Does "trickle down" work in the Catholic Church?

That’s one of the statements that echoed in my mind and feelings as I flew home from the annual meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America, in Cleveland, June 10-13.

This image of a “spiritual Reaganomics” operating within the Catholic Church was offered in the Plenary Address by Catherine Clifford and Richard Gaillardetz to the over 400 Catholic theologians assembled from around the USA and Canada.

A  Reaganomics of spiritual truth and beliefs, the two speakers pointed out,  claims that truth is delivered from above – from God’s revelation and then through the bishops, especially the Bishop of Rome.   It then is to “trickle down” to the ordinary faith.  In this understanding, the primary role of theologians is to help it trickle.

Such an understanding of how things work, Clifford and Gaillardetz made clear, does not conform to the nature of the Catholic Church, especially as the church as been understood in the Second Vatican Council. In their lecture, which they presented as a verbally danced duet, they gathered, refocused, and recharged what has been the pretty standard “ecclesiology’ (understanding of the church) that Catholic theologians have advanced since the explosive breakthroughs of the Second Vatican Council:

• That the beliefs of the Catholic Church are to be worked out through the collaborative and dialogical mining of three sources: the people of God (or the sensus fidelium – the sense of the faithful), the bishops (with the Bishop of Rome providing the unifying center), and theologians.
• While each of these sources of Catholic belief have different roles within the Church, none of them can be placed “above” the other.
• Each of these sources – bishops, theologians, people — has to “receive” (that means, listen to) what the others are saying.
• If any of the three sources has a certain “primacy” it is the “the people of God.” Therefore, as Clifford and Gaillardetz stressed, the exercise of the bishops’ and Pope’s teaching office must begin with listening carefully and respectfully to the “sense of the faithful.”   The role of the theologians is “to help the bishops listen carefully.”

But the problem that is rankling the Catholic Church today – and one of the primary reasons why a lot of people  are opting to move out of the Church – is that this leadership of the Catholic Church – yes, the bishops and yes, especially the Bishop of Rome – are NOT LISTENING. Clifford and Gaillardetz pointed out what most of their audience of theologians knew only too well:  many bishops in the US look on theologians with “a presumption of suspicion” that theologians are up to no good and are the primary causes of unrest in the church.

So the conclusion to Clifford and Gaillardetz’s presentation was that theologians, as well as ordinary Catholics in the pews, have to carry out the responsibility given to everyone in their baptism: the responsibility of being prophets.   If theologians and ordinary Catholics always have to listen carefully and respectfully to the bishops and Pope, they sometimes have to speak up and resist honestly and humbly.

In the present state of turmoil and confusion in the Catholic church, that responsibility of speaking up weighs more heavily than ever on the shoulders of Catholics and especially of theologians.  The job description of the theologian is to be a researcher and a teacher – but also to be a prophet.

The problem is that so often when theologians exercise their jobs as prophets and speak up to the bishops and Pope, they get into trouble, even lose their jobs – especially if they are priests or religious.

The power structures today in the Catholic Church do not correspond to the nature of the Church as a community of co-responsibility between people, theologians, bishops.

If the church, as is often said, “is not a democracy” (I’m not so sure about that), neither should it be the monarchy or oligarchy that it seems to be today.

Peritus Ratzinger

In a recent article in the New York Review of Books on the morass of pedophilia crimes and cover-ups facing Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church, Anthony Grafton offers these words of encouragement and hope for bewildered Catholics: “Again and again, Catholics have proved astonishingly resilient and inventive, and have come forward to offer what the hierarchical Church was not providing.”

That rather uplifting statement brought back to my mind similar words that I heard from the lips of none other than the young Father Josef Ratzinger, way back in 1963, in Rome, when he was attending the Second Vatican Council as a theological “peritus” (expert).

I was an even younger seminarian in Rome at the time, just beginning my theological studies at the Gregorian University.  Every evening when the Council was in session, there would be talks given all over Rome by the periti which we seminarians and the general public could attend.  It was a theological candy shop — with offerings from the likes of Karl Rahner, Hans Küng, Ives Congar, Edward Schillebeeckx, John Courtney Murray, Gregory Baum (sorry, at the time, there were no peritae).

Josef Ratzinger was a rather new name.  But one evening, we thought we’d give him a hearing. He was giving a talk on the church, and if I remember correctly it was in a press office on the Via della Conciliazione, right in St. Peter’s front yard.  He was brilliant.  And I remember one particular statement that both stunned and encouraged us. It was something like: “There have been times in the history of the Catholic Church when the bishops have so fallen away from the spirit of the Gospel, that it becomes necessary for the laity to exercise the  rights given them in baptism and to stand up, speak up, resist — even to the point of disobedience!”

I don’t think that the present clerical pedophilia morass is calling us Catholics to disobey. But it is calling us to stand up and speak up and demand that the Pope and the bishops make a public confession of the way they have mishandled so many cases of offending priests and bishops.

All they have to do is follow the rules for a “good confession” that are still given in any orthodox Catholic catechism:  a careful examination of conscience, an honest confession of sins (in detail if they are mortal sins), a sincere act of contrition, and a firm purpose of amendment.  If the Pope and bishops would do that, publicly, they would surely be forgiven by God — and the Catholic laity.

So, Pope Benedict, may I remind you that Josef Ratzinger is encouraging us to speak up….

Ouch!  My discomfort became all the more painful when Dowd went on with a bit of theological-historical analysis: “To circumscribe women, Saudi Arabia took Islam’s moral codes and orthdoxy to extremes not outlined by Muhammad; the Catholic Church took its moral codes and orthodoxy to extremes not outlined by Jesus. In the New Testament, Jesus is surrounded by strong women and never advocates that any woman — whether she’s his mother or a prostitute — be treated as a second-class citizen.”

Dowd’s right.  There are no theological or historical supports in what we know of the mission of Jesus and the early years of the church to support obligatory celibacy for the priesthood or to exclude women from the priestly ministry.  None.  The present practice can be called an aberration.

Dowd’s  mirror-images of Saudi Arabia and the Catholic Church pushed me to stand back and take a sobering look at this church that I love:  It is one of the few surviving  (if not the only surviving) absolute monarchies to exist on this planet. It is run by a man and his entourage called the Curia who are all  male and who, in the name of celibacy, have denied themselves the experience of intimate love of another human being, which means they have denied themselves  “the earthy, primal messiness of families and children.” (Lisa Miller quoted by Dowd)

And they exercise their power over the church in almost complete secrecy, without any recognized checks and balances. The Pope’s authority, as defined by the First and Second Vatican Councils is “full, supreme, and universal” and the pope can “always exercise this authority as he chooses.” (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, par. 22)

I invite my fellow Catholics to step back with me, take an honest look at the monarchical, exclusively-male, family-estranged authority structures of our church and ask ourselves the simple but sobering question:  Can this be the will of God? Can such a church really be what the God of Jesus — what Jesus — would approve of?

Or, must we say, as some Latin American theologian friends of mine put it:  This Catholic Church is the church of Jesus (along with other churches).  But this Catholic Church is not the church that Jesus wanted.

If we Catholics really feel that the present state of our church — with its absolute, monarchical, all-male structures –is not God’s will, what should be do?

Right now, I don’t want to take up that question.  I just want all of us Catholics to ask ourselves this question: can the present state of our church be the will of God?  And let the answer sink in.  Really sink in.  Take firm hold of our minds and hearts.

If the answer to this question does sink deeply into our Catholic identities, if it shakes us up, if it stirs our feelings, it will slowly but surely be translated into actions — actions that will bring us together to reform our church.

Hans Küng has recently called for such actions on the part of the bishops.   We have to talk more about what his call implies for the laity.

Pope Benedict

In a March 28 article on the present plight of the Pope and priestly pedophilia (wow, I didn’t intend that alliteration!), the NEW YORK TIMES wrote: “As archbishop, Benedict expended more energy pursuing theological dissidents than sexual predators.”  They’re referring to the early 80s, when Pope Benedict was Cardinal Ratzinger presiding over the diocese of Munich.

The claim has to be set in context, as John Allen reminds us in an op-ed piece in the same issue of the NYT.  In those days, priestly pedophilia was understood to be more of a moral disorder than a psychological disorder.  If it’s a moral problem, you can go to confession with a “firm purpose of amendment,” and then get back to your life armed with God’s grace.  If the problem is psychological, you will need serious therapy  and maybe God’s grace will be able to bring you only so far. The bishops, at that time, didn’t realize the messy psychic roots of pedophilia.

Okay. That’s true.  But what was becoming clear in the 80′s, I’m told, was the reality of post-traumatic stress and the disorder it causes. That was seen in Vietnam vets.  And it was also clear that the trauma of sexual abuse of children can have the same enduring devastating effects.   That the bishops could have, or should have, known:   If they thought that the moral disorder of priestly pedophilia could be set aright in the confessional and through grace, they should have also known (and maybe did) that the psychological disorder that the abuse caused in children could not be handled so neatly.  Such disorder and pain pervaded the life of the abused victims into their adulthood, long after the priests were absolved and back at the altar.  Where was the pastoral concern for the children who, as we have heard, were sometimes required to take oaths of silence about what had happened to them?

And here is where the TIMES article is telling us something.  What seems to be true of Ratzinger was broadly true of many bishops: he was more concerned about the horrors of heresy than the horrors of psychological devastations of sexually abused children.

That brings me to the “dictatorship of relativism.”  This was the phrase that Cardinal Ratzinger used in the sermon he preached for all his fellow Cardinals during the Mass before they all entered the Sacred Conclave and elected Ratzinger as Pope.  Many commentators have pointed out that it was this rallying call to oppose relativism that roused many Cardinals to vote for him.

Relativism, loosely described, means “anything goes.”  Ratzinger was going to put a stop to that among theologians.  That’s what occupied him as archbishop of Munich, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and as Pope. There are limits to what a theologian can say. If he or she goes too far, they lose their job.

But while Ratzinger and many Catholic bishops have opposed the dictatorship of theological relativism,  they seem to have  slacked on opposing — indeed, they seem to be fostering — a dictatorship of moral relativism when it comes to how they have handled not only pedophile priests, but bishops who have covered for, and then reassigned, such priests.

While theologians who have gone too far in questioning the uniqueness of Christ have been forbidden to teach, bishops who have not reported pedophile priests to the authorities have been promoted.

Where’s the relativism?  Where’s the “anything goes”?  Who is the dictator of relativism?

I’m referring to the accusations being made that you allowed a priest, Fr. Peter Hullermann, who had been identified as a pedophile in the diocese of Essen back in 1980, to come to your diocese in Munich, and after a brief period of therapy, he was permitted to take up his ministry without any enforced restrictions about staying away from kids.

And now the New York Times has made known that Dr. Werner Huth, the psychiatrist who treated (or tried to treat) Fr. Hullermann, reported to the Munich diocesan authorities at the time that Fr. Hullermann had refused to engage in one-on-one therapy and that he was “neither invested nor motivated” in his therapy.  Dr. Huth recommended to your diocese that Fr. Hullermann could be readmitted to priestly ministry only under the strictest conditions – namely, “that he stay away from children, not drink alcohol, and be accompanied and supervised at all times by another priest.”

Well, Fr. Hullerman was soon assigned a parish post, and Dr. Huth has stated that these conditions were “enforced only intermittently.”  It must have been very intermittently, since Hullermann was convicted in 1986 of sexually abusing minors and distributing pornographic materials.

The Vicar General for your diocese at the time has covered for you and said that you did not know that Hullermann was assigned to a parish. Also, Dr. Huth cannot prove that his stern warnings that “For God’s sake, he desperately has to be kept away from working with children,” were ever communicated to you.

Even if you can prove that you knew nothing about the reports of the psychiatrist or of the assignment of Fr. Hullermann, you cannot avoid the question that comes thundering into the mind and onto the lips of anyone reading about this:  WHY DIDN’T YOU?!  HOW COULD YOU NOT HAVE?

Your Holiness, excuse my bluntness: You are sailing down that well-known creek without a paddle.  You need to do something to clear your name and to reinstate the confidence of the Catholic church (that is, the Catholic people) in your leadership.

The legal, perhaps moral, solution would be for you to resign, as it would have been for the bishops mentioned by the Massachusetts Attorney General’s 2003 “Report on the Sexual Abuse of Children in the Boston Archdiocese.”  These were the bishops who cooperated with Cardinal Law in the cover up of pedophile priests.  All of them went on to be promoted to head other dioceses, while Law himself was removed and promoted to a plush post in the Vatican. (The Boston Bishops I’m talking about are: Thomas  Daily, Robert Banks, Alfred Hughes, William Murphy, and John McCormack.)  None of these men were really held responsible by Pope John Paul II or by you.  So we can’t really expect you to hold yourself responsible.

Therefore I’m suggesting that you can all keep your jobs and still show the Catholic people that you are serious about reforming the church and the all-male clerical caste-system that, according to many and most recently Hans Küng, is at the root of the deception and the sexual abuse.

All you have to do is drop obligatory celibacy for the priesthood and admit women to the priesthood!

Both of these moves are theologically possible, as the majority of your Roman Catholic theologians and scripture scholars will explain to you.  And, the move would enable you to have a sufficient number of priests around the world to enable the Catholic people to keep their “Sunday obligation” of going to Mass. (Right now, because you make celibacy more important than the Eucharist, there aren’t enough priests.)

So that’s the deal:  You and the offending bishops can keep your jobs, and regain the respect of your people – simply by admitting men and women to the priesthood without requiring them to deprive themselves of the intimacy of sexual love.

As easy as that!  How about it?

Perhaps what the Vatican sees as “a campaign” might be the effort of the press to do with the Pope and bishops what it does with all public officials: it holds them accountable to the values and claims of their office.  This should be even more expected of public officials of a religious organization that holds itself up to the world as a defender of values such as honesty, compassion, integrity.  The Pope has a carpet on which he calls many of his underlings to account.  The people of the Catholic Church, and the media, have their own carpet on which they call the Pope to account.

Besides, “poor me” responses to accusations really don’t work.  What the Vatican needs to do is stop calling all these accusations  a “campaign” and instead show that they are false .   If they really are false, it should be possible, if not easy, to show that they are false.

May I suggest two accusations that really need to be proven false:

1) In 1980, a German priest who had been accused of sexual abuse of minors in the diocese of Essen was transferred to the archdiocese of Munich for therapy; that was with the express approval of Archbishop Ratzinger. It seems that the priest never received therapy but was immediately given a new pastoral assignment in the archdiocese.  (He was later accused and convicted of sexually abusing children.) The then Vicar General, Gerhard Gruber, claims that Ratzinger, even though he was in charge of the archdiocese, knew nothing about this assignment of an abusive priest to a new parish. THAT’S WHAT HAS TO BE PROVEN.  Father Thomas Doyle, who is a canon lawyer and knows a lot about how sexual abuse cases have been handled, made this comment: “Pope Benedict is a micro-manager. He’s the old style. Anything like that would necessarily have been brought to his attention. Tell the vicar general to find a better line. What he’s trying to do, obviously, is protect the pope.”  THAT’S WHAT HAS TO BE SHOWN TO BE NOT TRUE!

2) More seriously, the Vatican needs to provide more information on why the Vatican insisted, during the height of the revelations of sexual abuse by priests in the US, that all the cases be sent directly to Rome  to be handled by the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.  The Vatican  has declared as  “false and calumnious”  accusations that Benedict covered up abuse cases when he oversaw investigations for four years as the boss of that Congregation . More information is needed to show that such accusations are indeed false.  This is especially urgent when some of the accusations are coming from within the Catholic Church.  Archbishop Weakland has said that while he was in charge of the Milwaukee diocese and duly sent in  a number of such cases to Rome, many of them were never acted upon.  Why?

So rather than “poor me,” I suggest that the Pope provide more transparency.

And I say that as a struggling Catholic who is very concerned about the well-being, not just the image,  of my church.

I have a definitely biased reaction to that statement.  I’m a former priest, who had to leave the clerical club because I wanted to also find God in human love (which means I didn’t want to sleep alone).  If I could have stayed, there would have been one less reason to rent a priest from abroad.

That’s what the Catholic Church in the US is presently doing — it’s renting — really, stealing — priests from other countries who need priests even more than the US RC Church does, especially Africa and Asia.  In the US (and Europe), the ratio of priest to Catholic laity is 1 to 1,300. In  Sub-Saharan Africa, it’s  1-4,786; in Southeast Asia: 1-5,322.

Many of this foreign sacerdotal acquisitions are doing a fine job of shepherding a flock whose customs they often don’t understand and whose language they often speak with heavy, hard-to-follow accents.  Many of them aren’t.  Whether they are or aren’t, it’s a shame that they cannot stay at home and tend their own flocks.  It’s a shame that so many parish-flocks throughout America are without shepherds.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  There’s a simple solution, and it’s staring the Vatican and American bishops right in the face:  Ordain married men and women.  As any Catholic theologian who doesn’t work for the Vatican or the Bishops’ Conference will tell you, there’s no theological reason why that can’t happen.  The only obstacle right now is, literally, “a man-made law” — that is, men huddled around one of the the last surviving real monarchies in the world — a monarchy that wants to hang on to its patriarchal power.

I say all this not from outside the Catholic Church, but from inside.  I love this church.  And it’s killing me to see how man-made rules are killing it.