Eve 2000. They killed a young police officer who had interrupted his holiday dinner to answer a call.

At his trial, Rodriguez claimed he had been abused in a Catholic high school in San Antonio by the Rev. Eugene Fitzsimmons and that the abuse and the consequent homosexuality led Rodriguez to bizarre behavior. Fitzsimmons was subpoenaed, but took the Fifth Amendment, even though Rodriguez later said the allegation of abuse and homosexuality was all a lie, an attempt to escape execution.

Rodriguez was sentenced to death. He wrote to the policeman’s widow. 

In a 2006 letter, Mr. Rodriguez told her he realized he owed her a debt he could never repay.

“Yet I can indeed offer a form of retribution to at least give you a sense of justice,” he wrote.

A federal judge approved his request to end his appeals Sept. 27, two days after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to consider a claim by Kentucky inmates that lethal injection there is inhumane. That case stalled executions around the nation until April, when the high court cleared the way for them to resume.  

Mr. Rodriguez had asked that there be no further appeals in his case, telling a judge that he hoped accepting his fate might help him enter heaven. 

His time to depart came on August 14, 2008, at 6:30 PM, as the Catholic Church began celebrating the feast of the Assumption of Mary into heaven. 

Immediately before his execution, Mr. Rodriguez apologized profusely to those affected by his crimes.

“My punishment is nothing compared to the pain and suffering I’ve brought you,” he said. “I’m not strong enough to ask for forgiveness. I ask the Lord to forgive. I’ve done horrible things that brought sorrow and pain to these wonderful people,” he said.

“I’m sorry, so sorry,” he said.

As the drugs took effect, Mr. Rodriguez was praying in a whisper. “I’m ready to go, Lord,” he said.

 

 Although I had hopes for Ave Maria University when I heard it would locate in Naples, Florida, (at last, someone who could talk about something other than golf!) I began having suspicions that Tom Monaghan had control issues. He wanted a town where he could control everything, and I mean everything. The staff would dress properly.  

An e-mail sent from the administration to the faculty about the AMU Dress Code (already a warning – a “dress code” for professors?) 

In hopes of bringing clarity and unity among all employees with respect to the dress code policy, I have been asked by the University Council to communicate the following information: Attached is the revised AMU Dress Code Policy.  As you will note, it is a clarification of the existing policy to provide clearer direction of what is and is not acceptable professional business attire.

Male employees are required to wear business attire that effectively promotes the professional image of Ave Maria University; meaning, jackets and ties are required with a preference of suits for faculty: suits are required for staff.  Of course, this is in conjunction with the stipulation noted in the policy regarding employees working in certain areas of the organization that warrants dressing differently.

In addition, beginning August 30, 2010 the AMU Dress Code Policy will be revised to state that female employees will no longer be permitted to wear slacks or pant suits during work hours.  They will however be permitted to wear slacks when traveling.

Although this is a major change for some of you and certainly comes with a cost for adding skirts, suits, and dresses to your existing wardrobe, it is the intent of Senior Management to work with local retailers in the hopes of providing suitable business clothes such as skirts or skirt-suits at discounted prices.  This information will be shared as it becomes available.  Please keep in mind that we are implementing this change to improve our overall appearance as an institution of professionals.  Knowing that this change will require time and planning, Management believed it important to provide several months advanced notice.

It is the expectation that all employees will adhere to the policy as written and management will enforce the policy accordingly.  

I like the word “enforce.” My wife was approached about teaching at AMU (for free of course) but she said no one from Michigan was going to tell her how to dress.

When I researching the book on clerical murders that I have underway, I noticed that even secular newspapers from 1900 -1920 used the words expiation in regard to punishment, especially capital punishment. Now the word expiation appears only in crossword puzzles.

The word and the concept appear to be suffering a similar fate in Catholic theology: 

According to the chairman of the Catholic bishops’ conference of Germany, the death of Jesus Christ was not a redemptive act of God to liberate human beings from the bondage of sin and open the gates of heaven. The Archbishop of Freiburg, Robert Zollitsch, known for his liberal views, publicly denied the fundamental Christian dogma of the sacrificial nature of Christ’s death in a recent interview with a German television station.

Zollitsch said that Christ “did not die for the sins of the people as if God had provided a sacrificial offering, like a scapegoat.”

Instead, Jesus had offered only “solidarity” with the poor and suffering. Zollitsch said “that is this great perspective, this tremendous solidarity.”

The interviewer asked, “You would now no longer describe it in such a way that God gave his own son, because we humans were so sinful? You would no longer describe it like this?”

Monsignor Zollitsch responded, “No.” 

The loss of the sense of expiation may help explain why the hierarchy treated abusers so lightly: expiatory punishment is a forgotten concept.

In Baltimore, the city I grew up in, 30% of the remaining Catholics schools are being closed. Only a handful remains in the whole metropolitan area, and it was the Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1852 that established the rule that every parish should have its parochial school.

Only 15% of the students in the Catholic schools in Baltimore City are Catholics.

In part, the racial and demographic changes of the past two generations are taking their final toll. Baltimore used to be a white, middle and working class city. Now it is a poor, black city with a few middle class neighborhoods, but the people who live downtown and around the renovated harbor do not have children.

The Catholic population has moved to the suburbs but the schools have not followed them. The archdiocese decided it was impossible to finance a Catholic school system when the religious who had staffed it were no longer available. And Catholics are having far fewer children, probably below replacement level for non-Hispanic Catholics.

Religious life in the United States is vanishing (see The Index of Leading Catholic Indicators). Some parishes pray for vocations, but the only contact that most people had with religious was in school. As the schools vanish, children have no contact with religious and therefore never even consider a religious vocation. That leads to an even lower number of religious, and so on in a downward cycle.

Some consider this situation decadence. But perhaps it is not. Religious life may have been suited to a certain phase of the history of the Church, and perhaps a Church that is 99.99% lay can be as vital as a Church in which priests and religious are the main carriers of religious tradition.

But Catholics in the United States relied upon Catholic schools, priests, and religious to transmit the faith, and nothing has replaced them. The European Catholics who constituted the bulk of the Catholic Church are either dying out or losing their faith; that group has suffered as severe a decline as the Episcopal Church has. Catholic numbers are increasing because of immigrants from Hispanic countries. But in those countries the surrounding culture carried and transmitted the faith, and that culture does not exist in the United States. The two or three hours of religious instruction a month that some Catholic children have until they are confirmed is really insufficient to form a Catholic identity.

A handful of Catholic families transmit both the culture and doctrines of Catholicism: they tend to be large, home-schooling families. The Catholic Church may end up like Judaism, with a small core of Orthodox families who produce children and an amorphous body of adherents who call themselves Catholic mainly because of lingering family traditions.

Abuse Tracker has chronicled the revelations of sexual abuse by clerics in Germany. It is a story of abuse and cover-ups all too familiar to those who have followed similar revelations in the United States and Ireland. While in quality the abuse in Germany is as bad as in English-speaking countries, in quantity it seems to be significantly less. If this is in fact the case, and not simply a matter of lesser reporting, peculiarities of European continental history may account for the lesser amount of abuse.

In the nineteenth century, Europe began to develop an image of Modern Man, and I mean man, not woman. The New Man was nationalistic, militaristic, rational, scientific. He rejected he world of Catholicism, which was international, pacifist, and superstitious – and feminine. In France, Italy, and Germany the Catholic clergy was attacked as the enemy of true masculinity.

Some who attacked the church more or less explicitly accused the clergy of perversion, either homosexuality or pedophilia.

The New Man took other incarnations in the twentieth century: The Futurist Man, the Fascist Man, and the Nazi Man. In the mid-1930s the Nazi government arrested hundreds of Catholic priests and brothers and charged them with sexual molestation of children and adolescent boys. (see the Wikepedia article) Historians have assumed that these charges were fabricated.

But what we have discovered about the Catholics clergy makes it appear probable that many of the charges were in fact true. The Nazis wanted to attack the Church, and the perverse and criminal behavior by a segment of the clergy gave them the tool. The cases, as far as I can tell, were tried in the regular German courts, not the Nazi courts, and in the regular German courts courts legality largely ruled.

The Nazis may have inadvertently done the Catholic Church in Germany a favor by purging hundreds of abusers from the ranks of the clergy. As a result of that purge, we may now be seeing fewer cases in Germany than in Ireland and the United States.

The memory of the trials of the Nazi era may explain, but not excuse, the touchiness of some German bishops. Germans have a long memory, and anything that reminds them of the Nazi era (Boy Scout uniforms, smoking bans) sets off irrational reactions.

Somene asked for the PDFs of the letters about the Portland, Oregon, cases. They are at BishopAccountability.org.

For the Laughlin letters, go here

and for Steigerwald letter, go here.

Arturo Vasquez over at the ever-fascinating Reditus spends a great deal of time, perhaps a little too much, in the curious corners of Catholicism, or perhaps semi-Catholicism: the bandit saints, popularly-canonized dogs, curanderos, Hermeticism, etc. I love it. He posited one explanation for his identity: 

3. Arturo Vasquez is a witch: We are surprised that people don’t make this accusation more often, because this is the one that would stick the best. “Behind all of his piety, and pretensions of traditionalism, Arturo uses his large basement for spells and other dark works. That is why he posts all of those questionable prayers, pictures of folk saints, and essays on Renaissance magic on his blog: to promote his business as a Tarot card reader and curandero.” “Yeah, I’ve seen him. Arturo was hustling on a street corner and offered to read my palm and put a curse on my ex-boyfriend for dumping me for my best friend.” “Arturo said he would cure my kid of the evil eye but instead made his skin turn purple. And the poor child can’t stop singing Prince songs.” “Arturo turned half of the members of the Ladies Altar Guild Wiccan.” And so forth. If there was still an Inquisition, he would be the first burned at the stake if his critics were Dominicans with a huge axe to grind.

 Dwight Longenecker, Anglican-turned-Catholic, would seem to be at the opposite pole from Vasquez, but he comments upon modern liberal religion: 

Religion, if it is religion at all, is surely about man’s commerce with the supernatural realm. In this sense Paganism is a real religion. A priest sacrificing chickens or virgins to a monstrous deity in hope of supernatural protection and power is what I call religion. An animist, high on the fermented juice of the tropical tree, dancing around the campfire and cutting himself to satisfy the spirit of the river is a real religion. So is a Buddhist monk sitting in a snowdrift in his underpants humming his mantra and transcending the cold. For that matter, even the Mormon baptizing someone for the dead or a televangelist praying down the Holy Spirit fire to heal, mightily heal is practicing real religion. It may be a false or misguided religion, but at least it is religion.

All of this is in contrast to the milk and water that much of mainstream modern Christianity has become in most Western cultures. There is no religion there because the modernists no longer believe in the supernatural.

 When I was a guest of the Hopis, it was clear they really believe in the kachinas, the spirits that mediate between us and the Creator. They hope to become a kachina when they die and bring God’s blessings, especially rain, to their people. 

Some say the American South is, or at least used to be, not exactly God-centered, but God-haunted. For me, and for many, the American Southwest is spirit-haunted. The veil between this world and the next is very thin in the desert. And the Hopis and the Navajos and the others know that the spirits are not effeminate semi-males with wings, but fearful, even when they are friendly.

On July, 8, 1988, Archbishop Levada of Portland , Oregon, wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger, then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, about the case of the Rev. Thomas Laughlin.

Laughlin, Levada explains, was ordained in 1948 at the age of 23. Levada continues, “he began homosexual contacts with boys shortly after his ordination (about age 25), and admitted to such misconduct both during his first priestly assignment as a teacher at Central Catholic High School, and as a pastor of St. Mary Parish in Corvallis. These contacts continued and apparently increased in frequency and number during his tenure as pastor of All Saints Parish until the time criminal charges of sexual abuse of minors were brought against him in 1983.”

“The reliable testimony of several boys questioned suggests that Fr. Laughlin used the confessional for purposes of solicitation.

“Even after his conviction, sentence, and having served six months in prison, he abused the privilege of his court ordered parole under the aegis of the Servants of the Paraclete in New Mexico by arranging for a secret liaison with one of the young men he had molested, and paid for his journey to meet him in San Diego for the purposes of engaging in sexual conduct.”

Archbishop Power of Portland had known about the abuse by at least 1975 and had not acted on it. That is not surprising, since in 1976 Power had received this letter from an official of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate Seminary in British Columbia in which the official conveyed information from a “most reliable source” about Philip Steigerwald:

PHILIP STEIGERWALD, presently working in Queen of Peace, Salem, Oregon, scheduled to be ordained to the Priesthood on the 20^th day of June , 1976, is an avowed homosexual.

 

 He rationalizes that neither the world nor the Church, at the present time, understands the beauty and good in such a relationship. His companion, at the present time, is another seminarian at Mount Angel (redacted). Philip has practiced homosexuality since thirteen years of age and claims to have been initiated into this practice by his confessor at that time.

 

This situation is known to his mother, some of his family and, at least two or more seminarians.

Archbishop Power found this letter no reason not to ordain Steigerwald, who of course made sexual advances to boys in his parish. Years later, their mother found out, and talked to a priest, who told them “that the archdiocese knew before they ordained Phil that he was a homosexual.” The mother wanted an explanation. So do I. The most probable one is not flattering to the personal moral conduct of Archbishop Power.

Ratzinger may not have known about the type of person who Power thought was suitable for the priesthood, but he certainly knew there were severe problems in the Church in the United States. Why the failure to act effectively?  Did Ratzinger tell himself these must be bizarre and isolated cases – but he was getting them on a regular basis. Or was he following John Paul’s implicit or explicit instructions about how to handle sexual abuse cases discretely and quietly? As Pope Benedict, Ratzinger owes the Church an explanation.

The Irish Times examined the failure of the Vatican to handle the news about the meeting with the Irish bishops. 

It also gives an explanation, all too probable, for the failure of the Vatican to cooperate with the Irish government or to admit any responsibility for clerical abuse: 

Which brings us to one of the bottom lines of Holy See thinking on the question of clerical sex abuse – a bottom line which explains all the insistence on “appropriate diplomatic channels” for contacts between the Murphy commission and the Holy Office or indeed the papal nuncio’s refusal to go before the foreign affairs committee, namely, that co-operating with the commission or going before the Oireachtas committee could in some way be interpreted as admission of legal (whatever about moral) responsibility for clerical sex abuse.

The Holy See has looked on aghast as the US Catholic Church has paid out upwards of $2 billion in damages to victims of clerical sex abuse. This is one buck that it does not want to see stop at the Apostolic Palace.

As we all know, our treasure is here, and bishops obviously think that when they stand before the judgment seta of God they will be judged on the size of the bank accounts they left behind in their dioceses. Lady Mead, Money, has been the curse of the Church for centuries, and continues to exert her poisonous influence in the corridors of the Vatican.

The New York Times each day publishes the names of the soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. I read them each day and say a prayer for them. It is the least I can do for those who have died to keep me and my family safe. 

The names and home towns reveal a lot: a lot if Hispanic names, and most are from small towns. One in particular struck me:

YAZZIE, Alejandro J. 23. Lane Cpl., Marines; Rock Point, Ariz.: First Marine Division. 

A Navajo, dying to defend the United States. 

At the Pueblo Indian Center in Albuquerque there is a bronze statue of Indians as soldiers in the U. S. Army. All these young Indians had left after their land was stolen from them was their courage and blood, which they offered to their conquerors in order to survive. Sometimes it’s hard to look a Native American in the face after what we Europeans have done to them.

What could the Pope do, as one person asked? 

Many, many things: 

He should immediately remove from the clergy all bishops who are known to be corrupt and abusers. There are about twenty, starting with Mr. Sanchez of Santa Fe (he of girlfriends A, B, C, D, E…). 

He should immediately remove from the cardinalate, and probably from the clergy, all Cardinals who have known about the abuse of children and let it go on. We should have Mr. Law and Mr. Mahony. 

He should order all dioceses and religious orders to publish the names of all known abusers and to open their archives to researchers. 

He should admit the failures of his predecessors, at least of Paul VI and John Paul II, who were informed of the abuse and refused to act against it.  

He should halt the processes for their canonization. Those Popes failed, and children were raped and committed suicide. 

He should discuss the sources of his own blindness for so many years. I have documents with his signature on them: he knew about some of the worst cases, such as El Paso. Did he really have no idea of what had occurred in the cases he handled? 

He should take up world-wide collection for the victims of abuse and sell a few items from the Vatican to pay into this fund. 

If Benedict does at least this, perhaps bishops through to the world will know he is serious and then and only then will they stop their clergy from abusing young people. Until then, it is all hot air, and his comments will be ignored as so much PR.

Pope Benedict will write a letter to the faithful of Ireland.

Ecclesiastical bureaucrats and professors (and Pope Benedict was both) live in a world of words, and think that saying the correct thing is equivalent to, even better than, doing the correct thing. Having said the correct words, they cannot understand why people want them to do something. The Pope will write a letter; and bishops have allowed tens of thousands of children and young people to be molested, raped, and tortured by Catholic priests and religious.  And Benedict will think he has done enough.

My discussion of the Schmidt case has obvious relevance to clerical sexual abuse. The abusers may have been, in some sense of the word, “sick”; they certainly had distorted personalities. But whatever the source of their desire to have sex with minors, they were guilty when they acted on that desire. 

As Joe said, a good verdict would be “sick but guilty.” The general approach of the Church during the past fifty years that abusers were sick, and were therefore not guilty, and therefore it would be wrong to punish them. The fallacy is that any mental illness removes responsibility and guilt.

Pope Benedict and the Irish bishops have issued a communiqué. 

 Good words, but only words.

 Although Benedict has acted more strongly against priest-abusers than any pope since Pius V, he has not really acted against bishops who have abused or against bishops who have tolerated abuse. 

Bishops who have committed sexual abuse remain bishops: they could be laicized, like Bishop Fernando Lugo of Paraguay was when he was elected president But these criminal bishops remain bishops “in good standing” in the Church. 

Cardinal Law was given a luxurious post in Rome and sits on my important committees. A few Irish bishops have been forced to resign because of public outrage, but of all the bishops who have tolerated sexual abuse, only a handful have suffered any consequences beyond having to issue apologies written by their lawyers. 

Having read hundreds of cases, I wonder whether many of the abusers are atheists, in fact whether some of the bishops are atheists. It is hard to imagine a believer who thought he would stand before the judgment of God who would enact, tolerate, and enable such blasphemous sacrileges. 

It would not be the first time the clergy and hierarchy was riddled with unbelief –  the weakness of faith in the French clergy of the 18^th century was unmasked by the Revolution.

The Naples Daily  News reports

A Brevard County woman claiming to be God’s messenger has been charged with attempted murder after reportedly shooting at a family on their back porch.

The sheriff’s office reports that 47-year-old Kathleen Aceto showed up with a gun and began shooting Friday morning. A man in the house grabbed a gun and fired back, and Aceto ran away.

Deputies responded and arrested Aceto, who lives a block from where the shooting occurred. She reportedly told the deputies that God told her to do it.

Aceto was charged with attempted murder, aggravated assault, armed burglary, shooting into an occupied dwelling and the use of a firearm in the commission of a felony.

She was being held without bail, and her mental health was being evaluated.

If she really thought that God told her to shoot the neighbors (to judge the probability of this one would have to know the neighbors) and she had been a better shot, should she be found guilty of murder? Or should she be sent to a theological reeducation camp like St. Luke’s in Suitland?

In 1913 a priest from Germany, the Rev. Hans Schmidt, killed his pregnant mistress. The police, after finding her dismembered body in the Hudson, suspected foul play. A pillowcase (of all things) let them to Schmidt, and he immediately confessed he had killed her, but that God had appeared to him in the chalice and told Schmidt to offer her as a love offering, in the same way God had appeared to Abraham and commanded him to sacrifice Isaac.

The State of New York did not believe Schmidt, and tried him for murder. Schmidt put on a good show of insanity at the trial, confessing to everything up to and including necrophilia. The jury at the second trial thought he was acting and convicted Schmidt, who was sentenced to death.

Schmidt then appealed his conviction on the grounds that he was only pretending to be insane. Schmidt admitted that he had accidentally killed his mistress in the course of giving her an abortion, but he had not intended to kill her. The penalty for abortion in New York was draconian, and Schmidt wanted to protect his accomplices. Schmidt assumed he would be found not guilty by reason of insanity, put in a comfy asylum for a while, and then deported to Germany.

Justice Cardozo heard the appeal. He told Schmidt that he was entitled to a new trial only if evidence not known at the time of the trail came to light. But Schmidt knew the evidence and lied to the court. Therefore Cardozo refused the appeal.

Cardozo, not letting well enough alone, went on to create the “deific exception.” Cardozo said that if Schmidt sincerely thought that God had commanded him to kill his mistress, Schmidt would not be guilty.

But what of the Moslems who tell courts that God told them (in the Koran, or elsewhere) to kill promiscuous daughters? This defense has been used in honor killing cases.

What Cardozo should have said that if Schmidt sincerely believed that God wanted him to kill his mistress he should also remember that God had established the secular power to do justice and therefore wanted Schmidt to suffer the consequences of his actions in the electric chair. Schmidt is the only priest ever executed in the United States and Canada.

Therefore, even if Ms. Aceto sincerely believed that God wanted her to shoot her neighbors (and I have had neighbors who needed shooting), she should also believe that God wanted the secular authorities to carry out their God-given task of disarming and incarcerating Ms. Aceto.

Incarceration is usually shorter than treatment.  Our legal system has not yet determined how to deal with criminals who we are almost certain will commit another crime after their release. In general, it is not good to punish a person for a crime he might commit, and civil commitment to an asylum is in reality punishment.