Courage to be Catholic, The
The first thing to understand for a genuine Catholic reform in the Church in America is that the clergy sex scandal is a crisis of priestly identity. Priests who genuinely believe themselves to be what the Catholic Church teaches they are, namely, icons living representations of the eternal Priesthood of Jesus Christ simply do not behave as sexual predators. Priests who believe themselves to be deeply internalized, that sense of themselves as icons of the eternal Priesthood of Jesus Christ, simply do not behave as sexual predators.
Secondly, it is a crisis of leadership of the Bishops of the United States; a scandal of clergy sexual malfeasance was turned into a crisis because of the failure of Bishops to lead. That failure reflects a crisis in episcopal identity. Bishops who believe themselves to be what the Church teaches they are: namely, successors of the Apostles, successors of Peter, Andrew, Paul, James and John and all the rest do not respond to scandal as crisis managers, they respond to scandal as Apostles.
But in the third place it is very important to recognize that this is a crisis of discipleship. And that means it involves all of us. Every crisis in the history of the Church from the flight of the Apostles on Holy Thursday night to today, is caused by a deficiency of sanctity and conviction in the Church. And that is all of our business.
This crisis of fidelity can only be addressed by a deeper fidelity on the part of all the people of the Church. So when I title my book The Courage To Be Catholic that is what I am talking about: the courage to live ever more authentic, indeed radically Catholic lives of vocational commitment. That is everybody's task in the Church because out of that will come the Saints who will renew and reform the Church, as it has been Saints who have renewed and reformed the Church for the past 2,000 years.
Crisis Corrections
It is just as important to understand what the crisis is not as it is to understand what the crisis is. First of all, this is not a crisis caused by celibacy. At the most elementary level and on the scandal side of the equation, it seems clear that this is a crisis caused by men failing to honor the celibate commitments they had made to Christ in the Church. To blame this crisis on celibacy is something like blaming treason on the Pledge of Allegiance. When a man commits treason, we don't say "Gee, there must be something wrong with the Pledge of Allegiance, maybe we should go back and rewrite the Pledge of Allegiance". No, we say the man has committed treason; because naming the deed accurately is the only way to address it properly.
It is also self-evidently absurd to suggest that this crisis would not have happened if the Catholic Church, in its Latin rite, had married clergy. This is absurd because other Christian Communions in the United States have problems of clergy sexual malfeasance that are according to some studies greater than those in the Catholic Church. So a married clergy is no barrier in those institutions to these problems. But at a deeper theological level, to suggest that this crisis would not have happened had the discipline of celibacy been relaxed or removed in the Latin Rite Church is to turn marriage into a crime prevention program. And those of us who are married rather resent the thought. Marriage, as understood from a Catholic theological perspective, is a covenant of self-giving love, receptivity and fruitfulness. It is not a crime prevention program, so Father McBrien and all the others should stop telling us that most of the Church is in a crime prevention program and that is the answer to the whole thing.
Secondly, it is not the case that this crisis has been caused by "authoritarianism" in the Church. In fact, on the episcopal leadership side of the equation, it is manifestly a failure to use the legitimate authority conferred by the Sacrament of Episcopal Ordination in Communion with the Holy See that has led a scandal into being a crisis. But at a deeper level, this cannot be a crisis caused by authoritarianism because the Catholic Church is not an authoritarian institution. The Catholic Church is a Communion of Disciples formed by an authoritative tradition and it is that tradition which forms the Church and gives it its form without reference to which there can be no reform. But that is not authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is "you do what I say because I say it". That's not the way the Church works. The Church is a Communion of Disciples gathered by an authoritative tradition answerable to that tradition. The Church is not something we make up. The Church is something whose form is given to us by Christ and there can be no reform of the Church that is authentically Catholic without reference to that form.
Third, the tag "Pedophilia Crisis" quickly got attached to this in January 2002 because of the Geoghan case in Boston. What we know fifteen months later empirically is that pedophilia, in the strict sense of the term, namely the sexual abuse of prepubescent minors, is not in any way, shape or form the dominant form of sexual abuse that has come to light in the past fifteen months. It is the most disgusting and revolting form of abuse, but it is not the dominant form. The dominant form of abuse seems to be the homosexual abuse of teenage boys and young men often in school or seminary. This raises a whole set of issues that simply have to be addressed in a more forthright way
Fourth, I think it is very important for faithful Catholic people who are inclined to view this as a crisis created by an anti-Catholic media, must recognize that this is not the case. It is certainly true that those elements of the national press that are deeply set against the Church, primarily because of the Church's Pro-Life witness and the Church's resistance to an unfettered biotechnology revolution and the redefinition of marriage, etc. have seen their opportunities and have taken them. We must recognize that this is not the media's crisis, this is the Church's crisis.
Finally, it is not the case, as the Catholic left wants to say, caused by the Catholic sexual ethic. This is a crisis caused by a failure to understand, internalize and live the Church's sexual ethic. It is a crisis caused in part by a failure to understand, to believe and to teach that the Catholic Church has a higher, nobler, more deeply humanistic view of human sexuality than the editors of Playboy and Cosmopolitan. And the failure to take that truth into the world and teach it has helped create the swamp of American culture today out of which these problems emerged.
What Happened?
Now, how did this all happen? It is a long and complicated story. I tried to unravel some of the threads in my book The Courage To Be Catholic. Perhaps I can sum up my proposal by saying that it helps to think about these problems through the prism of environmentalism of all things, and to think about these problems both in terms of scandal and in terms of the failure of leadership by Bishops. Also in terms of a damaged Catholic ecology, a damaged Catholic environment, a damaged ecclesial environment over the past 35 years, which like all damaged ecologies, eventually produce diseases, mutations and in this case, forms of spiritual death.
The crucial factor in the damaged Catholic ecology of the past decades has been what I call in the book "a culture of dissent". It created within the Church an invisible schism and an invisible fracture in the Communion of the Church, first inside the minds, the hearts and the souls of individuals and later in the institution of the Church itself. There is no reckoning with that invisible schism, that culture of dissent, that does not take account of what I call the "truths of 1968" when overt dissent by clergy, theologians, religious and even some Bishops from the authoritative teaching of Paul VI in the encyclical Humanae Vitae was allowed to prevail. It was allowed to prevail because some feared that a direct confrontation with dissent would create a schism in the Church, a fracture in the Church.
Schism
Well, we did not have a public fracture in the Church, but we did have an invisible schism, an invisible fracture in which, for example, in seminaries over some twenty years, men learned to live essentially double lives. With lives of intellectual and spiritual deception, they would pay formal public agreement to the teaching of the Church on the proper means of regulating families, on homosexuality, on celibacy, and on the ordination of women to the priesthood. They would make a public agreement to that, but in their minds and hearts they did not believe and accept those things, had no intention of defending them in their ministry, no intention of preaching them in their work as teachers, and thus led lives of self-deception intellectually and spiritually. This had a tremendously corrupting effect on the lives of seminarians, the lives of priests and frankly, on the lives of Bishops.
It is not implausible to suggest that men who have become accustomed to living lives of intellectual self-deception then become accustomed too readily to leading lives of behavioral self-deception as well.
The Holy Father said much the same thing last April 2002 when in an address to the Cardinals of the United States, summoned to Rome to sort some of this out, the Pope said that this crisis at the bottom line resulted from a failure to live and to teach "the fullness of Catholic faith". If we are not living and teaching the fullness of Catholic faith, the Church is going to become corrupt as indeed it has done at many previous moments in its earlier history.
Men and women of the culture of dissent are brothers and sisters in Christ. They deserve our prayers. But it seems to me that no good is served by denying the realities of the invisible schism in the Church. We must think carefully and concretely about how that is going to be addressed at all levels. In elementary education, secondary education, and particularly in Catholic colleges and universities it is essential that some Bishops somewhere have the courage to get up and say "I am sorry to have to say this, but in my judgment "x" can no longer be considered a Catholic college or university.
Hope
The title of my biography of Pope John Paul II is Witness to Hope because that is how the Pope defined himself in his address to the United Nations in 1995. It is very important to distinguish hope from optimism. Optimism is a matter of optics and how things look can change from one minute to the next or from one day to the next. Hope is a theological virtue. The Pope is a witness to hope not because he is an optimist, but because he is a man of profound faith. The virtue of hope rests on the theological virtue of faith. The Pope can be a man of hope precisely because he is a man of faith. And that is the challenge embedded in this crisis for all of us to deepen our own faith so that we too can be witnesses to hope in the Church and in the world.
In the mid-1930s as the shadows of totalitarianism, which so affected the life of Joszef Mindszenty, were lengthening across Europe, Pope Pius XI wrote: Let us thank God that He makes us live among the present problems. It is no longer permitted for anyone to be mediocre". That, I suggest, should be our watchword in transforming crisis into opportunity.
In the Bible, the Greek word "crisis" means two things. In the first instance, what we instinctively think of is a cataclysmic mess. But crisis in the Bible also means opportunity. It is a crossroad; it is an opportunity for deepening one's faith, deepening one's relationship with Christ, deepening one's relationship to the Church.
And that, it seems to me, is God's purpose in all of this. If, as Pope John Paul II said at Fatima, on May 13, 1982, one year to the day after he was shot down in his front yard, in the designs of providence there are no mere coincidences. If that is true, then the purpose in all of this sorrow, all of this embarrassment and all of this ugliness must be to call the Church to a deeper, truer reform of itself according to the mind of the Second Vatican Council as authoritatively interpreted by this great Pope. So, let us thank God that He makes us live among these present problems. It is no longer permitted for anyone to be mediocre.
This item 5235 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
