Union MA student Mike Swain offers some reflections on being Catholic at a time when your church is in the cultural cross-hairs.
As a Catholic at Union, this past month has been a gut check – quite literally at times, as reading media accounts of the Catholic Church’s institutional negligence and cover-up of sexual abuse cases has twisted my stomach in knots. The most recent round of public media disclosures has not arrived with a dull ache, which too often accompanies seemingly too-familiar news tragedies. It has come rather with something of a bodily interrogation of Catholic identity – and more specifically, an interrogation of what it means to call oneself Catholic at Union.
I realize that for many who have observed the slow, painful drip of media revelations in the past decade, any strong reaction may feel delayed. I can only write that I consider myself among the implicated laity who have taken umbrage – but too often remained privately fatalistic – in the face of these scandals over the years. But I am less interested in offering apologies than I am in professing – inadequately, considering the limitations of space – why this recent struggle has actually brought me into a deeper confrontation with Catholic identity.
To state upfront: I do not count myself among those who dismiss the institutional Church as fundamentally unnecessary or those who disregard Pope Benedict XVI as an entirely regressive authority. I depend on the institutional Church and those who labor within it. I only wish it would become less of a postmodern institution (as evidenced by its recent public relations defensiveness and seeming lack of accountability) and that it would loose itself from the presumptions of its patriarchic hierarchy. On broad theological grounds, though, I agree with the principle of Pope Benedict’s current mission – to reform a Church as one that stands in opposition to moral relativism, which exists as a real and powerful dilemma for those under the influence of postmodern late capitalist society – even as I may sharply disagree with many of his methods and ideas.
That said, as a Catholic at Union, it has been nearly impossible to ignore the sense of institutional trespass that has been evoked by the Vatican’s decision to rescind Father Roger Haight’s right to lecture and publish. For those who do not know, Fr. Haight – our current scholar-in-residence at Union – was ordered last year by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which monitors doctrinal-moral orthodoxy for the administrative body of the Catholic Church, to stop teaching and writing formally on theology because he supposedly failed to address issues of doctrinal heterodoxy. This was the latest measure of censorship that followed in the wake of the publishing of Jesus Symbol of God in 1999 and which has also included Fr. Haight’s forced resignation from Weston Jesuit School of Theology.
Throughout this lengthy process, Fr. Haight has, by his calm yet constitutively forceful Ignatian spirit, defended his theological arguments and maintained his position as both a Jesuit and Catholic, and in so doing, he has tried to make present the possibility of Catholic identity in conversation with postmodern currents of thought. Fr. Haight has also continued to motivate Catholics to accept the challenge of staying within the Church – and he has done so whether or not we agree with his theological justifications. It is for these reasons that Fr. Haight embodies the notion that Catholic identity is more possible, not less, in our communal and personal crises of undecidability – those crucibled states of unknowing we enter into when we risk, as we must, the confrontation of variable and seemingly contradictory experiences of God, and where it sometimes seems unlikely that any constructive definition of identity, truth, and authentic meaning can be discerned and professed. We are certainly privy to these crises on a daily basis at Union.
The revoking of Fr. Haight’s professorial status was effectively used as a statement by the CDF, one that bypassed an honest consideration of Fr. Haight’s real students and colleagues in the service of conveying the Church’s mission to bear witness to doctrinal solidity. While it is difficult to engage a fuller explication of the overlap, I see an analogous logic at work within the Church’s responses to certain cases of molestation, as well as within its current public relations strategies. The logic: to protect the Church itself – its doctrines and faith, yes, but also its messages and its image – from either heterodoxy or scandal, and to do so too often at the expense of engaging the spiritual-material reality of those affected by its decisions and members. Thus, the protection of the Church and the protection of children have at times constituted separate or conflicting missions. In light of this logic and its devastating repercussions, as well as through the experience of Fr. Haight’s removal, I have been led to deeply question where I identify or disidentify with the institutional actions and proclamations of the Church – and whether or not I will choose to identify at all.
This is an undoubtedly necessary task. But what this recent wave of scandals has brought home to me, quite painfully at times, is that the process of identification is not primarily within my hands. I may identify as Catholic, but the institutional Church also identifies and implicates me, and where identity and identification consciously change, they do so in concert with something deep within me that is out of my control, something that merely is. This is not an intellectually abstracted realization of God’s presence but a re-cognition, through an experience of corporeal illness, that I am bound to the sins of Catholic others, institutional or otherwise, as well as their ideals. The assumption of collective moral responsibility is also an act of acceptance, even if requires thoughtful attempts at differentiating dimensions of personal culpability.
I realize that my sentiment may contain, or appear to reflect, more than a subtle note of Catholic melodramatic guilt. But I also believe that this responsibility, far from being a matter of Catholic temperament, speaks to all of us. Quoting and expounding on Union’s oft-memorialized theologian, Thomas Merton wrote that even “Bonhoeffer’s worldliness [was] no denial of guilt, but [an] ‘entering into the fellowship of guilt for the sake of other’” people. In trying to reject the institutional sins of the Catholic Church, I have only found out how deeply invested I am in their failures. And these subsequent questions of fellowship have opened me up more fully to the anguished responsibility of learning to love my Church with eyes open, where “love is not blind…love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind” (G.K. Chesterton).
