Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

Clericalism is destructive and provokes the reaction of an irrational and even murderous anticlericalism. In attempting to get the laity to pay some attention to what priests are telling them (not a bad idea), the Church has made some wild claims about the clergy.
     Innocent III claimed that scripture called priests gods: “‘Diis no detrahes,’ [...]

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The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher offering pastoral counsel
 
 
A freethinker, William Jamieson, in 1871 had much to say about the dangers to the Republic that the Christian clergy represented. More convincing were his documented cases in which the clergy was a danger to young American womanhood. A series of scandals at the time led to various comments.
 
The [...]

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Willa Cather traduces Father Antonio José Martínez, the pastor of Taos, New Mexico, in her novel Death Comes to the Archbishop. It is only a novel, but is enough of a roman à clef that his memory has suffered. Lamy’s biographer, Paul Horgan (Lamy of Santa Fe), is fairer to Martínez, but glosses over many [...]

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Rick asks the fundamental questions.

What intrinsic deterrents did the abusers overcome to begin their sordid behaviors? What spiritual blindness did the bishop have to see this a clinical problem? These are the core questions. They are both spiritual. Enforcement both internal and external to the Church are certainly factors, but essentially they are not intrinsic. [...]

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Ian Kershaw wrote of the common German’s reaction to Nazi excesses and atrocities: 

the myth of ‘if only the Fuhrer knew’ was already at work. Many genuinely believed that matters, especially if unpalatable, were deliberately kept from Hitler, and that if he learned of them he would act swiftly to set things right. 

A similar attitude characterizes [...]

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Tom Roberts at the National Catholic Reporter reflects on the failure of the hierarchy:
Danneels was generally seen as one of the last of the Vatican II generation who knew that council intimately and supported its reforms. He would be, for lack of a better term, a liberal by many of today’s ecclesiastical measures. But it [...]

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Roger Vangheluwe was a priest when he began sexually abusing his five-year-old nephew. The abuse continued even after 1984, when Vangheluwe, at age 48, became bishop of Bruges. 
The boy’s family pressured the boy to remain silent to preserve the bishop’s career. The bishop gave the family money (source of money unspecified). As he grew up, [...]

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While I suspect that many priest sexual abusers and even some bishops may be true, congenital psychopaths with a different brain structure than the average person, most of their failure to feel the pain and damage that abuse was causing victims was brought about by the culture of clerical narcissism, Priests considered themselves other Christs, [...]

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As I said in the previous post, justice must be satisfied. Some Catholics believe that charity does away with justice, that it is wrong to punish sinners and criminals. John Zmirak examines this idea at Inside Catholic in the context of Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos’ 2001 letter praising a bishop for not turning over to the [...]

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Is there a school at the Vatican where priests and bishops are taught how to offend everyone? 
The NYT reports that the papal preacher, the Franciscan Cantalamessa, compared criticism of the hierarchy to anti-Semitic persecution: 

A senior Vatican priest speaking at a Good Friday service compared the uproar over sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church — which have [...]

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Kiev

The New York Times has discovered the existence of an Eastern Catholic Church with a married clergy. Today’s issue contains a good article on Father Yuriy Volevetskiy and his six children.
The Times is also correct in that the attitude of the Vatican is more of toleration of the Eastern (or Greek Catholic) churches rather [...]

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One of my responders is fortunate enough to live in the parish to which Father Dwight Longenecker is attached. 
Father Longenecker in his blog on Con Men has written one of the best analyses of clerical abusers, Maciel being the most famous. 

Why do people fall for priests who turn out to be such stinkers? It’s pretty [...]

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Commonweal has a discussion of the Vatican’s decision to place Pius XII and John Paul II on the path to canonization.
 
I share the concerns. Canonization is supposed to provide a role model for Catholics to follow, but how can you imitate even a good pope? For centuries almost all saints have been priests and religious, [...]

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A comment below raises the excellent question as to how the abusers can live with themselves.  How can they lead outward lives of piety and inwardly be sacrilegious criminals. 
Their spiritual ancestors the Pharisees had a similar ability to impress men by outward shows of piety but inwardly were full of rapine and evil: they were [...]

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The fully justified anger about Bishop Lahey should not blind us to the failings in other forms of Christianity. There have been crimes and cover-ups in other denominations. 
Abuse in independent churches is almost impossible to track. Even denominations like the Southern Baptists have a polity that makes it impossible to screen out abusers. 
When hierarchical churches have [...]

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