Never Step Foot in Catholic Church Again
I.
"The Murder of a Soul"
To experience relief at my female parent's being dead was once unthinkable, but then the news came from Republic of ireland. It would have crushed her. An immigrant'southward daughter, my female parent lived with an eye cast dorsum to the onetime country, the land against which she measured every virtue. Ireland was sky to her, and the Catholic Church was heaven's choir. Then came the Ryan Report.
Not long earlier The Boston Globe began publishing its series on predator priests, in 2002—the "Spotlight" series that became a moving-picture show of the same name—the regime of Ireland established a commission, ultimately chaired by Judge Sean Ryan, to investigate accounts and rumors of child corruption in Ireland's residential institutions for children, almost all of which were run by the Catholic Church building.
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The Ryan Commission published its 2,600-page study in 2009. Despite regime inspections and supervision, Catholic clergy had, across decades, violently tormented thousands of children. The written report found that children held in orphanages and reformatory schools were treated no better than slaves—in some cases, sex slaves. Rape and molestation of boys were "endemic." Other reports were issued about other institutions, including parish churches and schools, and homes for unwed mothers—the notorious "Magdalene Laundries," where girls and women were condemned to lives of coercive servitude. The ignominy of these institutions was laid out in plays and documentary films, and in Philomena, the picture starring Judi Dench, which was based on a true story. The homes-for-women scandal climaxed in 2017, when a regime report revealed that from 1925 to 1961, at the Bon Secours Mother and Babe Home, in Tuam, County Galway, babies who died—nearly 800 of them—were routinely disposed of in mass graves or sewage pits. Not simply priests had behaved despicably. So had nuns.
In August 2018, Pope Francis made a much publicized visit to Republic of ireland. His timing could non have been worse. Just then, a second wave of the Catholic sex-abuse scandal was breaking. In Germany, a leaked bishops' investigation revealed that from 1946 to 2014, 1,670 clergy had assaulted iii,677 children. Civil authorities in other nations were launching investigations, moving aggressively to preempt the Church building. In the United States, also in 2018, a Pennsylvania m jury declared that over the course of 70 years, more than than 1,000 children had been abused by more than 300 priests across the land. Church building government had successfully silenced the victims, deflected law enforcement, and shielded the predators. The Pennsylvania report was widely taken to be a conclusive adjudication, but yard-jury findings are not verdicts. Still, this record of testimony and investigation was staggering. The charges told of a ring of pedophile priests who gave many of their young targets the gift of a gold cross to clothing, so that the other predator priests could recognize an initiated kid who would not resist an overture. "This is the murder of a soul," said one victim who testified before the chiliad jury.
Attorneys general in at least 15 other states appear the opening of investigations into Church crimes, and the U.South. Department of Justice followed adjust. Soon, in several states, teams of police-enforcement agents armed with search warrants outburst into diocesan offices and secured records. The Texas Rangers raided the offices of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, which was presided over by Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. DiNardo had been presented by the Church building as the new confront of accountability and transparency when he came to Galveston-Houston in 2004. The rangers seized an archive of abuse—boxes of sex-accusation files along with computers, including DiNardo's. The key was accused of protecting a particularly egregious predator priest.
These and other investigations will produce an avalanche of scandal for years to come. As all of this was unfolding, Pope Francis responded with a meek call for a 4-twenty-four hours meeting of senior bishops, to be held in Rome under the rubric "The Protection of Minors in the Church." This was like putting Mafia chieftains in charge of a crime commission.
Before, during, and after his trip to Ireland, Francis had expressed, equally he put information technology, "shame and sorrow." But he showed no sign of understanding the need for the Church building to significantly reform itself or to undertake acts of true penance.
One of the astonishments of Pope Francis's Irish pilgrimage was his merits, made to reporters during his render trip to Rome, that until then he had known null of the Magdalene Laundries or their scandals: "I had never heard of these mothers—they phone call information technology the laundromat of women, where an unwed woman is significant and goes into these hospitals." Never heard of these mothers? When I read that, I said to myself: A lie. Pope Francis is lying. He may not take been lying—he may merely have been ignorant. But to be uninformed about the long-simmering Magdalene scandal was merely as bad. Equally I read the pope's words, a taut wire in me snapped.
The wire had begun to stretch a quarter of a century agone, when I was starting out every bit a Boston Globe columnist. Twenty years before, I had been a Catholic priest, preoccupied with war, social justice, and religious reform—questions that divers my work for the Globe. One of my start columns, published in September 1992, was a reflection on the child-sex-abuse crimes of a Massachusetts priest named James Porter. I argued that Porter's predation had been enabled by the Church's broader culture of priest-protecting silence. Responding to before World stories well-nigh Porter, an infuriated Key Bernard Constabulary, the archbishop of Boston, had hurled an abomination that seemed to come from the Middle Ages: "Nosotros call downwards God's power on the media, especially the Globe." It took a decade, merely God's power somewhen came down on Law himself.
In tandem with the "Spotlight" series and afterward, more than than a dozen of my columns on priestly sex abuse ran on the op-ed page, with titles such as "Priests' Victims Victimized Twice" and "Meltdown in the Catholic Church." I became a broken record on the subject.
I bring all of this upward to make the signal that, by the summer of 2018, equally a still-practicing Catholic, I harbored no illusions about the Church building'due south grotesque expose. So it took some doing to bring me to a breaking point, and Pope Francis—whom in many ways I admire, and in whom I had placed an almost desperate promise—is the unlikely person who brought me at that place.
For the outset time in my life, and without making a conscious decision, I simply stopped going to Mass. I embarked on an unwilled version of the Cosmic tradition of "fast and abstinence"—in this case, fasting from the Eucharist and abstaining from the overt practice of my faith. I am not deluding myself that this response of mine has significance for anyone else—Who cares? Information technology's nigh fourth dimension!—but for me the moment is a life marker. I have non been to Mass in months. I carry an ocean of grief in my heart.
Ii.
The Trappings of Empire
The virtues of the Catholic faith accept been obvious to me my whole life. The globe is meliorate for those virtues, and I cherish the countless men and women who bring the religion alive. The Catholic Church is a worldwide community of well over 1 billion people. North and South, rich and poor, intellectual and illiterate—it is the only institution that crosses all such borders on annihilation like this calibration. As James Joyce wrote in Finnegans Wake, Catholic means "Hither Comes Everybody." Around the globe there are more than 200,000 Catholic schools and nearly forty,000 Catholic hospitals and health-care facilities, generally in developing countries. The Church is the largest nongovernmental organization on the planet, through which selfless women and men treat the poor, teach the unlettered, heal the sick, and piece of work to preserve minimal standards of the common proficient. The world needs the Church of these legions to exist rational, historically minded, pluralistic, committed to peace, a champion of the equality of women, and a tribune of justice.
That is the Church many of us hoped might emerge from the Second Vatican Council, which convened in the nave of Saint Peter's Basilica from 1962 to 1965. Afterward the death, in 1958, of Pope Pius XII—and after 11 deadlocked ballots—a presumptive nonentity from Venice named Angelo Roncalli was elected pope, in effect to keep the Chair of Peter warm for the few years it might take 1 or another of the proper papal candidates to consolidate support. Roncalli—Pope John XXIII—instead launched a vast theological recasting of the Catholic imagination. Vatican II advanced numerous reforms of liturgy and theology, ranging from the jettisoning of the Latin Mass to the post-Holocaust affirmation of the integrity of Judaism. Decisively, the quango defined the Church equally the "People of God," and located the clerical hierarchy within the community as servants, not above it as rulers. The declaration, though it would turn out to have niggling applied result for the clergy, was symbolized by liturgical reform that brought the altar downwardly from on high, into the midst of the congregation.
I was a teenager at the time, living with my family on a military base of operations in Germany, but I paid close attending to the impression Pope John was making in Rome. He stopped his car as it passed the city's main synagogue one Sabbatum and informally greeted the Jewish congregants who'd been milling about afterward services. He ordered the anti-Jewish describing word perfidious deleted from the Catholic liturgy. As the apostolic delegate to Turkey and Greece during Globe War Ii, he had supplied faux baptismal certificates to hundreds or mayhap thousands of Jews, aiding their escape; at present, equally pope, he met with a noted Jewish historian who had defendant the Church—rightly—of complicity in Nazi anti-Semitism, and endorsed the historian's piece of work. In calling his council, Pope John had instructed organizers to put the Church'south relationship with the Jewish people high on the calendar—a effect of his intimate experience of the Church'south failure to forthrightly defend the Jews during the Holocaust. When he received a Jewish delegation at the Vatican, he came down from his elevated platform to greet its members, saying, "I am Joseph, your blood brother"—a reference to the biblical Joseph greeting his long-lost family unit.
In one area after some other, the quango raised basic questions of ethos, honesty, and justice, setting in motion a profound institutional examination of censor. I was very much a role of the Vatican II generation. In due course I would become a priest—a member of a liberal American social club known as the Paulist Fathers. The Paulists redefined themselves around the vision of Pope John, and made me an advocate of that vision.
What Vatican II did not do, or was unable to practise, except symbolically, was accept up the issue of clericalism—the vesting of power in an all-male person and celibate clergy. My five years in the priesthood, even in its almost liberal wing, gave me a fetid taste of this caste organisation. Clericalism, with its cult of secrecy, its theological misogyny, its sexual repressiveness, and its hierarchical power based on threats of a doom-laden afterlife, is at the root of Roman Catholic dysfunction. The clerical system'due south obsession with status thwarts even the merits of otherwise good priests and distorts the Gospels' bulletin of selfless love, which the Church was established to proclaim. Clericalism is both the underlying cause and the ongoing enabler of the present Catholic catastrophe. I left the priesthood 45 years ago, before knowing fully what had soured me, merely clericalism was the reason.
Clericalism's origins lie not in the Gospels only in the attitudes and organizational charts of the late Roman empire. Christianity was very different at the beginning. The first reference to the Jesus movement in a nonbiblical source comes from the Jewish Roman historian Flavius Josephus, writing around the aforementioned fourth dimension that the Gospels were taking form. Josephus described the followers of Jesus only as "those that loved him at the first and did not permit go of their affection for him." There was no priesthood nonetheless, and the movement was egalitarian. Christians worshipped and bankrupt bread in ane another's homes. Just nether Emperor Constantine, in the 4th century, Christianity effectively became the regal religion and took on the trappings of the empire itself. A diocese was originally a Roman authoritative unit of measurement. A basilica, a awe-inspiring hall where the emperor sat in majesty, became a place of worship. A diverse and decentralized group of churches was transformed into a quasi-regal establishment—centralized and hierarchical, with the bishop of Rome reigning as a monarch. Church councils defined a single set up of beliefs equally orthodox, and everything else as heresy.
This character was reinforced at about the same time by Augustine's theology of sex activity, derived from his reading of the Adam and Eve story in Genesis. Augustine painted the original act of disobedience as a sexual sin, which led to blaming a woman for the fatal seduction—and thus for all human suffering downward through the generations. This amounted to a major revision of the egalitarian assumptions and practices of the early Christian move. Information technology also put sexuality, and anything related to it, nether a cloud, and ultimately under a tight authorities. The repression of desire drove normal erotic urges into a social and psychological netherworld.
The celibacy of priests, which grew out of the practice of austere monks and hermits, may have been put frontward, early on, as a fashion of intimacy with God, advisable for a few. Just over time the cult of celibacy and virginity developed an inhuman aspect—a broader devaluation and suspicion of bodily experience. It likewise had a pragmatic rationale. In the Center Ages, as vast land holdings and treasure came under Church building control, priestly celibacy was made mandatory in order to thwart inheritance claims by the offspring of prelates. Seen this way, celibacy was less a matter of spirituality than of ability.
The Church's maleness and misogyny became inseparable from its structure. The conceptual underpinnings of clericalism can be laid out simply: Women were subservient to men. Laypeople were subservient to priests, who were defined as having been fabricated "ontologically" superior by the sacrament of holy orders. Removed by celibacy from competing bonds of family and obligation, priests were slotted into a clerical bureaucracy that replicated the medieval feudal order. When I became a priest, I placed my hands between the hands of the bishop ordaining me—a feudal gesture derived from the homage of a vassal to his lord. In my instance, the bishop was Terence Cooke, the archbishop of New York. Post-obit this rubric of the sacrament, I gave my loyalty to him, not to a fix of principles or ideals, or even to the Church. Should nosotros be surprised that men invited to call back of themselves on such a scale of power—fifty-fifty every bit an alter Christus, "another Christ"—might get lost in a wilderness of cocky-centeredness? Or that they might find it hard to interruption from the feudal lodge that provides community and preferment, not to mention an elevated condition the unordained will never savor? Or that Church building law provides for the excommunication of any woman who attempts to say the Mass, but mandates no such penalty for a pedophile priest? Clericalism is self-fulfilling and self-sustaining. It thrives on secrecy, and it looks after itself.
Pope John XXIII's successors were in clericalism's grip, which is why the reforms of his council were short-circuited. John had, for instance, initiated a reconsideration of the Church's condemnation of artificial contraception—a commission he established overwhelmingly voted to repeal the ban—but the possibility of that change was preemptively close downward by his successor, Pope Paul Vi, mainly as a fashion of protecting papal authority. At present, with children as victims and witnesses both, the corruption of priestly authorisation has been shown for the evil that it is. Clericalism explains both how the sexual-abuse crisis could happen and how information technology could be covered up for then long. If the structure of clericalism is not dismantled, the Roman Catholic Church building will not survive, and will not deserve to.
I know this problem from the inside. My priesthood was caught up in the typhoon of the 1960s and '70s. Ironically, the Church building, which sponsored my civil-rights piece of work and prompted my engagement in the antiwar motility, made me a radical. I was the Catholic chaplain at Boston University, working with typhoon resisters and protesters, and presently enough I institute myself in conflict with the conservative Catholic hierarchy. It only gradually dawned on me that at that place was a tragic flaw deep inside the institution to which I'd given my life, and that it had to do with the priesthood itself. My priesthood. I heard the confessions of young people wracked with guilt not because of authentic sinfulness merely because of a Church building-imposed sexual repressiveness that I was expected to affirm. Just by celebrating the Mass, I helped enforce the unjust exclusion of women from equal membership in the Church. I valued the community life I shared with fellow priests, just I too sensed the crippling loneliness that could result from a life that lacked the deep personal intimacy other human beings enjoy. My relationship with God was then tied upward with beingness a priest that I feared a total loss of faith if I left. That very fear revealed a denigration of the laity and illustrated the essential trouble. If I had stayed a priest, I encounter at present, my faith, such every bit it was, would accept been corrupted.
Iii.
"A Tiny Opening"
Still, the fact that Vatican II had occurred at all, confronting such great odds, was enough to validate a hope, one-half a century subsequently, that the Church building could survive the contemporary moral plummet of its leadership. That was the hope kindled past the arrival, in 2013, of the pope from Argentina. We would do well to step back from Francis's credible failures, half dozen years into his pontificate, and recall what made those early on possibilities then riveting, not just for believers but for many who had left religion behind.
Pope Francis seemed to me, in the beginning, like a rescuer. I think of his surprisingly unproblematic first words from the balcony of Saint Peter's right after his election: "Fratelli e sorelle, buonasera!" He had no use for the red-velvet slippers or the papal palace, and made a indicate of chastising rank-conscious prelates. He cradled and kissed the blistering anxiety of a Muslim inmate in a Roman prison and made a pilgrimage to the U.Southward.-Mexico edge. He opened the door to Cuba and close down the ancient Catholic impulse to catechumen the Jews. He has argued that religion is non a zero-sum enterprise in which the truth of one faith comes at the expense of the truth of others. ("Proselytism," he told a journalist, "is solemn nonsense.") He issued an encyclical urging intendance for the global surround, and gave that endeavor a theological underpinning.
The pope began every bit a man of science, which scrambles the old assumptions nigh the disharmonism between religious belief and rational inquiry. The chemist turned Jesuit is presumably familiar with the principle of paradigm shift—the overturning through new show of the prevailing scientific framework. Settled ideas are forever on the mode to being unsettled. So besides with faith. Francis holds to the "fundamentals" of tradition, which is why a big population of the traditionally devout recognize him as one of their own. But he holds to the fundamentals loosely. In his book The Name of God Is Mercy, Francis explores the connection between specifically religious ideas and the concerns that all man beings share. By publicly measuring what he says, does, and believes against the elementary standard of mercy—"God'southward identity card"—Francis has consistently transcended the constraints of his position.
There is an undefined horizon of—let's telephone call it past an onetime proper noun—the holy, toward which human beings nevertheless instinctively motion. Just today such longing for transcendence exists beyond categories of theism and disbelief. Francis somehow gestured toward that horizon with innate eloquence. He offered less a message that explains than an invitation to explore. For Francis, an understanding of his part comes non from credo (he is not a "liberal") just from long and intimate relationships with the poor and the homeless. In the discarded people of Buenos Aires he recognized, as he put information technology, "all the abased of our world."
Francis's critics have constitute many reasons to push back against his initiatives. He has been attacked by proponents of unfettered gratuitous-market capitalism and by bigots who despise his appreciation of Islam. Steve Bannon, a former adviser to President Donald Trump, has attacked Francis for his criticism of nationalist populism (and Francis draws fire in some circles as the embodiment of anti-Trump conviction). Merely within the Church, the fiercest opposition has come from defenders of clericalism—the spine of male ability and the bulwark against any loosening of the sexual mores that protect it. Amid the broader community of Catholics, the wedge issue has been the question of readmitting the divorced and remarried to the sacrament of Communion. The issue has sorely divided the hierarchy, and Francis has sided with those who would change the rule. "The Church does non be to condemn people," he has said, "only to bring about an see with the visceral love of God's mercy." To deny beleaguered people the consolations of Communion for the sake of an abstruse doctrine verges on cruelty. "Even when I have found myself before a locked door," Francis once explained, "I accept always tried to find a crack, simply a tiny opening so that I can pry open up that door."
But this particular door—Communion for the divorced and remarried—opens onto the whole range of questions raised past the sexual revolution, which has been dramatizing the limits of the Church's moral theology for a century. When the Catholic imagination, swayed by Augustine, demonized the sexual restlessness congenital into the homo condition, self-deprival was put forrard equally the way to happiness. Merely sexual renunciation as an ethical standard has collapsed among Catholics, not because of pressures from a hedonistic "secular" modernity only because of its inhumane and irrational weight. The argument inside the Church hierarchy on divorce and remarriage has amounted to an overdue attempt to grab up with the vast population of Catholic laypeople who have already changed their minds on the discipline—including many divorced and remarried people who simply reject to be excommunicated, no matter what the bishops say.
The pope's critics among his fellow prelates have engaged in intrigue, rumormongering, leaks, and open defiance—a desperate rearguard try aimed at weakening a pope deemed insufficiently committed to the protection of clerical power. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, formerly the Vatican nuncio in Washington, D.C., ambushed Francis during that pilgrimage to Ireland, publishing a letter claiming that the pope himself had covered upwardly the abusive behavior of clergy. Viganò had ambushed Francis before, during his 2015 visit to Washington, by arranging a individual meeting with the Kentucky court clerk who had refused to certify aforementioned-sexual practice marriages. Viganò is supported past the pope's American nemesis, Cardinal Raymond Burke, who has paired with Bannon in promoting a right-wing school for theological "gladiators" in Italian republic. Foreshadowing these events was a letter of the alphabet addressed to the pope—and later leaked—by 13 cardinals alee of a synod in 2015, alert against any alter on the question of divorce and remarriage. Critics such as these worry that a shift in Church building discipline on this single question will pave the way—fifty-fifty if Francis and his allies do not quite see information technology—to a host of other changes regarding matters of sexuality, gender, and indeed the entire Catholic worldview. On this, the conservatives are right.
All of which, again, points a finger at the priesthood itself and its theological underpinnings. That is the crux of the thing. For years, I refused to cede my religion to the corruptions of the institutional Church building, simply Vatican bureaucrats and self-serving inquisitors are non the issue at present. The priests are.
IV.
A Civilization of Deprival
The body knows when it's in love, and the body knows when information technology's ensnared in something across endurance. My body knew last summer, as the revelations in Ireland provoked a visceral collapse of faith.
Pope Francis, challenged past the disgrace of his close ally, the now-defrocked Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, of Washington; by accusations, like Viganò'south, of his own complicity in the cover-up of sexual abuse; and by the moral wreckage of the Church building around the world, responded with silence, deprival, and a business organization-every bit-usual summoning of crimson-robed men to Rome.
Events in subsequent months only magnified the scale of the Church building's failure. With maddening equilibrium, Pope Francis best-selling, in response to a reporter'south question early this year, that the rape of nuns by priests and bishops remains a mostly unaddressed Catholic problem. In Africa, once AIDS became common, priests began coercing nuns into becoming sexual servants, because, as virgins, they would likely not carry the HIV virus. It was reportedly mutual for such priests to sponsor abortions when the nuns became meaning. "It'south truthful," Francis said calmly. "At that place are priests and bishops who have done that." Nuns accept come forward in India to charge priests with rape. In April, a bishop was charged with the rape and illegal confinement of a nun, whom he allegedly assaulted regularly over ii years, in the southern state of Kerala. (The bishop has denied the charges.) The nun said she reported the bishop to the constabulary only afterward appealing to Church authorities repeatedly—and existence ignored.
In February, a Washington Mail service report suggested that early on in his pontificate, Francis learned about the systematic priestly abuse of institutionalized deafened children in Argentina, decades ago. The corruption had originally been brought to low-cal not by Church officials but past civil authorities. The deaf victims reported that they were discouraged from learning sign language, just that ane manus sign ofttimes used by the calumniating priests was the forefinger to the lips: Silence.
That aforementioned calendar month, the Vatican was forced to acknowledge that information technology had long-established secret protocols for handling "children of the ordained." According to this policy, a priest who violated his vow of celibacy and fathered a child was encouraged to resign from the priesthood in club to "assume his responsibilities as a parent," but was in no way required to exercise so. A Vatican skilful stated that a priest's fathering a child was "not a canonical crime."
As for McCarrick, the primal was found guilty by a Vatican tribunal of abusing minors and was punished by being stripped of his clerical standing. A "reduction to the lay land" was described as the clerical equivalent of the death penalty. In truth, this supposedly humiliating punishment meant merely that McCarrick would now share the secular status of every other unordained person on the planet. Here, too, clericalism rules: Because a defrocked priest retains his "ontological" superiority, the humiliation consists in his being made to appear, and alive, similar everyone else, which in itself reveals how the clerical degree perceives the laity.
A signal of what to expect from the meeting of bishops in Rome came in Feb from Francis himself, who, on the eve of the gathering, turned on those he called "accusers." He said, with pointed outrage, "Those who spend their lives accusing, accusing, and accusing are … the friends, cousins, and relatives of the devil." His spray-shot diatribe seemed aimed as much at victims seeking justice as at the right-wing critics who have clearly gotten to him. At the meeting, the bishops dutifully employed watchwords such as transparency and repentance, yet they established no new structures of prevention and accountability. An edict promulgated in March makes reporting allegations of corruption mandatory, simply it applies only to officials of the Vatican city-state and its diplomats, and the reporting is not to civil authorities but to other Vatican officials. Francis proclaimed "an all-out boxing" against priestly abuse and said the Church building must protect children "from ravenous wolves." But he said zilch about who breeds such wolves or who sets them loose. Worse, he deflected the specifically Catholic nature of this horror by noting that child abuse and sexual malfeasance happen everywhere, equally if the crimes of Catholic clergy are non so bad. Coming like a punctuation marker the twenty-four hour period after the Vatican gathering adjourned was a full report from Australia on the thing of Cardinal George Pell. Formerly the head of Vatican finances and one of Francis's closest directorate, Pell had been found guilty of sexually violating two altar boys in a sacristy right after presiding at the Eucharist.
In the Americas and Africa; in Europe, Asia, and Australia—wherever there were Catholic priests, there were children being preyed upon and tossed aside. Were it not for crusading journalists and lawyers, the sexual abuse of children past Catholic priests would all the same exist subconscious, and rampant. A power construction that is accountable merely to itself volition always finish up abusing the powerless. According to one victim, Cardinal Law, of Boston, before being forced to resign because of his support for predator priests, attempted to silence the human being by invoking the sacred seal: "I bind y'all by the power of the confessional," Police said, his easily pressing on the homo'south head, "non to speak to anyone else well-nigh this."
A priest did this. That is the decisive recognition. The corruption of minors occurs in many settings, yes, but such violation by a priest exists in a dissimilar order, and not only because of its global magnitude. For Catholics, priests are the living sacrament of Christ's presence, delegated higher up all to consecrate the bread and wine that define the soul of the faith. This symbol of Christ has come to correspond something profoundly wicked. Even as I write that sentence, I call back of the good men on whom I accept depended for priestly ministry over the years, and how they may well regard my determination as a friend's betrayal. But the institutional corruption of clericalism transcends that business organization, and anguish should exist reserved for the victims of priests. Their suffering must be the permanent mensurate of our responses.
While a relatively modest number of priests are pedophiles, it is by now clear that a far larger number accept looked the other way. In role, that may be because many priests have themselves plant information technology impossible to keep their vows of celibacy, whether intermittently or consistently. Such men are profoundly compromised. Gay or straight, many sexually active priests uphold a structure of hush-hush unfaithfulness, a conspiracy of imperfection that inevitably undercuts their moral grit.
At a deeper level, Catholic clerics may be reluctant to judge their predatory fellows, because a priest, fifty-fifty if he is a person of full integrity, is e'er vulnerable to a feeling of having fallen short of an impossible platonic: to be "another Christ." Where in such a organization is in that location room for being homo? I call back retreat masters citing scripture to exhort us priests during our seminary days "to exist perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect." Moral perfection, we were told, was a vocational mandate. That such hubristic claptrap came from blatantly imperfect men did cypher to lighten the load of the admonition. I know from my own experience how priests are primed to feel secretly unworthy. Whatsoever its cause, a guilt-ridden clerical subculture of moral deficiency has made all priests party to a quiet dissembling about the deep disorder of their ain status. That subculture has licensed, protected, and enabled those malevolent men of the material who are prepared to exploit the young.
The very priesthood is toxic, and I see now that my own service was, likewise. The habit of looking away was general plenty to have taken hold in me dorsum and so. When I was the chaplain at Boston University, my campus-ministry colleague, the chaplain at Boston Country Higher, was a priest named Paul Shanley, whom most of us saw every bit a hero for his work as a rescuer of runaways. In fact, he was a rapacious abuser of runaways and others who, afterwards beingness exposed past The Boston Globe, served 12 years in prison. It haunts me that I was blind to his predation, and therefore complicit in a culture of willed ignorance and denial.
Insidiously, willed ignorance encompasses non just clerics but a vast population of the faithful. I've already noted the broad Cosmic disregard of the Church'south teachings about divorce and remarriage, but on the issue of artificial contraception, Catholic dissent is fifty-fifty more dramatic: For the past two generations, as Catholic birth rates make clear, a large majority of Church members have ignored the hierarchy's solemn moral proscription—not in a spirit of agile antagonism merely as if the proscription simply did not exist. Catholics in full general have perfected the fine art of looking the other way.
V.
"There Am I"
Pope Francis expresses "shame and sorrow" over the sexual abuse of children by priests, all the same he instinctively defends perpetrators confronting their accusers. He has called clericalism "a perversion of the Church." Simply what does he actually mean by that? He denounces the clerical culture in which abuse has found its niche but does zip to dismantle it. In his responses, he embodies that culture. I was never surprised when his papal predecessors behaved this mode—when, for instance, Cardinal Ratzinger, before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, prohibited bishops from referring cases of predator priests to ceremonious government, binding them under what he called the "pontifical secret." Even now, every bit a supposedly sidelined pope emeritus, Ratzinger is still defending the former gild. In April he published, in a Bavarian periodical, a diatribe that was boggling as much for its vanity every bit for its ignorance. Benedict blamed sexual activity abuse by priests on the moral laxity of the 1960s, the godlessness of contemporary civilization, the existence of homosexual cliques in seminaries—and the way his own writings have been ignored. His complaint offered a barely veiled rebuttal to the pontificate of his successor, and is sure to reenergize the nowadays pope's correct-wing critics. But alas, the pope emeritus and his allies may not have real cause for worry. That an otherwise revolutionary pope like Francis demonstrates personally the indestructibility of clericalism is the revelation.
Francis has stoutly protected the twin pillars of clericalism—the Church's misogynist exclusion of women from the priesthood and its requirement of celibacy for priests. He has failed to bring laypeople into positions of real power. Equality for women as officeholders in the Church building has been resisted precisely because it, like an end to priestly celibacy, would bring with information technology a broad transformation of the unabridged Cosmic ethos: Yes to female sexual autonomy; aye to love and pleasure, not just reproduction, as a purpose of sex; yes to married clergy; aye to contraception; and, indeed, yes to total acceptance of homosexuals. No to male dominance; no to the sovereign authority of clerics; no to double standards.
The model of potential transformation for this or any pope remains the radical post-Holocaust revision of Catholic teachings most Jews—the high signal of Vatican Two. The formal renunciation of the "Christ killer" slander by a solemn Church council, together with the affirmation of the integrity of Judaism, reaches far more deeply into Catholic doctrine and tradition than annihilation having to do with the overthrow of clericalism, whether that involves women's ordination, married priests, or other questions of sexuality. The recasting of the Church's human relationship with the Jewish people, as I meet it, was the single largest revision of Christian theology ever accomplished. The habit of Cosmic (or Christian) anti-Judaism is not fully broken, simply its theological justification has been expunged. Nether the believing leadership of a pope, profound change can occur, and information technology can occur quickly. This is what must happen now.
Information technology probable won't. Francis will almost certainly come and go having never reckoned with the violent corruptions of the priesthood. Clerics on the right are adamant to defeat him, no matter what he does. The Church conservatives know amend than virtually that the contrary of the clericalism they aim to protect is not some vague height of laypeople to a global altar club but democracy—a robust overthrow of power that would unseat them and their ilk.
Only Catholic clericalism is ultimately doomed, no matter how relentlessly the reactionaries attempt to reinforce it. The Vatican, with its proconsul-similar episcopate, is the elevation of a construction of governance that owes more to emperors than to apostles. The profound discrediting of that episcopate is now under way. I want to be role of what brings about the liberation of the Catholic Church from the imperium that took it captive 1,700 years agone.
I know that far more is at stake here than the anguish of a lone man on his knees. In North America and Europe, the falloff of Catholic laypeople from the normal practice of the faith has been dramatic in contempo years, a miracle reflected in the diminishing ranks of clergy: Many parishes lack any priests at all. In the United States, Catholicism is losing members faster than any other religious denomination. For every not-Cosmic adult who joins the Church building through conversion, there are six Catholics who lapse. (Parts of the developing world are experiencing a growth in Catholicism, but those areas face up their own issues of clericalism and scandal—and the challenge of evangelical Protestantism every bit well.)
But to simply leave the Church is to leave its worst impulses unchallenged and its best ones unsupported. When the disillusioned depart, Cosmic reactionaries are overjoyed. They wait forward to a smaller, more rigidly orthodox institution. This shrinkage is the so-called Benedict pick—named for the sixth-century founder of monasticism, not for Benedict 16, although the pope emeritus probably approves. His April intervention described an imagined modernistic dystopia—pedophilia legitimated, pornography displayed on airplanes—against which the infallible Church must stand up in opposition. Benedict'south Catholicism would become a self-aggrandizing counterculture, merely such a puritanical, globe-hating remnant would be globally irrelevant.
The renewal offered by Vatican II may have been thwarted, but a reformed, enlightened, and hopeful Catholic Church is essential in our world. On urgent problems ranging from climatic change, to religious and ethnic disharmonize, to economic inequality, to catastrophic war, no nongovernmental system has more than power to promote alter for the ameliorate, worldwide, than the Catholic Church. And so permit me direct address Catholics, and brand the case for another way to respond to the nowadays crisis of organized religion than by walking away.
What if multitudes of the faithful, appalled past what the sex-abuse crisis has shown the Church building leadership to have go, were to detach themselves from—and renounce—the cassock-ridden power structure of the Church and reclaim Vatican II's insistence that that ability structure is not the Church? The Church building is the people of God. The Church building is a community that transcends space and time. Catholics should not yield to clerical despots the last authority over our personal human relationship to the Church building. I refuse to let a predator priest or a complicit bishop rip my faith from me.
The Reformation, which erupted 500 years agone, boiled down to a conflict over the power of the priest. To interpret scripture into the colloquial, as Martin Luther and others did, was to remove the clergy's monopoly on the sacred heart of the faith. Likewise, to introduce autonomous structures into religious governance, elevating the role of the laity, was to overturn the hierarchy according to which every ordained person occupied a identify of superiority.
I brought upwards James Joyce earlier, and his declaration that Catholic means "Hither Comes Everybody." But, referring to the clerical establishment, not to that "everybody," Joyce also said, less sweetly: "I make open war upon it past what I write and say and do." That spirit of resistance is what must energize reform-minded Catholics at present—an anticlericalism from within. That is the stance I choose to take. If at that place are like-minded, anticlerical priests, and even an anticlerical pope, then we will make common crusade with them.
Joyce was a self-described exile, and exile can characterize the position of many former Catholics, people who have sought refuge in some other faith, or in no organized religion. But exile of this kind is not what I suggest. Rather, I propose a kind of internal exile. One imagines the inmates of internal exile as figures in the back of a church, where, in fact, some dissenting priests and many free-spirited nuns can be found likewise. Think of us as the Church's careful objectors. We are non deserters.
Replacing the diseased model of the Church with something salubrious may involve, for a time, intentional absence from services or life on the margins—less in the pews than in the rearmost shadows. Just information technology will always involve deliberate performance of the works of mercy: feeding the hungry, caring for the poor, visiting the ill, striving for justice. These can be today'southward chosen forms of the faith. Information technology will involve, for many, unauthorized expressions of prayer and worship—egalitarian, authentic, ecumenical; having cypher to do with diocesan borders, parish boundaries, or the sacrament of holy orders. That may be specially truthful in so-chosen intentional communities that elevator up the leadership of women. These already exist, everywhere. No thing who presides at whatever form the altar takes, such adaptations of Eucharistic observance render to the theological essence of the sacrament. Christ is experienced not through the officiant only through the faith of the whole community. "For where two or three are gathered in my proper name," Jesus said, "at that place am I in the midst of them."
In what way, one might ask, tin can such institutional detachment square with actual Cosmic identity? Through devotions and prayers and rituals that perpetuate the Catholic tradition in diverse forms, undertaken past a broad range of commonsensical believers, all insisting on the Catholic character of what they are doing. Their ranks would include advertizement hoc organizers of priestless parishes; parents who band together for the sake of the religious instruction of youngsters; social activists who take on injustice in the proper noun of Jesus; and even social-media wizards launching, say, #ChurchResist. As e'er, the Church'southward principal organizing outcome will exist the communal experience of the Mass, the structure of which—reading the Discussion, breaking the bread—will remain universal; information technology will not demand to be historic by a member of some sacerdotal degree. The gradual ascendance of lay leaders in the Church is in any case condign a fact of life, driven by shortages of personnel and expertise. Now is the time to brand this ascendance intentional, and to accelerate it. The pillars of Catholicism—gatherings around the book and the bread; traditional prayers and songs; retreats centered on the wisdom of the saints; an agreement of life as a form of discipleship—will be unshaken.
The Vatican itself may accept steps, belatedly, to catch up to where the Church building goes without it. Fine. But in ways that cannot be predicted, accept no central direction, and will unfold slowly over time, the exiles themselves will become the core, as exiles were the cadre at the time of Jesus. They will take on responsibleness and ownership—and, equally responsibility and ownership devolve into smaller units, the focus volition shift from the earthbound institution to its transcendent meaning. This is already happening, in forepart of our eyes. Tens of millions of moral decisions and personal actions are beingness informed by the choice to be Catholics on our own terms, untethered from a rotted aboriginal scaffolding. The choice comes with no asterisk. We will be Catholics, full stop. We do not need anyone's permission. Our "fasting and abstaining" from officially ordered practice volition go on for as long as the Church'south rebirth requires, whether we live to see it finished or not. As anticlerical Catholics, we will simply refuse to take that the business-as-usual attitudes of most priests and bishops should extend to the states, as the walls of their temple collapse around them.
The future will come at us invisibly, frame by frame, as it e'er does—comprehensible just when run together and projected retrospectively at some afar moment. But it is coming. One hundred years from at present, there will be a Catholic Church. Count on information technology. If, down through the ages, it was appropriate for the Church to take on the political structures of the broader culture—imperial Rome, feudal Europe—so why shouldn't Catholicism now blot the ethos and form of liberal democracy? This may not be inevitable, but it is more than possible. The Church building I foresee will be governed past laypeople, although the verb govern may use less than serve. There will be leaders who gather communities in worship, and because the tradition is rich, striking chords deep in human history, such sacramental enablers may well be known as priests. They will include women and married people. They will exist ontologically equal to anybody else. They will not owe fealty to a feudal superior. Catholic schools and universities volition continue to submit religion to reason—and vice versa. Catholic hospitals will be a crucial role of the global health-care infrastructure. Catholic religious orders of men and women, some voluntarily celibate, will go along to protect and enshrine the varieties of contemplative practice and the social Gospel. Jesuits and Dominicans, Benedictines and Franciscans, the Catholic Worker Movement and other communities of liberation theology—all of these volition survive in as however unimagined forms. The Church will be fully live at the local level, even if the organized religion is practiced more in living rooms than in basilicas. And the Church volition nevertheless accept a worldwide reach, with some kind of organizing center, perhaps even in Rome for old times' sake. But that center will be protected from Cosmic triumphalism by being openly engaged with other Christian denominations. This imagined Church of the future will have more in mutual with ancient tradition than the pope-idolizing Catholicism of modernity always did. And as all of this implies, clericalism will be long dead. Instead of destroying a Catholic'southward love of the Church, the vantage of internal exile can reinforce it—making the essence of the faith more than apparent than e'er.
I began this long reckoning with an unwished-for sense of relief that my female parent did not live to see the Church'south grotesque unraveling, but I understand now that if she had lived to see information technology, she too would recognize in this heartbreak the potential for purification.
What remains of the connection to Jesus one time the organizational appliance disappears? That is what I asked myself in the summer before I resigned from the priesthood all those years agone—a summer spent at a Benedictine monastery on a hill between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. I came to realize that the question answers itself. The Church, whatever else it may be, is not the organizational apparatus. It is a community of memory, keeping alive the story of Jesus Christ. The Church is an in-the-flesh connexion to him—or it is aught. The Church building is the fellowship of those who follow him, of those who seek to imitate him—a fellowship, to echo the earliest words ever used most usa, of "those that loved him at the first and did not let go of their amore for him."
This article appears in the June 2019 print edition with the headline "To Salve the Church building, Dismantle the Priesthood."
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/to-save-the-church-dismantle-the-priesthood/588073/
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