Reflections on the current clerical sex scandals [II]
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him” [John 14:6-7].
The San Damiano Cross is the large Romanesque rood cross that St. Francis of Assisi was praying before when he received the commission from the Lord to rebuild the Church. The original cross presently hangs in the Basilica of Saint Clare (Basilica di Santa Chiara) in Assisi.
After the last post on false witnessing by outside media, we turn now to take a hard look at ourselves. Our first intra-church issue compares the way, the truth and the life of Jesus with the way of life in the Church permeated as it is with a clerical culture.
[1] Jesus’ way, truth and life
The word ‘way’ in Greek is ‘odos’, which means the natural way, the way to go. Metaphorically, which is how the Lord Jesus uses the word in John, it is a course of conduct and a way of thinking. It is Christ’s way of life which he wants his disciples to follow. He is pointing us to himself – his person, his words and actions, his ministry, his life – as the model for our ethical existence, as the way to the Father, the Creator of every one of us. And so, in Jesus’ “I am the way, the truth, and the life” we have pointers to the Holy Trinity. The way to the Father requires discipline and will; the truth is Christ the Son to whom we owe our focus and thinking; the life points to the life-giving Holy Spirit, the Giver of Life who proceeds from the Father and the Son and whose promptings we can feel. Willing, thinking and feeling are the tools with which humanity is specially equipped to live a moral existence. As people of God, we are expected to be the standard-bearers for a moral and disciplined way of life in a fast-changing world which has become all too earthly, too physical and too instinctual.
In what’s happening within the Roman Catholic Church right now, there is a dire need to return to the true spirit of Christ, to not just preach, but to also truly embrace his way and his truth and to live the life he calls us to.
Previous to this, we had the Year of St Paul, the focus of which ought to have brought the Church – the entire people of God – to a serious reflection on the demands of an authentic discipleship and a truthful community life so close to the chest of St Paul. Have we squandered the year? Did we do any serious reflections on authentic discipleship and truthful communal living as people of faith?
And now this year, the Year for Priests!
In his April 12 letter to all priests in anticipation of the closing of the priestly year, Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, wrote: “We want to be alert to what the Holy Spirit wants to say to us.” What could the Holy Spirit possibly be telling the Church – the whole people of God – to do in this year of revelation of colossal sex scandals brought about by ordained leaders?
Exposed for all to see are such evil things committed by ordained ministers of God which even the pagans would not do (!) [see 1 Cor 5:1], and which only grew into monstrous scandals in the public arena on account of further exposure of systemic institutional cover-ups. Hitherto, the ordained leaders of the Church were singularly concerned about the reputation of the Church and the image of the clergy. Face-saving was everything. When, in the words of the Chinese press, “face was bigger (more important) than the heavens” [面子大 過 天 ], truth was easily swept to one side, and the paramount welfare of innocent children mindlessly sacrificed. Truth, however, has a way of coming to light one day. And when truth exploded in the media on Catholic clerical sex scandals, the Church paid an even greater price – losing face beyond imagination, and its reputation plummeted beyond damage-control. In the light of these stunning revelations, is the Holy Spirit leading the theologians to re-think the theology of Holy Orders? In any case, must we not at least be more aware, and be more honest, about the tension in the choice of words between the indicative (“priests are holy”) and the imperative (“priests ought to be holy”)? Involving the superiors of paedophile-priests, these cover-ups are of a class that mirrors those perpetrated by practitioners in the political and financial circles (who, however, have to step down once their evil deeds are exposed). In the light of a gross lack of transparency and accountability in favour of the ruling class against the powerless victims, is the Holy Spirit calling the hierarchy to reform their ways in the administration and management of the Church?
The faithful – who make up the rest of the People of God, the 99.99% of the Church – are stunned silly.
What shall we do? What can we do?
[2] The adverse impact of clericalism
The laity must now learn to grow up, see our complicity in the sickness in the Church, and take up responsibility to help put things right. This is an intra-Church matter, something we all as members of the Roman Catholic Church are obliged to do for ourselves. This is a family matter.
For a start, the very first thing we must open our eyes to see and then to truthfully point out is that the Catholic Church has for too long been plagued with the negative aspects of a clerical culture. Let’s state the facts clearly. To have clerics is good; to have clericalism is not. The sacrament of Holy Orders, like the other six sacraments of the Church, is a gift from God and we rightly treasure it and give thanks for it. But clericalism is not a gift from God; it is the work of fallen humanity bent on its self-interest, at the expense of the rest of the Church.
Clericalism tends to eclipse the common priesthood of all believers of Christ, is severely damaging to the health of the faith community, and ought to be resisted with might and main by all in the Church who think and feel for the Church. Of course, religious leaders deserve respect on account of their office, but we have a greater duty to live a truthful human life and as faithful friends of the Lord who lives in our brothers and sisters in faith. “Obedience to God comes before obedience to men” (Acts 5:29).
George Wilson, a Jesuit who specialises in ecclesiastical organizational consultancy, can help open eyes to see more clearly. Writing in “An Examination of Conscience for the Whole People of God”[1], Wilson packs insights for truthful formation of adult Christians that are ignored only to the peril of all who care for the health of the Church. He is analysing the most fundamental, overarching, issue in all our intra-church reflections.
Wilson tells it as he sees is. It is correct, and by now commonplace, he says, to assign responsibility for this crisis to the “clerical culture” in the Church – a culture that “has begotten terrible evil” and is “noxious to the health of the Catholic community.” Apart from “unwarranted exclusion from empowerment”, this clerical culture is responsible for the laity’s “loss of their basic human potential for adulthood”.
The novelty in Wilson’s recommendations consists in telling the laity in no uncertain terms that it is time that they grew up, stopped putting the blame entirely on the clergy, and started taking up their responsibility to set things right. The future of our youth depends on what we do now. “We have all created and maintained the clerical culture that clouds our church’s proclamation of the Gospel,” he insists. If his critical assessment is hard to swallow, that’s because it is deadly accurate:
“Priests and bishops become autocratic and self-serving because the non-clerics in the faith community allow it. A clerical mind-set develops in priests and bishops because laypeople do not challenge them to something different, and the laity behave in such submissive ways because they do not want to pay the price of Christian adulthood. Putting clerics on pedestals covertly serves the interest of the run-of-the-mill ‘consumer Catholic’ by allowing him or her to evade the demands of one’s baptism. ‘Father’s got a direct line to God’ is a way of devaluing one’s own religious calling, putting oneself down and avoiding a responsible adult faith-life.“
The laity should not confuse respect – which is always good and healthy in any community – with a way of relating to the priests and bishops which some writers have gone so far as to describe as “positively idolatrous”. Respect is one thing, Wilson says, but “creating an unreal cocoon that shields the ordained from the give-and-take that should characterize equals under God is quite another.”
To overcome the negative aspects of the clerical culture in the Church, the laity must learn “to pay the price of risking the behaviors that generate new ones”. For example, “speaking up and challenging inappropriate claims to clergy superiority is not disrespect; it is simply claiming one’s baptismal dignity as a member of the household of the faith.” The difficulty for educators in the Church is to get non-clerics to not only talk about, but also to act towards, the clerics in new ways.
Wilson, to be sure, does not stay at the level of theory. He suggests that there are many things that the lay faithful can legitimately do. For example, he points out, “begin with as small a gesture as a layperson calling publicly for an open accounting of a parish’s finances.” He may call it a “small gesture”, but the implications are huge! It has immediate bearing on the repeated calls for transparency and accountability amongst the governors of the Church, the very keys to the failures and collapse of the moral integrity of the Catholic Church in this clerical sex scandal.
All professional people are subject to the temptations similar to “clericalism”. Wilson quotes from Richard Nixon’s associate, Bryce Harlow, to make a point:
“‘When they play ‘Hail to the Chief,’ give a twenty-one gun salute, and everybody stands up when you come into the room, and nobody ever tells you to go to hell, you lose touch with reality.’ Getting the corner office morphs easily from being an honor to becoming an expectation. The ecclesiastical version, lording it over good Christians because one has earned a seminary degree, can be more subtle because it is enveloped in incense and mystification.”
From our perspective, the lording by the ordained priests over the rest of the faith community – the priests of the common baptismal priesthood – is an important key to understanding the current crisis of church leadership. All three Synoptic Gospels report Jesus teaching His apostles who jostled for position or asked for His right and left hand seats a fundamental lesson in leadership training: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you…” (Mt20:15-16; Mk 10:42; Lk 22:25-26). And at the Last Supper, He demonstrated this teaching by washing their feet (John 13:1-20). Priesthood after the manner of Jesus Christ is a priesthood modeled after the Suffering, Servant Messiah. The last thing the priesthood should be is a power trip. All these were written in Scripture – the authoritative text of the believing community – for our instruction. How thoroughly have the ordained forgotten this fundamental teaching of the Lord? How thoroughly have the non-ordained aided and abetted them in their forgetfulness? These are questions valid for the common examination of conscience of the entire people of God – laity, priests and religious – and for coffee-corner dialogue.
In conclusion, a final word from Wilson:
“If we are to allow the Lord to teach us new ways of relating we must begin by assuming our share of responsibility for a culture that has begotten terrible evil.”
Foot Notes:
[1] Published in Human Development 25/2 (Summer, 2004), pp.5-8. In an important book on the current crisis, Clericalism: The Death of Priesthood, Wilson looks for the restoration of a genuine priesthood, free of clericalism, in which we become truly united in Christ.
Copyright © Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh, May 2010. All rights reserved.
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