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OUR BISHOPS HAVE ABANDONED US
By Harry J.
Jordan, Homiletic & Pastoral Review, May 2004:
As I write this, on the eve of Ash
Wednesday, I am aware that the “Passion of the Christ” will hit the
screens tomorrow. I had the privilege of seeing an advance showing of
Mel Gibson’s film last December when I was in Rome. I was staying at
the Pontifical North American College and the Rector had prevailed upon
the producer, who had just given a copy of the film to the Vatican for
the Holy Father, to show it to the seminarians, priests and guests at
the College. As millions have now learned, the film is a profound
experience and exposes the lie of those who, without ever seeing it, had
condemned it as anti-semitic and, as I heard one critic pontificate on a
television interview show, “not the gospel according to Jesus Christ,
but the gospel according to Mel Gibson.” One of the “last” words of
Christ on the Cross, as we all know, was the heart rending cry, “My God,
My God, why have you abandoned me?” Those words could very well be the
echo of the thousands of faithful priests in the United States who, in
this very painful season of our ministry, could say to our bishops, “why
have you abandoned us?”
Several weeks ago, in my diocese, one of
our priests died. For the first time, in the history of our diocese, no
notice was sent to the presbyterate, no request for prayers and Masses
was made, no arrangements for a funeral and burial announced. He had
become a “non-person”, consigned to oblivion, an embarrassment to be
ignored and forgotten. Yes, he was a priest who had been accused of
sexual misconduct and, obviously, the evidence was sufficient to sustain
his suspension from the priesthood and to send him to a diocesan
facility, which isolated him from any further connection with the Church
he had once been ordained to serve. He had been humiliated, his family
and friends had been hurt beyond measure, many of his former
parishioners deeply saddened at his ignominious downfall, and his
brother priests confounded by his weakness and the ensuing scandal, yet
compassionate to him as a brother priest who needed forgiveness and
love. Many of those same priests, angered by the treatment meted out to
him at death, complained. Various groups, from the College of
Consultors to the retired priests to the Priests’ Personnel Board, spoke
up. And, finally, a notice was faxed to our 126 rectories that Father
had died and that his family was satisfied with a private cremation and
burial. But a new policy has been established. All such accused
priests have been informed that, upon their death, no public Church
funeral will be permitted; the bishop will determine where the funeral
shall be held, who the homilist will be, and no viewing of the deceased
in Mass vestments permitted. Unlike many of our Catholic laity who may
have abandoned the Church for years and yet are entitled to the full
obsequies of our Faith, these fallen shepherds are consigned to the
“Potters Field” of the Church’s memory.
The John Jay Report, released on February 27th,
the first Friday of Lent, is terribly painful. The more than four
thousand priests it investigated over more than half a century (of some
150,000 priests) have caused grave harm to their victims, to the
faithful, to the Church itself, not to mention to the priesthood and to
the more than forty thousand active priests in America today. More than
enough has been written and publicized over the past few years since the
scandal exploded in Boston. The secular media has had a field day and
those who hate the Church have not been hesitant to wag their fingers
and to point out the “decadence” of the Catholic Church and its
“celibate” clergy.
Unfortunately the scandal is a fact, it is
real, it happened, and we must live with the pain and its consequences.
Apparently it is not sufficient to point out that only 2% (or 4% if you
accept the worst statistics) of priests have been unfaithful, that 96 or
98 per-cent of our clergy are true to their vows, holy in their
ministry, celibate, compassionate and caring men who live every day of
their priesthood as an alter Christus. And, by the
way, those statistics are based on accusations, not on proven
offenders…there is good reason to believe that as many as 50% of such
accusations are false! But where are our bishops? Oh, they are there
for the victims, as indeed they should be. Even though the great
majority of reported cases occurred thirty or more years ago, our
bishops have adopted a zero-tolerance stance and have put in place
guidelines and policies which effectively punish perpetrators and give
assurance that any future occurrences will be dealt with severely and
promptly. They have established lay committees and over-sight
commissions in each of their (arch) dioceses and have commissioned
diverse reports and studies to satisfy even the most outspoken of the
Church’s critics. But, was the John Jay Report really necessary? Is
the follow-up report commissioned a year from now also necessary?
Perhaps just when things are dying down again, the waters will be
stirred anew. Must our bishops continue (unintentionally, but
nevertheless effectively) to flay the Church in America and the
thousands of innocent priests in their (arch)dioceses?
They have authorized hundreds of millions
of dollars in reparation payments, not to mention untold millions in
internal costs for diocesan programs, both legal and otherwise. And I
have yet to hear any Church leader question the hundreds of millions of
dollars paid out to victims, funds which otherwise could have been used
for the poor, the homeless, for all the needs of those who depend upon
the Church in its unparalleled charity. I do not question, for a
moment, that the Church should pay whatever it costs to repair the lives
of victims and their families: medical, psychological,
spiritual help. But should our Catholic people be seeking punitive
damages from the Church when such funds deplete what is necessary for
the Body of Christ, for those who are most vulnerable and most in need?
Those who sue the Church for hundreds of millions of dollars are not
punishing the priests. They are not even hurting the Church. What they
are doing is depriving hundreds of thousands of people of the spiritual
and temporal blessings, which the Church would otherwise dispense for
its manifold ministries. Yes, many believe, our bishops have gone
overboard in trying to fix the problem. Some would say they have caved
into the secular media, been intimidated by a public relations fiasco,
and have belied the loyalty and fatherly devotion they owe to their
priest sons – not only to the forty thousand plus innocent men in collar
or cowl – but especially to those who are accused and even to those who
are convicted. Is there no redemption? Is there no forgiveness? Is
there no compassion? Is there no way in which a priest who may have
committed a grievous sin decades ago and who has since lived a dedicated
and selfless life might be restored to his priestly ministry? What was
Our Lord’s answer to Peter? “Not seven times, Peter, but seventy times
seven.”
Many of our priests in this country are
appalled at what our bishops have done and failed to do. As Edmund
Burke once said, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for
good men to do nothing.” And our bishops, for the most part, have been
silent in defending the Church and its ministers against its vociferous
and intolerant critics. They issue apologies and in this they do well.
We must apologize for our failings and many bishops were terribly remiss
in how they handled such cases of clergy abuse in the past. But do they
not owe some words of consolation to the great majority of their priests
who are hurting? Week after week, indeed it seems, day after day, the
headlines proclaim our sins. But when is the last time you saw one of
our bishops answer the unremitting howls and defend their clergy? It
seems as though there has been a sea-change in the relationship between
bishop and priest, a relationship which has always been that of father
to son. But, after twenty centuries, that ageless relationship has been
broken so that bishops have now become judge, jury and executioner. On
the day of our ordination we each knelt before the ordaining prelate
and, hands entwined, promised “obedience to you and to your
successors.” But, like any covenant, that promise carried with it a
concomitant obligation, a sacred obligation for a bishop to care for his
priests, to admonish his priests, to love his priests and to forgive his
priests. I don’t remember where I read it (I think Father Andrew
Greeley wrote it and I apologize for not remembering its source) but
I'll try to paraphrase it: “The oils of ordination do not change human
nature. All they do is act as a catalyst so that a priest can try
harder…note, try harder, not eradicate completely…to preach and live the
gospel, to cope with and overcome the temptations which are a part of
the human condition and to save his own soul while dedicating his life
to the salvation of others. You can’t have it both ways. If you want a
priest who is not attracted to women and who does not have to strive
every day to be faithful, then you want either a robot or an archangel.
Those who object to the humanity of the clergy should take it up with
the Lord. For as the Epistle to the Hebrews says, “Every priest is
taken from among men to serve the things of God, for being human he can
understand the frailty of human nature.’ Who would want a robot or an
archangel for a priest? Who would go to either of them for help? What
could they possibly know about the agony and ecstasy of being human?”
As someone else once said, “The mercy of Christianity is shown by the
way the Church has been able to use sinners as the ministers and agents
of salvation, beginning with Simon who became Peter and Saul of Tarsus
who became Paul. The surprising part of the priesthood in every
generation is not that a great number of God’s highly favored sons don’t
turn out to be angels, but that a few of God’s sons, who were
lightweights to begin with, turn out to be shepherds with a track record
for saving souls that the angels would stand in awe of.”
As we all know the Church, like Christ
whose body it is, has two natures, human and divine. We, laity and
priests, are the human element of the Church. And, like any human
being, we can be sinful, mean spirited, and all the things to which
fallen human nature is prone. But the Church is also divine. It is
Jesus Christ, it is our mother, it is holy and spotless, and it is our
salvation. We can never deny the humanity of Christ or of his priests.
But we must never forget, either, his divinity and the measure of the
divine…in the words of Shakespeare…”to err is human, to forgive
divine.” There are all kinds of victims’ web sites and organizations on
the Internet these days, usually always finding fault with whatever
steps the bishops have taken to contain and repair the problem. And, to
be fair, these efforts have been Herculean. But I have never heard any
victim or group of victims speak about forgiveness, either for the
Church in general or for a priest in particular. And yet isn’t that
what the Church is all about? Forgiveness? And shouldn’t those who
have been most aggrieved realize that in forgiveness there is healing?
Do our bishops really believe that the victims and their families always
want their pound of flesh that they want those who abused them never
to be redeemed? Is there no statute of limitations for the suffering
and humiliation of those failed, injured priests? Is their deep regret,
sorrow and sincere conversion always to be in vain? I am not speaking
of the very few who are hopeless addicts and who have betrayed their
vows over and over again. I am speaking of the great majority who have
fallen and who have repented and who have lived their lives now for
years in holiness and sorrow. Is zero-tolerance really Christian?
As I write these words (February 24th,
the day before Ash Wednesday), the newspaper has an article by Nicole
Winfield of the Associated Press which indicates that the Vatican has
issued a report by non-Catholic sex-abuse experts who criticize the U.S.
bishops’ policy of removing abusive priests from the ministry, saying it
is overly harsh. The report indicates that a zero-tolerance policy is
mistaken and even dangerous. Well, by the time this article is
published, this report will have been discussed over and over again. As
the report points out, David Clohessy, U.S. national director of the
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said that this Vatican
report “provides cover for every shrewd perpetrator and backsliding
bishop.” Well, that is not my read of our bishops. Many of them over
past years, more out of ignorance rather than ill will, have done grave
harm to the Church and victims by not acting decisively, but the current
USCCB has bent over backwards to redress past injury and prevent
reoccurrence of harm. My issue is not how our bishops have handled the
problem for victims, but how they have failed to handle the problem for
priests. They have been so myopic in trying to solve the overall
situation that they have lost sight of the very real loss of morale of
their priests and seminarians. We were always taught tu es sacerdos
in aeternum. And while the Church can and should impose the dire
penalty of stripping the priest, guilty of the most grievous crimes, of
his priestly faculties and “reducing” him to the lay state, we must
always remember that the sacrament of Holy Orders imprints an indelible
mark on a man’s soul, which can never be erased. And that even the
worst of sinners is offered forgiveness and redemption by Jesus Christ.
The guilty deserve their just punishment, the weak and repentant deserve
forgiveness and, perhaps, even a second chance. And all our priests
deserve the support, concern and loyalty of their fathers in Christ.
********
Monsignor Harry J. Jordan was ordained for the Diocese
of Camden, N.J. in 1961. Over the past forty-three years he has been a
teacher, high school principal, Episcopal Vicar for Human Services,
Director of Catholic Charities and pastor. Msgr. Jordan is currently
director of the Sacred Heart Residence for retired priests and serves as
a member of the College of Consultors for the diocese. This is his
first article for HPR. |
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