This has been a particularly wrenching sermon to write. I’ve done my research, reading many articles and books that relate to the Catholic Crisis. I’ve spoken with two priests and some of our members who are ex-Catholics, as well as others about this volatile issue. And I have wrestled in the depths of my own conscience.
When our new members sign the membership book they usually tell a little about their religious journey, and I’ve been surprised how many grew up Catholics. In fact if you are an ex-Catholic, could you please raise your hand so we can get an idea of how many we have?
In a conversation with a priest recently, he asked me what my impressions were of the Catholic Church. I replied honestly that I’ve always seen it as a progressive church in many ways, far ahead of us in its dedication to social justice, heading the liberation theology movement, and showing great compassion for those who are victims of poverty, war and disease.
And yet the church also seems terribly regressive in other ways, causing much pain by its stances against women, birth control, and gay people. I told him the Catholic Church is a great paradox to me. (By the way, he also told me his honest perception of Unitarian Universalism, which I’ll share with you another time).
The Catholic Crisis is also a paradox in that this is a church with a big heart and yet some of its priests and church officials are responsible for many agonizing wounds that may never heal. I see this crisis as a human issue as well as a religious one. I am outraged not at the Catholic Church but at those within the Catholic Church who have perpetrated and protected such destructive behavior.
In speaking with others I’ve discovered that this is a particularly sensitive subject. Many of us still suffer wounds from our past religious experiences, whether Catholic or Baptist or Jew. We may still have feelings of anger, sadness or even betrayal that linger on long after we have left that faith.
And when we read in the headlines day after day about the cruel abuse of children by religious leaders and the insensitive response of the church hierarchy, then those feelings can easily rise to the surface again. Those tripwire emotions may also erupt for those who have experienced sexual abuse themselves or in their family. And I imagine all of us have felt shock and anger that defenseless children have been harmed in such a devious way.
Healing, as well as justice, is certainly needed in the church, but healing can only take place when we face an issue and try to understand it. And this is a difficult issue to comprehend because it involves such a deep betrayal. We put implicit trust in our religious leaders to nurture and to protect people, and when that trust is violated, the pain can be intense.
The causes of the crisis in the Catholic Church are many, and I don’t pretend to understand them all. But I believe we do need to go beyond the superficial news coverage to try and grasp how such appalling behavior could take place in a religious setting.
One of the most obvious reasons to me is the practice of celibacy. In a recent New Yorker magazine, Thomas Keneally, a Catholic by the way, points out in his article called “Cold Sanctuary,” that “The Catholic priesthood did not begin as a celibate establishment. According to the Gospels, many of the Apostles had wives.”
In fact, it wasn’t until the twelfth century that an edict was issued requiring all priests to practice celibacy, “arguing that since priests ‘ought to be in fact and in name temples of God… it is unbecoming that they give themselves up to marriage and impurity.’”
This edict has been upheld through the centuries, partly, “according to historians, as a way of preventing the children of priests from inheriting Church property.” As you may guess, celibacy has been a difficult requirement to uphold. And in some places in the world, it has been vigorously rejected. In places like Italy, Latin America, and Africa, for example, many Roman Catholic priests have chosen not to take celibacy too literally. Instead they have seen it as a prohibition against formal marriage and so are not shy about having sexual relationships with women.
The Catholic Church has long been in turmoil about celibacy, and for good reason. Though it may be beneficial to the spiritual growth of some priests, celibacy is the product of an outmoded theology that is fearful of the body and of women.
In the words of Keneally, “To the celibate priest, women other than his earthly and heavenly mother remained dangerous creatures, a collective Eve.” It’s true that since the beginning of western religion, Eve has been a symbol of the fear and denigration of women. Traditional Christianity is imbedded with the message that women are inferior beings because they are more tempted by the flesh and resistant to the holy spirit.
Why else would the church close its door to the ordination of half of humankind? The argument by the church that all the disciples were male, except for Mary who was not a priest, does not hold water. Jesus was not even a priest, nor were any of the Apostles.
And as we have seen clearly with exceptional female clergy in our church, and our denomination, as well as others, gender should not play a role in who should be religious leaders. But there is one good reason for some church officials to fear women in the priesthood: they would never have allowed the molestation of children and youth to occur.
Thankfully, there have always been religious liberals within Christianity – Unitarians and Universalists among others – and within the Catholic Church who have protested against such simplistic dualisms. They have proclaimed instead the blessing of creation and the unity of being.
One such theologian is Matthew Fox, a Catholic who was drummed out of the church, and now hangs out with some rowdy Unitarian Universalists. In his book called “Original Blessing,” he tells us that the human race – and especially religion – goes to great lengths to eliminate the animal in us, our passions and desires.
And he asks this question, “Can we believe that our earthiness and sensuality and passions are a blessing? Or are we condemned forever to a hostile relationship with our very nature and therefore with all of nature?”
Wendell Berry speaks with the same voice when he says, “You cannot devalue the body and value the soul – or value anything else. The isolation of the body sets it into direct conflict with anything else in Creation. Nothing could be more absurd than to despise the body and yet yearn for resurrection.”
The practice of celibacy is a denial of our human nature and of nature itself. “Sex is the manifestation of the driving life force energy of the universe,” writes the pagan Starhawk. “Sexuality is an expression of the moving force that underlies everything and gives it life.”
It’s not sex that we should fear, but it is the repression of sexuality that results in pain and abuse.
Another cause of the Catholic Crisis is the demon of secrecy. In the recent book called “Betrayal” by the Boston Globe Investigative Staff, they painstakingly relate every detail of the crisis. They write this description of the worst of the offenders:
“As he sits today in oversized prison-issued clothing, John J. Geoghan is perhaps the nation's most conspicuous example of a sexually abusive member of the clergy, not just because of the stunning number of his victims—nearly two hundred have come forward so far—but because of the delicate and deceptive way the Church handled his sins. For more than two decades, even as two successive cardinals and dozens of Church officials in the Boston archdiocese learned that Geoghan could not control his compulsion to attack children, Geoghan found extraordinary solace in the Church's culture of secrecy.
The book goes on to quote from a letter Cardinal Bernard F. Law wrote to Geoghan in 1996, long after the priest's assaults had been detected…
"Yours has been an effective life of ministry, sadly impaired by illness. On behalf of those you have served well, and in my own name, I would like to thank you,"
The authors of “Betrayal” then point out that “Geoghan was one among many. And while the breadth of his assaults was vast, they were perhaps not as horrific as those committed by fellow priests who in some cases violently raped their young prey and then shooed them away as they resumed their priestly ministry. If it was a secret to the daily communicants and the congregations that filled the churches on Sunday mornings, it was common knowledge among Church leaders, who heard the anguished pleas from the mothers and fathers of children abused by priests. They promised to address the problem. They vowed they would not let it happen again. And then they did.”
Where did such a secretive and elitist attitude come from? Some of it came from a naďve assumption that religious leaders were somehow more holy than everyone else, and the higher your place in the hierarchy the closer to God and thus the more holy you were.
And so it became necessary to hide from the people any discrepancies that might give them an inkling of the real truth, that these were flawed men like the rest of us, who struggled with their sexuality and their spirituality. A tragic sense of power grew out of that supposition, religious leaders believing they had the right to go beyond the law and morality.
A third cause of the Catholic Crisis is a hierarchy that is removed from the people and plagued with hubris. Thomas Keneally quotes from Garry Wills book, “Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit,” about a “remark made by Monsignor Robert Rehkemper, of Dallas, after the trial, in 1997, of Father Rudolph Kos, a local pastor who created an altar boys’ club at which he sexually violated his disciples after plying them with alcohol and pot. Although the victims were subsequently awarded a hundred and twenty million dollars in a civil suit, and Father Kos was sent to prison, Monsignor Rehkemper thought the blame misplaced. ‘No one ever says anything about what the role of the parents was in all this,” he told a reporter. “They more properly should have known because they’re close to the kids.’ For good measure, he added, ‘I’m sure some kids were damaged, but I think the damage might have happened even without Father Kos, you see.’”
How far we have come from the stereotypical priests in the films, “The Bells of St. Mary’s” and “Boy’s Town.” Certainly most priests in the past and present have been ethical and compassionate men who would never do harm to a young person. But what has been particularly disturbing was the attempt by the church hierarchy to deny, cover up, stonewall, protect and even proliferate the damage that was being done.
Some church officials seem to be using many of the same tactics and strategies as the CEOs at Enron and Worldcom, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. These leaders are motivated by the same needs of secular CEOs: the expansion of their worldwide religious corporation using any means necessary. And if they continue to hold power, then the results may be the same as Enron and Worldcom.
Perhaps that’s the reason Cardinal Law, responding to news reports in 1992 about priestly child abuse in his archdiocese declared: “By all means, we call down God’s power on the media, particularly the Globe.” (I’m sure the Post was included in his damnations).
Speaking of Cardinal Law, the New York Times quotes a theology professor who defended the Cardinal with these words, “There is no way that a resignation by Cardinal Law could be interpreted except as giving great aid and encouragement to persons who would really like to turn the American church … into a kind of reform Catholocism, or a Catholic Unitarian Universalism.” I certainly don’t see a problem with that, do you?
The results of this abuse of power by the church hierarchy can be seen in the response of Maryetta Dussourd who is the mother of four boys, all of whom, she discovered, were being molested by Father Geoghan – one of the boys was just four years old. The authors of “Betrayal,” write that “…when she reported this outrage she found no solace from her friends or her church. Fellow parishioners shunned her. They accused her of provoking scandal. Church officials implored her to keep quiet. It was for the sake of the children, they said. Don't sue, they warned her. They told her that no one would believe her.”
"Everything you have taught your child about God and safety and trust—it is destroyed," said Dussourd, whose claims against the Church were settled in a 1997 confidential agreement—like scores of others in which the victims received money and the Church obtained their silence.
The church actually attacked some of these parents as being irresponsible and greedy, and yet many parents of abused boys asked only for apology and assurance that the guilty priests would be separated from children. Some sued only when the apology was minimal or hollow or priests were returned to the parish.
What is beyond imagination in many of these cases is not the number of Catholic priests who have preyed on children – though that is horrible in its own right – but the pattern of releasing these predatory priests back into unsuspecting congregations where they would blithely repeat their transgressions with more vulnerable and defenseless young people. Then some church officials had the gall to defend priests who abused teenagers instead of children by saying that it wasn’t so bad since it wasn’t “real pedophilia.”
These church officials should be piling into confession booths en masse. One bishop has confessed for all of them. Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, president of the bishops' conference, stated: "We are the ones whether through ignorance or lack of vigilance, or, God forbid, with knowledge, who allowed priest abusers to remain in ministry and reassigned them to communities where they continued to abuse. We are the ones who chose not to report the criminal actions of priests to the authorities, because the law did not require this. We are the ones who worried more about the possibility of scandal than bringing about the kind of openness that helps prevent abuse."
The bishops are also the ones who searched for scapegoats, drawing a tempting target on homosexual priests. They tried to confuse people with the message that homosexuality leads to child molestation, though the evidence is that more than 95 percent of the perpetrators of child sexual abuse are heterosexual men.
The church has long had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for gay priests, even though the Vatican has issued a blanket condemnation of all homosexual activity. And so gay priests are pressured not only to suppress their sexuality but their very identity as a gay person.
As Gary Wills writes in his article in the New York Review of Books, “Priests and Boys,”:
“The current scandal is not a sex scandal. It is a dishonesty scandal. … Until the hierarchy can ‘come clean’ – to themselves, to the faithful, to the world – an instinct toward shifted blame and righteous denunciation will stand between it and the truths it claims to preach. The problem is not with the Church, with the people of God, but with those who claim to be the Church, in a structure honeycombed with pretense, hypocrisy, and evasion. The core of solid belief, the common sense of the faithful, the deep belief in the saving truths of the creed, will stand more solid after this clumsy scaffolding of lies thrown up around it has collapsed.”
My hope is that this crisis will encourage Catholics to engage in a new dialogue amongst themselves and perhaps even with other faith communities about the possibilities of inviting women, married persons and declared homosexuals into the priesthood.
My hope is that Catholics will begin to tear down the “structures of deceit” that have cloaked this wrong-doing so that the church can become a transparent institution.
And finally, I hope this is an opportunity for Catholic laypeople to fling open the doors and take back control of the Church.
When these changes begin to bloom into a refreshing renewal, then perhaps healing and forgiveness will come. In the meantime, may our Catholic friends be in our thoughts and prayers.
Now I’m not quite finished. I would like to see Unitarian Universalists also use this crisis as an opportunity to look at some of our own problems and possibilities. The Catholics are certainly not the first to abuse their power. In the 1980s our own Unitarian Universalist movement, along with almost every other Protestant denomination, went through a crisis in which many clergy were confronted for their violation of sexual ethics.
That abuse and betrayal has been greatly diminished today because most denominations, including our own, took it seriously enough to set rigid boundaries for clergy, removing blatant abusers from fellowship, requiring therapy for others, and training all clergy and seminary students in their responsibility to be respectful role models when it comes to sexual relationships.
Many of our congregations – including our own -- have also been working on becoming safe congregations by developing safety policies that protect our children and youth and by creating covenants of right relationships that provide a safe environment for civil conversation. The Unitarian Universalist Association provides rich resources to help in the creation of safe congregations. One resource is the new Comprehensive Sexuality Education Curricula called “Our Whole Lives” (OWL) which addresses issues of sexual abuse in each of its five curricula. I’m pleased that we will be using the OWL curriculum in our religious education program this fall.
This is work we all need to be doing, whether we are Catholics or Unitarian Universalists. It’s work that grows out of our Judeo-Christian heritage as well as our seven principles. I invite you to join us in this never ending journey to growing a big heart.
Amen.
Spoken Prayer & Meditation
We pray this morning for healing.
Each of us comes here wounded,
Wounded by past religious experiences,
Wounded by those who have been abusive mentally or physically,
Wounded by an awareness of those who suffer so greatly around the world and as well as in our own families,
Wounded by life itself.
We cannot live this life without being wounded.
Our living is a journey towards healing.
We seek to find healing in worship,
In being with those we care for,
In humor and happiness,
In nature and tender touches.
Let us find healing now in the silence that enfolds us and upholds us.
Let us open our minds and hearts to the place of quiet, to the silent prayer for the healing of pain, and the soft, gentle coming of love . . .
Silent Prayer & Meditation
Amen.
