If you have followed the latest news, you might think that the Catholic Church has just made changes to “equate” the the sexual abuse of children with ordaining women as priests.

That’s what the New York Times told us over a week ago:

VATICAN CITY – The Vatican issued revisions to its internal laws on Thursday making it easier to discipline sex-abuser priests, but caused confusion by also stating that ordaining women as priests was as grave an offense as pedophilia.

The decision to link the issues appears to reflect the determination of embattled Vatican leaders to resist any suggestion that pedophilia within the priesthood can be addressed by ending the celibacy requirement or by allowing women to become priests.

Naturally, if you take this report at face value, as I did and many others have, including some on Tikkun Daily, you would think that the Church must be run by people who are either overtly evil or mentally ill. So I started looking into this episode. The more I looked, the more complicated it became.

Protest against sexual abuse of children by priests (flickr.cc/Steve Rhodes)

After investigating it this week, as a veteran journalist and a Catholic, I think I found the real culprit in this story. The real culprit is a spiritual virus of our times: the partial truth.

The partial truth has two lives. In its first life, it is a partial lie. It creates a false frame for the debate, makes moralistic dichotomies and leads to simplistic, destructive decisions. In its second life, it also contains some truth. The truthful side of a partial truth needs to be confronted honestly in its true depth so that understanding can develop and real solutions sought. But the lying quality of the partial truth has so confused and distorted the debate that an honest search for a solution has become all the more difficult and even derailed.

The difference between the two is spiritual. The lying side of a partial truth demonizes, condemns the Other, seduces us into feelings of moral superiority and incites us to destroy. The truthful side of a partial truth comes from compassion and understanding. It leads us to grieve while we seek justice and to move forward into a new, healed reality.

In what follows, I hope to put this incident under a spiritual magnifying glass and show the difference between the two, although it may sound, at this stage of the abuse crisis, like heresy. In Part I, we will look at the false side of the partial truth that distorts our understanding of the crisis. In Part II, we will look at the true side, the side that does reflect a genuine spiritual crisis within the Catholic Church.

At the outset, it’s important to recognize that we are shifting the examination away from the level of practical day-to-day events to the level of the meaning of these events. It’s easy to think this evades the actions necessary for responding to a social pathology as horrific as the sexual abuse of children by priests. But in my opinion, the source of the practical actions lies in this invisible realm of meaning.

Before we act, we usually draw conclusions about what an event means, perhaps even unconsciously. This conclusion then points us in the direction of action. If we find the meaning of the event is different than what we think, we may find we’ve been feverishly working in the wrong direction, looking for answers to the wrong questions.

That’s why the meaning-level of events is so important to examine first. To begin this with the recent episodes, one place to begin is with looking again at the lead of that New York Times’ story of July 15:

VATICAN CITY – The Vatican issued revisions to its internal laws on Thursday making it easier to discipline sex-abuser priests, but caused confusion by also stating that ordaining women as priests was as grave an offense as pedophilia.

The decision to link the issues appears to reflect the determination of embattled Vatican leaders to resist any suggestion that pedophilia within the priesthood can be addressed by ending the celibacy requirement or by allowing women to become priests.

View of the Vatican, Italy (flickr.com/cc/www.juanrubiano.com)

At first, it’s impossible to see what’s wrong — unless you read the original documents more closely. It is true that the Vatican issued new procedural rules that shift a group of violations that it calls “crimes against the faith” into the jurisdiction of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith so they can be decided more quickly.

Among these new violations: sexual abuse, ordaining women, defending heresies that distort Church teachings, provoking schisms, apostasy in rejecting the Church entirely, recording and broadcasting confessions that go on between priest and penitent.

Called “norms,” these new guidelines are something like Congress deciding that any legislation on a range of subjects will now be fast-tracked and bypass some of the usual procedural machinery.

In his report in the National Catholic Reporter, John Allen tried to make the distinctions clear.

Unrelated to the sexual abuse crisis, the revisions also add several other offenses to the list of “grave crimes” subject to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (and thus to the expedited penalties the congregation can hand out). They include crimes against the faith, such as heresy, apostasy and schism; recording or broadcast of the sacrament of confession; and the attempted ordination of women.

The last point ratifies a December 2007 decree from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which stipulated that anyone attempting to ordain a woman, as well as women who claim ordination, are subject to excommunication. That decree appeared in the wake of several events around the world in which organizers claimed to ordain women priests in defiance of church authorities.

Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, a guest blogger at the Washington Post, also had a clear explanation of the facts:

At a Vatican briefing this morning, Maltese Monsignor Charles Scicluna, an official at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, denied that the Vatican equates women’s ordination with the sexual abuse of children. An illicit ordination, Scicluna said, is a “”sacramental” crime, while abuse is a “moral” crime.

Like many modern states, and like other Christian churches and denominations, the Catholic Church has a variety of tribunals or courts for dealing with all sorts of cases and persons. A court can simultaneously deal with crimes involving different degrees of moral wrongdoing. Courts in the United States hear cases about crimes ranging from peddling without a license to murder. The fact that a court deals with various crimes does not imply that every crime they handle is equally grave, shocking, or scandalous.

Similarly, no one in the Vatican is saying that the attempted ordination of women does the same kind of damage as the horrific harm sexual abuse inflicts on a minor or a person who is vulnerable.

The problem with the New York Times report, and the dozens of repetitions of it in media around the country, is that the Times reporter subtly combined fact with deduction and presented the composite as fact. It is incorrect, strictly speaking, to say the Vatican “stated” that it is now treating the ordination of women on a par with the abuse children. One might decide that is what the procedural shift means. After all, in the world of business, one of the best signs that a corporation is in a financial crisis is that it makes procedural changes in its accounting methods.

But there is a difference between the facts of what has happened and deductions from the facts. In the second sentence, the reporter does the same thing in bolder fashion. She makes a sweeping statement that purports to explain what she calls “the decision to link the issues.” Again, she is confusing her own deduction with the actual facts, presenting her thought as if it was the fact.

Although this might appear to be Jesuitical hair-splitting, this process of looking for these subtle conflations is very interesting, because they reveal what we might call the “meta-story.” During my many years in the corporate media, I learned that the popular press operates on a set of ongoing culturally popular assumptions about what is true and what is not.

These meta-stories use popular assumptions of the moment to construct a theological background to see the meaning of the events in the foreground. But they often rely on slippery partial truths, not entirely wrong, but highly simplistic, morally black and white, melodramatic and rarely stated in writing. They suppress nuance, paradox and moral complexities. They are the frame within which you see the picture, but like the frame, they are not intended to be noticed.

What also goes unnoticed is the subtle but corrosive spiritual impact that they have on the readers. They can easily stir up harsh judgments in the heart and turn people away from deeper understanding and compassion.

Look back on old newspapers, and the meta-stories are much more obvious. In World War II, the war mentality made it acceptable to refer to Japanese as “Japs,” and during the Cold War, to call both the Russians and Chinese the “Reds.”

You may have noticed how the meta-story about a new president shifts in an entirely predictable way over time. At first the new president is a hero, then there are “questions about his political abilities” and finally, he “can’t do anything right.”

The same thing has happened obviously with the Middle East. In the 1960s, it was the “good, moral and embattled Israel” fighting the “terrorist Palestinians of the PLO;” now it’s the “colonizing oppressive Israel” tyrannizing the “poor, suffering embattled Palestinians.” In the 1960s, no one mentioned the massacre in Deir Yassin, just as the fact that Hamas has fired thousands of rockets into Israel from Gaza does not fit into the conventional meta-story.

In this way, the meta-story forces complex facts into the simple frame in a predictable way, like a Procrustean bed. It highlights the facts that fit and cuts out facts that don’t. Anyone who has tried to talk to a mainstream reporter about something that does not fit the meta-story of the moment knows what it is like to hit a blank wall of incomprehension.

Visitors to the Vatican Museum on spiral staircase (flickr.com/cc/giorgos)

In the New York Times report on the Vatican, the reporter could only think what she thought and write what she wrote because she was operating within a current meta-story that the “Catholic Church is a crazy mess and morally suspect.” She could not conflate the facts with her deductions in the way she did, and her editors would not have accepted her story, if it did not fit the current cultural accepted groove. When the meta-story changes, you’ll see facts conflated with a different set of deductions to fit the new groove.

Once the meta-story takes shape, much of the analysis stays within this frame, perhaps without even knowing it. Even the thoughtful responses, such as this from Mary E. Hunt, a feminist theologian writing on Religion Dispatches, accepted the popular frame.

It’s hard to see past the PR aspect of this to the theological. Mixing the two issues, even under the same legal umbrella, is a profoundly perverse proposition. Either these gentlemen are more ethically tone deaf than one can imagine, or they are sly beyond the dreams of foxes in an effort to redirect attention from the criminal behavior of clergy against children to their wrath over the ordination of women. Neither option is terribly appealing.

Here at Tikkun Daily, Amanda Udis-Kesssler discusses a “pro-lives ethic” as a solution to the crisis, an interesting and worthwhile thought, but she also accepts the conventional frame as a starting point. She writes:

As part of its announcement about new laws disciplining child-abuser priests, the Vatican revealed yesterday that it would treat child abuse by priests and the ordination of women to the priesthood as equally grievous offenses against the Catholic Church. Also included in the list of offenses at this level, by the way, are heresy, apostasy and schism.

Many of the responses to these writers have been much less reasonable. After Fr.Zuhlsdorf’s blog in the Washington Post, there was a deluge of screaming and yelling in the public comments about “this disgusting antique religion”, “anti-church/religion liberals,” “utter nonsense”, “a worldwide cabal of priests,” “oh-poor-us-you-bigoted-Catholic bashers” etc. And then comments like: “Do you hate the NFL? Do you insist they use female players?” and “Christianity is based on proven myths, (many of them plagiarized from other tribes) of a tiny Semitic tribe” and of course, the traditional accusation that “the catholic church is very anti-Christ.”

In such comments, instead of an honest discussion of the issues, we get a drunken barroom shouting match. People yell at each other, drunk with rage, drunk with self-righteousness, drunk from demonizing someone or something else as the “Other.”

If these blog comments look extreme, I invite you to look at your own emotional and spiritual journey while experiencing this tempest. For myself, I was at first shocked and outraged at the Catholic Church when I read the New York Times, then full of shame and anger for the Church when I read the attacks online, aware that some were justified.

As I looked into the issue more deeply, I became disgusted and bemused by the distortions and simplifications. In the end, where did this whole emotional journey get me? I was emotionally drained, more passive, less willing to see any hope for change except to tear down this “wicked Babylon”, this “Other,” in this case, the Catholic Church.

Did this happen to you? When you read the news, do you go through a roller-coaster of anger, condemnation, judgment and end up feeling somewhat self-righteous about your own points of view? Are you led to hate and want vengeance? Or does it feel good in some secret way to be so right and know the “Others” are so wrong?

Where does this emotional binge get us? Does all the anger and blame help move us toward a spiritually healthy form of justice? Or does it invite us to mistake vengeance for justice? Have we lost an understanding of the difference? Could we recognize a lynch-mob mentality when we are a part of it?

Or at the other extreme, has all the emotion left us empty and depressed? Do we wind up doubting the value of action, thinking nothing will ever change, that the world is hopelessly evil?

If so, then something has gone wrong. And it’s no accident. There is a clear and predictable process at work, like cancer. These distorted meta-stories are the natural product of the commerciality of the mass media. They are easy to read. In a black-and-white melodrama, the world becomes understandable. You quickly see who is right and who is wrong. You’re glad you’re not one of “them.”

It’s easy to think “How stupid can they be!” You get a quick shot of self-righteousness and twinge of superiority – like the false energy of sugar. In fact, I knew an editor once who referred to the stories in his magazine as “candy for the mind.”

The next day, the news presents a new morality play, a new episode in the meta-story, and we get another shot of judgment and self-righteousness. So we keep coming back – and getting exposed to the sponsors of this news, the advertisers. It’s another chance to notice the ads, be tempted by the products and stay within the commercial loop of consumerism.

Wait! you might think. Are you telling me that the whole problem with the Catholic Church comes from the distortions of a commercial news media? Are you trying to excuse this entrenched criminality of abusive priests and the institutions that protected them? Or that something isn’t wrong with a Church that denies women a role as priests? Are you saying there isn’t really a crisis in the Catholic Church and it’s all in our mind?

No, of course not.

In Part II of examining this crisis, we turn to the truthful side of a partial truth.