THE SYSTEM IS BROKEN!!!

This is how our bishops are trained?  No wonder they're a bunch of dancing monkeys!!!  Back in the days before Vatican II, Cardinal Spellman was notorious for calling on one priest or another to get up at a dinner and sing a song and then, to thank him for his performance, name him a Monsignor.  There is no objection to people having fun and using their talents, but this system is teaching the NACers to be song-and-dance suck-ups to the system and it reinforces the emasculation of the clergy with the scalpel of the Church's smothering institutionalism.  It would be much healthier to see the seminarians trained to mix as adults among adults with the rich benefactors flown over for the annual "Rector's Dinner" than to teach them to perform at the command of the hierarchy for the pleasure of the powerful.   sick, sick, sick--time for change.  Give us priests who are men and not monkeys. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church XXII

The Chapter House of York

Minster

In our previous post we looked at John Wycliffe, the English priest and Oxford scholar who towards the end of the fourteenth century challenged the wealth of the Church.  The Lollards are said to be his followers but I suspect that Lollardy was a movement somewhat independent of Wycliffe but which found his teachings consistent with their beliefs and sort of hitched their cart to his horse.  There seems to have been a general agitation in England about the power and wealth of the institutional Church even before Wycliffe and certainly a resentment of the political influence of the Church both on the Crown and on the daily life of Englishmen. 
Wycliffe, even though he was a priest himself and had a rather comfortable living as the rector of Lutterworth, was scandalized by the wealth and worldliness of the clergy.  Moreover, there seems to have been some personal rancor in Wycliffe towards the hierarchy and the religious orders because of the way his own career at Oxford had been thwarted when Archbishop Langham replaced him as head of Canterbury Hall with a monk.  But personal issues aside, Wycliffe had legitimate reason for criticizing the Church and its hold over the economic and political structures of England.  I am not inclined to think that his voice was the trumpet that gave out the tune to which everyone else danced, however.  I think rather that Wycliffe was simply the scholar who systematically developed a theology that articulated what many people in England had already felt.  In other words, he gave voice more than he gave leadership to the rebellion against the Church.
Moreover, I estimate Wycliffe to have been sincere in his criticism while I think others were motivated by other and less noble reasons.  Wycliffe’s chief protector, John of Gaunt—uncle of the King (Richard II) and Regent during the King’s minority, and other nobles were jealous of the immense wealth in land held by the Church.  Their support for Wycliffe was based in their desire to secularize the lands belonging to the monasteries and to the various bishoprics of England and put these lands at the disposal of themselves and their fellow nobles.  Land represented wealth—land provided rents from the vast populations that lived on them and worked the land.  These rents were going to the Churches and abbeys and being poured into immense building projects of the medieval cathedrals and monasteries.  The rents were also providing for the vast libraries of the monasteries, the silk and brocade vestments used in worship, the gold and silver bejeweled altar ornaments.  Of course the production of such artifacts created employment among thousands of craftsmen, builders, quarrymen, and others hired by the Church, but they also provided what had become a very luxurious lifestyle for the monks and for the clergy. 
The pomp of the clergy not only excited the jealousy of the nobility, but alienated many of the working class folk as well.  Priests and friars talked about the poverty of Christ and his disciples but they themselves lived far from simple lives.  Pious folk would see Christ hanging naked on the crucifix but then be puzzled by the vestments worn by the clergy at his altar and even more disgusted by the elegant horses they rode or fine houses in which they lived attended by servants.  At the same time that the Church had accumulated so much corporate wealth, many individual priests charged exorbitant fees for baptisms and weddings and funerals.  The clergy had become a cash-making profession rather than a vocation of preaching the Gospel.  People felt trapped—their salvation depended on these rites but these rites were available only for great charge.
Thus when Wycliffe came along and said that the clergy should be poor and humble folk, ministering to the poor and humble as a peer and not as a great person who made his power felt over lesser ones (remember Matthew 20:25?)—his message resonated with many people.  When Wycliffe said that the True Church was not a collection of prelates and priests but of those pious souls of pure heart and good intention—souls known with certainty only to God—people felt inspired.  The clergy, on the other hand, felt threatened and betrayed—here, one of their own, was undermining their control and power.  They struck out at Wycliffe.   He was several times made to answer charges of heresy though he was never, in his lifetime, convicted.  Posthumously the Council of Constance condemned his writings and his exhumed corpse was burned as a heretic.  But striking at Wycliffe’s cadaver did not destroy the movement.  Those who adhered to his ideas were called “Lollards” from the middle Dutch word, lollaerd, a mumbler or one who mutters. 
There were many Lollards in late fourteenth and in fifteenth-century England. It wasn’t an organized movement.  There was no Lollard hierarchy.  Most continued going to Mass,  were married at the Church porch (as was the custom of the day),  had their children baptized, their dead buried with the rites of the Church.   One thing that did distinguished them from “good Catholics” was that they often possessed copies of the scriptures in English—Wycliffe had provided the first English translation since the days of King Alfred.   They would meet and discuss the scriptures.  Sometimes their ideas took them far afield of Catholic orthodoxy in regard to the real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist or the ability of the priest to absolve sins.  They were seen as much a threat to the State as to the Church since over time they more and more became a movement among the working classes which resented not only the wealth of the Church but the wealth and political power of the nobility.  They would be the first to rally to Protestant ideas in the sixteenth century but in the meantime were often arrested, tried, and burned at the stake for their lack of religious orthodoxy and their political radicalism.  At Lambeth, the London residence of the Archbishops of Canterbury, there is the famous “Lollards’ Tower” which was used as a prison for Lollards awaiting execution.  But we can see cracks appearing in the fabric of Catholic England a century and a half before Henry VIII.    And those Lollards who did die for their religious convictions became the heroes in the minds of many people—not for their distorted ideas of Christian doctrine but for the courage they showed in facing down the institutional Church even to the cost of their lives.  sanguis martyrum semen christianorum. 

Reformation Today! 7 --Needed: Leaders Who "Get It"

The Late Cardinal Anthony

Bevilaqua--what is there about

Pennsylvania that people just

don't get it?

According to Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports:

As penalties go for Penn State, death would've been preferable.

The NCAA hammered the Nittany Lions football program Monday for its role in concealing Jerry Sandusky's sexual molestation acts, leveling coach Joe Paterno's once revered team with stiff penalties and unprecedented fines that will hurt in ways that suspending play for a season or two might not have.

They include:

• A $60 million fine, with the money going to an endowment to benefit the welfare of children.

• A four-year ban on postseason play, including the Big Ten championship game, bowls or the playoffs coming in 2014.

• A reduction in the maximum allowance of scholarships offered to incoming players from 25 to 15 a year for the next four years.

• Any entering or returning player is free to transfer without restriction (such as sitting out one season). Others can maintain their scholarship at Penn State and choose not to play.

• The vacating of all victories from 1998-2011, which strips Paterno of his title as the winningest coach in college football history (now Grambling's Eddie Robinson) and Division I-A (now Bobby Bowden). Paterno, for the record, loses 111 wins and now ranks 12th with 298.

Mark Emmert took unprecedented measures to punish Penn State. (Getty Images)There’s more, such as a five-year probationary period and the hiring of an academic monitor of the NCAA's choosing and so forth. Penn State will not appeal the sanctions. School president Rodney Erickson signed a consent agreement with the NCAA and "accepts the penalties."

A harsh punishment, perhaps a fatal wound for a much cherished feature of Penn State’s collective life, but for some not harsh enough.  And yet, at the same time there are massed crowds chanting “We are Penn State” and demanding the return of Joe Paterno’s statue as well as life-as-normal on the Penn State campus.  “Don’t punish Penn State for the crimes of Jerry Sandusky,” they cry.  “We need to pick up the pieces of Penn State and put them back so that we can go on to a future even brighter than our past—that would be Joe Paterno’s legacy,” one campus orator repeatedly declaimed at a rally encouraging Penn State enthusiasts to “move on and move forward.”       

(Reuters) - Monsignor William Lynn, the highest-ranking clergyman convicted in the U.S. Roman Catholic Church scandal, was sentenced on Tuesday to up to six years in prison for covering up child sex abuse by priests in Philadelphia.  Judge M. Teresa Sarmina told Lynn, 61, the former secretary of the clergy for the Philadelphia Archdiocese, that he protected "monsters in clerical garb who molested children."

I have to admit that I don’t get satisfaction out of seeing anyone, especially a sixty-something overweight guy in a shabby black suit, go to prison, but that is not the issue.  The complaint has been made that Monsignor Lynn “is being held responsible for all of the abuse that occurred over 30 to 40 years, none of which he participated in.”  The Archdiocese of Philadelphia issued a statement saying "fair-minded people will question the severity" of what it called a "heavy" sentence. "We hope that when this punishment is objectively reviewed, it will be adjusted."  According to the Reuters report, the Archdiocese continued saying that the Church has changed since the events at the center of the trial.   But has it?   Maybe Lynn is taking the fall for decisions made by his boss, the late Cardinal Anthony Bevilaqua and Bevilaqua, splendidly entombed in the chapel at the Philly seminary, is beyond the call of human accountability, but Cardinal Law—the most notorious protector of clerical malfeasants is splendidly ensconced in luxury apartments in Rome where he has enough time to meddle in niggling accusations against the good Sisters of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. 

And this is the problem—whether it is the Church or Penn State or a thousand other institutions, too many organizations put their corporate good over the good of the individuals who comprise them. 

Joe Paterno and William Lynn (and their Eminences Law and Bevilaqua and Penn State officials) and how many others have desired at all costs to protect the institutions they represent rather than to see that institutions are here to serve—and protect—those entrusted to their care. 

Penn State lost its way.  The University does not exist for Football. The University exists for the men and women who go there to find the truths and an education is meant to offer.  And the Church has lost its way.  We, the faithful, do not exist for the Church.  The Church exists for us, and our well-being cannot be sacrificed for the good of some “Church” that exists only in theology books and the minds of hierarchs.  The Church exists for us—for our well-being in this life so that we can safely travel the path that leads us from today’s finite existence into the Infinite Reality which is the ultimate destiny for which we humans are created.  Our well-being in this life—spiritual, physical, emotional, mental well-being—are the first steps on the journey into what we Christians believe is the Fullness of Life which is our destiny.      

For too many people today—and especially for those whose life has become a full-time dedication to an institution that calls itself “the Church”—that institution which confuses itself for  “The Church” is more important than the men and women—and children—who comprise the flesh and blood reality of the Church.  The ultimate reality of the Church is not the Pope and Bishops and clergy and religious and laity in some pyramidal hierarchy (with its corresponding lower-archy), but it is the living Body of Christ with its diversity of members each with his or her own function and each with his or her key importance to the welfare of the whole.  In other words, when we talk about Church Reform today we need to vision it no longer from the top down but from within to see the network of individuals whose being woven together in a seamless unity of mutual respect and appreciation for the intrinsic worth of each member from the least to the greatest comprises the mystical Body of Christ.  In such a Church, there is no room for the arrogant triumphalism and self-aggrandizing clericalism of those who are trying to bring back the Church of the previous five centuries.  We need new models that display service rather than power and we need new leaders who have the spirituality to make those new models realities.  It appears that such new leadership would require a whole lot of housecleaning.    

Church Reform Today: The Political Ties of Bishops, 1

One of the goals, indeed the chief goal, of the Gregorian Reform was to free the Church from political entanglement with the Empire.  The purpose was not create the two separate spheres, or I should say separated spheres, of Church and State which our American mythology values so highly because the Church, with its mission to proclaim the kingdom of God, cannot act as if the State—or any other institution—simply exists in a universe parallel to itself.  The Gospel demands that we take an appropriately critical, critical according to the norms of the Gospel, stance towards the world and all that is in it.  By critical I do not mean negative.  A negative critique of creation slides too easily towards Gnosticism.  By critical I mean that we as Church must critique the world as to where it does and where it doesn’t match up to the Gospel.  Note: we as Church.  It is not the role of the “Institution” alone to do this.  Indeed, the Institution, which is not the Church but only one aspect of Christ’s Church, itself must stand under the critique of the Gospel.  That itself is a lesson that most people in the Institution seem to have forgotten these days.   But to critique with integrity we must not only have stood under the judgment of the Gospel ourselves, we must not be indebted to the institutions we critique.  I am not sure that as the Catholic Church we are equipped to critique our society.  The sex abuse scandal has revealed the lack of gospel integrity in the Church, not because of the sinfulness of certain clergy or religious (though that does not help), but because we, both as Institution and as Community of the Faithful became complicit in the abuse by our failure to address the issue honestly and openly.  We will always have sinners in our midst.  There will be sexual predators of all varieties because human society, and we are a human society, will always have sexual predators.  We will have adulterers and fornicators of both gay and straight sorts. We will have drunks and druggies, thieves, embezzlers, abortionists, those who practice euthanasia, who bear false witness, who cheat their employees, who don’t give their employers an honest day’s work, and who pollute the air and water.  We will have people who take us to wars that cannot be justified, and those who sell bonds that are junk.  Sinners are what makes the world go ‘round and moreover Jesus died for them.  They belong in Church.  indeed, they—or rather we—are the Church.  Don’t get on your high horse about “those” or “that kind of people” or “them.”  We have met the sinner and he is us” to paraphrase Pogo.  That being said, however, it is not our task as Church to bless sin by tacit complicity in remaining silent.  Acknowledging our own sins and failings, individually and collectively, we need to be able to speak out about injustices in the world around us—from sexual abuse of minors to abortion to the death penalty to unjust wars, to human rights abuses, to whatever is wrong and unjust in the ways that we relate to one another whether individually or societally.  Because I sin, there are fundamental wrongs in the way I myself and an individual treat people around me.  I need to be reminded of that and challenged to take responsibility for that.  And there are fundamental wrongs in the way that I, not as an individual but as a member of our American society, treat people around me.  I—and other Americans—need to be reminded of that and take responsibility for that.  And there are fundamental wrongs in the way that I, not as an individual but as a member of the Church, treat people around me.  I—and others in the Church with me—need to be reminded of that and take responsibility for that. 
     One of the ways that I, as a member of American society, am guilty of fundamental wrongs in the way I relate to others around me is that I tolerate the murder of the unborn, hundreds of thousands of the unborn.  I don’t approve of it but I am as complicit in it as any bishop has been complicit in the sexual abuse of minors.  I know it goes on.  I confess it is wrong.  I lament it.  But I go about my day; I eat my meals; I go to work; I hang-out with my friends; and I sleep at night in spite of it.  “I wish we could do something about it.”      But that is only one of the sins I am complicit in as a member of our society.  I stood by while Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield led George Bush like a pig with a ring in his nose to war—and led us to war along with him—a war that cannot and never could be morally justified and a war that was energized by a knowing web of lies about WMDs.  And I see the coffins come home and the mothers and the wives and the children trying to make heroes of those who are in fact victims because these deaths must have some significance more than the loss of pawns on a chessboard to make the Vice President and his friends even richer than they are.  And I watched while hundreds of thousands of senior citizens were robbed of their retirements by the Savings and Loans Debacles.  And I have no idea how many people are put to death—legally but not morally—in Texas and Virginia and wherever else while I sit down to dinner, or have a drink on the patio, or sleep undisturbed at night.  And Latinos who just want a chance for them and their children to have a better life die in the desert night after night while I dream undisturbed.   And I know that racism didn’t die with Miss Hilly Holbrook when I hear Sunday Mass goers say “Well, he isn’t my president.” 
     There was a time when our bishops gave moral leadership.  There was a time when our bishops wrote a pastoral letter warning us about the fundamental moral evils beneath “Reaganomics”—you know that system that made some people rich before it made a lot of people poor when it imploded back in 2008.   There was a time when our bishops gave moral leadership and wrote a pastoral letter on War and Peace.  They didn’t make these letters up out of whole cloth.  They took the scriptures, the Fathers of the Church, papal pronouncements, the Documents of Vatican II—they mined the whole tradition to give leadership in our day and age.  But today?  Where are they today?

     “When a Baptist gets money, he becomes a Presbyterian,” a friend told me a few years back. “And when a Methodist wants to join the country club, he becomes an Episcopalian.  When a Catholic priest becomes a bishop, he becomes a Republican.”  One of the senior bishops in the United States, a man who has been a bishop since the “old days,” even before the Apostolic Delegation of Jean Jadot and his crop of liberal Vatican II bishops, told me “The problem with the bishops today is that they are the sons of doctors and lawyers and professionals.  They have no connection with the working class—they were raised to see the working class people as a threat—they come from ‘management’ families.”  Yes, I think that is part of the problem.  The bishops know only a segment of society, they have lost touch—as most white Americans—with their own roots.  But I think the problem is far more serious.     You have men as bishops who have lost their socio-political autonomy and who see the challenges facing society not from the perspective of a Gospel critique but from a political ideology.  More to come.   

Celibacy--Today's Situation

The Changing Face of the
Priesthood by Father Donald
Cozzens--certainly worth the

read

Professor Daniel Maguire of Marquette University wrote today in the New York Times “Letters” that   “The root of the problem (clerical sex abuse) is mandatory celibacy. There is a reason religions with a married clergy have no comparable problem — not that they are problem-free. Celibacy is not a bona fide occupational qualification for ministry.” I am a bit surprised at this because Dr. Maguire is usually better nuanced in his observations.  In the first place his claim that religions (or at least other Christian Churches) with a married clergy have no comparable problem.  I am not sure what parallel universe that Professor Maguire lives in, or perhaps it is just the rarified air of his ivory tower—and theologians have the more rarified air of all academics, allowing angels to have danced on the heads of pins for centuries—but he needs to talk with any Episcopalian or Lutheran Bishop or meet with the officials of any presbytery in the country to know that the problem of clerical sex abuse is not unique to celibate clergy.  On the other hand, he may want to visit a few Buddhist temples and inquire why their celibate monks (seem, at least to) stay out of the limelight in this disheartening problem.  Don’t misunderstand me, I am not defending mandatory celibacy. To the contrary:  I think it is sick.  Not  because it has to do with sex, but because—and here is where Maguire is on to something though he misdiagnosed it—celibacy and sex abuse (whether of minors or vulnerable adults) does have a common root.  Power. 

      The most common motivational issue behind sexual abuse is the need of one person to dominate another who is in a position of inferior power.  An adult incapable of healthy peer relationships seeks to control or otherwise dominate a person whose youth and naiveté leaves him (or her) vulnerable.  An employer or a person higher up the power chain in a corporation or an institution (for example the United States Military) has a need to flex power by exercising control over a subordinate, and what control is more total than demanding sexual favors.  Even in what might appear—and the operative word is appear—to be a healthy peer relationship, one person often has a need to dominate the other. 

      Celibacy too is about power and the need to dominate.  In 2000 Father Donald Cozzens of the Cleveland diocese published a book that “hit the nail on the head,” The Changing Face of the Priesthood.  This is one of the most insightful, indeed I think it is the single most insightful, analysis of the issues facing the Catholic Church in North America.  It deals with far more than celibacy or the sex-abuse crisis.  I think it is particularly insightful on reasons for the vocation crisis in the Church today and why parents, unlike fifty years ago, do not want their children to be priests or nuns.  It deals with how the abuse of power is structuralized in the Catholic Church. 

     In the last several posts, I have shown that celibacy historically was used to protect Church property against alienation to the families of priests in the medieval period.  That is not an issue today. Today I would suggest that celibacy is a key factor in creating a psychological dependency of the clergy on the hierarchy.  The priest is never allowed to achieve a full social maturity.  He is required to live in Church-owned housing.  With housing provided, he is paid a less than professional salary—enough to live on but not enough to give him any independence.  While some priests are able to supplement this dependency-income with family money or are canny enough to successfully transform their resources into something of a fortune sufficient to let them buy a home and have an income sufficient for independence, most clergy remain for their entire lives dependent on their diocese or religious community for housing, meals, automobile, and an income just sufficient for clothing and relatively modest vacations.  Such dependency creates a relationship with the Institutional Church and its representatives not unlike that of the abuse victim afraid to break the ties with his abuser.  Where can he go?  What choices does he have?  He comes to see himself as powerless over his life and life choices.  Who will have him if the abuser (or in this case, the Institution) turns him out?  The abuser (or the Institution) is someone that everyone esteems.  While he, the abused (or the priest) finds himself unhappy with the situation, it must be him and not the situation since the abuser (Institution) is so highly respected that they can do nothing wrong.  Or perhaps the victim (the priest) feels “honored” to be the recipient of the reflected glory and power of the abuser (Institution).  And there are rewards.  Just as an abuser might take his victim for a nice vacation, buy him or her some clothes, even a car, or give him access to money or a career.  So too the priest has the hopes of being sent on for higher studies, given a better parish, maybe even being made a monsignor, or—dare he think it?—a bishop! 

      This is not to say that that there are not good priests, sincere priests,—there are, hundreds, even thousands.   There are many men who have found an interior freedom that lets them function effectively in a dysfunctional institution.  They give generous service to others and have found strategies to maintain their own emotional and spiritual health despite the unhealthiness of the system in which they work.  On the other hand, many good priests have come to realize just how dysfunctional the system is and for their own welfare have chosen to find other vocational paths.  And, tragically, the Church has more than a significant share of men who have drunk the clerical Kool-Aid and live not in the freedom of the Gospel but in enthrallment to an Institution that is in dire need of Reform.  More on this in the next posting.