Protestant Sheep Stealers?

in Protestantism 10 Comments

George Weigel has some insights into religious change in Latin Ameirca. 

…in trying to preach the Gospel today, what Benedict called the “mainstream Christian denominations” themselves face a new situation. For the “geography of Christianity” had “changed dramatically in recent times, and is in the process of changing further still.” There is a “new form of Christianity, which is spreading with overpowering missionary dynamism, sometimes in frightening ways … a form of Christianity with little institutional depth, little rationality and even less dogmatic content, and with little stability.”

By which, I think we can assume, the Pope meant the explosion of evangelical (in the American sense of the term), Pentecostalist, and fundamentalist Christianity throughout the Third World. “What is this new form of Christianity saying to us, for better and for worse?”, the Pope asked his mainline German Protestant audience. Perhaps I might venture an answer to that question.

The first thing that is being said is that preaching Jesus Christ crucified and the transforming power of personal friendship with the Risen Lord is going to win out, every time, over enticing men and women into a religious trade union or cultural club. Surely Benedict XVI, whose pontificate has been characterized by the theme of intimate friendship with the Lord, knows that. One hopes he is saying it, firmly, to the “bishops from all over the world” who are “constantly” complaining to him about evangelical inroads into their flocks.

Take, for example, Latin America. The Catholic Church has been active in Latin America for over half a millennium. If it has poorly catechized that vast expanse of territory, such that the Church cannot retain the loyalty of traditionally Catholic peoples, it should look first to its own incapacities and failures, rather than blaming well-funded American evangelical and Pentecostalist missions for its problems. As scholars like David Martin and Amy Sherman have demonstrated, it is the power of these missions to change self-destructive patterns of behavior through radical conversion to Christ that has given them their purchase in areas where five hundred years of Catholicism have failed to build a culture of responsibility—especially male responsibility. More recognition of that, and less complaining to the Pope, would seem the appropriate Christian response from Catholic bishops in the world’s most densely Christian continent.  

I am have been doing further research into male alienation from Christianity.

 

The Catholic clergy alienated many men in Latin America by trying to control or eliminate what men considered to be their own expression of Catholicism. Priests disliked the fiestas and the male exuberance that the fiestas occasioned.  The priests sound like sourpusses when they object to fireworks, but they also objected to the fiestas’ costs that kept families in poverty and to the drinking and mayhem that fiestas brought about.

 

Charismatics in Latin America seem to have more success in getting men to behave themselves and devote their resources to their families. I am not sure why this has not provoked male rebellion. Perhaps the pastors are a lot closer to the people. They need little theological education, unlike Catholic priests, and are married. Perhaps charismatic worship allows for male exuberance that found expression in dancing, drinking, and fighting. Or perhaps something else.But the charismatic churches are feminized too and have not been able to reach the young men who are increasingly drawn into the world of narcoterrorism.

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Kansas City

in clergy sex abuse scandal 45 Comments Tags: ,

Rod Dreher is back in the blogosphere, and has two very good blogs (here and here) on the situation in Kansas City, where Bishop Finn has just been indicted.

Dreher makes most of the important points. I have only a few words to add.

Bishops cannot be trusted implicitly. Some consider it their duty to lie to protect themselves. They do not consider anything they promise to be binding.

The Catholic Church suffers from a serious misunderstanding of the role of the clergy. The laity are infantilized, and want to regard the clergy as living oracles and saints, rather than as ordinary sinners who have a difficult and demanding role in the Catholic community. The higher clergy especially are politicians, and should be given no more trust than any other politician, whether in corporate, military, or governmental life. The laity in general turn a blind eye to this; recognizing it would make life too uncomfortable.

The Catholic Church (and other forms of Christianity) also suffers from a widespread misunderstanding of forgiveness. Forgiveness is a gift, first of all; it cannot be demanded. To be forgiven the sinner must truly repent, and part of repentance is accepting the just punishment for one’s sins (in Bishop Finn’s case, time in jail) and a desire to, as far as possible, remedy the evil that one’s sin has caused.

The role of penance has been forgotten. One has only to consider how abusive priests would have been treated in the early church. Even if repentant, they would have had to do lifelong, harsh physical penance and would have been reconciled to the church only on their deathbed.

In Newfoundland, after Archbishop Penney had transferred abusers, he appointed a commission to investigate his actions The committee told Penney that he was indeed at fault. Penney, being a faulty but an honorable man, resigned his office and devoted his life to prayer and penance for the harm he had caused. If Finn were an honorable man, he would resign, plead guilty, and tell the court he would accept whatever punishment the court saw fit. If, that is, he were an honorable man. If he knew what honor was.

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The Cows of Galicia

in Camino de Santiago No Comments Tags: ,

About a year ago on a sunny day I climbed into Galicia on the Camino and stayed on O’Cebreiro. I woke to a fog which turned into a driving rain.

The Camino follows farm roads which are also used by the local animals, with predictable results. I arrived in Triacastela in the rain and changed into dry clothes. I usually wore my sandals in the evening, but it was pouring. I therefore wore my boots to church.

The local church is one to Santiago. This photo shows it in a rare moment of sunshine. The building is black with lichen, moss, and small plants nourished by the perpetual rain.

I went into the cold, damp church; the priest arrived wearing a heavy down jacket and invited us to sit up in the choir stalls. As the pilgrims filled the sanctuary, a distinct odor of cow also permeated the church – but then He was born in a stable, so it was the first thing He smelled.

We sat around the altar in a cold twelfth-century Romanesque church with flickering candles and a barnyard odor. The priest came out and noticed that the Brazilian girl next to me was shivering. He went back and got his jacket for her. His warmth made us forget the chill of the church.

Jack Hitt wrote a book in the Camino, Off the Road, from which some of the funniest lines in The Way are taken. Jack did the Camino back in 1994, so the animal population has declined somewhat and facilities are much better, but the Camino is still very rustic.

I had deep sympathy with this passage from his book:

The only accessible roads are ox paths, all paved in squishy sheets of bovine and ovine dung. The village smells of fresh shit, quite piquant in the late morning. Parked at the front door of each house is an ox, who welcomes us by evacuating his bowels in a small explosion. At the occasional post is tethered a cow who also seems genuinely excited by our arrival and speaks oxen. Scrawny dogs howl at our approach, scampering along and then slip-sliding in an impressive 180-degree halt. Chickens flit along the surface of the shit, screeching an unconvincing claim to ownership.

Let me say this about shit. I have spent months walking through all manner of it. To tell the truth, a pilgrim comes to like shit. I know this sounds like an acquired taste, possibly born of necessity. But shit, of the rural variety, can have an attractive odor. I am not including humans; don’t even want to talk about it. But ruminants, horses, rural dogs, and chickens produce tons of dung along the road. And I welcome it because the wafting odor of manure is an olfactory signal of pending rest. It means animals, which means people, which means shelter, which means coffee and water and food.

muuu

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Companions on The Way

in Camino de Santiago 6 Comments Tags: ,

Martin Sheen’s and Emilio Estevez’s The Way opened in 15 cities, and will open on 500 screens on October 21. On Saturday I went to Washington to see it; I highly recommend it, but be prepared for an emotional roller coaster.

It is never too late to find the way.

I made the 500 mile trek of the Camino de Santiago from St Jean Pied-du-Port to Santiago de Compostela in the fall of 2010. I wrote of my experience in “The Way of St. James” in the September / October 2011 issue of Touchstone and in these blogs: (here, here, and here).

Sheen had been there in the fall of 2009 making the film (the trailer).

The plot as summarized in the Boston Herald:

Martin Sheen, Estevez’s father and the father of Charlie Sheen, plays an aging American optometrist named Tom.

After the sudden death of Tom’s wayward son Daniel (Estevez) in a freak mountain storm on the pilgrimage to Compostela, a shaken Tom goes to St. Jean Pied du Port, France, to retrieve the body. Instead, he has the remains cremated and decides to complete the journey in his son’s memory and carry Daniel’s ashes with him.

Along “The Way,” Tom, who can be both gruff and magnetic, picks up companions also seeking something — enlightenment, forgiveness, weight loss, smoking cessation.

Among them are Dutch stoner Joost (Yorick van Wageningen of “The New World”), Sarah (Deborah Kara Unger), a sexy and tart-tongued fellow American who plans to quit smoking at journey’s end, and Jack (James Nesbitt), a suspiciously theatrical Irish author who claims to have writer’s block, although he never shuts up.

There are some obvious cinematic references to The Wizard of Oz and also to Sheen’s life and family difficulties, but the film does capture the experience of the Camino, or at least the intense parts of the experience.

Emilio Estevez could have made a film about a traditional Catholic making the Camino, but it would have been less accessible to a general audience, and it would also have been a lot less interesting. The four characters who make the Camino together are trying to ignore God – but then why are they walking 500 miles on a Way that constantly reminds them of Him? And in any case, God is not ignoring them, as becomes clear.

The film, like the Camino, and like life, is full of pain and heart-wrenching grief that will not be healed until God wipes the tears from every eye. But the Camino is also full of joy and laughter. It is is very physical – muddy boots, blisters, wet clothing, aching shoulders – but also drinking glasses of red wine on sunny afternoons while looking over just-harvested wheat fields, and all, both the pains and the small pleasures, shot through with hints of transcendence. Jesus healed the blind with his spit, and healed a women who but touched his garment. And the blood and water flowing from his pierced side brought life to a dying universe.

Above all the Camino is about community – the little community of the four characters, of the fellow pilgrims on the Camino who are always doing small acts of kindness, of the Spaniards who are forever directing wandering pilgrims to the right path and greeting them with a Buen Camino, of the dead who have walked the Camino in the past millennium – and of the saints in heaven, whose statues look down from a thousand church portals.And above stands the cross, whose arms open everywhere a pilgrim looks, giving an abrazo to the whole world.

The film is intense at times but is varied with the wonderful, odd, and funny things that also make up the Camino. I didn’t stay in the dormitories – I had read of the world class snorers who frequented them, so I missed the opportunity to get to know people better – but my short conversations and brief interactions with the locals gave me a flavor for what others were experiencing a with greater depth.

One aspect of the Camino that is difficult to capture in a film is the lesson in patience, in ploddingness, in taking time for the small details. As an American male, for the first few hours of the first day I was annoyed when anyone, especially a woman, passed me, but I reminded myself this was not a race. I also stopped whenever my shoes needed adjusting – a half-hour delay in retying a shoe might mean days of misery from a blister. I also walked for hour after hour through the Kansas-like fields of the Meseta, hearing nothing but my own footsteps and seeing nothing but wheat for almost the entire day. God is in the intense moments, but He is also in the quiet performance of duty, one step after another, hour after hour, day after day, week after week. As Teresa of Ávila said, También anda Dios en la cocina, entre los pucheros – God walks among the pots and pans. But that is hard to show in a 2 hour film.

Ultreya!

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Why I Love Florida

in Florida 5 Comments

My local newspaper, The Naples Daily News, reports

A woman was arrested on burglary charges after being found standing in a person’s garage naked with items loaded in the back of a truck, Collier County sheriff’s deputies say.

Amber Marie Welsh, 32, of the 1700 block of Sunshine Boulevard, Golden Gate, was arrested Thursday by deputies in the 3600 block of White Boulevard.

When deputies arrived, they said they found Welsh standing naked in the victim’s garage next to a dark gray F-150 pickup truck that was backing inside and the bed of the truck was full of items.

According to reports, the victim was present at the time of the investigation and stated that the items, totaling $1,500, in the bed of the truck belonged to them and did not give permission for the items to be removed.

Welsh told deputies she was hired by the home’s owner to clean and remove all of the property from the house.

The reports did not explain why Welsh was naked inside the garage nor did it describe the items that were stolen.

Welsh faces charges of burglary and grand theft.

And we will never learn the explanation for the alleged thief’s state of undress, and whether she planned to make her getaway in that state. Not that anyone would have noticed.

One day I was going for my morning walk on the deserted beach when a young man (and not even a German) asked me if anyone would mind his skinny-dipping in the Gulf. I said I had no objections, but he might consider the security cameras on the houses facing the beach.

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Lost in the Past

in Catholic Church 13 Comments Tags:

Der Spiegel interviewed Hans Küng, who continued his criticism of the way the Church is being governed and what he thinks is the resulting decline of the Church in Germany.. He thinks it is being recentralized in the Curia at the expense of the bishops, but Der Spiegel pointed out

You don’t just want to reduce the power of the pope. You are also calling for an end to celibacy, you want women to be ordained as priests and you want the Church to lift its ban on birth control. Catholics loyal to the pope say that these elements are part of the core values of the Catholic Church. If you peel all of this away, how much of the Church is left?

Whatever the merits of these proposals, clearly adopting them would not stem the decline of the Church in developed countries. The Evangelical Church, the Anglican Church, and the Episcopal Church have all these and are in massive decline. Moreover, adopting them would alienate Catholics who have tried to remain faithful to Church teaching.

King looks like he is mired in the past and is fighting the battles of his youth, a common failing as people age. My late father-in-law could never be convinced that Communism had indeed fallen in eastern Europe.

The same criticism could be made of Benedict, with his focus on Nazism and Communism. However, it would be unseemly to say the least, of a German pope to ignore the phenomnenon of Nazism. Benedict, unlike Küng, shows that he is aware of changes in the world situation. He pointed out to the Lutherans that the traditional churches were faced with erosion of two fronts: on one hand, to secularization which disregards all religion, and on the other hand to charismatic movements which are weak on institutions and rational inquiry.

The pope said this common witness of the Gospel has been made more difficult by the rise of fundamentalist Christian groups that are spreading with “overpowering missionary dynamism, sometimes in frightening ways,” leaving mainstream Christian denominations at a loss.

“This is a form of Christianity with little institutional depth, little rationality and even less dogmatic content, and little stability. This worldwide phenomenon poses a question to us all: What is this new form of Christianity saying to us — for better and for worse?” he said.

Kung and most progressives ignore this religious phenomenon: it does not fit in with their ideas that the Church must be adopted to the modern world, the modern world consisting almost exclusively of academic central European types.

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Chaco

in Navajo, Southwest, Uncategorized 17 Comments

The hiatus in my blogging was the result of my trip to Utah and New Mexico.

I camped in Chaco Canyon, which is still isolated (30 miles down a corrugated dirt road and across several washes). The ruins are still impressive, and arouse in everyone the questions — why here? And why did everyone leave?

Reconstruction of Pueblo Bonito

Archæoastronomers have found strong evidence that the Anasazi (the term I still like) had a complex calendar. Not only did they calculate the solstice and equinoxes, they (unlike the Mayans) calculated the 18.6 year cycle of the lunar standstill. Each building, and the whole complex of buildings and roads that fills the San Juan basin, an area bigger than Portugal, seem to be aligned with both lunar and solar movements.

In 1977 Anna Sofaer discovered the sun dagger on Fajada Butte. At the solstice light from between two slabs forms a dagger in the center of a 19 revolution spiral, and equinox and lunar movements are also marked by movements of light on this and other spirals.

The Anasazi seemed to have reproduced on earth the order of the heavens and to have constructed the Center Place that the Hopis sought in their many wanderings.

But everyone left.

The Navajo explain the departure by the story of the Great Gambler. The Great Gambler lived in Chaco, and the Native Americans, then as now, had a fascination with gambling. The people first pledged and lost their lands to the Great Gambler, then their goods, then their wives and children, then themselves. They lost everything, and became the slaves of the Great Gambler, who built the magnificent buildings of Chaco. He then tried to extend his dominion over the sun and rain, but the Holy People formed a young man who challenged the Great Gambler, who lost, and was thrown outside the universe.

The Hopi Gambler

The people of Chaco scattered, and some joined the Navajos. They brought with them the construction of houses and pottery. But later, when the Spanish tried to subdue the Navajos, the Navajos gave up living in houses and making pottery and became complete nomads, to avoid being enslaved again.

Somehow the resemblance to the history of finance capitalism (and the stock market is a great gamble) is altogether too striking.

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Ave atque Vale, sisters

in Catholic Church 10 Comments Tags:

The New York Times has an article, Nuns, a Dying Breed, on the disappearance of Catholic sister from the Catholic Health system

The history of religious women has had its ups and downs, There was an order if widows in the early church, but it gave Paul headaches, and he advised the younger widows to marry and raise families, rather than gadding about and spreading gossip. The Middle Ages saw formal and informal groups of women such as the Beguines, but the Council of Trent, in its attempt to bring order to a chaotic church, ordered that all religious women be subject to cloister, thereby ending any active charitable work.

The Daughters of Charity were the first to escape from this prohibition; they scrupulously avoided anything that would make them look like a nuns to avoid being forces into a cloister. . The nineteenth century saw an extraordinary increase in the sisters of the active congregations 0 8n 1898, 13,000 members, but in 1878, 135,000 members. They founded numerous schools and hospitals and social welfare services, educating, to the displeasure the anticlericals, the majority of the girls in France.

Historians look for human motives, and there were natural motives for a woman to join a congregation. At a time when women were confined to the household, a congregation gave a women opportunity for work in education and health care that no other lay women had. A sister lived with like-minded and supportive women, respected by all, and had security in illness and old age. Lay people were also told that religious life was superior to married life. There were no doubt supernatural motives, but the natural motives contributed to the vast increase in sisters, There were 1.5 sisters per priest in France at the height of the congregations, and 3 sisters per priest in the United Sates. The vast majority of the staff of the Church was female.

But this is all gone with the wind. Prosperity and the opening of careers to women meant that women could choose their work and support themselves outside of a congregation. The emphasis in theology changed and the dignity and importance of the lay state of life was now recognized. Ill advised changes also undermined many congregations.

The congregations are dying, and many are making plans to shut down. The one in the NYT article has not had a new member in 25 years, and has decided to accept no more.

The congregations that ran hospitals have done well financially. A few years ago the Wall Street Journal tracked the money the Daughters of Charity had gotten for their hospitals and found a billion of so of it in the Grand Caymans. This will pay for the retirement of the sisters in those congregations. I am not aware that the prosperous congregations have shared any of this wealth with the aging sisters of the teaching congregations, who had few or no assets when the schools they had staffed shut down.

I do not expect any rebirth of these congregations on a grand scale in the West; there will always be a few women who are drawn to the contemplative life and A few small vital congregations will survive. Women in the third world are still drawn to the congregations for the same reasons Western women were in the nineteenth century, but eventually those societies too will modernize.

Catholic health care can be run economically with employees, but Catholic educations is vanishing. No alternative method of educating the laity in the rudiments of the faith has been put in place, and we are returning to the middle ages in the level of religious literacy.. In the book on Catalonia I previously mentioned, the zealous clergy of the Counter Reformation were astonished to find the level of ignorance of basic doctrine among the population – and I am afraid we are returning to that. What that curious word Trinity means, what or who the Holy Spirit is, who wrote the four gospels, will all be mysteries to most Catholics – who are confronting biblically literate Protestants. Sounds familiar? — 16th C redux.

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A Disquisition on the Spanish Inquisition

in Catalonia, Catholic Church 7 Comments Tags: , ,

Most people’s knowledge of the Spanish Inquisition is limited to the Monty Python sketch “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” etc

But there were other Inquisitions in Spain. In the northeast corner of Spain lies Catalonia, with its own culture and language and laws. It was ruled by the Spanish king, but was independent of Castile and León. It therefore had its own Inquisition.

The Catalan Inquisition was set up to deal with conversos, Jews who had pretended to convert to Christianity after all Jews were expelled from Spain. However, there were only a handful of conversos in Catalonia, and that problem rapidly disappeared.

Like all bureaucracies, the Catalan Inquisition had no desire to end itself and instead sought to find other problems that would justify its existence. Of course heretics were a proper object for the Inquisition to investigate, but, alas, there were no heretics in Catalonia, much to the Inquisition’s disappointment.

Inquisitors were headquartered in Barcelona and were supposed to travel around to all parishes in Catalonia to investigate problems. However, Barcelona in the 15th-17th centuries was a very pleasant city, the roads in the countryside were bad, the weather was too hot or too cold much of the year, and there were bandits and bad food to deal with. So every few decades or maybe every century or so the Inquisition would show up at a parish and read in Castilian Spanish a long list of obscure heresies and ask people to come forward to denounce anyone who held them. Most people in the countryside did not understand Castilian, and their parish priests had already warned them to keep their mouths shut. The Inquisition, although it is accused of terrorizing the peasantry, in fact had minimal contact with 90% of the population.

The Inquisitors spent most of their time in Barcelona censoring books. As many classical texts had been edited by humanists who later became Protestants, the Inquisition confiscated the editions of Terence and others. The University complained, and the Inquisition contented itself with inking out the offending names of the renegade humanists. (Take that! Melancthon)

(This reminds me of the second grade at St. Matthew’s Elementary School in Baltimore. The first poem in our little poetry book was a sappy poem by Father Leonard Feeney. He got into a fight with Cardinal Cushing over the meaning of the doctrine of extra eccelsiam nulla salus –outside of the Church there is no salvation. Cushing had Feeney excommunicated. Therefore all over America an equally sappy poem was sent out and pasted over the offending poem of Father Feeney. Later I and my friends always referred to Feeney by the Homeric epithet, “he of the pasted-over poem.” But I digress.)

Occasionally the Inquisition would find a monk who had given a badly phrased sermon, or a young man who claimed that fornication was not a sin (“I do not believe anyone will go to hell just for screwing,” one opined), but usually its search for heresy was fruitless. It had to content itself with other crimes under its jurisdiction, like sodomy and bestiality – not very dignified crimes for learned Inquisitors to concern themselves with. It is hard to have a really good auto de fe with only a shepherd who has been too affectionate with the sheep. The only possible heretics the Inquisition encountered were Frenchmen who aroused popular hostility because France was infected with Calvinism – but most French immigrant laborers had no intellectual interests.

Popular Catholicism in Spain was somewhat different from clerical and especially Tridentine Catholicism. It was much more active and rowdy. Pilgrimages, carnival, dancing and fireworks (inside the church!) and so on. Reforming clerics sound like spoilsports and wet blankets in their attempts to end the fun.

But popular religion had a much darker side: belief in witchcraft. The Catalan Inquisition decided that witchcraft did not exist and that belief in it was a vile superstition. Unfortunately, the people and the secular authorities did believe in witchcraft and often executed old women whom professional witch hunters accused of witchcraft. The Inquisition did everything it could to protect the accused and sometimes to literally snatch them from the hands of secular authorities before the supposed witches could be executed.

The Inquisition’s campaign against belief in witchcraft had a long history. Charlemagne had forbidden the burning of witches and made the killing of a supposed witch a capital offence. I believe that the persecution of witches was far more prevalent in Protestant countries than in Catholic ones. Why this was so I do not know. Both forms of Christianity shared a belief in the existence of demons, but the clergy of the Catholic Church seemed to be much more set against the belief in witchcraft.

The Inquisition’s campaign against heresy and against the belief in witchcraft may be manifestations of the same rationalism. The Inquisition did not believe that witchcraft existed and despised the popular belief in it because it led to the murder of innocent women. It also looked for heresy, wrong ideas about God and the Church, because it had seen the damage that false beliefs could do. I don’t think that Calvinism or Lutheranism was likely to result in crimes (although one should remember the Anabaptists at Munster) but the Inquisition was not taking any chances.

Also, and more importantly, if the Inquisitors stopped looking for heretics, what would they do? It was hard to find a cushy and respectable clerical job in Spain. Many of the Catalans whom the Inquisition prosecuted were accused of the offense of saying that the Inquisition was wasting time and money by looking for heresies when there were none in Catalonia. No bureaucrat likes to be told his job should be abolished.

(PS, I derive much of this from The Phoenix and the Flame: Catalonia and the Counter Reformation by Henry Kramer. I am reading up on Catalonia in preparation for a hike there next year).

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The Death of Children

in clergy sex abuse scandal 14 Comments

Years ago, before I started investigating the sexual abuse crisis, I had a series of dreams in which I encountered the souls of boys who had died and did not know that they were dead. They had to make the final step into death but they were afraid. I tried to comfort them as best I could, knowing that they would never become fathers, one of our great consolations in this world ruled by death. Then they left me, and passed out completely out of this world into the next.

When he was a Christian Brother , the Rev Robert Charles Best with his fellow abuser Brother Gerald Ridsdale would hunt boys at their school and abuse them.

Among the victims are 26 suicides, victims who were assaulted as boys by Best and his associates such as the convicted pedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale.

Twenty-six suicides, twenty-six known suicides, twenty-six known suicides to date.

There will be more. The detective investigating the cases is worried about the fallout from his investigation.

Detective Sergeant Carson also feels a particular guilt of his own.

As he has investigated Best and his friends, he has questioned himself.

“When you have blokes the same age as me coming in here and crying their eyes out as they give their statements you know there are more important things than just me,” he said.

“If we hadn’t done the investigation we might not have uncovered what these blokes did.

“But there are times when I wonder about it all.”

The anguish of one of Best’s victims who suicided after talking to police is particularly haunting.

“I talked that kid into making a statement,” Detective Sergeant Carson said.

“I said, ‘We’ll do something about this.’ So who’s responsible for his death, me or Best?

“Another fella said to me that as soon as his mum dies he’s going to kill himself.

“I can’t do anything about it. I’d rather see people live rather than me come along and take a statement from them and upsetting them more.”

And the sole focus of the hierarchy was the abusers:

“Best got convicted for earlier crimes last December and the church knew that,” he said.

“Yet the Catholic Church spent millions of dollars on this bloke’s defence in his latest trials and did nothing for the victims.”

The man who says he was one a “fairly strong Catholic” does his best to be charitable in his view of the church he grew up in.

But he doesn’t always succeed.

“So many people in the Catholic Church do so many good things, yet the hierarchy of the Catholic Church go and do all they can for this bloke knowing full well there are victims at three separate schools over an enormous period of time,” he said.

If I had accidentally killed a child, if I had inadvertently driven someone to suicide, I would mourn the rest of my life. I would do penance and plead night and day for forgiveness and pray for the person. If I had been responsible, I would find it hard to go on living – yet the bishops are far more troubled by any criticism leveled against them than by the hundreds of victims who committed suicide. Is it possible for men suffering from such hardness of heart to be saved?

Yet Christ died for the worst of sinners. Every day when I was on the Camino de Santiago, I prayed for the victims, that they would be healed; I prayed for the abusers, that they would repent; and I prayed for the enabling church officials that they would acknowledge their responsibility and repent and make such amends as they could. So far the latter two prayers do not seem to have been answered.

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Like the Church, the State Fails

in law enforcement 4 Comments Tags: , ,

Those who have noticed the patterns in the hierarchy’s handling of abusive priests will have a sense of déjà vu while reading this story. I have emphasized the parallels.

Pericles Clergeau as a child emigrated from Haiti to the U.S. He soon manifested violent behavior:

The father, Joslin Clergeau, said Pericles started exhibiting emotional and behavioral problems at 4 or 5, not long after they emigrated from western Haiti.

“When Pericles was mad, he would bang his head on the walls,” said Mr. Clergeau, a taxi driver. “If you see his arm, you see the line of scars from when he’d bite, bite, bite himself.”

Mr. Clergeau said Pericles was first hospitalized at 7 or 8 after “he beat a boy with a chair when the boy called him gay.” He said Pericles celebrated his first communion on a psychiatric ward at Cambridge Hospital.

The year between Mr. Clergeau’s 17th and 18th birthdays was tumultuous. He was moved five times by a system that did not seem to know what to do with his increasing aggression.

Teenagers who violently challenge authority often disrupt a therapeutic environment and endanger the staff. Even though child welfare experts consider stability of placement to be beneficial and instability detrimental, these youths are the most likely to be bounced from program to program.

In early 2009, Mr. Clergeau, kicked out of his previous program because of an assault, turned 17 at a juvenile detention center. From there, he was transferred to the Hillcrest Center, a 14-acre campus in the Berkshires that specializes in youths with extreme psychiatric, emotional and behavioral disorders.

He tried to run away a few times, but his first major encounter with the police there occurred in May, when he flew into a despairing rage, destroying furniture, hitting an employee with a rock and trying to hang himself.

The following month, the police were summoned again. Arriving at the main building, Officer William C. Colvin observed broken glass and other debris littering the entrance. Inside, he saw a 6-foot-2-inch male student — Mr. Clergeau — face down on the floor with one staff member holding each of his legs and two more employees lying across his back.

Earlier that day, Mr. Clergeau had “gone AWOL,” and when finally located on the property, he was hostile, screaming and wielding a four-foot-long wooden sign post, the police report said.

Swinging the stick, he had run back into the school, smashing a large glass clock and a photocopier. He charged a solid wooden door, cracking it in half and tearing it from its hinges. When the principal and others tackled him, he tore at the principal’s face with the jagged post, causing what Officer Colvin described as “a long bruiser” from jaw to ear.

Mr. Clergeau was charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, destruction of property and disorderly conduct. After a couple of days in jail, he was sent to the Brandon School and Residential Treatment Center in Natick.

In July, police officers reported there because Mr. Clergeau had become enraged during classroom detention. Having placed a staff member in a headlock and repeatedly punched him, Mr. Clergeau was charged again with assault and battery.

By September, he had been transferred to the Lowell Treatment Center. Not long after settling in, he was disruptive in class and ordered to return to his locked residential unit. He refused.

“He said, ‘If I’m getting in trouble for nothing, I might as well do something,’ ” Mr. Casaubon, a staff member at the school, said. Then Mr. Clergeau started hurling wooden chairs at his teacher.

Seeking to restrain him, Mr. Casaubon, who is muscular but shorter than Mr. Clergeau, managed to pin him against the wall. Mr. Clergeau promised to calm down if released. Mr. Casaubon let him go, he said, and the young man “sucker punched” him.

Mr. Casaubon, who needed surgery to rebuild his broken eye socket, said he pursued charges reluctantly, because “I knew nothing would happen.” (The case is still pending.) But, he said, “everybody was yelling at me to go to the police so that it would go on record that this guy is a violent person and shouldn’t be in public. I mean, that was him on meds. Imagine when he’s off meds.”

Afterward, Mr. Casaubon said, staff members learned that Mr. Clergeau had a record of previous assaults with similar modes of attack. “I sure wish I had known he strikes when you let go,” he said. “But it could have been worse. I’m not dead.”

Mr. Clergeau’s next stop was Westborough State Hospital, a hauntingly beautiful 19th-century asylum on a hilly campus overlooking a lake. The hospital has since closed because of budget cuts.

Mr. Clergeau was placed in a treatment program that served a combination of fragile, traumatized teenagers and violent juvenile offenders. It was a difficult mix.

Mr. Allard, who had a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and had been committed there after an encounter with the police, said Mr. Clergeau ruled the roost, intimidating his fellow patients and the staff, too.

During several months at the hospital, Mr. Clergeau reportedly assaulted nine staff members, sending a few out on medical leave, a person familiar with his stay there said. “You could feel the rage radiating off him,” another person said.

Both people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared repercussions for exposing what had happened.

The basketball game occurred on Mr. Clergeau’s 18th birthday, the day he technically aged out of the child welfare department’s care.

Two days later, he smashed a dresser drawer, fashioned a weapon and threatened to impale anybody who came near him. The unit was cleared of patients, the state police were called and Mr. Clergeau, after barricading himself in his room, was persuaded to surrender peacefully. He was led away in handcuffs.

Only then did the program staff learn, through a fax sent anonymously, that Mr. Clergeau had a record of violence, with eight outstanding warrants at that time.

The hospital’s human rights officer filed an internal complaint on behalf of Mr. Allard, which set off a departmental investigation that dragged on without resolution. But Mr. Clergeau was not prosecuted for anything that happened at the hospital. That was partly because the state Department of Mental Health discourages the criminalization of its adolescent patients; staff members did not press assault charges.

The police, learning about the attack on Mr. Allard after the fact, were in the process of opening an investigation when the weapon incident occurred.

“As we responded the next day and locked up the subject on the eight outstanding warrants, the investigation into the past A & B did not go anywhere,” David Procopio, a state police spokesman, said, referring to assault and battery.

Now back in his hometown, Ware, and feeling stable with an apartment and a job, Mr. Allard was stunned to learn that Mr. Clergeau had never been held accountable for, as he put it, “the attempted murder of me.”

“I can’t believe they let him out into a public place,” he said.

Last Resort

Mr. Clergeau was discharged from Westborough with the expectation that he would be imprisoned. Hospital authorities told the state police that he was “not a psych patient,” which appears to reflect a medical opinion that he belonged in a correctional setting.

At that point, Mr. Clergeau’s Lowell assault case was reactivated. A judge set bail at $1,000, and after a few weeks at a juvenile detention center, he was released to his father.

But Mr. Clergeau’s destructive and self-destructive path crisscrossed Massachusetts, taking him in and out of the custody of three state agencies as well as multiple treatment centers, hospitals, police departments and courts.

Over time, Mr. Clergeau established a clear pattern of lashing out violently. In turn, the government developed a pattern, too, of shuttling him from place to place until it released him to the streets and he ended up on the doorstep of a homeless shelter with little security, few resources and no knowledge of his history.

Other institutions that had treated Mr. Clergeau previously did not know his full history, either.

“No one seemingly put together a composite,” his court-appointed lawyer, Michael Collora, said. “Each incident was viewed in isolation.”

Pericles Clergeau, a tall, sturdy teenager with a troubled past, did not much like it when Kevin Allard, a radiant, sometimes manic youth, arrived at Adolescent Unit 2 at the Westborough state psychiatric hospital early last year.

“He was like the alpha male of the place, and I was the competition,” Mr. Allard said. “It was his turf, and I was mowing the lawn.”

On Feb. 3, 2010, the two 18-year-olds faced off in a basketball game called Taps, where one player can send the other’s score plummeting to zero by tapping in a rebound. The game was close and tense, and the verbal sparring kept escalating, too. Mr. Clergeau was near 21 points when a swish by Mr. Allard derailed him.

Catching his breath, Mr. Allard felt Mr. Clergeau — about six inches taller — very close behind. In seconds, Mr. Allard said, Mr. Clergeau’s arm was wrapped around his throat and he was dangling in a choke hold. He tried to wriggle free but passed out. Mr. Clergeau dropped him on the tarmac, and Mr. Allard came to with a deep laceration on his forehead, dripping blood, according to several accounts.

The next day, Dr. Bruce Meltzer, the unit’s medical director and psychiatrist, told a state mental health department investigator that “he fears the perp could commit murder and that it could happen at any time,” according to an internal document.

That concern got buried in an internal investigation. Mr. Clergeau was neither prosecuted nor placed for long in a more secure situation. And almost exactly a year later, on Jan. 29, 2011, Mr. Clergeau, homeless and adrift, was arrested in the killing of an employee at the shelter in Lowell where he had been staying. When the police arrived, Mr. Clergeau was standing behind the reception desk clutching a bloodstained knife. “I did it, I did it,” he said as he was being handcuffed, according to the police report.

All too familiar – the unwillingness to deal with a malefactor, the attempt to hush things up, the failure of the police, the catastrophic consequences.The institutional and personal weaknesses are similar.

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Defender of the Children

in Uncategorized 15 Comments Tags: ,

Since 2002 Msgr Scicluna has been investigating cases of sexual abuse for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, at first under Cardinal Ratzinger. Scicluna gathered the evidence against Maciel and spoke to numerous victims, They and Jason Barry have a high opinion of his honesty, sincerity, and sympathy.

Like all the others – Jason Barry, Tom Doyle, Richard Sipe, myself – who began looking into sexual abuse in the Church, he had no idea of what he was getting into or how it would change his life.

When the question about what it had meant in terms of his life path, to be involved in these huge scandals, is asked, his face turns serious: “I understood that the Church did not crumble, despite these scandals, and this is precisely because its foundations are supernatural. There is no other way to explain it.”

Some seek to minimize the effects of abuse or to compare it to abuse by a coach or teacher.

Scicluma used strong words to underline the fact that violence shown towards minors by clergymen constitutes “an abuse of spiritual power”. “Yes, it is true – adds the Maltese prelate – there is a specific difference between repeated abuse by a lay person and that carried out by a priest, on victims that expect to see in them the figure of the “good shepherd”. Scicluna’s face darkens and he looks saddened. “If a priest commits the abuse, the trauma caused to the victim is even deeper, the spiritual trust that existed is destroyed and a person’s faith is lost.”

We ask the “promoter of justice” whether the change in mentality that Benedict XVI has asked for, is taking root in the Church. “I believe – he says in a faint voice – that a change in mentality is only possible for those who have the courage to meet the victims of abuse, to welcome them and to listen to their stories. If this does not happen, one may have read up on every detail of the scandal, be fully prepared, but that person will not be able to fully comprehend the trauma that these immense sins cause. The reaction and anger expressed by the victims of priests is unlike that found in any other type of case, because it comes from deep within the soul”.

Scicluna seems to suspect and fear that the bishops still don’t get it, but hopes they will.

For this reason, reveals Scicluna, the bishops that will be participating in the seminar in February 2012 will need to have met with the victims of paedophile priests in their respective countries, prior to attending. “It is a traumatic experience that is life changing, as in my case. Thanks to God, to the strict laws that are in place and to the development of a new conscience, these cases have decreased dramatically compared to previous years. We need to continue to support the victims who have for so long been seen as “threats” to the good name of the Church, instead of being treated as individuals who have been wounded in their innermost soul. We need to welcome and help these victims ensuring above all that the traumatic experiences they have been through are not repeated”.

I am less hopeful – it will take a massive shock, far greater than the ones we have experienced, to change the hearts of the clerical careerists who infest – perhaps dominate – the hierarchy of the Church.

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Christianity and Churchianity

in Catholic Church, Protestantism 29 Comments Tags: , ,

I just read Pierre Hagy’s Wake Up Lazarus! On Catholic Renewal. In the first part of the book he documents the decline of the Catholic Church in the United States and the comparative success of evangelical Protestant churches. The Catholic Church, like the Episcopal Church, has lost a third of its members in the past generation; the loss in concealed in the Catholic Church by Hispanic immigration.

 

Hegy examines the culture of two local churches, an evangelical church started in 1955 which has grown to 2700 members and an astonishing missionary outreach, and a Catholic parish which seems to be doing everything right – shared governance lively liturgies- small communities – but whose attendance and support is shrinking.

 

In the Protestant church 80% of the members tithe, although tithing is not required. In the Catholic parish, parishioners give only 1% of their income, on line with national Catholic giving.  The Protestant church has a large number of converts and an international missionary effort; the Catholic parish has about 10 adult converts per year and no missionary effort.

 

Hegy’s main point is that church involvement does not produce a growth in spirituality, but a growth in spirituality produces church involvement. Successful evangelical churches are constantly leading their members into a deeper life of prayer and a relationship with Christ, and the core 5% of their membership lead a life of spiritual discipline comparable to a Catholic secular institute. 

 

Hegy also says that the Tridentine church’s emphasis on rules does not work, but a cultivation of moral habits does work in forming Christians. In the U. S. a larger percentage of Protestants than Catholics attend church. Other statistics I have seen indicate that evangelical Protestants are stricter in sexual morality than Catholics are.

 

Hegy sees the renewed emphasis on rules in the Catholic Church as doomed to failure. Instead the Church should encourage all its members to cultivate spiritual growth and discipline, encouraging its members to move up from minimal involvement to the beginning of spiritual disciple to serious discipline to complete commitment to Christ. It is not necessary to enforce attendance in mass under pain of mortal sin if Catholics wanted to come to mass to thank God for Jesus.The Catholic Church focuses on the church; the evangelical churches focus on Christ.

 

I have been asked whether what I have learned about sexual abuse among Catholic clergy has not destroyed my faith in the Catholic Church. The answer is no, but it has made me realize that simple reception of the sacraments does not produce virtue. With a lively faith and habits of payer the sacraments are fruitful. Without faith and prayer the sacraments have little or no effect. Priests said daily mass and raped children on the same altar.

 

Hegy mentions the transformation of the U.S. Catholic church into an Hispanic Church, but does not explore what this might mean. He also mentions that in the evangelical church women were far more involved than men, and what this might mean. I am returning to that subject in a book I am working on,  Meek or Macho? Men and Religion.

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The Spanish Civil War

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The Spanish Civil War began 75 years ago. The historian Stephen Payne blames the Left. They murdered rightist leaders hoping to provoke the army into rebellion. Then the Left could crush the army and have a free hand in reconstructing Spain and eliminating the right. It didn’t work out that way. The Right won and crushed the Left. Political leaders, from antiquity to the present, have never learned that wars rarely go according to plan. They also have never learned that it is easier to start a war than to stop one.

Payne thinks that the Nationalists and Republicans killed about the same number of people – and the Nationalists won and had the Left at their mercy. If the Left had one, the Right would have been slaughtered.

Some bishops, many bishops have recently disgraced their office. But all the bishops who were in the Republican zone were murdered. They stayed with their flock and died. The only two who survived were outside of the country and could not get back to their sees. One in four priests in the Republican zone were murdered, many tortured to death. The Italians bombed Barcelona and killed hundreds of civilians in a foretaste of Dresden and Hiroshima. And the children above all suffered.

Payne thinks that Spain has changed radically and such violence could never be repeated. The dispossessed rural working class of the south is gone; the devout small holders of the north have abandoned their villages, which are in ruins. A Socialist government is doing the bidding of international bankers. Catholicism has dried up. All ideologies are discredited. The conflicts are still there, but they are a shadow of their former selves, and no one thinks that Spain can be saved from its problems by the Right or Left. In fact, the young think that the economic situation is hopeless and would like to emigrate.

Yet is still a beautiful and deeply moving country, and to me it feels like the Roman Empire never really ended. To sit in the sun on a patio above the vineyards and grain fields, in front of a stone Romanesque church, drinking the red wine of Rioja – the Romans would have felt comfortable. They would think that the locals mangled Latin, but they would recognize the local language as Latin. I hope that Hispania endures.

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