Many years ago, when I was struggling to understand the smoke-and-mirrors world of corporate journalism, a Washington, D.C., veteran passed on to me a bit of wisdom:

When I was a reporter, an old PR pro once told me something. He said ‘You come to the press conferences and you listen, and the first mistake you make is that you think we’re lying. You discover we’re not lying. Then you make a greater mistake. You think we’re telling the truth.’ (1)

In Part I of examining the Catholic Crisis, I tried to point out the problem with this greater mistake. We examined the falsity within the partial truths of the meta-stories in pop culture, these simplistic, black-and-white constructs that make the world safe and understandable. We picked apart the assumptions blended with facts in one of last week’s news story that made it seem the Vatican thinks the ordaining of women is as bad as priests who sexually abuse children.

Now, we turn to a more difficult side of the partial truth: the way in which it is true. The truth within the partial truth poses a challenge to human understanding, because it is so difficult to face that our mind wants nothing more than to jump to quick and easy explanations, to construct meta-stories of some kind. But if we do this, we avoid the paradox that can, with struggle, force us to mature.

To see how this works, we can leave the constructed stories of the pop media and look directly at two events:

The first is the case of Fr. Roy Bourgeois:

Fr. Roy Bourgeois leads a SOAW protest at Fort Benning. (flickr.com/cc)

On August 9, 2008, Fr. Roy Bourgeois, one of the best known Catholic activists for social justice, attended and delivered the homily at the ordination of Janice Sevre-Duszynska as a Catholic priest in a ceremony held by Roman Catholic women trying to change the Church.

It took his Maryknoll religious order nine days to request and hold a meeting with him to investigate his actions. Within ten weeks, the Vatican had issued a letter threatening excommunication if he didn’t recant. On December 10, 2008, four months after the event, the Vatican excommunicated him and ended his 36-year career as a Maryknoll priest.

In so doing, the Roman leadership rejected a priest who has led one of the most important witnesses to Catholic Christian values in opposition to U.S. militarism. Since 1990, Fr. Roy has developed an annual vigil for the victims of U.S.-trained counterinsurgency campaigns in Central and Latin America at the gates of the army base where the military forces were trained.

Anti-militarism and murder protest at School of the Americas. (crazbabe21/flickr/cc)

Each November, this School of Americas Watch protest has grown to attract 10,000 to 15,000, including college and high school students, in what I think is the largest and most successful, sustained anti-militarism protest in the U.S. It took only four months for the Church leadership to cast out Fr. Roy and marginalize all his efforts for social justice.

The second: the case of Stephen Kiesle.

In 1981, Kiesle, a priest in the Diocese of Oakland, asked for permission to leave the priesthood. His request came three years after he had been arrested for molesting children at the parish where he was serving. He had been convicted of tying up and molesting two boys, aged 11 and 12 years old and had finished serving three years’ probation.

In early 1982, Oakland Bishop John Cummins sent the request to the Vatican to approve Kiesle’s request to leave the priesthood. No response. Cummins sent two more letters. No response. He spoke with Vatican officials directly during a visit. The response: The paperwork had been lost, please send again.

Pope Benedict XVI celebrates mass in Lisbon, Portugal, in May. (flickr.com/cc/M.Mazur/www.thepapalvisit.org.uk)

In 1985, four years after Kiesle’s request, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger wrote back to ask Cummins to “consider the good of the Universal Church together with that of the petitioner (Kiesle).” Cardinal Ratzinger wrote that the case needed “very careful consideration” and “a longer period of time” since Kiesle was still young. It wasn’t until 1987 that the Vatican finally defrocked Kiesle.

This didn’t do much good. By then, Kiesle had become a youth minister at another church where he abused more children before he left in 1988. No longer a priest, he molested two girls in his mobile home in 1995 and was sentenced to six years in state prison in 2004. During his 15 years as a priest, Kiesle had molested at least 15 children. From his initial request to his defrocking, the Vatican took six years to act.

Four months vs. six years.

What in heaven’s name is going on? What does this mean?

At this point, the cultural meta-story becomes tempting. Maybe the New York Times report didn’t go far enough. Perhaps the Catholic hierarchy sees ordaining women as worse than sexual abuse. Maybe it is true that “the Catholic Church is a crazy mess” and it is run by rigid European men, “bitter old queens” as one blog put it, as a kind of religious Mafia, as another said.

We might conclude that Catholics, like myself, have been badly misled, our credulity manipulated by the clever seductions of con men. Perhaps this idea of being “a faithful Catholic” is nothing but a slogan, a way of belonging. Could it be that 1.2 billion people are caught up in a global trance, terrified by visions of hell deliberately conjured up to turn them into sheep?

Perhaps you might even agree with some of this.

Yet deep inside, something feels amiss. A slight twinge, an intuition tells me that this meta-story is not what it seems, that it is hiding an ulterior motive. What is this? I’m not sure, at least not yet.

Priest holds up Eucharist during Mass at Iglesia de San Nicolas, Pamplona, Spain (flickr.com/cc)

Something is amiss because I have my interior experience that I cannot deny. In the Catholic Church, I encounter something large, invisible and magnificent. It comes through the Mass, the prayers and most of all, that moment when I take the Eucharist, the body and blood, and I feel my body absorb it like a flower feeling the flush of fertilizer.

I also see the exterior evidence of the Church’s witness in the world, the way it has been a “light unto the nations.” It has taken, at times, courageous and counter-cultural stands against profit-driven global capitalism, against American militarism in Iraq, against the ego-centric selfishness and materialism that underlie many secular attitudes. It showed its own ability to change in the amazing transformation of Vatican II, initiated at the top of the hierarchy, and in Pope John Paul II’s efforts at forging a new relationship with the Jewish community and Judaism.

I know without any doubt that this is a Church I can trust.

I also know without any doubt that it is a Church I can not trust – not in the way I would like. The two events above are only small examples of a long history of chaos and catastrophe within the Church stretching back centuries. The sexual abuse scandal is bad, but how about the Crusades, the Inquisition and silence during the Holocaust?

How about the pope who came to power by murdering his predecessor, or the popes who slept with their sisters and other men’s wives, or the pope who funded the Sistine Chapel by levying a tax on prostitutes as well as the priests who kept lovers? Or the pope who had eight illegitimate children and inaugurated what was called at the time the “Golden Age of Bastards”? Or the pope who held orgies and gave prizes to those who had the most sex?

How about the more than three dozen “anti-popes” who rejected the Roman pope and the Western schism when two popes competed for legitimacy? If you want to look into a chamber of horrors, look into Catholic Church history.
Like other Catholics, I’m caught between my love for the Catholic witness to the world, through the centuries, and my pain for the victims, all of them, also through the centuries.

My faith is challenged; it cannot remain as it was. It must change. But in what direction?

So I called Fr. Roy and presented him with these two cases and the Vatican’s overall response to abuse. He feels the same way I do:

“I’ve been struggling with this,” he said. “I’ve been asking, ‘What does this say?’ ”

Of course he is. We Catholics should be struggling. Thousands of children were hurt by men acting in our name. Their emotional and spiritual lives were crushed. By our Church. By our priests and our bishops. We would have to be doorposts not to be in a lot of pain over what has happened.

About five years ago, Fr. Roy told me he faced challenge to his faith in the Church. He was so disturbed by the sin of sexism and the refusal of the hierarchy to allow discussion of the ordination of women that he considered leaving. Some of his Catholic friends did leave and became happily adjusted to other denominations.

Then something clicked in me. I thought, why should I leave? This is my church too. They’d be happy if I left. They’d get rid of this trouble-maker.

Now, he has developed a different faith-relationship to the Church. He sees two churches, one of the people, one of the hierarchy. He says:

Our church leaders in Rome are not the owners of the Church. We, as a faith community are the owners of the church. As Catholics, we are taught the primacy of conscience. It’s our life-line to God. Conscience enables us to discern right from wrong. When we don’t follow our conscience, we are tormented.”

Even Pope Benedict XVI once said, Fr. Roy quotes:

Over the pope, there still stands one’s own conscience which must be obeyed before all else.

Philip S. Kaufman, a Benedictine monk, wrote:

“Obedience, even to the Pope, was always ruled by conscience. The great 13th century canonist Hostiensis wrote: “If the subject cannot bring his conscience into conformity with his prelate’s (which implicitly included the Pope), then he should follow his conscience and not obey… even if his conscience is wrong.”

Official Catholic teaching affirms this “primacy of conscience.” But it also says it must be a well-formed conscience. To form conscience properly, a person must seriously study the official Church teachings and give them the benefit of the doubt, the way you would take the opinion of a medical doctor seriously before seeking a second opinion. Then you study the Scriptures, take your question to prayer and then confer with a confessor and priest. After honestly undergoing this process of study and reflection, the Church recognizes that one is duty-bound to follow one’s sincere conscience.

The problem is that many people don’t do this. It’s easy to be tempted by two types of errors. In one, we reject the Church teachings we dislike out of hand, without reading them, thinking about them or discussing them with dedicated teachers. In doing this, we seem to confer on ourselves the infallibility that many would reject in the Pope.

On the other hand, we can also defer to the Church teachings without facing our own inner doubts and thoughts. We become like dutiful children who don’t want to go through the trouble of thinking for ourselves. This second error of slavish deference concerns Fr. Roy.

Many of us as Catholics never grow up to be adults. We remain as children. It’s always a struggle to grow up.

In fact, this kind of passive submission to domination is not genuine, and it violates the code of Catholic canon law regulating the operations of the Church:

Canon Law 748.1: “All are bound to seek the truth in the matters which concern God and his Church; when they have found it, then by divine law, they are bound, and they have the right, to embrace it and keep it.”

However, this search for the truth is not just a private affair. It depends also on a dialogue with the whole Church community, the world community. If the lay members of the Catholic Church convened a group of 100 representing the world’s laity, only 6 would come from the United States, perhaps only two or three would be liberal left-wing American Catholics.

The lay members of the Church include the agricultural workers in Mexico, the urban slum-dwellers of Brazil, the former monarchists in France and supporters of Franco in Spain, the pre-Vatican II pensioners in Ireland, the rural villagers in Africa or Asia. Every voice deserves a hearing, not just the voice of liberal Americans.

We might decry the Americanization of the world when it comes to the spread of McDonald’s and Starbucks but there’s more than a whiff of cultural imperialism in the assumption that the world should instantly adopt the latest ideas from modern liberal America. John L. Allen Jr., writes about “the complexities of setting policy in a global church” in the National Catholic Reporter, pointing out that:

the 67 million Catholics in the United States represent just six percent of the total Catholic population of almost 1.2 billion, meaning that 94 percent of Catholics in the world don’t automatically see things through American eyes.

At the center of this world church are the Pope and the bishops who have what is called the teaching authority of the magisterium. They are responsible for listening to and shaping the global dialogue over the presence of God through the risen Jesus among Catholics today. If anyone has attempted to hear, let alone follow God’s will, you know this is no small task. We might not agree, or even respect, how they are operating, but are we so sure we would do a better job?

You might object and say that the problem is in the job itself. The abuse of the Pope and bishops comes from the nature of hierarchy and the power that they derive from it. Maybe the thing to do is change the whole structure of the Church, democratize it the way the Protestant Reformation did and producing the ultimate democratic structure at the individual church-level like the Congregationalists in early America.

Here again, this easy solution short-circuits some realities. The loss of any central structure produces not just the endless fragmentation of the Protestant churches, but destroys the focal point for gathering together the dialogue of the world community. The Catholic Church believes God speaks through the whole community of the faithful, not through sub-communities or individuals by themselves.

Richard Gula, a well-known professor of moral theology at the Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley, contrasts the disadvantages with the advantages of this centralization during a discussion of Church moral teachings.

In the Roman Catholic Church, the magisterium (the Pope AND bishops conferring together) is an institutionalized authority in matters of faith and morals. The great disadvantage of having an institutionalized authority in the church is that, if it does not function well in a cooperative and collaborative fashion, it can obscure the human character of the process of formulating a moral teaching.

The guidance of the Holy Spirit does not exempt the magisterium from the human process of gathering data, consulting, reflecting on the data, making a proposal, entertaining counter-proposals, doing more research and so on. Rather, the Spirit guides the learning-teaching process in the church in and through these fallible human efforts.

To obscure this process can result in creating an “extrinsic” authority for teachings. “Extrinsic” authority fails to recognize that a teaching is as strong as the thoroughness of the homework which produced it and the cogency of the arguments which support it.

However, the great advantage of having an “institutionalized” authority in the magisterium is that it provides a structure which can bring together, in a cooperative and complementary way, the experience and insights of various perspectives so as to reach as complete an expression of truth about the moral life as possible.

When the collaborative function of teaching is working well in the church, we reap the fruits of this advantage. We have known this in the documents of Vatican II and in the wide acclaim given to the American bishops’ pastoral letters in the 1980s.”

Where does this leave us in our search for a way to understand – and have faith in – this troubled church?

On a spiritual level, I think we are witnessing the very human conflict between king and priest on one side and prophet on the other. This conflict lies at the heart of much Jewish and Christian tradition. One might say Jesus lived out the tradition of the Jewish prophet, challenging the religious kings and priests of his day as the prophet Nathan challenged King David over his murder of Uriah for the sake of taking Bathsheba as a wife.

One way of seeing Jesus’ death – and there are many – is that he suffered the prophet’s death at the hands of the priests, just as Jewish prophets suffered throughout their history, just as today’s prophets, such as Fr. Roy Bourgeois, suffer at the hands of today’s priests, such as his persecutors in the Catholic hierarchy.

In my opinion, there would be a great advance in inter-religious relations between Christians and Jews, and an advance in Christian understanding of Jesus’ truth, if we Christians recognized that the tension of Jesus life had nothing to do with Jewish priests or Judaism at a particular time in history. Instead, Jesus died from the war between the world as it is and the world that is emerging, the tension between what the Jewish sages called ha’olam hazeh vha’olam haba. (העולם הזה והעולם הבא.)

So far we’ve been talking about other people. How about ourselves?

Don’t you find this same conflict between the priestly and prophetic in your own life? Have you ever been in charge of some structure, perhaps as head of a department or organization at work, or as a parent of a family with children, in which you must make decisions about daily functioning? And haven’t there been some people calling on you to change things with ideas that you resist because they seem so disruptive to the operation or question basic assumptions?

How about inside your own heart? Do you ever find some part of yourself clinging to the status quo, the world as you know it and fight against change, even necessary change you know you must make and yet for some reason find yourself unable to summon up the will or determination?

Even worse, have any of us woken up at some point in our lives to discover that we have been fighting tenaciously for values and beliefs that were actually self-destructive? Do we ever discover, to our horror, that we have been campaigning against exactly what would have been, in the end, the very best for us? Who among us, if we are really truly honest with ourselves as we examine our lives deeply cannot see the purification process, perhaps even what some of us might call a crucifixion, that we are experiencing as a necessary process in our journey from what is to what will be?

And to push this challenge a bit more: Is it possible that those “old European men” in Rome might have a prophetic side that challenges some of our own priestly attachments? Is it possible we have blind spots ourselves precisely in some of the beliefs we hold so dear? Maybe we suffer from a kind of First-World-itis, an entitled sense of agency and individualism that is less healthy than we think?

This might sound ridiculous. Those who identify with the liberal American left, like myself, can be pretty certain we’re right — so right that we might miss a note of triumphalism and condescension toward others. But it was exactly this tone in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 that alienated some of the voters during the Bush-Kerry campaign and swung them toward Bush, in spite of the film’s devastating indictment of his handling of the attacks.

I think we avoid this interior civil war between priest and prophet at our peril. If we let it, the faith-struggle will force us into a zone of ambiguity where we get stripped of the certainties that we have taken for granted. To me, in my Christian way of seeing things, I’m offered the bitter opportunity of taking up my cross of doubt and difficulty and allow my ego-attachments to undergo crucifixion. Yet I can do so only because, through faith in the example of Christ, I can trust that if I let myself fall into the abyss, I’ll sprout wings. My ego-destruction is not self-destruction but self-emergence. And I will emerge wiser and more mature.

This reveals the problem with the slick, cultural meta-story based on the partial truth: it gives us an easy out. It offers a quick by-pass from spiritual struggle with a pat answer. We get to skate over the surface of reality, never facing the troublesome depths. We can stay within the safe confines of our own mind. We don’t need to admit we’re lost and confused and need God in a radical way. We don’t have to grow.

Ultimately this is the crucial difference. The cultural meta-story allows me to stay stuck in life, just as the struggle for faith forces me to move ahead into a new reality. The ulterior motive of the meta-story is that it offers to lull me asleep; the faith-struggle wakes me up.

At this point, I took the paradox of these two events, the Church’s treatment of Fr. Roy and of Stephen Kiesle, into meditation, and asked in empty, hopeful waiting:

(flickr.com/cc/Sherrie Thai)

Where is the truth?

Where is God’s presence in this situation?

How am I being called to see this, and to respond?

I spent some time on this, and as I left my prayer mat, I became aware of my own ignorance about the layers upon layers of human history and thought that are coming into collision in this one moment. I also must confront a faith in the goodness of God yet a universe permeated by the incomprehensible mystery of evil, even in the Church.

Later on in the day, I was flooded with feelings I didn’t know I had. I was overcome with pain and grief, compassion and love, for the victims of the abuse, for the women frustrated in acting on their interior call to serve as priests, for the Catholic bishops trying to balance the voices they hear throughout the world and within themselves, and yes, for the pope, a human like the rest of us, torn between his own priestly and prophetic selves.

St. Paul compared the struggle of humanity to a woman laboring to give birth.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. (Romans 8:22-23)

Everyone is groaning in travail as we await redemption in our physical reality. We are in the birthing room – and who would leave and retreat to the safety of waiting room, listening to the process, making snap judgments, insulting the participants and wondering why some just don’t walk out and leave others on the birthing table to die?

Perhaps this is the ultimate cost of the cultural meta-story and all the superficial judgments like it: they keep us from feeling the emotions of our labor. Perhaps the emotions themselves contain part of the answer I’m seeking.

Does this mean we should passively sit by with a box of tissues, and letting “events take their course?” Absolutely not! The process of this faith-challenge, this faith-confrontation leads us into a new understanding. We can act honestly and openly, with justice, not just vengeance. Whatever can be done, must be done so that victims find the peace of true healing and not just the continuation of the cycle of abuse targeted at someone else.

But action by itself will not circumvent the spiritual struggle. Something is purifying and transforming all reality, including the Church. Something is calling us Catholics to look more deeply into these visible layers of what we call the Catholic Church. We’re all being forced to mature into a genuine faith and place our hope in something more invisible, more mysterious and better than just merely good.

As St. Paul said next:

For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. (Romans 8:24-25)

TEXT NOTE:

1) Quote from Hodding Carter III, a Southern journalist who joined the civil rights movement, worked for Lyndon Johnson and became an assistant secretary of state under President Jimmy Carter. He became the public voice of the Carter administration during the time he held the briefings during the Iran hostage crisis.


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