revelations

By Diogenes ( articles ) | May 26, 2004

Meditating -- while in a truck-stop restroom off I-70 -- on the mutability of human existence, Indy priest Fr. Ron Ashmore happened to flash his credentials at a fetching young man who turned out to be a cop. Busted.

He completed a six month course of inpatient therapy and paid his $260 fine. Now Fr. Ron has been proposed to return to ministry, as administrator of three country parishes. Archbishop Buechlein has written parishioners inviting them to share their "candid thoughts" about Ashmore with their pastoral councils.

My own candid thoughts on the matter are unprintable (un-uploadable?), but one would think the archbishop might have realized by his own lights that Ashmore has no future in pastoral ministry. Imagine for a moment that a high school principal were arrested for exposing himself and stayed on in his job. Think of the degree of respect he'd receive from the students. Picture the snickering and cat-calls at the school assemblies. How often could he utter three consecutive sentences without an inadvertent double entendre that would bring the house down?

True, we expect mass-goers to act more decorously than high school boys, but then we expect pastors to deal with more momentous issues than principals. How is Ashmore going to call his flock to self-sacrificing chastity? Will parishioners with a tortured conscience seek him out in the confessional? What will parents tell their children about approaching Father after Mass? ("Well ... so long as you wash your hands afterwards, dear.")

"Father Ashmore has, in fact, been a successful pastor, and I would like to give him a second chance," the archbishop wrote. "We are the Church, and being the Church is about forgiving and being forgiven."

Well, he did say he was sorry, didn't he?

Trolling for creation spirituality in the public restrooms is a pretty negligible offense in the eyes of a bishop, that goes without saying. But even Buechlein ought to wonder whether six months of psychodrama suffices to put a man like Ashmore back in the pitching rotation. (For Sandra Miesel's personal take on Fr. Ron, check out the comments thread at Amy Welborn's blog.) As always, one is forced to conclude that emotionally unstable gays are reassigned to ministry because, for those who make the decisions, the consequences of not reassigning them are even worse.