Cardinal Angelo Sodano on John Paul Beatification: Shut Up about the "Peripheral Issues" of the Abuse Crisis

Here's another indicator (to me) that makes the upcoming beatification of John Paul II sickening:

Tom Roberts reports in National Catholic Reporter yesterday that, when asked Thursday by reporters about the scandal John Paul II created by his protection of Marcial Maciel, Cardinal Angelo Sodano replied, 

How can you, in such a great moment, get into such peripheral issues when the world is applauding the pope?  I'm stunned.

The implication of this cruel, callous, horrific remark seems clear to me.  The huge spectacle being mounted in Rome this weekend is all about shutting up anyone who wants to keep talking about the real and inescapable problems of the Catholic church right now.  The abuse crisis, in particular . . . .  

Problems created by John Paul and bequeathed to the church as a significant part of his legacy, because

1) he sought to undermine the reforms of Vatican II from the very center of the church

2) he made the entire church hostage to a hyper-sacralized notion of priesthood that has deepened the division between the clerical elite in whose hands all institutional power resides and the rest of the people of God

3) he not only ignored the abuse crisis that broke open to public view under his papal reign, but he protected one of the most notorious figures in the church connected to that crisis, Legionaries of Christ founder Marcial Maciel.

And we're supposed to remain silent about that now, Sodano tells us.  We're supposed to be in such shock and awe at the goings on in Rome that we're stunned into speechless wonder.

We're supposed to forget about the thousands on thousands of our brothers and sisters whose lives have been shattered by childhood abuse by clerics, and whose wounds are re-opened by this shoddy spectacle.  We're supposed to ignore the thousands on thousands of brother and sister Catholics who have walked away from the church and who continue to do so, due to the legacy left us by John Paul the Blessed. 

What kind of bona fide good shepherd within a Christian communion would even think of referring to survivors of clerical sexual abuse as "peripheral issues"?  Here's the kind of shepherd Sodano is: he is one of the most powerful figures in the Curia, after John Paul made him secretary of state.  And his direct connection to the Maciel cover-up is well-known and has been exhaustively documented by Jason Berry.

As Berry has shown, Cardinal Sodano's nephew Andrea Sodano, indicted for fraud and money-laundering in New York in 2008, had strong business ties to Maciel.  Maciel's connections to Cardinal Sodano go back to the 1980s, when they became friends in Chile, where they cozied up to dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose regime tortured and disappeared huge numbers of Chilean citizens regarded as threats to the regime.

When John Paul made Sodano the Vatican secretary of state, Maciel wined and dined Sodano to consolidate their bond and to assure Vatican promotion of the Legionaries of Christ.  There are strong suggestions that Sodano and his family benefited in overt ways--i.e., financially--from money Maciel used to grease the palms of Vatican officials and buy protection.  Sodano intervened directly and repeatedly in the Vatican process that was investigating Maciel and his activities, even declaring at one point--with no authority from anyone--that the process had ended and Maciel had been exonerated of all charges.

At Easter 2010, Sodano interrupted the Vatican Easter liturgy to praise Benedict and to dismiss any talk about Benedict's involvement in cover-ups of abuse cases before he became pope as "petty gossip."

Sodano is, in a word, corrupt.  He is not far from a Mafia figure in clerical garb.

And he wants everyone to shut up as the John Paul beatification show gets underway--back to business, MYOB, we clerics run the church and it's going to remain that way?!  Shut up and stop talking about those "peripheral issues" that happen to be standing outside the doors of your parish churches holding pictures of themselves as children, showing you the real-life faces of children sexually molested by Catholic priests?

Sickening in the extreme.  And yet another reason I will be boycotting tomorrow's big Roman spectacle in my own little powerless, peripheral way.  The signal clearly given to me by the man being beatified tomorrow, during his years as pope, is that I and my kind are not welcome in his church.  No more welcome than are those children who were molested by priests.  Or the poor of Latin America tortured by Pinochet and other dictators.  Or women who seek to respond to the Spirit's vocational call within the all-male clerical structures of the Catholic church.

We're not welcome, all of us, in the church of John Paul the Blessed.  In the church of Angelo Sodano.  And, on the whole, all the pain of the savage exclusion aside, I don't believe I'd have any interest at all in belonging to Sodano's little church, even if it did pretend to welcome me with open arms.

Weekend News Round-Up: The Catholic Abuse Scandal (New Hampshire, Legion of Christ, Euteneuer)

I blogged yesterday about the scandalous attempt of Bishop John McCormack of New Hampshire to "out" a John Doe who has filed suit against New Hampshire Catholic officials re: claims of childhood abuse.  And this morning, I'm seeing in Voice of the Faithful's latest issue of the VOTF e-newsletter In the Vineyard that the New Hampshire VOTF chapter is challenging McCormack to "honor his pledge to treat clergy abuse survivors with care and concern, not harassment through punitive legal measures."

And two bits of fascinating editorial commentary coming recently from one of the leading intellectual journals of the Catholic right, New Oxford Review.  Editorials serving up a nice helping of theological and moral Corvus corax for the gustatory delectation of the tightie-rightie contingent of the contemporary Catholic church . . . . Both are editorial statements, and both dated April 2011.

The first is an editorial admitting that there just may have been a few problems with Fr. Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legion of Christ, and once the darling of the Catholic right.  This statement focuses on a recent article by a former Legionary priest, Fr. Richard Gill, who decided following the revelations of the unsavory history of the group's founder Maciel that he could not longer in conscience remain a member of the Legion of Christ.  To make sense of the New Oxford Review editorial, which is only partially available to non-subscribers, you'll need to read Gill's statement about the Legion of Christ at the Chiesa website which  published it.

Gill asks if the Legion of Christ can be rehabilitated--as the Vatican thinks it can.  As a former Legion member with a long history with the community, Gill concludes that rehabilitating Maciel's religious community will require a steep uphill climb--if rehabilitation is, indeed, possible.  And it will require more transparency than we've yet seen in having answers to a list of still-to-be-answered questions about how Maciel was allowed to pull the wool over so many people's eyes for so long.

I find Gill's questions about the "origins and history" of the Maciel scandal particularly fascinating.  As he puts it, there's a "mystery" about the Maciel saga, which has not yet been adequately addressed or resolved: namely, how can his community and Vatican officials have been so taken with Maciel for so long, when serious questions about his life and leadership had long been raised?  Specific questions that flow from this central one about the "mystery" of Maciel, are, Gill thinks, the following:

• How did it happen that Maciel was reinstated as Superior General in 1959, after he had been suspended for more than two years while he was under Vatican investigation--when the accusations against him turned out to be true, and he was still permitted to carry on with more abuse and even to father children while remaining Superior General up to 2005?
• How did Maciel get a Decree of Praise for the congregation from Paul VI?
• What is the story behind the "disappearance" of Maciel for about a year in the late 1970s? This was the period in which one of of his children was born. How could Maciel regularly disappear for weeks or a month with no questions raised by church officials or his community?
• How did he get away with the double life, fathering at least three children from two mistresses over decades with no one noticing or colluding?
• Why did no one see it as a red flag that he rarely said Mass or the Breviary or went on retreats?
• How did the Constitutions of the Legion get official Vatican approval, when it's now clear that they have serious flaws and conflicts with canon law? 
• How could Maciel, with his more or less well-known history, have gained such access to John Paul II and apparently misled him for years?
• How to explain the consistent defense of Maciel by Cardinals Angelo Sodano and Franc Rodé and their encouragement of his community to esteem him, even after the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith censured him in 2006? 
• "What does it say about the internal culture of the Vatican that while Maciel was being praised at his 60th anniversary in 2004 by Cardinal Sodano, he was being investigated by Cardinal Josef Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith?"
• How were the Legion's leaders allowed to promulgate a different version of the Statutes of Regnum Christi than the one approved in 2004 by Cardinal Rodé?

As Gill rightly notes, until we know the answers to these perplexing questions, it will be exceptionally difficult to clean up the Legion's act--because (here, switching to my analysis and not Gill's) that act is clearly interwoven with the apparently willing malfeasance of top Vatican officials.  And since we have now amassed abundant evidence indicating that Maciel's clout had everything to do with $$$$, and since $$$$ definitely talks in the Vatican, I suspect we won't ever know the really dark secrets at the heart of the Maciel mystery, which involve payoffs of Vatican officials to buy their silence and support of Maciel.  Of Maciel, whose abundant $$$$ came from wealthy conservative Catholics around the world, who have predominant influence in the Vatican.

New Oxford Review is serving up a savory helping of crow this month not only because of the embarrassment that Maciel has proven to be for traditionalist Catholics (and because a highly regarded former member of his community keeps blowing the whistle on the lack of transparency in the attempt to rehabilitate the Legion of Christ).  It's doing so, as well, because this Catholic journal that makes strong claims about its intellectual vibrancy ("the brightest minds in Catholic journalism today") once also fawned over a now-fallen "American idol," Fr. Thomas J. Euteneuer.  Who turns out to have been perhaps not the bright star in the American Catholic intellectual or moral firmament that New Oxford Review had made him out to be.

And as this editorial statement indicates, when the idol crashed to the ground, "those of us who had interacted with him or admired him from afar were left scratching our heads."  Indeed.  Google the terms "New Oxford Review" and "Euteneuer," and you'll find one article after another by Euteneuer (e.g., "The Demon of Child Sacrifice & the Valley of Slaughter," "The New Rite of Exorcism: A Potent Weapon is Weakened," etc.) that this Catholic journal, whose masthead proclaims that it is "dedicated to delivering sparkling prose on behalf of Holy Mother Church from some of the finest Catholic writers of our times," has published.

When idols turn out to have clay feet and the crumbling of those feet causes the idols to tumble to the ground, those who have bowed before the idols not uncommonly have to consume a healthy serving of crow.  Particularly when those doing the bowing have had a penchant for attacking the "false" religiosity of others.

Having eaten not a few dishes of crow in my own lifetime, I have a tiny bit of advice to offer New Oxford Review, as their Maciel-Euteneuer repast gets underway.  In my experience, nothing makes the tough strands of the old bird go down better than eating it with a helping side dish of humble pie.

Eugene Kennedy on John Paul II's Beatification: The Saint Who Kept Looking Away

Eugene Kennedy's reading at National Catholic Reporter this week of what the beatification of John Paul II will signify for many Catholics is thought-provoking.  And, as with everything Kennedy writes, masterfully written.

Kennedy adopts psychotherapeutic categories of analysis, especially the category of narcissism, to put his finger on what troubles many of us about the precipitous haste to beatify and then canonize JPII.  He notes that the previous pope certainly appealed to audiences that were receptive to his rock-star image.  On some young Catholics, in particular, the rock-star pope exerted mesmerizing influence through his adroit use of theatrical skills and his ability to project a stage persona.

But for many others, it was precisely that image and that ability to put on a mask and play a role that were troubling.  Kennedy writes, 

Are there unanswered questions about this pope who may have dazzled but seemed to exude so little real warmth for the believers at whom, above his Slavic smile, he never seemed to look directly?

What was the inner man -- for this must be the testing point for the blessed -- like when, claiming to be a champion for personalism, he preached of human personality as divided rather than united? What was he like when, in his romantic but self-contained reflections on human sexuality, he spoke so abstractly but with such certainty that abstaining from sex was the highest ideal even for married couples?

Who was this man who sang the glories of the Blessed Mother but who kept real women beyond the end of his wagging finger and was determined, as if the fate of the world depended on it, to keep them out of the priesthood? Who was this man who always defended Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae, but who absented himself from the final vote of the Vatican II commission that recommended a broadening of the church’s position on birth control?

Who was this man who looked away from the burgeoning sex abuse scandal of his clergy while he sheltered and defended the godfather of all sex abusers, Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado? Who was he when he welcomed Cardinal Law to a Roman sinecure after Law was forced to resign from the archbishopric of Boston for his manner of dealing with sex abusing priests?

A man who looked away: a man who looked away when he smiled, so that his eyes appeared not to see those at whom he was smiling, the real human beings; a man who looked away when women asked him to see what being second-class citizens in a church that denies them ordination means for their real human lives; a man who looked away when lay Catholics asked him to engage in dialogue about how, no matter what Rome says, a huge majority of married Catholics are using contraceptives and will continue to do so, and the resistance of the church's top leaders to dialogue about this matter is scandalous.  And, finally, a man who turned his head and averted his eyes as the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, Fr. Marcial Maciel, sexually molested one seminarian after another, fathered children and maintained them and their mothers in secret, using his community's funds to do this, abused narcotics, and, it's now known, raped his own children.

And here's the problem, of course: many of us don't want an icon of holiness for our church today who looks away, in the face of human need and human problems.  We want pastors who are human, who can engage our human faces with their human faces, face to face, eye to eye.  We want--we desperately need--pastors who will walk among us, hearing our voices, listening to our concerns and to what we have to say.  We don't want, we don't need, rock stars on stages lit by bright lights, far removed from us.

We try to imagine Jesus in all of this--in the looking away, in the self-absorption on a stage, in the smiles that aren't really smiles and the performance that masks the real human being behind the mask--and our imagination falters.  Because the Jesus about whom we read in the gospels wasn't on a stage.  He wasn't self-absorbed.  He was among the crowds, imminently approachable, so approachable that he gave himself away over and over again.

As he listened to those in need, wept with them, let them touch him, and invited them--everyone, and especially the outcasts of his world--to table.  As he repudiated the class system of his culture and priestly caste, which placed women beyond the pale, because of their menstrual impurity, so that no respectable rabbi would invite a woman, let alone one accused of immorality, to his table.  For fear that her ritual pollution would pollute him, the teacher.

For many of us, John Paul II does not point the way to holiness for the church today.  Made a saint, he will not be a symbol of holiness that charts the course for the church of the world in which we live today.  He will, instead, be a countersign, someone whose very remembrance points back to a model for holiness in the church of our period that thwarts the effective engagement of church with world.  Many of us remember the previous pope as a pope who called on us to pretend that all holiness in creation is found only in the church, and that the world is entirely full of sin--at the very moment in which we began to discover the depths of corruption within our church and its pastoral leaders, who had been hiding abusive priests and sending known  molesters of children back into parishes to abuse again.

The canonization of John Paul II is, of course, a foregone conclusion.  It always has been, because John Paul belongs to (in the sense that the Vatican and Catholic leaders have been bought by) a number of powerful and very wealthy right-wing Catholic groups who intended, from the outset, to secure his canonization.  Groups that have the backing of powerful and very wealthy right-wing political donors in the secular sphere in many places.  Canonization is every bit as much a political process as it is a religious one.  And money talks in political processes.

So the previous pope will most certainly be canonized, no matter how much the haste to declare him a saint causes pain to many Catholics--whose voices do not and will not count in this matter.  I predict, however, quite a bit more pain to come from this canonization, some of it unforeseen right now.

One of the hazards of rushing anyone to sainthood with unseemly haste is that the jury is often still out about aspects of that person's life, while people still living have pieces of information about him or her that may not yet have come to light.  I think we have yet to see or hear all that might be disclosed about John Paul's leadership of the church during the dark period in which the abuse crisis finally came to light.  And I suspect that some of what we will begin to hear after the beatification in May will not prove flattering at all for the legacy of the saint-to-be.

This canonization process is dividing the church even more than it is already divided, at a point in history in which it can least stand to be divided.  And the imminent beatification of JPII will only drive the wedge deeper, producing more pain in a church in which the pain of unresolved issues--issues from which John Paul averted his face--is already all around.

News on Thanksgiving Day: Necon Catholics Resist Pope on Condoms, Benedict on Media and Maciel, and Mormon Musings

In the news this morning of American Thanksgiving: three articles that have caught my eye online in recent days (though I'm finding far too little time to read the news):

First, neocon Catholics are perturbed--perturbed, I tell you!--that the pope has spoken out about condoms.  And contradicted their messages of hate, transmitted for years now to anyone struggling with decisions about whether it might be morally better to use a condom to avoid infecting someone else with a fatal illness, than to refrain from using a condom. 

At Huffington Post (I think this may actually be an AP article picked up by HuffPo), Rachel Zoll reports that leading American neocon Catholics are refusing to accept what Benedict has said about condoms, and are claiming (variously) that the always anti-Catholic media have made all of this up, or that the pope's spokesman Fr. Frederico Lombardi is an unreliable source for a statement by Benedict, or that they'll accept the papal verdict on condom use in cases where someone may infect another person with serious illness only when it's officially defined by the papacy. 

I find this reaction deliciously ironic, given that these are the same folks who have, for years now, been telling their brother and sister Catholics that it's the papal way or the highway.  Though they've always been highly selective in reading church teachings, following in the footsteps of one of the founding members of the American Catholic neocon movement William F. Buckley, who refused to accept John XXIII's encyclical critical of ruthless capitalism, Mater et Magistra.  And who famously said in response that he'd take the mater but forego the magistra.

One can't escape the impression that for some Catholics, keeping hate alive--in the case of the condom discussion, keeping hate of gays, in particular, alive--trumps almost any other value.  What theocon Catholics obviously fear in any sane, rational, nuanced discussion of matters like condom use is the opening of a door to sane, rational, nuanced discussion of the whole shaky edifice of natural-law based sexual ethics.  They fear opening the door to any discussion that might in any shape, form, or fashion moralize homosexual behavior and homosexual lives and relationships.  Or might bring into the light for honest discussion the important fact that the vast majority of married Catholics in developed nations practice contraception and affirm its use as moral.

And they fear--the constant, disingenuous bugbear of the Catholic right, anytime discussions like this arise in the Catholic church--the "confusion" of the laity.  Who are imagined to be too dull to understand theological fine points or to handle nuance, but who need the firm hand of guidance from above and the simplistic bullet points from on high that tell believers precisely what to think about any matter at hand.  As Zoll's article notes, the "confusion" that the recent papal statement is now said to be causing will create real headaches for the U.S. Catholic bishops, given the extent to which they have realigned the U.S. Catholic church in recent years around the hardest possible positions on issues of sexual morality.

I can't say I'm sorry to see the bishops cope with this new papal headache. Sometimes a headache serves the valuable purpose of reminding us that we have a head on top of our shoulders.

And on the new book of interviews with Benedict by journalist Peter Seewald, Light of the World, in which the papal remark about condoms first appeared: as Paddy Agnew notes in the Irish Times, while media attention is focused primarily on the condom remark, much more that is newsworthy in the book is going unnoticed.  For instance, Benedict continues to slam the media, without which we would not even know what we now know about the abuse situation, since church officials have hardly been intent on divulging information about this situation to the public.  As Mark Serrano notes at SNAP, the continued attempt of Catholic officials including the pope to divert blame to the media for doing its job, while they refuse to admit or deal with their own involvement in cover-ups of abuse, is "inappropriate and hurtful."

And then there's Benedict's astonishing observation that, though the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, Marciel Maciel, who is now known to have sexually abused seminarians for years, to have fathered children while heading the Legionaries, and to have raped some of his own children, was "a false prophet," the order he founded is "by and large sound."  Though that order long made a cult of Maciel's personality and defended him tooth and nail when all of this information began to become public.

Like another of its right-wing counterparts, Opus Dei, the Legionaries of Christ are a cash cow for Rome, and the Vatican is not about to repudiate this lucrative cow.  Both religious communities are closely connected to wealthy business leaders and social elites in Europe and the Americas, and both have disproportionate influence in the Catholic media throughout the world.  The pope is not about to lose the milk offered by this particular cow, or the power its adherents wield in the political, economic, and media lives of many nations.

Finally--a complete change of subject--I'm intrigued by Holly Welker's recent article at Religion Dispatches explaining why she won't leave the Mormon church alone, though she has left this church in which she was raised.  I find strong parallels between Welker's argument about why the LDS church deserves her critical attention, though she is not now an active Mormon, and the situation in which many Catholics find ourselves today.  

First, in both cases, there's a strong push from those who remain in these churches--particularly those intent on shielding the church from critical scrutiny--to keep their errant brothers and sisters decisively locked out.  I'm interested to read that some Mormons, including members of her own family, complain that Welker won't leave the church alone though she's left it.  These complaints sound very much like the taunts that many Catholics issue to their brothers and sisters who have serious reservations about the sharp turn to the right the church has taken under the last two papacies.  These taunts constantly reiterate, "If you don't like it, leave it; find a wishy-washy mainline Protestant church that accepts anybody and believes anything."

Welker notes that, though she has left the LDS church in the sense that she is no longer an active member and she openly criticizes some of its positions, she cannot leave behind what is woven into her own being from childhood.  She was a pious and committed Mormon, and the formative influence of Mormonism on her life remains strong.  The LDS church continues to affect her and many people she loves, and she will not leave it alone:

That, of course, is one primary reason I cannot and will not leave the church alone: it continues to exert its influence in areas that affect my life and the lives of people I love. Most of what I have written recently about the church deals with gender and sex; as long as the church has opinions that move it to action on these topics, I will have opinions on the church’s actions, which I claim the right to express.

And I suspect quite a few Catholics on the margins, including me, could say the same of the Catholic church and our relationship to it from the margins.