Burntwater

in death, Popular religion, Southwest 12 Comments Tags: , ,

Scott Thybony writes about his journey around the Four Corners in search of a place that was once on a map: Burntwater. Within the story of that journey he tells the story of his other journeys, his search for the Hopi Sun Chief, his visit to a kiva during a kachina dance, his Good Friday pilgrimage from Santa Fe to Chimayo, his search for the spot in the Grand Canyon where his brother had died when the helicopter he was piloting was hit by a small plane.

Like the desert landscape, Burntwater deals with the elemental facts: love and suffering and survival and death. The desert is spirit haunted and is heartbreakingly beautiful – the beauty of the desert, like the beauty of life, will break your heart. Beauty is not for the weak; the most beautiful thing in the world is the Cross, the utter-self emptying of the Creator, who tasted death for all his creatures.

I don’t know the status of Thybony’s beliefs, but he senses that his life is being shaped so that it manifests hozho, the Navaho concept of beauty, but a beauty that incorporates suffering and death. I would call it Providence or the Holy Spirit, the sacred fire from which all reality springs and to which all returns. But the name is less important than the reality.

“Only later did I learn about the Navajo idea of beauty and how it moves through life like a wind. It’s not the beauty of surfaces alone, but an indwelling beauty that enfolds and completes, a life-restoring beauty. Only later did I learn about beauty and how it can be lost.”

The Hopi know that life is like this, the Navajo know it, the Penitentes know it – but so much of modern Christianity is sentimental and vacuous and superficial.

If you still need reading for Passion Week, I would recommend Burntwater.

Chimayó

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The Slant is Everything

in clergy sex abuse scandal 13 Comments Tags: ,

Get Religion examines a Commonweal blog on the new archbishop of Baltimore, William Lori.

In the blog, Terry Mattingly says

Consider, for example, this passage:

While Lori is known for his orthodoxy on doctrine and social issues, he was praised by many for taking a hard line in dealing with abusive priests, and in dealing with subsequent financial scandals that emerged.

Catch that? It’s all about that crucial word “while.”

Even though Lori is theologically orthodox, he was also willing to take a hard line against abusive priests who did everything they could to shatter both their vows and the church’s doctrines, on multiple levels. Why is it hard to believe that someone can be orthodox and, well, just?

Terry  points out that this implies an opposition, and that in my book Sacrilege, I, who am doctrinally and liturgically and politically conservative, am scathing in my comments on the abusers and their enables.

Most of the people who comment on the sexual abuse crisis try to adopt it to their narrative:

Liberals say that sexual abuse is the product of a patriarchal, hierarchal, obscurantist, hidebound corrupt Vatican-loyalists church that at least since Constantine’s day (or maybe St Paul’s) has gone astray from the feminist, sexual liberationist gospel that Jesus really proclaimed

Conservatives it is the result of amoral loosey-goosey feel-good liberalism which scarcely believes in God and has clown masses and doesn’t say the rosary and pals around with Democrats and that if we all just obeyed every jot and tittle of canon law all would be well.

Both try to fit the news to their version of what is happening in the Church. There is in fact evidence to support both sides: Maciel vs. Shanley, Law vs. Weakland.

What has happened is much more subtle. Abusers and their enablers are masters of manipulation: they know how to adopt their message to the narratives of their audience, narratives that have weaknesses.

It could be simple: “I am a dear old Irish priest who is kind and gentle with children and that is why I want to spend so much time alone with theme,”  “O, Isn’t Faaather wonderful!” (Geoghan)

Or it could be: “You need to overcome your sexual hang-ups, o 15 year old boy. Look in this book, see, theologians now say that there is nothing wrong with homosexual acts, and that they can be ways of growing in sexual maturity.” (Shanley and Gordon MacRae)

All the segments of the church should realize that their narratives, their ways of interpreting what has happened and is happening, can be exploited for destructive and immoral purposes, and not just in regard to sexual matters. Concern for the poor can be manipulated into toleration of leftist thuggery; concern for order can be manipulated into toleration of fascist thuggery.

We should always be aware of how we can be manipulated by those whose intentions are not good.

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The Easy Life of a Hunter-Gatherer

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Archeologists used to assume that the transition from the hunter-gatherer’s life to a farmer’s life was caused by the discovery that farming was easier. In fact this is not true. Studies have shown that the hunter-gatherers had to work less hard (about 20 hours a week for adults) than farmers do to get an adequate diet. There was more food in a farming community (because everyone, man, woman, and child worked) but it was less varied. The farmers had a worse diet and their health was worse, both because of a poor diet and because they lived in close proximity and transmitted diseases (see this summary).

The Presbyterian minister, David Brainerd, discovered that the Indians on the New York / New Jersey border did not have a high opinion of white people. Not only did they think that whites were morally worse (see previous blog), whites had a harder way of life.

In trying to ascertain the Indians’ religious ideas, Brainerd discovered

After the coming of the white people, they seemed to suppose there were three deities, and three only, because they saw people of three different kinds of complexion, viz. English, Negroes, an themselves.

It is a notion pretty generally prevailing among them, that it was not the same God that made them, who made us; but that they were made after the white people: which further shows that they imagine a plurality of divine powers. And I fancy they suppose that their god gained some special skill by seeing the white people made, and so made them better: for it is certain they look upon themselves, and their method of living (which, they say, their god expressly prescribed for them,)  vastly preferable to the white people, and their methods. And hence will frequently sit and laugh at them, as being good for nothing else but to plough and to fatigue themselves with hard labour; while they enjoy the satisfaction of stretching themselves on the ground, and sleeping as much as they please; and have no other trouble than now and then to chase the deer which is often attended by pleasure rather than pain.

The Indians thought that their way of life was easier than the whites’; they were correct, but farming can support greater numbers. Paradoxically the diseases cultivated by these numbers were what did the hunter-gatherers in (see Guns, Germs, and Steel).

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The Curse of Drink

in alcoholism, Masculinity, Southwest 1 Comment Tags: , ,

Tony Hillerman, as much as he admired the Navajos, did not idealize them, and described the blight of alcohol among the Diné, the people. In The Ghostway Jim Chee reflects on a drunken woman who was lying in the road and was run over, and on the others like her. “In the milder seasons, they drank themselves to death in front of trucks on U.S. 666 or Navajo Route 1. Now, with the icy wind beginning to blow, they would drink themselves to death in frozen ditches.”

In 1745-6, David Brainerd, a Presbyterian minister, worked as a missionary among the Indians in New Jersey near the New York border. He discovered they seemed “to abhor even the christian name.” Brainerd explained why:

This aversion to Christianity arises partly from a view of the “immorality and vicious behavior of many who are called Christians.” They [the Indians] observe  that horrid wickedness in nominal Christians, which the light of nature condemns in themselves: and not having distinguishing views of things, are ready to look on all the white people alike, and to condemn the alike, for the abominable practices of some. – Hence, when I have attempted to treat with them about Christianity, they have frequently objected the scandalous practices of Christians.  They have observed to me, that the white people lie, defraud, steal and drink worse than the Indians; that they have taught the Indians these things, especially the latter of them; who before the coming of the English, knew of no such thing as strong drink: that the English have, by these means, made the quarrel and kill one another; and, in a word,  brought them to the practice of all those vices that now prevail among them. So that they have now vastly more miserable, than they were before the coming of the white people into the country. – These, and such like objections, they frequently make against Christianity, which are not easily answered to their satisfaction; many of them being facts too notoriously true.

David Courtwright in his book Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City claims that the Indians learned how to react to alcohol by observing how white people reacted. Unfortunately Indians did not see mature Frenchmen or Italians savoring a glass of wine, but young, adventurous, testosterone-driven males getting drunk and shooting up the town.

Among all the accusations made against the Spanish in their entrada into New Mexico, I do not remember reading that they introduced the natives denizens to drunkenness. They had wine and brandy; was it too rare to trade to the Indians, or did the Spanish, even on the frontier, not abuse alcohol as much as the English did?

(There is some evidence that before the Spanish arrived the Pueblo Indians may have made a weak beer by fermenting corn, but nothing conclusive and no traces in oral history of alcohol abuse in pre-contact times).

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The Peripatetic Nun

in Catholic Church, Southwest 9 Comments Tags: , ,

The comparison (see previous blog) of Hinduism and Catholicism brought to mind what I had just read in John Kessell’s Kiva, Cross, and Crown, about the Pecos Indians of New Mexico. The Spanish tried various ways to convert the Indians to Christianity, but the friars despaired about the superficiality of the conversion. Indians said their prayers and came to church, but also continued their dances and mysterious goings on in the kivas.

On top of all this, the archbishop of Mexico City wrote a letter to the Franciscan friars telling them that a a Spanish Franciscan nun, María de Jesús Ágrada (1602-1665) had been miraculously transported to New Mexico to preach to the heathen Indians. The archbishop asked the friars to investigate.

My curiosity was piqued. One friar, who eventually visited her, said he was convinced by her descriptions of New Mexico – although there were ulterior motives for his interest in her.

Wikipedia explains about Sor María:

She is credited in her book Mystical City of God (Spanish: Mistica Ciudad de Dios, Vida de la Virgen María) with receiving directly from the Blessed Virgin Mary a lengthy revelation, consisting of 8 books (6 volumes), about the terrestrial and heavenly life of Blessed Mary and her relationship with the Triune God, the doings and Mysteries performed by Jesus as God–Man in flesh and in Spirit, with extensive detail, in a narrative that covers the New Testament time line but accompanied with doctrines given by the Holy Mother on how to acquire true sanctity.

Our Authoress Receiving Dictation

She is credited by having contributed in the evangelization of what is known today as Texas, New Mexico and Arizona by supernaturally appearing to early tribes in the region before official evangelization missions had even begun for that location, in what has been cataloged as bilocation as she never left the convent she resided for the time being,[2] which adds to other supernatural, and documented phenomena accompanying her history, as levitation during praying, and uncorrupted body even to this day, more than 300 hundred years after her death.

From an Authentic Seventeenth Century Photograph

Philip IV was, of course, the descendant of Joanna the Mad. The Hapsburgs had a certain problem with inbreeding.

Wikipedia also claims:

Giacomo Casanova mentions being compelled to read María de Ágreda’s book, Mystical City of God, during his imprisonment in the Venice prison “i Piombi” as a means of the clergy to psychologically torture the prisoners. He called it the work of an “overheated imagination of a devout, melancholy, Spanish virgin locked up in a Convent.” In it, Casanova argues that a captive’s mind can get inflamed with such aberrant ideas to the point of madness, which was purportedly the purpose of having been given the book to read.

Cruel and unusual punishment.

Clerical response to Sor  María was mixed. Pope Clement X declared her Venerable and the process for her canonization was opened in 1673, but has been stalled ever since. For a while her Mystical City of God was put on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1681 (no doubt to the relief of prisoners like Casanova).

If clerics sometimes have made grumpy statements about women it should be remembered that  they are the recipients of numerous claims from visionaries (almost all women) to have messages from God. Some learned theologian has to read through all the visions, which may recount what  Archangel Gabriel said to the Archangel Michael and what Mary had to say to that, to see if the visionary had snuck in the doctrine of redemptive transmigration or claimed that she was the fourth person of the Trinity.

Nor is this ancient history. A few years ago, in a certain city with which I am familiar, a seeresss claimed to be a stigmatic, to waltz with Jesus in heaven, etc. She gathered followers who had to wear special aprons. She announced that her guardian angel was 10 feet tall, taller than other people’s guardian angels, and that her followers should stand around him, wearing their special aprons, and look up at him and sing his favorite song, “Baby Face.”

I am not making this up – and some poor priest, who would rather be studying Scotus’ epistemology or at least playing golf, had to investigate it.

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The Tiber, The Channel, and the Bosphorus

in Anglicans, Catholic Church, Episcopal Church, Popular religion, Protestantism, Voluntarism 3 Comments Tags: ,

Committed Christians in a Christendom that has many competing Christian bodies have to do something they really should not have to do: decide which Church they should belong to.

Journeys of Faith: Evangelicalism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Anglicanism

edited by Robert L. Plummer (Zondervan, 2012) recounts faith journeys among the various Christian traditions: Evangelicalism, Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Anglicanism.

A convert explains why he left, for example, the Baptist Church for Orthodoxy. A Baptist responds, and then the convert gets to respond again. It is a good format.

All churches have their severe problems. I have documented some of Catholicism’s worst problems, so I have no illusions about the Roman Catholic Church. Evangelicalism, Orthodoxy, and Anglicanism all have severe problems; some are historical accidents, some may by intrinsic to the traditions.

For my part, it has always been clear to me that the Roman Catholic Church has all the elements of the complete Church as described in the New Testament, including a central authority, the papacy, to strengthen the brethren and to foster unity.  Whether they are in the right proportion or operate in the right manner in another question entirely.

In reading the rehearsal of the Catholic-Protestant arguments on justification in this book, I keep sensing that nominalist, voluntarist  assumptions have made the controversy insoluble. God is the cause of all things, the creator of all things, including all actions. Every human action is created by God, or it would not exist. But a human action is both free and caused (a concept difficult for modern Westerners to understand – we have a nominalist, voluntarist conception of freedom in the air we breathe). God causes some things by acting through free agents. Therefore the actions are both the action of God and the action of the agent. This is true in the orders of nature and of grace.

When God acts in us, God acts in us. That is, out just actions are truly His, but they are also truly ours. Since they are truly His, they are saving, since they are truly ours, they are worthy of blame or praise, that is, they are meritorious. Paul was confident that the just God would give him the crown he had merited.

Chrysostom explains this in the context of friendship. Friendship finds or makes friends equal. A friend when he discovers that his friend needs something, gives it to him, but in a way that makes the recipient seem to be doing a favor to the giver.

As to the Eucharist, the best explanations I have ever read was by a member of the Eastern Church. He explained that the same thing happens invisibly at the Eucharist as happened when Jesus was on earth. When Jesus ate bread, it was transformed into his body. In the Eucharistic banquet, the same thing happens invisibly. Although we see bread, it has truly become Jesus. This explanation avoids terminology that sounds foreign to the New Testament (transubstantiation) and better preserves the whole context of the Heavenly Banquet at which God and man are sat down.

The Evangelical in this book also takes some swipes at the supposed unity of Roman Catholicism by comparing it to Hinduism. If he knew more about popular Catholicism, he would have even more ammunition. But the imperfect assimilation to Christianity in many Catholic cultures (an endless source of frustration to the clergy) has two sides. Less so than Protestantism, the Catholic Church (for all the charges of cultural genocide) has tried to transform rather than totally destroy the cultures it encounters, so that the riches of all nations will serve the Lord. But the result is often an odd mixture, sometimes charming, sometimes appalling.

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A Human Jesus

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As part of my Lenten reading I just finished Patrick Henry Reardon’s The Jesus We Missed: The Surprising Truth about the Humanity of Christ. Publishers choose titles, and the title is a little misleading. Reardon has some escellent insights, but as he would inist, it is nto really new: it is in the Gospels. Russell Moore’s introduction is also a little misleading. Reardon does not concentrate on the brute physicality of Jesus’ existence, such as whether he was sick and suffered the indignities of intestinal flu. Reardon, wisely, does not discuss the intensely emotional question of Jesus’ sexuality – although Jesus grew up and underwent puberty like all human males.

Like a good Antiochan, Reardon, while fully accepting the conciliar dogmas on the two natures of Christ, concentrates on the humanity of Jesus. We are saved by the human acts of a divine person, and Reardon concentrates on the human intentions of the writers of Scripture and on the humanity of Jesus.

Perhaps the most important point that Reardon makes is that to be human is to be in movement, in development. If the Son of God assumed our full humanity, he also assumed the process of development that all human beings undergo. That is, Jesus learned things as we do, by observation, study, and pondering. He also, like the prophets, was given moments of special insight into events and into human thoughts. These do not prove that he was omniscient, in the sense that he knew all things in a quantitative sense (for example, all the stars in the universe, their planets, the movements of each atom and sub-atomic particle from the Big Bang to the End, etc.)  As a Son he knew what the Father wanted him to know, in the way the Father wanted him to know them.

Reardon does not argue this but simply states it as being most congruent with the text – which it certainly is, but of course there is a strong tradition that claims that Jesus was in some sense omniscient. To address that theological tradition would require another book.

Reardon examines the texts to see how Jesus came to a clearer and clearer idea of what his Messianic mission entailed, that is, betrayal and the cross. This came about primarily through a study of the Scriptures.

When I was at Providence College in the 1960s, the Dominicans were totally captivated by the historical-critical approach to Scripture, the four source theory of Genesis, etc. I asked the question which was dismissed as not being worthy of an answer, whether Jesus’ approach to Scripture should not be normative. If we are to put on the mind of Christ, should we not also regard Scripture in the same way he regarded it? Reardon’s answer is yes.

Reardon’s approach also, no doubt inadvertently, bears a resemblance to books from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that also tried to bring out the full humanity – and the masculinity – of Jesus, books such as Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows. Those writers, however, often had a weak grasp of the Messianic mission and of the atonement, and sometimes were on the fringes of orthodoxy, an accusation that cannot be made about Reardon.

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How Slippery is the Slope?

in abortion 3 Comments Tags: , ,

This is for real:

From The Journal of Medical Ethics

Law, ethics, and medicine

Paper

After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?

1. Alberto Giubilini

2. Francesca Minerva

+ Author Affiliations

1. 1Department of Philosophy, University of Milan, Milan, Italy

2. 2Centre for Human Bioethics, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

3. 3Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

4. 4Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Oxford University, Oxford, UK

Abstract

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

This, via Patrick Madrid, is, for the time being, a projection:

January 22, 2023

Dear Mom:

Can you believe it is already the year 2023? I’m still writing ’22 on everything! It seems like only yesterday that I was sitting in the first grade and celebrating the change to a new century.

I know we really haven’t chatted since Christmas, Mom, and I’m sorry. Anyway, I have some difficult news to share with you and, to be honest, I really didn’t want to call or talk about this face to face.

But before I get to that, let me report that Ted just got a big promotion, and I should be up for a hefty raise this year if I keep putting in all those crazy hours. You know how I work at it. (Yes, we’re still struggling to pay the bills.)

Little Timmy’s been okay at kindergarten, although he complains about going. But then, he wasn’t happy about the day-care center either. So what can we do?

He’s been a real problem, Mom. He’s a good kid, but quite honestly, he’s an unfair burden on us at this time in our lives.Ted and I have talked this through, and we have finally made a choice. Plenty of other families have made the same choice and are really better off today.

Our pastor is supportive of our choice. He pointed out the family is a system, and the demands of one member shouldn’t be allowed to ruin the whole. The pastor told us to be prayerful and to consider all the factors as to what is right to make our family work. He says that even though he probably wouldn’t do it himself, the choice really is ours. He was kind enough to refer us to a children’s clinic near here, so at least that part is easy.

Don’t get me wrong, Mom. I’m not an uncaring mother. I do feel sorry for the little guy. I think he heard Ted and me talking about this the other night. I turned and saw him standing at the bottom of the stairs in his PJ’s with his little teddy bear that you gave him under his arm, and his eyes were sort of welled up with tears.

Mom, the way he looked at me just about broke my heart, but I honestly believe this is better for Timmy, too. It’s just not fair to force him to live in a family that can’t give him the time and attention he deserves.

And please, Mom, don’t give me the kind of grief that grandma gave you over your abortions. It’s the same thing, you know. There’s really no difference.

We’ve told Timmy he’s just going in for a “vaccination.” Anyway, they say the termination procedure is painless. I guess it’s just as well that you haven’t seen that much of little Timmy lately.

Please give my love to Dad.

Your daughter

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Congregationalist Catholicism

in Episcopal Church, Popular religion 10 Comments Tags: , , , ,

In Baltimore, parishes were closed one or two at a time, and I noticed little outcry. Ethnic parishes had been built within a block or two of each other, and the neighborhoods had become almost entirely back, with very few Catholics. Other dioceses held onto a structure that was built for a far larger and more ethnic Catholic population, and with the recent financial crunch have had to close down parishes wholesale. In Cleveland the enormous decline in both the Catholic and overall population has necessitated the closing of numerous parishes with the usual outcry – although is hard to see how it could have been avoided.

One parish responded by setting up its own congregation independent of the bishop Tom Roberts has an article, “A Community of a Different Sort,” in the National Catholic Reporter (now available here) about this situation.

The Rev. Robert Marrone had revived St. Peter’s, an inner city parish (for some of its problems see Marrone’s difficult relationship with street people) by attracting white suburbanites, but Bishop Lennon decided that it had to be closed as part of the diocesan reorganization. The members of the parish rented their own space in an industrial and have continued to meet as the Community of St. Peter with Marrone, their former pastor, who has been threatened with unspecified ecclesiastical penalties.

The parish seems to be in schism – it is conducting unauthorized liturgies with the former pastor, who is not assigned to it and is listed as being on leave from the active ministry.

The present Catholic system of episcopal governance is not God-given in all its details, but on the whole many problems in the Church have been the result of bishops (and popes) failing to exercise the oversight that is the essence of their office, not in exercising too much oversight.

The Community of St. Peter has set itself up as an independent Catholic congregation outside the structure of the diocese. Marrone has not been suspended or excommunicated – not yet, but that seems inevitable.

Marrone claims that the split was not based on any of the controversies in the Church, but on the desire of the congregation to stay together. The congregation has set itself up as a legal entity and plans to hire its own clergy.

In all the other independent Catholic congregations that have been set up, almost immediately there is a full acceptance of homosexual behavior and a general rejection of Catholic sexual ethics. It also seems inevitable that the parish will hire a woman priest, whose ordination they will claim to have somehow been in the line of apostolic succession – the one doctrine that schismatic Catholics cling to when they reject all other Catholic ecclesiology. (See the experience of Spiritus Christi in Rochester)

Protestant denominations that are congregational in polity also have a poor record of dealing with sensitive problems like sexual abuse. The Southern Baptists point out that the denomination has no authority over clergy – each congregation calls its pastor and no one outside the congregation  has any say over the qualifications, opinions or behavior of the pastor. Congregations who have suffered from manipulative, sexually abusive pastors sometimes look wistfully at denominations with an episcopal structure which could step in and deal with the problem.

I do not see why the Community of St. Peter does not join the Episcopal Church. That polity allows the congregation more autonomy in running its affairs and choosing its pastors than the Roman Catholic system does, but also provides episcopal oversight to deal with problems that congregations cannot deal with internally. A congregation can also accept or reject as much Catholicism as its feels comfortable with. The Episcopalian Church has a good pension system, which an individual congregation would have trouble setting up.

Do the parishioners of the Community of St. Peter not think that the Episcopal Church is as much a church as the Roman Catholic Church? Do they have a lingering suspicion that Episcopalian priests are not “validly” ordained? Why do they insist in being Catholic but not being in communion (or at least in impaired communion) with the local Roman Catholic bishop, or, for that matter, with any bishop of any denomination? If they reject the episcopal structure entirely, in what sense do they differ from Congregationalists? If they set up their own episcopal structure independent of the Roman Catholic Church, in what sense are they not in schism?

I suspect that, in their anger at Lennon, they have not thought these matters through, and they will sooner or later discover that it is hard to remain Catholic when one is completely detached from the structures of Catholicism. It is hard to be a Catholic with the bishops that have been inflicted on us, but it is almost impossible to be a Catholic without a bishop.

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Mourning the Church

in clergy sex abuse scandal 8 Comments Tags: ,

On Thursday I heard Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea speak in Naples at a VOTF series.  She is a clinical psychologist specializing in trauma and had spoken to the bishops 2002 at the Dallas conference.

She focused on what she saw as the roots of the sexual abuse crisis. She had left the Catholic Church some time ago and has become a liberal Protestant, and her position was that the Catholic Church should adopt the ethos of liberal Protestantism to rid itself itself clerical narcissism that had enabled the abuse.

Unfortunately her theology is so different from Catholicism that most Catholics, especially those in the hierarchy, will dismiss her immediately, although she had some excellent suggestions. Among them was the reinstitution of the sacred penitentiary (although she did not use that term).

She said that bishops sought the easy way out of the accusations: pay off the victims and laicize the abusive priests. But this turned abusers loose with no control or supervision. She suggested offering such priests a residence in the country, where they could work, say mass, pray, and stay away from children. They would have no internet access or cell phone, and would be accompanied whenever they left the residence.

She described the process of mourning that victims had to go through for the life they had lost and Catholics had to go through for the image of the Church they had lost, an image that never corresponded to reality.

The clerical attitudes that she found intolerable and a betray of Christ were exemplified by an article that a Canadian referred me to: “Parent of Abuse Compliant Raps Plourde” (Ottawa Citizen, June 4, 1986).

The mother of one of the three boys allegedly abused by a Nepean priest lashed out Tuesday at Archbishop Joseph-Aurèle Plourde for his “unchristian” response to parent’s complaints.

On Monday, Plourde issued a statement criticizing parents for going outside the church with their allegations instead of “placing their trust in their own pastors, priests, and bishops.”

(snip)

The woman…said she had tried to get satisfaction within the church without result. After she had relayed her accusations on separate occasions to two priests a bishop, and a member of her parish council she was scolded by the bishop for gossiping, she said.

She said Plourde phoned her at her home in early May to say “she mustn’t go to the police and mustn’t go to the media and mustn’t bring shame upon the Church.

He said it wasn’t my concern and was in danger of a grave sin of scandal,” she said.

“Not once did any of these men ask about my son and his condition, not once.”

(The accused priest, Dale Crampton, later pleaded guilty.)

I really do not think that this attitude has changed – bishops have been told by their lawyers that they have to do certain things and have to pretend to be human beings and express concern for the victims, but my strong suspicions that it is all show, and there has been no conversion of heart. Liberals like Weakland and conservatives like Egan were equally hard-hearted.

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Adolescents and Alcohol

in Uncategorized 12 Comments Tags: , ,

When I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia 1969-1975, the undergraduate college had a deserved reputation as a party school. Easters, which had begun as a series of genteel dances, had degenerated into a mammoth drunken orgy that attracted debauchees from across the country, until it was finally suppressed. Every year one or two students would die of an alcohol related accident or alcohol poisoning.

My dissertation director, Robert Kellogg, devoted his career there to trying to tone down the drinking culture. He helped found a residential college that provided an alternative atmosphere to the fraternities.

But thinks just got worse and worse, until UVA lacrosse player George Huguely V assaulted his former girl friend, Yeardley Love, and she died. He is on trial for first degree murder.  \

Tricia Bishop has a long article in the Baltimore Sun about the drinking culture at colleges. Why student  think it cool to drink until they pass out is beyond me.

The remarks of Webster, a professor at johns Hopkins Public Health, bear some analysis.

Webster has studied assaults among lovers, particularly lethal violence, and said alcohol is a frequent factor, and a potential, if partial, cause of it — a debated belief in the medical community.

“We know that alcohol abuse impairs judgment, it makes it harder to control one’s impulses in certain circumstances,” Webster said. “So I think it does play a causal role.”

He also believes that alcohol treatment could reduce violent incidents, but adds that he’s part of a minority who thinks that way. It took a long time for such attacks, typically man on woman, to be considered crimes, and women’s rights advocates are reluctant to link abuse to a disease like alcoholism, Webster said.

“When we start to think about diseased people, people with an illness, some of us want to cut them some slack. how can you hold somebody accountable for their disease?” he said. “But I don’t think it’s an either-or scenario. I think you can hold people accountable for their behavior.”

The jury in Huguely’s trial, which will begin deliberation in the case next week, is expected to consider Huguely’s alcohol use when determining whether he intended to kill her. They could find that the alcohol impaired his judgment so much, that he was incapable of the premeditated murder he’s charged with.

He had been drinking almost nonstop the Sunday he went to Love’s apartment, where she too was intoxicated.

Alcoholism, like pedophilia, is regarded as a “disease,” and somehow mitigates or removes responsibility for criminal actions. I dislike the word “disease.” It sounds too much like an infection caused by a pathogen, There are almost certainly physical components and involuntary psychological quirks in both alcoholism and pedophilia, but it think it better to regard them as disorders. It is a disorder to want to drink more alcohol the more one consumes alcohol; it is a disorder to desire to have sex with children.

But a person is responsible for acting on his desires: his desires do not compel him to drink or to have sex with children. They make him want to do these things, but he is not under any compulsion to do so. It is not a tick, like La Tourette’s syndrome.

Does a disordered diminish legal responsibility? I do not see why it should. Almost everyone has a desire to do something he shouldn’t do, whether it is speeding or not paying taxes, but we chose whether to act on our desires.

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Shoots of Life in a Spiritual Desert

in Anti-Semitism, Catholic Church, clergy sex abuse scandal 20 Comments Tags: , ,

Commonweal has an excerpt, “Nazi Racism and the Church,” from a forthcoming book by John Connelly that will appear next month:  From Enemy to brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965.

Briefly, Msgr. Oesterreicher was far more of a critic of the Vatican and of Pius XII’s dealings with the Nazis before and during the war than he was after the war when he defended Pius XII against of accusations of being pro-Nazi (e.g., Hochhuth’s The Deputy).

A reader of these letters encounters a very different Oesterreicher from the man who appeared on U.S. nightly news in 1963. Instead of defending the Vatican, the Oesterreicher of the prewar years is freely critical, calling Pius XII “timid” and accusing him of currying favor with fascism. The letters reveal Thieme and Oesterreicher attempting repeatedly to get the bishops of Europe—above all, the bishop of Rome—to come out unmistakably against Nazism and anti-Semitism. What they encountered was a Vatican in many ways similar to Hochhuth’s later portrayal of it. In 1937 Oesterreicher decided to publish Catholic arguments against anti-Semitism in a brochure bearing the signatures of as many prominent Catholics as he could find. The resulting “Memorandum on the Jewish People,” written anonymously by Thieme and the exiled political writer Waldemar Gurian (another Jewish-born convert to Catholicism), appeared simultaneously in Vienna, Paris, and New York, and used a range of arguments from Scripture and church history to oppose all discrimination against Jews. Despite intense canvassing, Oesterreicher found not a single bishop willing to support the effort.

Pius XII had a diplomatic mindset which was inadequate to deal with the evils of Nazism. Oesterreicher wanted Pius to release German Catholic soldiers from their oath to Hitler; that would have resulted in the martyrdom of tens of thousands of Catholic priests and laity, and possibly even civil war in Germany –but it might have prevented the universal catastrophe of World War II and the Holocaust. Pius could not even imagine such a course of action, and made indirect public criticisms of Nazi actions, which in diplomatic terms was very daring.

A few Catholic clergy were pro-Nazi (like Bishop Hudal), most were vaguely anti-Semitic, and were exhorted by some “progressive” Catholics to adopt to the new, modern world of eugenics and scientific racism. The real opposition to Nazism, the prophetic voices that were to bear fruit in Vatican II’s statement on the Jews, was heard in the voices of converts like Oesterreicher and Maritain and Dietrich von Hildebrand – those who had chosen Catholicism and who took it seriously.

Although anti-Semitism has not been purged from the Catholic Church, it is on the decline – although one cardinal blamed the media’s interest in clerical sexual abuse on the Jews who wanted to punish the Church for supporting the Palestinians. However, on the whole, Catholic anti-Semitism is in decline, because of the actions of a small group, many of them converts.

Perhaps something similar will happen with attitudes to sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Clearly abuse had been tolerated for a long time. “The Vatican” is not monolithic in its attitudes, any more that “Washington” is. Some still refuse to take the matter of abuse seriously; others like Benedict have come to a partial realization of how evil it is; a few, like Msgr. Scicluna (a promoter of justice [investigator] for the CDF), want to hold bishops accountable for their failures.

The small group of laity, such as Jason Berry, Richard Sipe, Terry McKiernan, and a few others, representing a spectrum of Catholicism, may be the catalyst for a change of heart in the way sexual abuse in regarded and handled in the entire Catholic Church. In such a massive institution, the change will take decades to filter throughout the world, and the change will only be partial, but it seems to be a real change, and that can be credited to those who insisted on speaking out.

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In the City of Brotherly Love

in clergy sex abuse scandal 8 Comments Tags: , , ,

The Philadelphia prosecutors are going after the Archdiocese of Philadelphian as an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial of Msgr. Lynn, and want to introduce evidence of the pattern of enabling abusers.

When I had lawyers review my book Sacrilege for libel issues, they were astonished at what bishops had done. Bishops came very close to being accessories before the facts to felonies. Bishops escaped because a prosecutor had to prove that a bishop assigned a known abuser to a parish with children with the intention of helping the crime be committed. Intention is very hard to prove, although when a bishop makes a known abuser a Boy Scout chaplain, circumstantial evidence is pretty strong.

Bishops repeatedly showed a total disregard for the safety of children, and as I understand it their legal culpability depends on the statues in each state about child endangerment. New Hampshire has a very strong statute; I do not know what Pennsylvania has. Lynn is no doubt guilty morally of endangering children, but whether his actions and failures are caught by the statute remains to be seen.

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Homosexuality, Narcissism, and Machismo

in Uncategorized 17 Comments

Is homosexuality itself a psychological disorder? Freud though that homosexuality was a form of narcissism (definitely a disorder), of falling in love with an image of oneself, rather than the opposite sex.

Certainly many homosexuals are narcissists, as are many heterosexuals.

Narcissism is the root of endless evils in the clergy, and I have long thought that having the priest face the people during mass concentrates attention on the priest and feeds narcissism.

Many people, as Father Michael points out, equate homosexuality and effeminacy. This is not true. As an investigator I encountered many non-effeminate homosexuals. One case I had led me to a gay biker bar (that was scary). In another case the gay was a star rugby player. And in another case someone insisted an entire college football team engaged in homosexual orgies (I had some doubts about that).

Many of the abuser of teenage boys were fairly macho, otherwise boys would have shied away from them. This was a good cover. No one could imagine that former military engineer, tall, cowboy- booted Ed Donelan was having sex with his wards at the Casa de los Muchachos.

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