Archbishop Dolan Meets a Critic of Priests

Below Archbishop Dolan recounts a great exchange with a rather harsh critic he met in an airport. It gives a window into how your average priest is experiencing the tragedy of the sex abuse scandals. I found this on the excellent and nicely named site, Fallible Blogma. It seems especially timely as we enter this week of maximum media attack on the Church, otherwise known as Holy Week.

By Archbishop Dolan:

It was only the third time it had happened to me in my nearly thirty-five happy years as a priest, all three times over the last nine-and-a-half years.

Other priests tell me it has happened to them a lot more.

Three is enough. Each time has left me so shaken I was near nausea.

It happened last Friday . . .

I had just arrived at the Denver Airport, there to speak at their popular annual “Living Our Catholic Faith” conference.

As I was waiting with the others for the electronic train to take me to the terminal, a man, maybe in his mid-forties, waiting as well, came closer to me.

“Are you a Catholic priest?” he kindly asked.

“Sure am. Nice to meet you,” says I, as I offered my hand.

He ignored it. “I was raised a Catholic,” he replied, almost always a hint of a cut to come, but I was not prepared for the razor sharpness of the stiletto, as he went on, “and now, as a father of two boys, I can’t look at you or any other priest without thinking of a sexual abuser.”

What to respond? Yell at him? Cuss him out? Apologize? Deck him? Express understanding? I must admit all such reactions came to mind as I staggered with shame and anger from the damage of the wound he had inflicted with those stinging words.

“Well,” I recovered enough to remark, “I’m sure sorry you feel that way. But, let me ask you, do you automatically presume a sexual abuser when you see a Rabbi or Protestant minister?”

“Not at all,” he came back through gritted teeth as we both boarded the train.

“How about when you see a coach, or a boy scout leader, or a foster parent, or a counsellor, or physician?” I continued.

“Of course not!” he came back. “What’s all that got to do with it?”

“A lot,” I stayed with him, “because each of those professions have as high a percentage of sexual abuse, if not even higher, than that of priests.”

“Well, that may be,” he retorted. “But the Church is the only group that knew it was going on, did nothing about it, and kept transferring the perverts around.”

“You obviously never heard the stats on public school teachers,” I observed. “In my home town of New York City alone, experts say the rate of sexual abuse among public school teachers is ten times higher than that of priests, and these abusers just get transferred around.” (Had I known at that time the news in in last Sunday’s New York Times about the high rate of abuse of the most helpless in state supervised homes, with reported abusers simply transferred to another home, I would have mentioned that, too.)

To that he said nothing, so I went in for a further charge.

“Pardon me for being so blunt, but you sure were with me, so, let me ask: when you look at yourself in a mirror, do you see a sex abuser?”

Now he was as taken aback as I had been two-minutes before. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Sadly,” I answered, “studies tell us that most children sexually abused are victims of their own fathers or other family members.”

Enough of the debate, I concluded, as I saw him dazed. So I tried to calm it down.

“So, I tell you what: when I look at you, I won’t see a sex abuser, and I would appreciate the same consideration from you.”

The train had arrived at baggage claim, and we both exited together.

“Well then, why do we only hear this garbage about you priests,” he inquired, as he got a bit more pensive.

“We priests wonder the same thing. I’ve got a few reasons if you’re interested.”

He nodded his head as we slowly walked to the carousel.

“For one,” I continued, “we priests deserve the more intense scrutiny, because people trust us more as we dare claim to represent God, so, when one of us do it – even if only a tiny minority of us ever have — it is more disgusting.”

“Two, I’m afraid there are many out there who have no love for the Church, and are itching to ruin us. This is the issue they love to endlessly scourge us with.”

“And, three, I hate to say it,” as I wrapped it up, “there’s a lot of money to be made in suing the Catholic Church, while it’s hardly worth suing any of the other groups I mentioned before.”

We both by then had our luggage, and headed for the door. He then put his hand out, the hand he had not extended five minutes earlier when I had put mine out to him. We shook.

“Thanks. Glad I met you.”

He halted a minute. “You know, I think of the great priests I knew when I was a kid. And now, because I work in IT at Regis University, I know some devoted Jesuits. Shouldn’t judge all you guys because of the horrible sins of a few.”

“Thanks!,” I smiled.

I guess things were patched-up, because, as he walked away, he added, “At least I owe you a joke: What happens when you can’t pay your exorcist?”

“Got me,” I answered.

“You get ‘re-possessed’!”

We both laughed and separated.

Notwithstanding the happy ending, I was still trembling . . . and almost felt like I needed an exorcism to expel my shattered soul, as I had to confront again the horror this whole mess has been to victims and their families, our Catholic people like the man I had just met . . . and to us priests.

Retrieved April 17, 2011 from http://www.fallibleblogma.com/index.php/archbishop-dolan-meets-a-critic-of-priests/#more-4292

There they go again! 2: PBS does Holy Week

PBS is celebrating Holy Week by dredging up a decades-old but terrible scandal of clergy abuse in Alaska. Far from being "a little-known chapter of the Catholic Church sex abuse story," as the network claims, the New York Times did several articles on it and the Los Angeles Times made it into a huge front-page story. Not satisfied with its earlier lengthy episode on the abuse scandal ("Hand of God," January 2007), PBS's Frontline is piling it on with this new attack, well timed to undermine the Catholic Church during the most holy week of her liturgical year.

As Dave Pierre, author of Double Standard says, the scandal was real and shocking -

However, media outlets like PBS have surpassed the point where they are merely reporting a story. They are using the scandals as a tool to single out and further tarnish the Church.

When will PBS’ Frontline investigate the massive child abuse and cover-ups happening today - not decades ago - in our nation's public schools? How about the recent cover-ups of abuse by Orthodox rabbis in New York City?

See Pierre's blog at http://www.themediareport.com

Ordination of Women and Abuses of Priests

By Hadley Arkes

The complaint was pressed on me in January at a wedding in the exurbs of Pennsylvania. I was doing one of the readings and that office was shared also by an urbane woman of middle years, an accomplished artist, mother of three children in their twenties. She had been raised a Catholic, but she had detached herself from the Church. She was obviously generous and loving, and too decorous to set out for me the grounds of her defection from the Church. But at dinner something did break though, as a complaint and challenge.

She recalled an article in the Guardian, the British publication, reporting on an announcement last July from the Vatican, a restatement of “grave crimes” in the Church. And what sparked her indignation was the news that, in this restatement of Catholic teaching, those people who engaged in the ordination of women were put on the same plane as priests who engaged in the sexual abuse of children.

The ordination of women was something she regarded as an eminently plausible and legitimate state of affairs. The argument cast up in resistance to women as priests she evidently regarded not only as wrong, but as a corrupted understanding, revealing a demeaning view of women.
I had not had the chance yet to see the documents that had drawn her ire, but my guess, as I told her, is that she was looking at the problem with a lens and an angle strikingly different from that of the Church. And in that guess, I think I was proved quite right. On July 15, the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith issued a restatement on grave crimes (gravioribus delictis). Fr. Lombardi, the head of the Vatican press office, sought to explain the restatement in a manner that should have put things in their rightful place. Zenit, the news agency concentrating on the Vatican, offered this account: “In addition to norms regarding priests who sexually abuse minors, the revision clarifies crimes against the Eucharist, the sacraments of confession and holy orders, and crimes against the faith.”

Anyone who pretended to ordain a woman as a priest, or any woman receiving that supposed ordination, would be subject to excommunication. The sexual abuse of children would also be regarded now as one of those grave crimes against the Church. But when the two offenses are brought together in this way, within the same scheme, the meaning should become plainer: The object is not to denigrate the concern for women; it is rather to put the wrong of sexual abuse on a higher plane of gravity, involving a deep wrong against the faith.

Looking with a different lens, one may not see that the ordaining of women is bound up with the meaning of the Eucharist and a “sacrament.” As Aquinas argued, the very point of a sacrament is that it is supposed to represent something real, that the quality of a sacrament is enhanced as it bears a closer, natural resemblance, to the thing being represented. And what is being represented here has a striking presence in the economy of nature as a man. The priest stands in place of Jesus.

In this vein I did a piece once for Crisis magazine on “Jackie Robinson and the Ordination of Women.” It began with a trivia quiz: In the movie biographies of baseball stars, James Stewart played Monty Stratton of the White Sox, and Dan Dailey played Dizzy Dean. Who played Jackie Robinson? Answer: Jackie himself, for there were no black leading men in Hollywood in 1952. But Lena Horne was there. Why not do it in cross-gender as directors these days do Shakespeare? That could not be done, you see, because Jackie Robinson really was a male and there was a need to be faithful to the Jackie Robinson story.

Lest we forget, the matter of representation with the Eucharist is bound up as well with the logic of the Incarnation: If God came in human form, God could not have come as a hermaphrodite. “Male and female created He them.” God had to come as one thing or the other.

But of course, within the scheme of the Church, no male stands higher than Mary. And as Cardinal Saper sought to explain in the 1970s (“On the Admission of Women to the Priesthood”) women such as Saint Clare and Saint Teresa of Avila were founders of new orders, and others, like Saint Catherine of Siena left writings so rich that these women have been elevated to doctors of the Church. And what this recognized was that there were simply different functions: the fact that men served as priests, in doing the kinds of things that Jesus would do in service, did not indicate that they bore some power of their own. Theirs was to be a derivative power, inviting the power truly wielded by another.

In New York, the new Archbishop, Timothy Dolan, caught the precise sense of the matter in the restatement from the Vatican: “The offenses listed – child abuse, use of child pornography, and abuse of a mentally disabled adult – now carry the weight of the most serious of crimes against the very heart of the Church.” It was not, again, that the place of women was being lowered. But rather, the deep infidelity of priests was being raised now, as a wrong that went to the core of Catholic teaching.


Hadley Arkes is the Ney Professor of Jurisprudence at Amherst College. His most recent book is Constitutional Illusions & Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural Law.
Retrieved March 15, 2011 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/?task=view

PA comment: Quite right, but a PR faux pas nonetheless?

Another Anti-Catholic Rant from the New York Times

Once again, a shamelessly biased anti-Catholic rant from Maureen Dowd. (On the phenomenon of anti-Catholic Catholics like Dowd, Garry Wills, et al., see The New Anti-Catholicism by Philip Jenkins.) Contrary to the claim in her latest op-ed piece, the Vatican said nothing to equate mock ordinations of women and clergy sex abuse. Yes, it was a PR mistake--another own goal--to address these grave but utterly different offenses in the same document, but that's all.

As for the two "inquisitions" of nuns that exercise Ms. Dowd so mightily, these visitations were long overdue. The investigations of the seminaries that had adopted an actively homosexual culture, aided and abetted by nuns, came much too late too. (See Michael Rose's Goodbye, Good Men for details.) The Church's older religious orders and liberal seminaries did immense damage to the Church, infected as they were by a Sixties climate of "anything goes" in faith and morals. The irony is that the liberals who promoted these developments in the 1970s (when clergy sex abuse rose to the level of the male population as a whole before falling back close to zero today) are using the crisis they helped create to denounce the Vatican's efforts to clean up the mess.

Meanwhile, much to the annoyance of the aging liberals, it is the young, orthodox, and faithful parts of the Church, the new strict religious communities and seminaries, that are thriving as the liberal Catholic project dies off. Still, it will take decades for the Church to recover from the damage in every area--in catechesis, liturgy, architecture, music, ecclesiology, theology, and morals--that that liberal project wrought.

On "Liberal" Dissidents and the Crisis

In the thread mentioned in my last post, Anne Rice often quotes dissidents--even extreme ones like Hans Kung--and columnists as vehemently opposed to the hierarchy and Magisterium as Maureen Dowd of the NYT. When the anti-papal and anti-Benedict bias of these sources is pointed out, Ms. Rice observes that they are sincere and we can learn from them. Both points are true as far as I know, but there is much more to be said about the dissidents' own role and responsibility in this sordid saga. And saying it cannot be dismissed as mere defensiveness. Here is my response:
_____________________________________
There is clearly a difference of perception here and repetition and autobiographical statements do not make the assertions more persuasive. (I do not mean that disrespectfully--I am a huge fan of Ms. Rice's recent work.)

On the question of "liberals" (those who have consistently and often contemptuously opposed the leadership of JP II and Benedict), they may well be sincere and we should learn from opponents as well as friends.

But if we want to understand the current scandal and crisis in the Church, we have to face up to these "liberals'" (or dissidents may be a better term) contribution to it. These include a semi-secularization of Catholics who are terribly under-catechized and whose beliefs and behavior are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from the rest of society, on matters from abortion to the Real Presence, as well as sexual permissiveness. It seems the rate of sexual abuse of adolescents by clergy also rose in this period to approximate much of the rest of the male population.

This atmosphere of permissiveness, dilettantism, a gay subculture that disdained the vow of chastity and the Church's moral guidance in general, permeated the seminaries and infected the priests who graduated from them. The problem was exacerbated enormously by theologians like Kung and Curran who treated almost everything in the Church's teaching on faith and morals as up for grabs. (The Church is also not a graduate theological seminar or playground for academics and intellectuals.)

If we want a full accounting for the abuse scandal and assurance it will not be repeated, we need to face up to this issue and not sweep it under the rug.

Clergy Abuse and the Pope: A response to Anne Rice

For a couple of weeks now I have been participating in an amazon.com discussion thread begun by Anne Rice, a writer whose recent work I greatly admire. I have made several contributions but become increasingly frustrated by the way this (like other threads) quickly starts going round in circles with no real movement in response to postings from different perspectives. Repetition and autobiographical statements produce no value added. The thread is at

http://www.amazon.com/tag/catholicism/forum/ref=cm_cd_pg_newest?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx260WUKFZL9IBC&cdPage=1&cdSort=oldest&cdThread=Tx6HSNWJ207P29

A new participant, NY2VA, has made an excellent, clear contribution that does actually clarify things and take the discussion forward. Whether it goes forward from here remains to be seen. NY2VA has kindly agreed to allow me to repost her or his post with the disclaimer that the points it makes derive from conversations with others. (Don't they always?) Here's the post. It is a response to Anne Rice's points.

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Posted on Apr. 18, 2010 1:48 PM PDT
Last edited by the author 2 hours ago
NY2VA says:
As a gifted and skilled author you appreciate the value of words, what they mean, and the importance of their proper usage when reasoning through a problem in order to arrive at valid conclusion. We are told to let yes mean yes and no mean no. Just so.

Pedophilia is the inherently abusive commission of sexual relations with prepubescent children. The sexual abuse committed by some Catholic clergy does not fit the definition of the word being applied. So, why such insistence on using the word? Some 80% of the sexual abuse cases in the US involved boys between the ages of 11 and 17. That makes them adolescents. Male adolescents. In the spirit of calling things what they are, there is no pedphlilia scandal. There is an ephebophilia scandal. The men in question abandoned their sacred vows and succumbed to male hebephilia, attraction to pubescent male children. Ergo, there is a homosexuality problem.

The problem is that homosexual men who did not control their sexual desires were given positions of authority and trust, and placed in close proximity to adolescent boys. And when they victimized them, they were counseled and transferred - often based on the "best," most current psychiatric theory - instead of being arrested and imprisoned. The blame for the problems belongs to the men themselves, and the bishops of those times, predominately the 60's and 70's, not to the pope of today.

Regarding your oft repeated, loyal Catholic, hypothetical inquiry as to whether Pope Benedict XVI should be punished if he is found to have done wrong, of course he should. If he cheats at cards, he should expect to be horsewhipped. If Tony Blair is found to have embezzled millions from the Bank of England, he should be jailed. If LeBron James hacks an opponent, he should be whistled for a personal foul. If you do 85 mph in a 45 mph zone, you should be ticketed for reckless driving. And the point is?

I see no constructive use in hypothetical questions. Talking about what someone thinks should happen if something that probably did not happen but possibly might have happened actually did happen is a pointless (at best) and destructive (more likely) parlor game. If you want to discuss the scandal of homosexual abuse of adolescent boys by men who broke their vows and betrayed the trust placed in them by the Catholic Church, and the failure of their superiors to protect their flocks, you will be discussing something real. And some good might come of it.

The use of the political terms liberal and conservative is likewise misguided. The Catholic Church is not a political institution. There is no liberal or conservative Faith. There is orthodox and there is heterodox. Period. One is either obedient, the antidote to the greatest of sins - pride, or one is disobedient, Non serviam! We are all sinners. The priests who broke their vows and abused their charges were disobedient sinners. Had they and the bishops and therapists who enabled their abuse been faithful to the Magisterium, no scandal of this scale would exist. It is only when we insist on being our own Magisterium - Non serviam! - that we go wrong.

God love you.

Viva Cristo Rey.

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For those who do not know, the last words of the above post were made famous as the last words of a great Catholic martyr of Mexico's secularist government, the Jesuit priest Miguel Pro. He was killed by firing squad in front of news cameras November 23, 1927. (See Robert Royal's inspiring book, The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century.)