Clean It Up or Pay the Consequences

John Paul II, he left

a sullied heritage and

a Church in need of

Reform

During the conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI I heard an American priest commentator for RTÉ, the Irish National Broadcasting network, say that what was needed in a pope was “someone who would come in and clean out that rats’ nest of pezzi grossi monsignors, the Roman Curia.”  The commentator was in Rome with the Dome of Saint Peter’s in the background; sitting in the Dublin studio was Bishop John Magee where the show’s moderator asked Magee—former secretary to Popes Paul VI, John Paul I, and John Paul II—if he, Magee, were part of that rats’ nest.  Magee was not amused, but as time has gone on it has become clear that he indeed was one rat among the pack, and that he lost out to bigger rats.  When John Paul’s private secretary, (now Cardinal) Stanislaw Dziwisz wrote his 2007 memoirs of his 40 years of service to Wojtyla both as Archbishop of Krakow and as Pope, he never mentioned Magee, the only aide to John Paul Dziwisz hadn’t mentioned.  Given Magee’s role as secretary and then as Master of Ceremonies to John Paul this was a gratuitous slap to the Irishman and his service.  Dziwisz had been jealous of John Paul’s personal affection for Magee, the nicer and more gentlemanly of the two men.  Unfortunately, a gentleman though he may be, Magee’s bad judgment in the Diocese of Cloyne where John Paul named him bishop, led to one of the most serious breakdowns of justice in the whole Irish sex-abuse scandal and Magee eventually resigned his diocese in disgrace.  Dziwisz, for his part, has since been exposed as a self-serving bureaucrat who made a fortune from the “gratuities” people offered him in exchange for access to the Pope—in other words Dziwisz was selling access to the Pope.  He often dragged the frail and ailing Pope from his quarters to meet some wealthy visiting socialite or politician who wanted a picture with John Paul.  Moreover, in the Pope’s final years Dziwisz practically ran the Church by inserting himself as the only channel of communication between the Cardinals in charge of the various dicasteries and the increasingly incapacitated Pope.   With the election of Benedict, Dziwisz has gone home to Poland as Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow, but the rats’ nest of conspiracy and intrigue has continued.  The current Vatican Dr. Strangelove is Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, a member of the Salesian Order and the apparently the target of the current palace coup that involves the Pope’s butler having leaked confidential papers to an Italian journalist in an effort to expose Bertone’s consolidation of power in his (Bertone’s) office, the Secretariat of State.  (For more about Bertone, look at entries for June 7, 2011, and February 15 & 16, 2012.)  Bertone has nominated named a disproportionate number of his fellow Salesians to be bishops and seems to be engineering a return to an Italian papacy in the next conclave.
        Frankly, I have no idea of what is going on the Vatican other than what I read in the papers, but the idea of the Pope’s personal aide-de-camp stealing state papers and turning them over to journalists, the precipitous firing of the head of the Vatican Bank, the Bank’s failure to meet international standards on fiscal accountability and transparency, the opening of burial vaults looking for evidence in child-kidnapping (see entry for May 15, 2012), the struggles to impose more curial control over Caritas Internationalis and its fiscal power, are all signs that while it has been centuries since something has been rotten in the State of Denmark, much is rotten in the Vatican State. From a historical point of view, the Church is ripe for Reform.  Will it be a reform from within a la Innocent III or a reform from without, Luther style?  That all depends on how willing (and able) the Pope elected that day I heard the RTÉ commentator speak is to come in and clean out that rats’ nest of pezzi grossi monsignori. 

Silenced Shepherds --Can They Please Find A Voice?

Enda Kenny, the Irish Prime Minister

whose frank challenge of Vatican policy

has sparked some controversy and a

recalling of the Vatican Nuncio.

I don’t watch much television, especially during the slower hours of the midday, but a colleague of mine who is a bit of a TV junkie—he keeps the television on in his office even when he is interviewing students, told me about watching the debate in the Irish Dáil Éireann (the Irish “House of Commons”) when the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) delivered a scathing rebuke of the Holy See for the conduct of the Irish Bishops in the sex abuse scandal that has plagued Ireland as it has the Church in the United States, Canada, and various other nations.   The Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, a Catholic himself responded to the Cloyne Report—a government investigation of the clerical pedophilia scandal in the Diocese of Cloyne where nineteen priests have been accused of sexual abuse and where the Church failed to follow its own guidelines of reporting these instances—by an attack directly on the Vatican.  Kenny said that “the dysfunction, disconnection, and elitism that dominates the culture of the Vatican to this day” was responsible for the failure of the Church to protect young people and he apparently did not spare Benedict XVI in his attack.  In 1996 The Irish bishops had put in place a policy that accusations would be reported to the police but the Papal Nuncio at the time Archbishop Luciano Storero, instructed the bishops not to follow their own policy.  In some regards it is unfortunate that Benedict has had to bear the brunt of the Taoiseach’s wrath as when he served as the head of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the then Cardinal Ratzinger was one of the few Vatican voices that wanted to get to the root of the abuse problem.  Nonetheless, “sow the wind and reap the worldwind,” as they say and the Holy See is being drowned in guano as the chickens come home to roost.    
      Two weeks ago I attended the installation of our new pastor.  I had not seen this ceremony  before.  It was disheartening.  Like so much that is wrong with “the new liturgy” it was way too long on words and not very rich in ritual action.  Words, words, words, words, words…we really don’t need so many words.  But what was particularly bad about all the words is that the”rite” (if you can call it that) speaks not of mission or evangelism or even shepherdly care.  It is all about protecting the status quo—maintaining the discipline of the church, looking after the property, affirming the teaching of the magisterium, safeguarding the faith, etc. ad nauseam.  How do you like that ad nauseam—there is some Latin for you.    Now I am the last person who wants a heretic in the pulpit or a spendthrift with the parish credit card, but we have more important things to worry about.  70% of our folks aren’t darkening the door of the Church, most of our youth think the whole thing is outdated, hundreds of parishes across this country don’t have a priest for Sunday Eucharist.  Moreover, some of us are really excited about the Gospel and think we need to find new ways to bring it to ears that have grown tired of and deaf to the “same old same old.”  Some of us believe that despite the best efforts of this new translation to make the mass unintelligible, that the Eucharist is something really wonderful and we want to not only make its celebration even more wonderful but make sure every Catholic can have access to it.  Some of us are worried about that old lady down the street who can’t afford her property tax anymore and even more of us are worried about that guy that is sleeping out behind the garages because he has no place to go.  Some of us think the Church has a mission in the world and we are more preoccupied about that than we are about who washes the chalices after communion or whether we say “I believe” or “We believe.”  
     So my point both in regard to installing pastors and reporting pedophiles is this: dissent is not the biggest sin we have to worry about and loyalty is not the greatest virtue we need.  Please Lord give us Shepherds, both here and in Rome, who are so enraptured by your Kingdom that they can forget about their own.  Amen.

More on the Need for a New Reformation

Two views of what the Church is about.  Which

one do you think has a greatercredibility in

bringing the message of Jesus into the world today,
the nun working with the poor, or the Cardinal in all
his glory?  

Yesterday I began an entry on why the Church stands in need of Reformation today just as it has in other periods of history.   I began with the axiom Ecclesia semper reformans, semper reformanda—the Church, always reforming and always in need of reform but promised that I would look at some more concrete examples of why we need to have a modern Reformation—and my list is not meant to be an exhaustive list.  I am sure there are other reasons beyond the one’s I am going to enumerate.

     The first and most obvious is the sex-abuse crisis that has rocked the Church not only in the United States but throughout the Western world.  Even more indicative of the need for Reform than the sex-abuse itself, was the almost universal behavior of bishops attempting to “cover-up” the scandal rather than address its root causes.  And why this cannot be effectively reformed from within the ranks of the papal administration is that it is becoming increasingly clear that the bishops’ policies of cover-up were directed from Rome.  After the recent reports (The Cloyne and Murphy Reports) regarding  clergy sex abuse in several diocese of Ireland, the Taoiseach, Enda Kerry, issued a stinging condemnation in the Daìl (the Taoiseach is the Prime Minister; the Daìl is the Irish Parliament) of the Vatican for its role in orchestrating a policy of cover-up.  This problematic policy is not unique to Ireland.  The papacy of John Paul II was particularly unable to understand the crisis and deal with it openly and effectively and while Pope Benedict, as Cardinal Ratzinger, pressed for more effective policies to get to the roots of the problem, the obstructionist prelates in the Roman Curia who neither understand the seriousness of the problem nor are willing to effect the radical structural change that is needed to heal it are still in place. Probably the single most critical area for Reform in the Catholic Church today is the Roman Curia which has moved far from being an extension of papal power into an organization with immense power of its own, a power that transcends and even supersedes the authority of the pope himself.  (Sometimes when we do a series of entries on the Second Vatican Council we will look at how the Curia survived the Conciliar attempts of Reform and has emerged even more powerful than it was before the Council.) 
      A second reason indicating the need for a Reformation is the loss of prestige which the Church has suffered in the world over the last forty years.  This loss is due not to the Second Vatican Council.  Indeed those of us who remember the Council recall the immense boost of credibility and energy the Church enjoyed from that fateful January day in 1959 when Pope John XXIII announced he was convoking a Council.  The Catholic Church moved from being perceived as an arcane and cultic relic of the bygone days of monarchic absolutism with its millions of enthralled and docile adherents to being a vital and engaged participant in the world community.  The remote and other-worldly visage of Pius XII was replaced by the kindly and humane “Good Pope John.”   Part of the loss of prestige, and I believe a great part of it, has been the deliberate policy of a secular society and its advocates to push to the margins of public life any and all religion, but especially any religion whose influence could undermine the post-religious agenda of secular liberalism.  Again, those of us who remember the times of the Second Vatican Council remember that magazines like Time, Newsweek, and Life covered not only the Catholic Church but religious topics of all sorts with great regularity and a respectful tone.   One can search modern newspapers and journals, including the aforementioned Time and Newsweek, and will rarely find religious topics covered except for such topics as the ubiquitous sex-abuse scandal or some other story which can be viewed only from the critical perspective. This does not betray an anti-Catholic bias as some bishops have claimed, but an anti-religious slant.   Even non-Catholic churchmen of considerable repute such as Anglican Archbishops Rowan Williams or Desmond Tutu, or evangelical Jim Wallis are almost never in the pages of the press, though the more erratic such as Billy Graham’s son, Franklin,  or John Hagee occasionally show up because they reinforce Christianity as something eccentric or even hateful.   And of course, speaking of hateful,  one sees with some regularity the “God hates Fags” placards of the so-called Westboro Baptist “Church.”  Nevertheless, I don’t want to blame secularism for pushing  religion in general and Catholicism in particular from its once privileged position in the public eye.  The Church itself has contributed to its position of ridicule and contempt not only by its gross handling of the sexual abuse crisis, but by its increasing return to the authoritarianism of past epochs and the revival of so much archaic pomp as Cardinals Burke and Pell  strut around swathed in yards of watered silk and  Benedict himself seems to raid the Vatican attic for the most curious accoutrements from ages past.  I am not suggesting that Catholics should convert to Presbyterian drab, but rather we need to pay attention to the world in which we live and not attempt to inhabit a parallel universe of red queens, mad hatters, and protonotaries apostolic.  A Reformed Catholicism that focused on the Church’s mission of making the Gospel a force in the modern world, a Church that continued the Mission of its Founder ”to bring glad tidings to the poor….to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord" would recover the prestige that has  been squandered with the lack of transparency and the return to an arrogant and pretentious authoritarianism that is leaving the church “naked unto her enemies.”   well, more reasons in the next entry.