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.

Record Number of German Catholics Leave in 2010: The Costly Moral Backdrop to the Beatification of John Paul II

The response to my posting earlier today about the Catholic church in Belgium has sparked ongoing discussion of why people are now leaving the Catholic church in many places, and what it means to remain connected to it at this point in history.  And this reminds me to update readers on the situation in Germany: 

A study undertaken recently by the German Catholic weekly Christ und Welt finds that in 2010, over 180,000 German Catholics officially resigned from the Catholic church.  This represents an increase of 40% over the official resignations in 2009, and is being attributed to the revelations of abuse and its cover-up in the German Catholic church in the past year.  As readers of this blog will know, those revelations involved even news that the current pope, when Joseph Ratzinger was archbishop of Munich, had reassigned to active ministry a priest who had been found to have abused minors.

In an article by Christa Pongratz-Lippitt in the latest issue of the British Catholic paper The Tablet, which appears to be behind a firewall, but a copy of which Jim McCrea has kindly emailed me, it's noted that in some parts of heavily Catholic Bavaria, the increase in resignations from the church was 70% over the figures of 2009.  Pongratz-Lippitt states, "Several Catholics in senior positions in Germany have expressed their concern that the exodus had now reached 'the inner core of German Catholicism' and that many committed Catholics were leaving."  This observation is echoed, she notes, by sociology professor Michael Ebertz of the Catholic University of Freiburg, who says that many of those now leaving the Catholic church in Germany are "seriously concerned" about the church: in other words, they are among the most committed of German Catholics, who have stuck with the church through thick and thin up to now.

To underscore his point, Ebertz notes that many of these Catholics are now joining the Lutheran church.  They do not, in other words, want to be unchurched.  The Catholic church has simply become not viable for them as an ecclesial communion any longer.  It has become in key respects a countersign to the gospel it proclaims, and it is precisely their desire to live lives faithful to the gospel that propels them from the church at this point in its history. 

This echoes the observation of Cathleen Kaveny about which I blogged back in October that she hears of increasing numbers of American Catholics leaving the Catholic church as a matter of conscience.  They are concerned about what their remaining in the church means by way of complicity with evil that they see as systemic and as not being addressed effectively, honestly, or willingly by the current pastoral leaders of the Catholic church.

As Ebertz notes, when the behavior of the pastoral leaders of a church results in these levels of disaffection, we're speaking about more than a loss of credibility: we're speaking of a crisis affecting a church's "entire status in society."  Pongratz-Lippitt also quotes the Dominican vicar general of Cologne, Fr. Dominik Schwaderlapp,who tells Christ und Welt that the current mass exodus of German Catholics represents a "protest and deep disgust at the sex abuse scandals."

My intuition is that it represents more, however.  It represents the increasing inability of many of us who are Catholic to continue to support or even be associated with a church whose leaders (and often, whose key spokespersons, à la Bill Donohue) so grossly contradict the mandates of the gospel the church proclaims, that we don't know where to go except outside the walls of the church, in order to find that gospel meaningful in our own lives.  This is what I mean when I say that the church is becoming a countersign to the gospel it proclaims, for many of us, at this historical moment.

As the petition for reform sent by a significant proportion of Catholic theologians teaching in Catholic universities in Germany to the Vatican early this year notes, if the situation in the German Catholic church is not addressed quickly and proactively by church officials, it will soon be too late to reverse the mass exodus or recover any credibility for the Catholic church in Germany society.  The theologians who sent this petition to the Vatican note that their intent in doing so is pastoral: they care about the church and the message it proclaims.  They want that message to mean something of significance to those who hear it (for more information and commentary about this petition, see here, here, here, here, here, and here).

And to repeat my point of earlier today, as Rome gears up for the big spectacle of the beatification of the pope on whose watch the abuse crisis first broke wide open in the Catholic church, and who did nothing to address this crisis, while shielding the notorious Marcial Maciel of the Legion of Christ: that spectacle will in no way restore the shaken confidence of many Catholics who are raising serious questions about the moral example and integrity of church leaders.  It will do, rather, the opposite.

It will do as much to restore the church and set it on solid foundations again as, say, a huge, expensive royal wedding will do to restore traditional heterosexual marriage and set it on solid foundations again. Or about as much as Bill Donohue's expensive ad in tomorrow's Chicago Tribune will do to make right-thinking people imagine that the gays and not the bishops are responsible for the abuse situation.  Sound and fury frequently signify nothing, when staged by leaders intent on diverting attention from the emptiness inhabiting the heart of the costly show. 

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.

Conservative Catholics Question Beatification of John Paul II: Breaking News

Father Marcial Maciel and Pope John Paul II

And here's a fascinating bit of news: it's not merely marginalized, hanging-on-by-the-fingernails Catholics like me who are raising serious questions about the push to beatify John Paul II so precipitously.  It's conservative Catholics who are now also raising questions--some conservative Catholics, at least.

As Tom Fox reports yesterday in National Catholic Reporter, a number of influential Catholic conservatives have signed a petition at the website of Remnant Online calling into serious question the intent to beatify John Paul  immediately.  Among the reasons these Catholics are offering for their reservations?  John Paul's protection of the notorious predator-priest Marcial Maciel.

And they're even pointing out that the single miracle attributed to John Paul, on which the rush to canonize him is based, is ambiguous and open to further discussion.

When those who have most ardently defended the architects of restorationist Catholicism--John Paul II and Benedict--begin to ask critical questions about precisely what this model is doing to the Catholic church, something monumental may be underway in the culture of Catholicism.  As I noted when the Euteneuer case broke open (and here), one of the noteworthy aspects of that case was the willingness of right-wing Catholic websites to blow the whistle on Euteneuer, who had formerly been their darling.

The same thing is happening, to an extent, with the Corapi case.  As I noted two days ago, I first got wind of this case by reading the critical--and good--commentary about Corapi (which goes beyond the question of his guilt or innocence vis-a-vis the current allegations against him) at two Catholic websites with a strongly conservative bent. 

Why the willingness of those who have formerly fiercely defended the powers that be to speak out now?  I suspect it has something to do with just how bad things really are right now for the Catholic church.  There's simply no longer any way to pretend that things are anything other than horrific, when it comes to the public reputation of the Catholic church and to demographic indicators about its future in the developed sector of the world.

Maybe a few more folks are waking up to the fact that, if no one does anything soon, there won't be much left to defend, when all is said and done.  And that waking up is all to the good, if it's really taking place.

Colm Tóibín on John Paul II's Visit to Dublin: "Mysticism and Mystery Followed by Authority and Power"

John Paul II and Marcial Maciel

 

When I first read Irish writer Colm Tóibín's eulogy of Pope John Paul II in the New York Times several days following the pope's death, I remember being struck by three points.  The first was how perfectly Tóibín captured the theatricality of John Paul II and his papacy.  Of everything John Paul did in the public eye, down to the minutest gesture.  

The second point was the stark ambivalence of who this pope was and what he stood for: the media-savvy warmth mixed with a private wariness that made the man anything but approachable, the celebration of freedom for Eastern Europe and the total denial of freedom within the structures of the church itself, the fatherly image unmixed with any discernible paternal affection, the heightened machismo celebrated by the media that seemed asexually devoid of any real concern for the embodied experience of lay Catholics.  Here's Tóibín on what he saw in 1991 when he was at the monastery of Jasna Gora as John Paul celebrated the vigil of the Assumption there:

I watched his face on one of the big screens. In repose he was managing still to be both the stern father and the kind uncle, allowing the considerable number of ambiguities in his being to amount to something powerful and touching and memorable. His eyes were kind and intrigued by things, but also guarded, almost weary, and then, watching him there under the fiercely sharp lights that Polish television shined on him, I studied his mouth, which seemed to me that night to belong to a different being, a more implacable and more stubborn man who would care deeply about discipline and doctrine. His eyes understood and forgave everything; his mouth and the set of his chin forbade deviation and did not want there to be any change. His power, as the night came to an end, arose from the tension between the two, the lure of the drama in his own physiognomy.

And finally, what struck me in Tóibín's remembrance of John Paul was, simply, the ah ha! of discovering that someone else saw in this pope what I saw.  That someone else felt that keen sword's edge of ambivalence in who this pope was and everything he did, a sword's edge that the multitudes of those cheering John Paul the Great, the rock-star pope, the media darling (and creation) seemed utterly to miss.

And so I wondered what it was in Tóibín's perspective that predisposed him to see as I myself had persistently seen, when I read what the pope wrote, or encountered him on television or in one single public event I attended, at which he presided, and which I've described previously on this blog.  Is it that Tóibín and I are both ambivalent about the church because we're gay, I wondered?  Or does something else account for this seeing that seems so at odds with what others see here?

And now I'm asking myself these questions all over again as I read Tóibín's wonderful book The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe.  Where I find the following remembrance of what Tóibín saw when John Paul visited Dublin in 1979:  

I remember him descending from the aeroplane, dressed in white, a half-watchful smile, a half-pained look on his face.  He was attentive to people, it was easy to see that, while he remained distant, a fatherly prelate and a figurehead at the same time.  As he went to his helicopter I watched a woman approaching him who desperately wanted to touch him, or have him bless her.  She was an ordinary woman, not one of the dignitaries the Pope had been greeting.  I tried at the time to describe this moment as though it was important, because the Pope was not on show, there were no television cameras or photographers.  I saw that the Pope noticed the woman, but he was determined now to continue.  She followed and there was a sort of panic in her eyes as she called out to him.  And then I saw his face change from that soft warmth to something else, something tougher.  He was not going to pay any attention to the woman.  I don't know why I thought this was so important during his time at the airport.  But now his face hardened completely.  It was a strange, funny moment.  It hardly mattered.  And yet it stayed with me for the rest of his visit.  At that time we knew almost nothing about him (p. 7).

And then on to the papal Mass at Phoenix Park in Dublin, where Tóibín had a press pass and was seated in a front row--a Mass he found "pure drama," "Fellini's Roma mixed with an elaborate tableau from the Inca period" (ibid.).  And where the pope began by speaking about liturgical celebration and ended by speaking about sex, where he --as Tóibín puts it--won the crowd over with theatricality and followed by hectoring his now-captive audience.  "Mysticism and mystery followed by authority and power"--but, as Tóibín notes, no one else saw it this way, and what he wrote about John Paul at that time was not published (p. 8).

And as I read this eyewitness account of John Paul's behavior--of his tragically ambivalent presence--on two separate occasions by an insightful writer with a novelist's eye, I ask myself all over again: how can what seems so obvious to some of us about this pope be so utterly hidden from those pushing for his immediate canonization?  For some of us, the velvet glove of this pope and his reign always comprised an iron fist, and that fist smashed quite a few members of the people of God who deserved the pope's support and love, and not the fist: women; theologians, and liberation theologians in particular; gays and lesbians, etc.

But as we've since learned, the fist that did not hesitate to come down hard on the heads of some Catholics never once manifested itself in his dealings with people like Marcial Maciel, no matter how outrageously destructive Maciel's behavior, which involved sexual abuse of seminarians, fathering children by several women while he headed the Legionaries of Christ, raping some of his own children, spreading money around lavishly in the Vatican to bribe Curial officials, using illicit drugs.  For Maciel, and for all the bishops in the church who have actively protected clerics abusing children, there was nothing but support.  All velvet.  No fist.

And despite the tragic ambivalence of this legacy, which makes John Paul not a figure of heroic sanctity for some of us, but, in key respects, yes, I'll say it bluntly, a countersign to the gospel, this pope is soon to be beatified.  And it appears that, as this happens, the only choice those of us who see the ambivalence, the contradictions described so sharply by Colm Tóibín, will have is to keep quiet.  As we've been told to do ever since John Paul came on the scene and seized center stage and the bright lights.

John Allen on Focolare Movement: "Track Record of Bringing People Together"

Remember how, when Pope John Paul II died, we were told that the signs waved by the faithful at his funeral--saying, "Santo subito!"--were a spontaneous cry from the heart of the church for the immediate canonization of the saintly pope?  What wasn't frequently reported in American newspapers as these "spontaneous" demonstrations captured the attention of the mainstream media was that the "spontaneous" outburst of piety was carefully orchestrated--and paid for--by a powerful Catholic lay group, Focolare.  Focolare had, in fact, manufactured the "Santo subito!" signs and was already distributing them in advance of the funeral.

As Vatican watcher Luigi Accattoli noted in the period following John Paul's funeral, the Focolare movement  spearheaded the call for John Paul's immediate canonization from the point of the pope's death forward.  Accatoli has reported that, right after the funeral, petitions began circulating among various cardinals calling for John Paul's speedy canonization--petitions widely thought by many Vatican observers to originate with the Focolare movement.  Gordon Urquhart, a former Focolare member who has written a book, The Pope's Armada, about Focolare and other right-trending lay movements John Paul II encouraged, notes that the Focolare movement and other "new ecclesial" lay movements allied to it now have as much influence in the Vatican Curia as Opus Dei does.

And because of Focolare's intimate connection to the process that has pushed the canonization of John Paul II forward so precipitously, I'm intrigued--but hardly surprised--to see John Allen now pointing to Focolare as a model for healing the divisions of the church.  Allen's thesis: "In a time of bitter divisions, Focolare is one of the few outfits with a track record of bringing people together."

Except.  Except for this: for many Catholics, the rush to canonize a pope who knew about the horrific history of abuse of the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, Marcial Maciel, who protected Maciel, and who did nothing at all to address the abuse crisis in the church which came to light on his watch, is anything but healing.  For many of us, the rush to canonize John Paul II is a deeply divisive act that tears at the fabric of the church.  And of our souls.  And of the souls of all those who have been abused by priests, and have not found healing or justice in the church's response to their abuse.

And so why is John Allen praising Focolare and pointing to it as a model for healing the church's divisions and bringing the church together?  Why is he doing this now?  As John Paul's beatification nears?

Once again, it appears that Allen's prescription for the church of the 21st century--a prescription he pretends to disguise in the dispassionate language of a centrist "guy known for being fairly middle of the road" (to borrow a phrase from his Focolare article)--is anything but dispassionate and uncommitted.  In the guise of pleading for healing of divisions, for transcending ideological tensions between right- and left-leaning factions in the church from which he himself stands aloof, Allen is, once again, pushing an agenda that is anything but healing.  Or above the fray.

He's pushing an agenda that implicitly calls for everyone in the church who finds John Paul II's non-response to the abuse crisis deeply troubling to shut up and start cheering as the pope's beatification approaches.  Allen is pushing an agenda that calls for the capitulation of Catholic progressives to their brothers and sisters of the right, who own the title Catholic, Allen consistently implies, in a unique and unilateral way that calls the catholicity of progressive Catholics into question.

Oh, and for any of you who happen to be Catholic and to imagine that the church of the 21st century might contribute to healing and the overcoming of divisions if it stops targeting its gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, don't look to Focolare for inspiration.  As Gordon Urquhart notes, Focolare is heavily involved in political movements  throughout Europe to undermine gay rights.  Urquhart notes that Focolare promotes the bogus idea that homosexuality can be "cured," and has published a book  entitled Homosexual, Who Are You?, which maintains that gays are "guilty of involuntary murder by giving AIDS to young people."

"In a time of bitter divisions, Focolare is one of the few outfits with a track record of bringing people together," Mr. Allen says.  

Perhaps.  If we can accept that one man's meat is another man's poison.

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.

More Responses to 1997 Vatican Letter to Irish Bishops, and a Response to Catholic Diocese of Colorado Springs' Ex-Gay Program

 

Andrew Sullivan's take on the 1997 Vatican letter instructing the Catholic bishops of Ireland to handle abuse cases entirely within canonical structures, evading the police as they did so: Sullivan wonders about the wisdom of the current Vatican rush to canonize John Paul II immediately, as one revelation after another about the sordid way the church did business during his papacy, vis-a-vis those reporting childhood sexual abuse by priests, comes along:

And let us be clear who was presiding over this disgraceful and disgusting negligence of a core moral value: the protection of children from abuse and rape. The Pope ultimately responsible, John Paul II, is on an absurdly fast track for beatification. How will history look on a church that made a saint out of a Pope who ignored, suppressed, and had underlings covering up the rape of countless vulnerable children? In Ireland, the abuse was so severe, so long-running, so protected by a vile collusion between church and state that the attempt to hush it up is damning. It seems to me a stretch to argue that the Church under John Paul II returned to a very papal hierarchical structure and simultaneously say the Pope has no responsibility for the mass rape and abuse of children he so blithely presided over.

Sullivan generously concludes that, despite his pastorally dubious handling of the abuse situation and of the case of serial abuser of minors, rapist of his own children, and drug addict Fr. Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, John Paul II was a "deeply holy man."  In my view, John Paul's sanctity is seriously compromised by his handling of the abuse situation and protection of Maciel.

And Voice of the Faithful's response to the disclosure of the 1997 Vatican letter to the Irish bishops (this is the lead article in the latest In the Vineyard newsletter, 21 Jan. 2011): 

In a New York Times story following the letter’s publication, Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said this letter is “not new” and that, “They’ve known about it in Ireland for some time.” Colm Gorman, a victim of abuse in Ireland, contradicted Lombardi, saying the “letter was not known until its disclosure on Monday (Jan. 17) by RTE.”

VOTF maintains that the Church’s credibility will remain severely damaged unless the Vatican admits to what has been done in the past. The clergy sexual abuse scandal arose and was abetted not just by many thousands of individual priests, religious and others working for the Church who committed heinous crimes, but also by a Church hierarchy that has sought to protect its public image by enforcing a de facto policy of secrecy under the guise of adhering to canonical procedures.

Despite the misleading claim of papal press secretary Fr. Lombardi, the public and Catholics in general now know of the existence of this 1997 letter only because an unnamed Irish bishop leaked it to the media recently.  As the Vatican rushes to canonize John Paul II in a bread-and-circuses diversionary move designed to distract us from the anti-pastoral response of top church leaders to the abuse crisis, I wonder how many other documents like this are floating around, which may come to light as John Paul is canonized--to the embarrassment of Rome and those buying the precipitous canonization of John Paul.

And, on a different topic: here's the response of the new Catholic group Equally Blessed to the 12-step gay-reparative program of the Colorado Springs Catholic diocese about which I blogged earlier today:

“We are all sinners, but in this instance, the sin lies not in gay and lesbian Catholics, but in those who describe children of God in such demeaning language,” said Frank DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, an Equally Blessed partner.

“The notion that homosexuality is an illness similar to alcoholism or addiction to narcotics finds no support in psychological literature,” DeBernardo added. “But you don’t need an advanced degree to understand that the fruits of lifelong, committed, monogamous relationships are quite different than the damage and heartache done by chemical dependencies.”

As I noted in my posting about this earlier today, under the guise of charitable pastoral outreach to the gay and lesbian community, some Catholics--with magisterial approval--continue to characterize gay and lesbian human beings as sick and disordered simply because these human beings are made gay and lesbian by God.  Hence programs designed to "cure" the "illness" of homosexuality--and all the attendant claims of right-wing supporters of such programs that gays stand in unique need of cure, because they are uniquely susceptible to all kinds of illnesses simply because they are gay.

This is hatred disguised as love, which singles out a vulnerable minority group and demands the right to continue stigmatizing and marginalizing that group by tagging it as diseased--in the name of God.  This kind of hatred disguised as love, which claims divine warrant, does grievous harm not merely to those it targets, but to the churches that continue to wallow in it, and to society at large.  It's time for this nonsense to stop.

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.