Life Imitates Art

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Last night I watched an episode of Foyle’s War. The criminal was an English teenager who had watched too many American gangster movies and started to act them out. Ecoterrorists were inspired by Edward Abbey novels.  The Sorrows of Young Werther led to a rash of suicides.

I fear that the bombers in Boston may inspire copycats. Two teenagers have paralyzed a major city and have made the international news.

But what can the media do? They can hardly ignore what is going on in Boston. But the more coverage they give, the more likely some alienated teenager is going to get ideas.

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God as Therapist?

in Catholic Church, prayer, Protestantism 23 Comments Tags: , ,

Tanya Luhrmann wrote When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God.

She has a column in today’s NYT, “When God is Your Therapist.”

IT had never occurred to me to think of God as a therapist when I began to spend time, 10 years ago, at an evangelical church in Chicago. Like many secular observers, I was interested in the fact that people like me seemed to experience reality in a fundamentally different manner. I soon came to realize that one of the most important features of these churches is that they offer a powerful way to deal with anxiety and distress, not because of what people believe but because of what they do when they pray.

One way to see this is that the books teaching someone how to pray read a lot like cognitive behavior therapy manuals. For instance, the Rev. Rick Warren’s “The Purpose Driven Life,” one of the best-selling books of all time, teaches you to identify your self-critical, self-demeaning thoughts, to interrupt them and recognize them as mistaken, and to replace them with different thoughts. Cognitive-behavioral therapists often ask their patients to write down the critical, debilitating thoughts that make their lives so difficult, and to practice using different ones. That is more or less what Warren invites readers to do. He spells out thoughts he thinks his readers have but don’t want, and then asks them to consider themselves from God’s point of view: not as the inadequate people they feel themselves to be, but as loved, as relevant and as having purpose.

Does it work? In my own research, the more people affirmed, “I feel God’s love for me, directly,” the less stressed and lonely they were and the fewer psychiatric symptoms they reported.

More strikingly, I saw that the church implicitly invited people to treat God like an actual therapist. In many evangelical churches, prayer is understood as a back-and-forth conversation with God — a daydream in which you talk with a wise, good, fatherly friend. Indeed, when congregants talk about their relationship with God, they often sound as if they think of God as some benign, complacent therapist who will listen to their concerns and help them to handle them.

I am not sure how it fits into the mainstream of Christian spirituality, but it does not sound bizarre or harmful to try to talk to God and listen for His response (always remembering that we might mistake another voice for His, and even when He speaks we hear Him filtered through our receptors).

God certainly wishes to comfort the distressed, families whose father had died, parents who have lost a child.

I saw the same thing at another church, where a young couple lost a child in a late miscarriage. Some months later I spent several hours with them. Clearly numbed, they told me they did not understand why God had allowed the child to die. But they never gave a theological explanation for what happened. They blamed neither their own wickedness nor demons. Instead, they talked about how important it was to know that God had stood by their side. The husband quoted from memory a passage in the Gospel of John, where many followers abandon Jesus because his teachings don’t make sense to them. Jesus says sadly to his disciples, “You do not want to leave, too, do you?” and Peter responds, “Lord, to whom shall we go?”

This sounds mature to me.

Luhrmann doesn’t discuss what kind of response people get when they talk to God about cheating on their spouses or stealing from their employers. If God is still benign and complacent I would have doubts about this approach to Him.

Luhrmann also claims that

This approach to the age-old problem of theodicy is not really available to mainstream Protestants and Catholics, who do not imagine a God so intimate, so loving, so much like a person. That may help to explain why it is evangelical Christianity that has grown so much in the last 40 years.

“so much like a person” – but almost all Christians believe in a personal God, whom they know in Jesus Christ. Although there are problems with the Catholic devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the relationship is certainly personal. And Lutherans have a strong personal relationship to Jesus, “Jesu, meine Freude.”

I am not sure that Luhrmann is right, or perhaps what evangelicals mean by a “personal” relationship with God is something completely different from what other Protestants and Catholics mean.

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Machistas and Christ

in crime, Masculinity, Protestantism 33 Comments Tags: , , , , , ,

Latino men have the reputation for being detached from the church, and too many of them are caught up in destructive macho and gangster cultures.

Both Catholics and evangélicos (conservative Protestants, fundamentalist/Pentecostal) try to reach them; I have wondered who has the better success.

John Wolseth lived in Honduras and studied a barrio with gangs, Catholic Base Communities, and evangélico (Pentecostal in this barrio) churches. He describes and analyzes that environment in  Jesus and the Gang: Youth Violence and Christianity in Urban Honduras.

Progressive Catholicism emphasizes community and solidarity with the poor and blames the problems of the poor on structural inequities, especially economic oppression.  Catholic youth groups in the barrio follow this analysis and try to identify with the poor. But they are fearful of identifying with the poor who are gang members. Catholic youth blame gangsterism on social inequities, but do not explain why they themselves have not followed the path of the gangsters.

Pentecostals set up a harsh dichotomy between the world ruled by Satan and the church ruled by Christ.  Young men who want to give up the destructive and self-destructive life of the gangs can have a conversion experience and dedicate themselves to a new life, totally rejecting the old one and separating themselves from it. They have to change their lives to convince both the church and their old gangs that they are cristianos. If a man leaves a gang, he is killed by the gang, unless he becomes a cristiano. Gangs usually let Pentecostal former gang members alone, if the former members demonstrate that their lives have really changed. Perhaps it is from superstitious motives, but at least the gangs let them go.

Catholics, with their rhetoric of solidarity, do not offer gang members the opportunity for a clean break that Pentecostals offer. Catholics blame society for individual problems; Pentecostals stress individual responsibility. Wolseth  blames Neoliberalism and American interference for most of Honduras’ problems (and therefore agrees with progressive Catholics), but admits that Pentecostals help some individuals escape from the most destructive consequences of broader social problems.

Perhaps in Latin cultures, Catholics cannot do this. Catholicism and the culture are so entwined that becoming a fervent Catholic does not offer the same sort of break that gangsters need. Pentecostals, as they reject both destructive machismo and most specifically Catholic practices – mass, statues, procession, rote prayers – are foreign to the general Catholic-based culture and therefore can offer gangsters the clean break. (This is my analysis)

The same dynamic seems to be at work with the older married men that Elizabeth Brusco describes in The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Columbia. The general culture includes both machismo and Catholicism. When men become evangélico, they reject both Catholicism and machismo. They follow a biblical pattern which makes men responsible heads of household. Catholics of course would like men to abandon machismo and become responsible husbands and  fathers, but they do not seem to be able to offer the clean break that men need.

When Catholic families get some money, the first thing they buy is a radio; when evangelical families get some money, the first thing they buy is a dining room table. Protestantism more than Catholicism has stressed the importance of the family in the Christian life, sometimes to the extreme. I think C.S. Lewis said that sometimes Protestants set up the dichotomy of the family vs the world, rather than the kingdom of God vs the world. But on the whole, stressed modern cultures need a strong emphasis on the family, and conservative Protestantism seems to have had some success in helping people follow the biblical model.

If anyone has any observations on this, especially from what they have experienced or seen, I would appreciate them.

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The Worst of Sinners

in clergy sex abuse scandal 33 Comments Tags: , ,

Too many Christians have the idea that all you need to do to be saved is be basically good or at least well-intentioned. They have a week grasp on the holiness of God and the infinite distance between divine holiness and natural man at his best.

As a corollary to this attitude, there are acceptable and non-acceptable sins. Acceptable sins are the sins that normal middle class people commit, such as fornication and adultery. More expansive people extend it to underclass sins, such as murder.

But almost everyone draws the line at genocide and child abuse.

What people have a hard time grasping (and I include myself) is that Christ came to die for sinners, including the worst of sinners.

Catholics pray for the living and the dead. Purgatory is a specifically western Catholic doctrine, but Protestants with whom I have discussed it say that the equivalent Protestant doctrine is standing before the judgment seat of God after death, and seeing the full truth of one’s life and of God’s attitude to it.

After the attacks pf 9/11. I couldn’t bring myself to pray for the attackers, although they needed prayers more than anyone else. I prayed for all the dead. When I did the Camino, each day   prayed for the victims of sexual abuse and for the abusers – and that was a hard prayer to make.

As part of their prayers for the dead, Catholics have masses said for the deceased. The mass is not meant to honor the deceased (as idea that has taken hold at funeral masses) but to pray for them as they come before the judgment seat of God.

In Franco’s Spain (and perhaps today) masses are said for the repose of the soul of Adolf Hitler – and if anyone needs prayer, he does. A mass is being offered for the terrible abuser, Cardinal Groër. He had homoerotic contact with almost very student he can in contact with, perhaps a thousand , perhaps more. His case has devastated the church in Austria, and still causes trouble:

VIENNA – Reacting to criticism, an Austrian bishop says he has changed his mind and will not attend a memorial Mass for a cardinal accused of molesting young boys.

Agidius Zsifkovics, the bishop of Eisenstadt, was to participate in Monday’s Mass marking the 10th anniversary of the death of Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer. But Zsifkovics says he decided not to “after numerous encounters and discussions over the past days.”

Groer stepped down as archbishop of Vienna in 1995 after former theological students accused him of sexual abuse.

After Zsifkovics initially said he would attend the service, a statement on the website of “Those Affected by Churchly Abuse” late last month accused him of planning to honour a man who left “a trail of spiritual destruction.”

I don’t know what was the intention of Bishop Zsifkovics; but masses are said – or at least should be said – not to honor the deceased but to pray for him, a sinner. And the worst sinners need the most prayers.

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Ecclesia semper reformanda

in Uncategorized, Vatican 32 Comments Tags: ,

John O’Malley’s book Trent: What Happened at the Council has many surprises.

His is one of the few (perhaps four) people alive who have read all the dozens of volumes of the proceedings  of the Council of Trent. As Trent’s decisions were framed as laws, it is not easy to understand them without understanding the legislative history – and even popes have misunderstood what Trent really said. For example, it did not intend to settle the question of the wider vs. the narrower canon of the Bible. Trent was, all things considered, irenic. It did not condemn Reformers or their books by name. It also focused on external actions, “If anyone says such and such, let him be anathema, If anyone does such and such…”; not ”If anyone believes…” or “If anyone thinks….”

One reform that Trent took up still has not been fully implemented: a bishop should be resident in his diocese. There are hundreds of bishops in Rome and other cities who carry out administrative duties and are not ordinaries of the diocese. There should be one, and only one bishop, in a diocese, including the diocese of Rome.

Rome’s habit of making bishop and archbishop an honorary title distorts the role of the bishop in the church, which is to oversee a local church. Rome is full of herds of wandering bishops, archbishops, and cardinals, who push papers for a few hours (or watch subordinates think about pushing papers for a few hours) and then occupy seats in coffee shops and restaurants and plot against one another, when they are not up to worse mischief.

There is no theological reason why Vatican bureaucrats have to be bishops, or even priests. The only practical reason is to indulge the snobbery of other bishops, who look down upon mere priests and laity. When Christoph Schönborn, then a Dominican priest and theologian, was given the task of writing the new catechism, he had to write to all the bishops of the world for their opinions. John Paul consecrated Schönborn an auxiliary bishop of Vienna, because bishops would not deign to answer the letter of a mere priest.

My proposal for the reform of the papal curia: send almost all bishops and priests out to work in dioceses. Staff the Vatican with deacons, lay men, and lay women (and lay men and probably lay women could be cardinals, if that were deemed necessary). Also, make Italian, English, and Spanish the three working languages of the Vatican, and specify that to begin working there one must be competent in two of the three and learn the third within five years.  Also, discourage people from making a career of working at the Vatican by rotating them home periodically.

Perhaps after another ecumenical council and in another 500 years, with massive pressure, some of these reforms could be enacted. But I know the power of entrenched bureaucracy.

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NO ONE CARES

in clergy sex abuse scandal, Pope Francis, Vatican 13 Comments Tags: , ,

I recently read Daniel Quinn’s novel After Dachau. It is a cleverly done piece of alternate history: its premise (warning – spoiler!) is that the Nazis won the war, but the reader does not realize this until he is well into the novel.

I won’t go into all the details, but we learn that time dated A.D., After Dachau, where the great hero Adolf Hitler defeated the Jews.

Someone discovers what really happened, and tries to alert people. But what he learns for his pains is that NO ONE CARES.

I often feel that way about the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. A handful of people do care, but the Vatican realizes that even in the developed world, very few care, and the typical Catholic is a South American or African peasant who has not even heard of the sexual abuse crisis, and in any case is facing problems even more urgent, such as starvation, massacres, and persecution.

Pope Francis may say the right things – after all, who will defend child molestation? – but will he do the right thing? His record in Argentina does not look promising.

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Dives and Lazarus

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The Atlantic has an article, Why the Rich Don’t Give to Charity: The wealthiest Americans donate 1.3 percent of their income; the poorest, 3.2 percent

The relative generosity of lower-income Americans is accentuated by the fact that, unlike middle-class and wealthy donors, most of them cannot take advantage of the charitable tax deduction, because they do not itemize deductions on their income-tax returns.

American rich are far more generous than the rich in other countries, and give substantial amounts, more in absolute terms than the poor, of course. But they tend to give to elite institutions: Harvard, The Metropolitan Museum, orchestras, conservancies. The poor give to religious organizations and social service organizations.

Researchers theorizes that the lack of generosity is because the rich have no contact with the poor:

Consistent with previous studies, they found that less affluent ZIP codes gave relatively more. Around Washington, D.C., for instance, middle- and lower-income neighborhoods, such as Suitland and Capitol Heights in Prince George’s County, Maryland, gave proportionally more than the tony neighborhoods of Bethesda, Maryland, and McLean, Virginia. But the researchers also found something else: differences in behavior among wealthy households, depending on the type of neighborhood they lived in. Wealthy people who lived in homogeneously affluent areas—areas where more than 40 percent of households earned at least $200,000 a year—were less generous than comparably wealthy people who lived in more socioeconomically diverse surroundings. It seems that insulation from people in need may dampen the charitable impulse.

In college I worked several summers as a substitute mailman in Baltimore’s zone 18, which included slums in the south along North Avenue, working and middle class neighborhoods along York Road, and mansions in Guilford, houses in which the mail was sometimes delivered to the servants’ entrance and taken by the butler.

We were warned not to put our fingers through mail slots in the slums, because we might be bitten by rats. We were also told if we were approached by someone who demanded money, to tell him that all the money belonged to the federal government, and it was a federal offence to take any. I was approached once in a back alley, and the would-be mugger apparently decided that a federal case was not worth a few dollars.

Because I was a substitute I did not know the routes and it took me longer to deliver the mail. In Guilford I would sometimes get surly remarks about how I was much later than the regular mailman and they would report me.

In the working class neighborhoods people took pity on a college student in August and frequently offered me water or ice tea and even invited me to take a brief rest on the porch.

I also had a brief and unsuccessful career as a waiter.

If restaurant service is at all decent, I leave at least 20%, because I know how hard it is to be on your feet all day. I also give the garbage men a large tip at Christmas. I also try to help people who have fallen into hard straights.

College students tend to work in summer internships rather than service industries or construction, and they do not have the experience of what it is to do something physically tiring to earn one’s daily bread –and often little else. A little more experience of the difficulties of the poor might make the well-off more generous- I think 5% is a reasonable goal, 2% to institutions, 3% to the poor. The standard  for millennia has been 10% – without tax deductibility.

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Papa Francisco

in clergy sex abuse scandal, Vatican 56 Comments Tags: , ,

The election of Jorge Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, was somewhat of a surprise, although it should not have been, because he seems to have been the runner-up in the last papal election,, coming in second after Ratzinger.

A few thoughts:

From all reports he is dedicated to the poor and leads a simple, austere life.  He wants to seek out the most wounded and despised members of society. He is fiercely orthodox in his denunciations of abortion and gay marriage.

His record as Jesuit superior during Argentina’s dirty war has been questioned. Leftist terrorism in the1970s was designed to provoke a crack-down which would provoke a revolution. The leftists got the crackdown, but not the revolution, and the military executed 30,000 victims.  Bergoglio remained publicly silent, although he seems to have helped some victims.

What can one infer about his character from this public silence? It is hard to say. He may have had trouble understanding what was going on and uncertain about how to proceed. I think one can say that he does not seek out confrontation, even when provoked.

What does all this mean for the church?

His embrace of the despised may include abusers and enablers of abusers in the Church; he just visited Cardinal Law.

He may ignore the Curia and concentrate on the horrendous problems of the Catholic poor. The typical Catholic, we forget, is a South American or African peasant. These people face starvation, oppression, disease, and grinding poverty. If he concentrates on these problems he will be praised, and he may ignore sexual abuse and the corruption in the Church administration that has enabled it, viewing it as a minor problem compared to what the poor are suffering throughout the world.

That may have been the intention of the Italian cardinals, who are happy with the way the Curia functions and thinks that all the fuss about sexual abuse is Anglo-American Puritanism.

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The Index of Forbidden Blogs

in clergy sex abuse scandal, Vatican 33 Comments Tags: , ,

The fate of early bloggers

Just when you think that the bureaucrats at the Vatican cannot do anything stupider than they’ve done before, they manage do outdo themselves:

One of the domain names of a website that is the primary source of information on clergy sex abuse cases has been blocked on the Vatican’s web servers.

Users on Vatican servers who try to access one of the four web addresses for Bishopaccountability.org, which tracks publicly available information on clergy accused of abuse, are told the page has been blocked because of “Hate/Racism.”

A Vatican spokesman said the site may be blocked because of an automatic filter system that checks words that appear on websites for explicit nature or inappropriateness.

————–

Bishopaccountability.org, which is a non-profit corporation in the U.S. state of Massachusetts, is run by a staff of two located in the Boston area.

A staple of those researching the decades-long clergy sex abuse crisis, the site includes links to reporting on abuse since the 1980s, a database of accused abusers throughout the U.S., testimonies of abuse survivors, and court documents from lawsuits and criminal prosecutions across the U.S.

Among its activities in the past year, the site has:

*Made available more than 8,500 pages of material detailing claims of sexual abuse by a group of Franciscan priests and brothers in California, after their court-ordered release in May 2012;

*Provided a detailed timeline of the witness testimonies and evidence in the trial of Msgr. William Lynn, a former official in the Philadelphia archdiocese who was found guilty in June 2012 of endangering children during his time at the archdiocese from 1992-2004, and;

*Given background information on the release of some 12,000 files documenting Cardinal Roger Mahony and the Los Angeles’ archdiocese’s handling of abuse cases in the 1980s, following the files’ court ordered release in February 2013;

“This Web site is dedicated to the survivors and their families and loved ones,” the site states on its “About us” page.

Access to one of the site’s four addresses was prevented by the web service provided in Paul VI Audience Hall, a facility the Vatican has provided for use by reporters during the papal transition.

I helped BishopAccountability get started. It has hundreds of thousands of pages of documents which are being organized and put on the web. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

What the Vatican bureaucrats at all levels do not yet realize is that the web makes secrecy almost impossible. Their idiocies will be broadcast world-wide, so they might as well do the right thing.

Any attempts to suppress the web will fail, and will only give wider publicity to their mistakes:

WHAT THE VATICAN DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW!

It used to be said, O that mine enemy would write a book! Now it can be said, O that mine enemy would try to block my web site!

(PS: The excuse that it was blocked accidentally does not hold water. If it had been blocked because of sexual content – understandable – it would have said BLOCKED BECAUSE OF SEXUAL CONTENT, not HATE/RACISM. Maybe Cardinal Mahony’s delicate sensibilities were offended.)

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Judging or Banning?

in Catholic Church, Moral Theology, Voluntarism 12 Comments Tags: , ,

John Allen wrote about the papal election:  “No matter what happens, the church almost certainly won’t reverse its bans [my emphasis] on abortion, gay marriage or women priests.”

Ralph McInerney, who should have known better, also referred to the Church’s “ban” on contraception.

The use of the words “ban” or “prohibition” are profoundly misleading, since these words refer to an act of the will.

However, the magisterium of the Church is not an act of the will, but of the intellect. It is matter of judgment. That is, the Church through its various organs, councils, synods, popes, and theologians, makes a judgment about a matter of the moral law. This judgment is guided by the Holy Spirit into a gradual attaining of the truth. At certain points the judgment becomes infallible – that point is sometimes a matter of debate.

The Church has not “banned” contraception or abortion; it has made a judgment that these actions are intrinsically wrong and contrary to the structure of reality that God has created.

Similarly, although it is matter of the sacramental order rather than the moral law, the Church has decided that only bread made from wheat (not rice) and only wine made from grapes (not cherries) can be made into the Body and Blood of Christ at Mass. Any attempt to use other materials would not work, as it is contrary to the sacramental structure. In the same way only a male can be ordained a priest; a woman cannot be ordained a priest; any attempt to ordain a woman would not work. Nor, for example, can a person be baptized with rose petals, as some liberal Protestant churches occasionally do.

This does not say that rice is inferior to wheat, or cherries to grapes, or women to men, but that in the structure of sacramental reality only certain things are possible. It is a matter judgment about the structure of sacramental reality.

Of course some people disagree with the judgment, and we must weigh the relative authority of those making the judgment.

Underlying the use of words like “ban” is a voluntarist conception if law– that the Church or the Pope makes the moral law, and can change or dispense from it. An over-emphasis on obedience, or rather on what the Jesuits all “corpse obedience” as opposed to Dominican “rational obedience” contributes to this misunderstanding.

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Nil Inultum Remanebit

in clergy sex abuse scandal 29 Comments Tags: ,

The story of the downfall of Cardinal O’Brien has proceeded at a dizzying pace.

He was accused by three current and one former priests of inappropriate actions. He resigned and will not attend the conclave. The Pope has accepted his resignation.

It sounds like a confession of guilt to me.

The four accusers must have strong evidence, because they can be sued for libel, and in Britain they must prove the truth of their allegation.

He has also been vociferous on his criticism of gay marriage.

Cardinal Groër of Vienna had made strong homeoerotic gestures to almost every student and seminarian he had come in contact with – 1,000+. A former student read Groer’s denunciation of homosexual acts. Groër said that those who committed them would not enter the kingdom of heaven. The student thought that was not what Groër had told him while they had a relationship, and decided to go public – the first public accusation against a cleric in German-speaking lands since the Nazi era.

Pope John Paul let Groër retire as scheduled and received him socially in the Vatican at the very conclave at which the new archbishop of Vienna, Schönborn, was made a cardinal, Schönborn was not happy and told the reporters who informed him of Groer’s presence of in Rome of his unhappiness.

The contrast between Benedict and John Paul in this matter is striking.

O’Brien is not necessarily hypocrite. A person can commit sins and still think they are sins, and advise other people not to commit them. It’s not very convincing, but it is not hypocrisy.

There is another cardinal who has not yet been outed. He has been far more active than O’Brien, but none of his numerous victims will go public, because it would ruin their clerical careers. Rod Dreher is also familiar with that cardinal and writes about him today.

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Coresponsibility in the Church

in Uncategorized 22 Comments Tags: , ,

The centralized administration of the Roman Catholic Church is not a theological necessity. It may be the best way of administering the Church under current circumstances; or another way may be best.

The current situation is the result of the papacy’s attempts to preserve the unity of the church which was threatened by nationalist, Protestant, and later totalitarian movements. The French revolution swept away all the old feudal structures that had limited the centralization of administration in Rome, focusing more and more attention on the person of the pope.

But  a church with over a billion members is too big to be administered in every detail from Rome; in fact much is left up to the bishops and local organizations.

Bishops failed in their handling of sexual abuse, and they suffered no consequences.

John Allen and the Jesuit Hans Zollner discuss this in the context of Benedict’s reform attempts:

One of the reasons it’s tough to style Benedict as a reformer, at least in the United States, is precisely because the perception is that bishops have not been held accountable. We have a bishop in Kansas City who pled guilty to not reporting suspected child abuse, Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston received a position in Rome, and now Cardinal Roger Mahony is on his way to the conclave despite having been relieved of administrative and public duties by his successor. What about accountability for bishops?

I know this is a constant question from American journalists and the public. I was there when Monsignor Scicluna responded to your question on this point at the symposium last year.

He said we need greater accountability mechanisms for bishops.

Yes, the question really is not resolved. It’s complicated to work out clear procedures, partly because civil law and church law often don’t coincide in many instances and in many countries. We’ve tried to promote understanding of this point, but I know it’s hard to do. The civil law in the United States on these issues, for instance, is not the law in other countries. What your people ask for may not be what Germans, or Italians, or Malaysians, would ask for, and so it’s hard to arrive at a common standard [of accountability] for the entire world.

Obviously, we have to think about how accountability for bishops can be put in place, clearly and recognizably. Despite its hierarchical nature, the church actually doesn’t have clear procedures for some of these issues. For instance, the role of the bishops’ conference [in enforcing accountability] is not clear, the role of the Metropolitan is not clear.

I was a bit surprised by Monsignor Scicluna’s reply to you, because he seemed to suggest that it all goes back to the pope. The poor pope can’t possibly deal with every one of these situations. There have to be intermediate steps, and these are not yet in place. That’s probably true not only of the church, but of many other institutions. Who’s responsible for a teacher who abuses a child in a school? Is it the principal, the superintendent, the regional administrator, the minister for education in that country?

Benedict did nothing to make bishops co-responsible. Perhaps he could not imagine what could be done, or the task of restructuring 5,000 bishops was beyond his strength – there would be massive opposition, bishops do not want to be held responsible.

The western church used to have a synodal structure; there could be other ways on introducing the laity into the process. One danger is that any local organizations would be subject to pressure from hostile governments, pressure which the Vatican is in a better position to resist.

There is no easy, obvious, universal solution – which doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Perhaps the next pope will begin to develop both the idea and practice of co-responsibility in the church.

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Auf Wiedershauen, Benedikt

in Uncategorized 32 Comments Tags: , , ,

Benedict’s resignation should not be all that surprising. He has maintained that a pope can resign, and canon law provides for it.

Despite his reputation as a hard-line, Ratzinger expressed discomfort with the tendency to idolize the pope, culminating in the rock-start image of John Paul II. At one point Ratzinger said that the separated Eastern Churches would only have to acknowledge the papacy as it existed in the first millennium, when it was not all that important.

In their battles with secular and totalitarian states, popes put the focus on themselves as the locus of unity in the Church – ubi Petrus, ibi Eccelsia. This may have been necessary to prevent the church from being taken captive by nationalist and totalitarian governments (as has happened with a large segment of the Catholic Church in China). But such a focus distorts the papal office.

One result has been an unrealistic expectation about what a pope can or should do. The impression is that the pope can by his own will change whatever he wants in the Church, including the moral law. He could allow priests to marry, allow women to be ordain, say that contraception, abortion, and homosexual acts are not sins, etc.

Maciel told the seminarians he abused that, of course while homosexuality was wrong, the pope had given him a dispensation from that law because of his health needs.

Even when it comes to disciplinary matters, popes should not and generally do not make changes without the consensus of the church. The popes who declared the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption canvassed the world’s bishops and received many requests from priests, religious, and laity to declare the dogmas.

Even a change in a discipline such as celibacy would require the consensus of the world’s bishops over a reasonable period of time.

Benedict has done more that any pope in centuries (probably since Pius V) to end sexual abuse in the Church. He has not done enough, but he has done more than most bishops, priests, and even laity want. One reason the Vatican did not encourage bishops to discipline abusive priests is that the laity screamed whenever their favorite charismatic, narcissistic, abusive priest was disciplined. The bishops saw how the laity reacted, and so did the Vatican.

The responsibility for tolerating abusive priests is shared by segments of the church; those who tried to end it were often marginalized and rejected, because abusers are very popular- that is how they get access to children. In such matters, the papacy, the episcopacy, the clergy and laity all failed, and the children were sacrificed to a false image of the Church.

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Archbishop Gomez’ Actions in LA

in clergy sex abuse scandal 36 Comments Tags: , ,

Several people here and elsewhere have criticized Archbishop Gomez, He has been in charge of the Los Angles archdiocese for two years – why did he wait until now to do anything, as Mahony himself asked.

My guess is that events passed something like this:

When Gomez began archbishop, it took him a while to assimilate what had happened. He had enormous new duties as archbishop, the paper trail ran to tens of thousands of pages, and the leftover staff from Mahony’s years was not in a  hurry to point out how compromising the documents were.

When Gomez realized what had happened, he knew he had to do two things: release the documents and rebuke Mahony.

They had to be done simultaneously.

He could not release the documents without rebuking Mahony –  that is clear.

He could not rebuke Mahoney without releasing the documents, because Mahony and his defenders would claim that Gomez’ s actions were not justified by the evidence.

But he could not rebuke Mahony publicly without getting the Vatican’s consent – and that would take time and negotiation.

In the meanwhile he had to let the lawyers continue their legal maneuvers so that the documents would not be released without a simultaneous rebuke of Mahony.

As soon as he had Vatican consent, Gomez released the documents and rebuked Mahony – that is all that Gomez himself could do.

That is my guess about how things developed.

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What Mahony Should Hear

in clergy sex abuse scandal, repentance 15 Comments Tags: ,

On rare occasions the clerical vetting system fails and a Christian becomes a bishop or even a pope.

A Catholic Christian knows the gravity of sin and the necessity of repentance, which includes doing penance to expiate sin.

If Archbishop Gomez were a Christian, he would first privately and then publicly address Cardinal Mahony in terms such as these:

My dear brother, I fear for your salvation and I do not want to see you burn forever in the fires of hell, alienated from God, condemned by the voices of the abused children whose bodies and souls you allowed to be ruined.

You must immediately and publicly repent.

Send your cardinal’s hat back to the pope. Resign your priesthood. It is better to enter into life a layman than to be cast with a cardinal’s robes into Gehenna.

Become a lay bother at a poor monastery. Take the humblest jobs, cleaning the toilets and shoveling the stables. Spend every other moment on your knees until they are bloody, begging God to forgive you and not cast you into hell.

Tell the state that you will tell them everything and accept any punishment that they give you. Accept imprisonment and what you know probably awaits you in prison.

Perhaps the Lord will relent and will spare you. My dear brother, I pray that you repent before  death, which comes to every man, and no one knows the day or hour.

So Gomez would speak if he were a Christian and not an ecclesiastical bureaucrat – something the Vatican does its best to prevent.

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