ECCLESIAL SIN TODAY (AGAIN)

I recently read an NCR article that cited Bishop Morlino of Wisconsin blaming the sex abuse crisis on a homosexual subculture in the Catholic Church. This same argument was put forward in the early 2000s. It was a shameful example of scapegoating then and it remains shameful today. The problem in the church is not the result of homosexuals who are ordained. And the problem is not the result of the sexual revolution in the 1960s either. Former Cardinal McCarrick was not known for his liberal views. Misdiagnosing the problem has two effects: 1. It obscures the solution; and 2. It hurts even more innocent people. The scandal is primarily the result of episcopal failures and lack of accountability. It was clear that this was the case in 2001 when discussions were taking place over the Dallas Charter.

During that time, I worked for Cardinal George of Chicago at his seminary in Mundelein. Cardinal George consulted with the faculty over the matter. He felt that the Dallas Charter needed to have a corresponding policy for bishops. When he came to speak to us, I wrote out this quote from Bernard of Clairvaux on the blackboard facing him:

Woe to the unfaithful stewards who, themselves not yet reconciled, take on themselves the responsibility of recognizing righteousness in others, as if they were themselves righteous men (Isaiah 68:2). Woe to the sons of wrath (Ephesians 2:3) who profess they are ministers of grace. Woe to the sons of wrath who are not afraid to usurp to themselves the name and rank of “peacemaker.” Woe to the sons of wrath who pretend to be mediators of peace, and who feed upon the sins of the people. Woe to those who, walking in the flesh, cannot please God (Romans 8:8) and presume to wish to please him.

I am afraid I am a bit difficult, but Cardinal George, to his credit took time to listen to my more reasonable presentation seriously as to why the impending charter needed an enforcement mechanism. Perhaps he listened because he already agreed with me, but I found him willing to listen to contrary views most of the time. In the end, Cardinal George was not able to incorporate episcopal accountability into the Dallas Charter. So I wrote an article based on the materials I presented in that meeting and several subsequent ones.

The article, "Bonaventure and the Sin of the Church," on the subject of the crisis was the first of three reform related publications addressing the sexual abuse crisis. The article treats several subjects related to ecclesiology and tradition that we need not consider too closely here. The full article is available on my Linked In page and for free on the Internet. The second article, “When Magisterium Becomes Imperium,” was a response to the ongoing failure of leadership and is also on my page. The last publication was my book The Great Catholic Reformers: From Gregory the Great to Dorothy Day, which can be ordered from Paulist Press or Amazon (sorry for the moment of shameless self promotion, but the book never sold even though it won a Catholic Press Association award).

The reason I am sharing the conclusion to my first major article is that we are covering the same ground in the same way as before. I warned of the consequences of using the scandal as a means to scapegoat homosexuals and of failing to address the root issues associated with episcopal exercises of power and privilege. At the same time, I tried to avoid scapegoating the bishops even though there is no denying their culpability. I suppose I am against scapegoating anyone for any reason. While I expect some of you may not like some of the ecclesiology, please recognize that the article was reviewed by the CDF and received no objections. The following is the conclusion to that 2002 article, much of which remains sadly relevant.

We must be careful before we dismiss the legitimacy of speaking about a sinful Church which truly and collectively carries the guilt for the sin of its members as it takes part in purification through its earthly journey, for it is precisely under the analogy of the Body of Christ that the tradition speaks about ecclesial sin. If the Church is a mystery or a sacrament, then there must be multiple ways of unveiling what it is and what it means.[i] Some analogies highlight certain aspects but are inappropriate for others. If we consider the Church in terms of God’s predestining decision or convocation, whether we include the angels or not, then we should not talk about a sinful Church. However, it is a violation of the analogy of faith to believe that this one way into the mystery of the Church exhausts its reality or delimits the validity of the other analogies. When I apply Bonaventure’s analysis of the sin of the Church as primarily manifested in legalism, I find that it opens up some interesting ways to call for reform and to present an apologetic of humility for the Church.

The sin of legalism becomes apparent in our struggles with modernity. The ecclesial claims of the nineteenth and twentieth century Catholics fall into a dangerous triumphalism that Augustine, Gregory, and Bonaventure fought so valiantly against in their own times. Those apologetic claims concerning the perfection of the Church came out of a context where the Church was legitimately attempting to preserve its integrity against the initiatives of various nation states to control it. In the process, the Church repeatedly used the rhetoric of perfection, lifting up its status as a means to salvation in an effort to argue for its legal rights. However, if we deny the sinfulness of the Church Militant, or the Pilgrim Church, then we must conclude that there is a bifurcated Church composed of a sinless, invisible reality completely divorced from our experience of an all too visible and actual institution and community. Such a perspective naturally leads to disillusionment culminating in either a rejection of the Church as a viable means of salvation, on the one hand, and the threat of Donatism, on the other. In both cases, the failure to recognize the wounded Church and its members inevitably violates unity.

Donatism, in our current context, is manifested in the development of groups and organizations that consider themselves to be the “real” or “faithful” or “true Catholics” who do not participate in the sinful lapses of the rest of the members of the Church. This perspective can be manifested by those who call themselves conservative or liberal, progressive or traditionalist, or any of the other labels that would seem to introduce polarized parties into the unity of faith. If we all accept the sins of the Church as our own responsibility and as our own crosses to bear, then we would not fall into the temptation of introducing parties, whether they belong to Paul or Apollos (1 Corinthians 1:10-17), as the means to reform the Church.

The introduction of parties or factions as the means to reform the Church is a problem because it seeks to restrict sin and failure to those outside of the party. Those who are unable to accept the wounded body or the sinful Church, according to Gregory the Great, are the people who do not recognize the sinfulness in their own hearts.[ii] Whereas the Church advances in its adversity, making its progress by means of penance and purification, Gregory warns that partisans remain stuck in a stupor because they do not understand from their own experience how spiritual progress is made.[iii]

Bonaventure’s analysis of the sin of the Church as legalism further unveils the problem with partisanship in the Church. Such partisanship is particularly apparent in the way we have responded to the current crisis over the sexual abuses of the clergy. Some groups wish to change the law so that homosexuals are banned from ordination and others seek to allow the ordination of married clergy or women priests. By shifting both the blame and the solution of this crisis to canon law, members of the Church are attempting to restrict their own need to accept responsibility and repentance for the broader reality of sin in the Church. In fact, the way some groups have attempted to use the wounded Body of Christ to ensconce their own political or ideological agendas into canon law reveals a lack of piety, which Bonaventure defined as mercy manifested in patience and love.

It is also easy to discern how legalism helped to create and to sustain the current crisis in terms of Episcopal decisions over the last decade. In 1992 the bishops passed a policy indicating how sexual abuse of minors should be handled in the Church. This policy, as is clear to everyone today, did not solve the problem.[iv] Did it fail because it was a bad policy? Unfortunately we will never know because, like the bishops who failed to support the reform initiatives of the medieval councils, too many of the bishops did not embrace the policy as a legitimate expression of Catholic spirituality. Perhaps some of the bishops, like their medieval predecessors, saw the reform policy as an infringement upon their episcopal rights. Some bishops, however, may have simply placed too much faith in their advisors who claimed that these men could be treated and returned safely to ministry. Regardless of their motivations, the bishops were not the only group that failed to see that the policy was enforced. The rest of the clergy and laity were lulled by their faith in law and policy into relinquishing their duty to remain vigilant and involved in the protection of the children in our community.

The current policy passed in Dallas will not solve the problem of abusive priests either.[v] This problem will only begin to be resolved when our bishops come to see piety as their duty to protect, to promote, and to provide for all of their people, especially the weakest and most vulnerable, rather than limiting piety to the external expressions of religious devotions and duties. If the bishops understood how piety is based on the proper relationship between a parent and child, then they would not have allowed some of their “offspring,” or priests, to prey upon the most vulnerable members of our communion, our children. Of course, the problem may be that the bishops based their actions on their lived experience of Catholic families rather than on the proper relationship between parents and their children.

Everyone knows that child abuse and spousal abuse are serious problems in the United States. In a national study of reported and substantiated cases of child abuse in 1996, there were approximately 1,553,800 children who were harmed by child abuse and neglect.[vi] This figure does not include the unreported cases, which are suspected to outnumber those reported to government agencies. Of these cases, there were 217,700 children who were sexually abused.[vii] The vast majority of perpetrators of child abuse and neglect in general were the birth parents at a rate of 78%.[viii] This is even more stunning when one considers that children are “consistently vulnerable to sexual abuse from the age of three.”[ix] Half of the cases of sexual abuse were by a birth parent, a stepparent, or a substitute parent such as a grandparent.[x] Since roughly a quarter of the population in this country is at least nominally Catholic, it is incredible to assume that active Catholics are unaware of these activities taking place in their families, schools and parishes.

Why has there not been a hue and cry over these shocking statistics? If Catholics are so nonchalant about child abuse in their families, why are they so concerned by such a statistically small number of abuses by priests? Perhaps it boils down to Bonaventure’s understanding of the result of original sin and the sin of the Church, the desire to claim things as private property, even children. When abuse takes place in a family, we assume that it is a family matter. We see the children involved as their children. Since the clergy and the laity alike have idolized the family, we have failed to intervene in these matters. Thus it is not surprising that the bishops have imitated the families they came from and have tried to keep these painful matters private.

The responsibility for the scandal over sexual abuse certainly rests primarily with those bishops who repeatedly moved offenders around, but there are many people who have consented to this sinful pattern of behavior. Their consent, according to the tradition and several clear statements in Scripture, makes them participants. Why did the parents of these children fail to report these crimes to the civil authorities? How could the various lawyers and mental health practitioners advising the families and the dioceses support these decisions? Why did the friends of the family and the extended family members fail to report these offenses? How many times have we failed to intervene when we knew or suspected abuse of a child was taking place, regardless of whether it happens in the home, school, or church? Looked at from this perspective, the sinfulness of the Church, of ourselves, becomes apparent. Though there are many reasons why people do not report child abuse, ranging from fear of retaliation to uncertainty over the consequences for the children involved, failure to report this abuse to legal authorities simply allows the perpetrators to continue to harm children with our tacit consent.

Using a corporate understanding of a sinful Church calls all of us to recognize the need for reform on personal, cultural, and institutional levels. Bonaventure speaks of this in terms of every Christian’s duty to pick up his or her cross as part of the process of their own salvation. The imitation of Christ includes the task of reforming the Church and bearing the burdens of others as Christ bore the sin of the world. He warned his reforming brothers that we should not expect to be loved for our efforts to reform the Church, especially from rigid and merciless bishops, for to do so is to sow the seeds of discouragement in our souls.[xi] After all, Christ’s efforts to heal his people met with scorn, ridicule and crucifixion by the “prelates” of his own day, though it resulted in the reconciliation between God and humanity. Bonaventure teaches us that it is in the experience of trying to help those who are resisting our efforts that we come to truly know the mind of Christ. This is, in fact, how we come to be like Christ.[xii] We cannot, therefore, abandon the Church in its wounded sinfulness because to do so would be a failure to imitate Christ’s commitment to heal the sins of the world.

The time has come for all of us to recognize that all children are God’s children and our responsibility to piously protect. If we fail to speak out against these types of abuse and against all other types of abuse and oppression, we participate in these sins. The questions for the Roman Catholic Church in America are whether we have truly come to terms with our communal sin and whether we are willing to make our act of ecclesial repentance. As our own penance, we need to confess our sin in order to teach this generation and the next generation not to imitate the bad example we have set. As an act of satisfaction, we should exhort the bishops to embrace their penance and truly correct themselves, so that they might again have the legitimacy to lead the rest of the community and the nation into the light of reconciliation over the issues of abuse. Regardless of whether the bishops fail us again, we must resolve not to sin again, to remain vigilant, and to actively oppose all abuse by bringing it to light.

[i] For more comprehensive and contemporary treatments of this idea see Henri de Lubac, The Splendour of the Church, trans. Michael Mason (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956); George Tavard, The Pilgrim Church (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967); Avery Dulles, Models of the Church (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1974).

[ii] Moralia 3.24.47.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] The resolution passed by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops can be found in Origins 22 (December 3, 1992) 418.

[v] The “Essential Norms for Diocesan/Eparchial Policies Dealing with Allegations of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Priests, Deacons, or Other Church Personnel” passed by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is printed in Origins 32 (June 27, 2002) 107-108.

[vi] Andrea J. Sedlak and Diane D. Broadhurst, Executive Summary of the Third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families (September 1996) 7; available from https://www.calib.com/nccanch/pubs/statinfo/nis3.cfm, accessed 12 July 2002. Apparently, this is the most current comprehensive study of child abuse and neglect in the United States.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Ibid. 15.

[ix] Ibid. 3.

[x] Ibid. 15.

[xi] Hex?emeron 20.30; 23.25-26.

[xii] Ibid. 17.15; 18.11; 23.26.