Reflections on the current clerical sex scandals [III]
“You know that in the world the recognized rulers lord it over their subjects, and their great men make them feel the weight of authority. This is not the way with you; among you, whoever wants to be great must be your servant, and whoever wants to be the first must be the willing slave of all.” [Mark 10:42-43]
SEE-THROUGH CHURCH BY GIJS VAN VAERENBERGH-2011-photo-kristof-vrancken
For our second intra-church issue, we turn to the lack of transparency and accountability that has been identified as a fundamental root-cause of many Catholic woes, along with blind obedience.
For ease of reference, we list six points for on-going coffee-corner dialogue.
[1] Beware of corruption of the faith
All religions are susceptible to some basic corruptions and only authentic faith can put people back on the right path. In his time, Jesus did not attempt to abolish the Jewish religion, but to fight against any form of corruption of the authentic Jewish faith wherever he saw it. There are always warning signs of corruption of our faith in our own lives and in the life of the Church. Among these signs, the more urgent ones are often “blind obedience” and “the end justifies the means”. And yet, what the Lord teaches is frightfully straight forward: “The truth will set you free” (John 8:32).
[2] Keeping silent in the face of evil is not Christian
St Paul, in response to the problem of incest in the Corinthian faith community, called the Corinthian Christians to see that in the face of evil, keeping silent is not a Christian attitude (1 Cor 5). In the 14th century, St Catherine of Siena said: “Speak as if you have a million voices. It is silence that kills the world.” Faith urges us to summon up courage to hold the people who run the Church accountable. It is only when Catholics follow St Catherine’s suggestion and speak truth to power, will children be a lot safer and the Church a whole lot more truthful and authentic.
Jay Matthews, the parish priest at St. Benedict’s Church in East Oakland, California, USA believes that his diocese and the Vatican need to begin openly talking about this biggest crisis the Church has encountered in modern times, instead of being so secretive. The days of the Church’s policy of keeping any discussion of wayward priests as internal matters cannot continue, he says. Because we do not live in a society where pedophiles are accepted, “that’s where the discussion needs to begin.”
Clearly, accountability and transparency need to take deeper roots in Catholicism.
[3] Place your trust in God alone
Part of the cause of the clergy sex abuses was that the laity did not know any better. For so long had the laity been nurtured in holding the clergy in unrealistically high esteem that they lacked the ability to say “No” in the face of evil about to be perpetrated by members of the clergy. Worse, after an evil had actually been perpetrated, the laity still lacked the ability to step forward to expose it and to help prevent it from repeating.
The spirit of docility and of obedience, which is meant to be practiced by the whole people of God – laity, priests and religious – towards the Holy Spirit, has insidiously but disastrously been shifted so that this docile and obedient spirit had for way too long been coaxed out of the laity and directed to the ordained, instead of to God. Wherever that happens, it not only creates an idolatrous relationship, but it sets the community up for a fall once the people see that their trust has been so badly abused.
Archbishop Michael Sheehan spoke with honesty when he, on taking over temporary custody as Apostolic Administrator of the Diocese of Phoenix on June 18, 2003, after its bishop, Thomas J. O’Brien, resigned in disgrace, told the people to place their trust and hope not in the priests and the bishops, but in God, in whom they cannot be disappointed.
The laity must now come to understand that obedience should never be explained to mean stupefying submission to anything and everything that the ordained leadership of the day propounds and enforces. Instead, its proper meaning lies in a willing acceptance by the whole people of God – laity, priests and religious – of what Christ has already established and in what he continues to do as he prods and blesses through the truthful living of the faith community. “Obedience to God comes before obedience to men” (Acts 5:29).
Apart from Christ, the valid question for thinking Catholics is not who said something, but what is said and why.
[4] Blind obedience is Nuremburg all over again
With her usual clarity of mind, Sr Joan points to “obedience” as the fundamental problem that trumps transparency and accountability in the Church. “The dilemma that really threatens the future of the church is a distorted notion of the vow of obedience and the tension it creates between loyalty to the Gospel and loyalty to the institution — translate: ‘system’.” Under investigation, Canon lawyers were found to hold their tongues in obedience to their bishops, and bishops were found to put off disciplinary actions against errant priests in seeming obedience to Rome – the “highest authority”, the last court of appeal, as it were, and Rome seemed slow to act. Was that why public outcry reached the heavens and the Holy Spirit had to intervene? 3,500 years ago, the Lord God sent Moses to set His people free from the misery of slavery in Egypt. “I have heard my people cry,” Yhwh said (Exodus 3:7). This time, the God who has heard His people cry is raising prophetic voices from every corner of the universal Church. The Holy Spirit is urging everyone to stop holding their tongue, to open up, and speak for God, never mind if you stammer like Moses and are bound to irk the powerful authority as well as the very people whom you set out to help.
The “system” had gone seriously wrong when those charged with the responsibility to take moral and legal steps to stop a child predator from preying on more children everywhere bracketed off that responsibility. Worse yet, when challenged, the standard defence was: “I was only following orders.” This kind of defence is called “the Nuremberg defence”, named after the memorable trial of Nazi officials for their atrocious crimes in the Holocaust. Nuremberg decided that “defence of superior orders” is not a defence for war crimes.
“Blind obedience”, for too long held up as a sure path to holiness, was itself blind. It blinds a human being, who is created a free moral agent, from acting in his God-given freedom, and surrenders himself unconditionally to the views and perspectives of another person with official authority. But Sr Joan is adamant: “Blind obedience is itself an abuse of the human morality.”
In piercing clarity, she writes: “It is a misuse of the human soul in the name of religious commitment. It is a sin against individual conscience. It makes moral children of the adults from whom moral agency is required. It makes a vow, which is meant to require religious figures to listen always to the law of God, beholden first to the laws of very human organizations in the person of very human authorities. It is a law that isn’t even working in the military and can never substitute for personal morality.”
Catholics across the globe have always presumed that the priests and religious of the church are the ones in whom they should be able “to presume a strong conscience and an even stronger commitment to the public welfare”. There is clearly an urgent need now to change our theology and our religious discipline in such a way that people of good conscience should be free to be real moral leaders instead of being reduced to mere agents of an official institution. An institution is not in real good health when it demands obedience above morality, canon law above human decency and justice. In such a mold, keepers of the religion stand in risk of becoming the very stumbling blocks of morality and Christian values.
[5] The effect of a lack of transparency and accountability
But what had actually happened?
When the stories first broke, the press sensationalized a few high-profile cases of serial rapes and molestations of young children by Catholic priests. Then, instead of sporadic cases, the world was stunned by the revelation of unheard of numbers. From there, the focus quickly shifted away from individual clerical rapists to the unmasking of a systemic problem. Outrage flared upon the disclosure of a systematic practice of episcopal cover-ups. Instead of holding paedophile priests to account, and instead of being transparent in handling abuse-complaints, bishops regularly moved predator-priests from one place to another, and kept their crimes secret. Whenever bishops knowingly reassigned abusive priests without notifying the police, they enabled rapists to commit more crimes in different places. These bishops became accessories to crimes. Rather than expose predator-priests to legal accountability or to moral censure in the public arena, the practice was to save the alleged integrity of the clergy and the church. The integrity of the innocent children under their care was never their concern. Trading truth, moral integrity, children’s innocence, and managerial accountability for clerical image, bishops have been thoroughly irresponsible. Catholic parents are aware abuse occurs across the board; but the systemic enabling of the abuser is what has broken the heart of every Catholic and created this public outrage. Behind this clerical protective shield lies not a Christian ethical mind set, but what some authors refer to as a “tribal behavior” or a “tribal morality”, or what Aloysius Mowe, SJ, describes as the preservation of “caste” interests. Whatever you may call it, the suffering ecclesial Body of Christ was repeatedly nailed to the cross by those whose duty it was to lead and shepherd it.
However, the signs of light from a new dawn are breaking through. At the universal level, we are now witnessing positive signs of the hierarchy turning towards transparency and accountability. In his address to US Bishops on ad limina visit in 2004, Pope John Paul II called for “accountability in the Church’s governance on every level,” and reminded the bishops to “listen to the faithful”, to include them more through “better structures of participation, consultation, and shared responsibility.” In his March 19, 2010 formal apology to the Irish victims of clerical sex abuse, Pope Benedict XVI said decades of cover-ups by the Church were due to “a misplaced concern for the reputation of the Church and the avoidance of scandal.” At a press conference April 22, 2010 on the resignation of Bishop Roger Joseph Vangheluwe of Bruges, Belgium, who admitted to sexually abusing a minor, Archbishop Andre-Mutien Leonard of Mechelen-Brussels said: “The decision of the bishop of Bruges, and the calling of this press conference, express the transparency that the Catholic Church in Belgium rigorously wishes to apply in these matters, turning a new page with respect to the not-so-distant period in which the Church, and others, preferred the solution of silence or concealment.”
The point is, everywhere we turn, where accountability is lacking, transparency is absent. The lack of transparency and accountability that precipitated the current sex abuse scandals is repeated in other areas of church life. A failure to address the issue results, in practical terms, in a continuous shielding and habouring of [a] sexual abuses other than paedophilia, and [b] mismanagement of Church funds, to name but two subjects that are causing untold unrest amongst the laity. Parishioners are all too familiar with local clerical scandals, albeit of a different nature from paedophilia. At the level of the local church, every thinking Catholic has cause to feel worried for the Church when all that we hear from the pulpit is: “Thank God we don’t have paedophile cases here.” At the local level, have we begun to respond to the Spirit who is clearly leading the whole Church towards greater transparency and accountability in all areas of church life?
[6] Listen to those bishops who are open to the Spirit
It is therefore useful to turn to the more honest and encouraging words from bishops of other parts of the world who show openness to the Spirit.
At this year’s Chrism Mass, Archbishop Buti Joseph Tlhagale OMI, President of the South African Catholic Bishops’ Conference, addressed the Catholic Church’s current crisis sparked off in Ireland and Germany, and said, “I know that the church in Africa, is inflicted by the same scourge…. What happens in Ireland or in Germany or America affects us all. It simply means that the misbehaviour of priests in Africa has not been exposed to the same glare of the media as in other parts of the world.” This is honest and truthful talk, the kind the mature laity expect from the ordained leaders. In late April, Bishop Roger Joseph Vangheluwe of Bruges resigned after admitting to sexually abusing a minor over a period of time during his priesthood and at the beginning of his episcopate. On May 4, Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard of the Mechelen-Brussels Archdiocese, the president of the Belgian bishops’ conference, affirmed that the Church in his country has “painful questions” to address.
And listen to these words from two Australian bishops. Bishop Geoffrey Robinson in his book, Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church, “came to the unshakeable belief that within the Catholic Church there absolutely must be profound and enduring change”. And Bishop Patrick Power declares, “Hardly a day goes by without me hearing a cry from the heart for such change from people who truly love the Church, young and old, male and female, lay people, priests and religious. During this Year for Priests, many of my colleagues around Australia are crying out for credible leadership from the hierarchy which involves more than mere words.” And yet, is the local church even in the “mere words” stage yet – that is, words from the hierarchy acknowledging the need for change and renewal? Or, are we still in the “we are ok” mold, blithely fooling ourselves and everyone else that all this is just a European problem? Are we listening to the Spirit at all?
Copyright © Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh, July 2010. All rights reserved.
You are most welcome to respond to this post. Email your comments to us at jeffangiegoh@gmail.com. You can also be dialogue partners in this Ephphatha Coffee-Corner Ministry by sending us questions for discussion.