Category: COMMENTARY

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What if the Catholic Church Responded to Its Sex Scandal The Way the NCAA Did to Theirs?

By Mike Rivage-Seul

Many were pleasantly surprised by the severity of the sanctions the National Collegiate Athletic Association placed on Penn State following its investigation of the Jerry Sandusky child abuse scandal. The NCAA’s measures evidenced an appropriately serious approach to unspeakable crimes. At the same time, however, the athletic association’s aggressive sanctions contrasted sharply with the lack of appropriate response to much greater crimes on the part of Roman Catholic clergy. It made some wonder what it might look like if the Catholic Church handled its infinitely larger scandal in a fashion similar to that of the NCAA.

Of course, the Penn State’s board of trustees had initially tried to defuse its shameful situation by having the institution’s president resign and by firing Joe Paterno, the football program’s legendary coach. Eventually, they even removed “Joepa’s” statue that (dis)graced the entrance way to the football stadium in Happy Valley.

But the NCAA went far beyond that — even further than most had expected. It appointed high profile Independent Counsel, Louis Freeh, to investigate responsibility for Sandusky’s crimes and the cover-up that followed. Then in the wake of Freeh’s damning final report, it fined the University $60 million dollars — the amount the football program takes in annually. It ordered the program to vacate its winnings since 1998 (thus depriving Paterno of his legacy as the winningest coach in NCAA football history). It forbade the program to extend any football scholarships for the next four years, and released all of its current players from their ties to Penn State, making them immediately eligible to play elsewhere. The football program will be devastated for years to come.

The NCAA’s bold sanctions couldn’t be further from the response of the Roman Catholic hierarchy to its child abuse scandal. There instead the “old boy” defense of the institution and the members of its all male club kicked in just as it did at first inside Penn State’s football program when the Sandusky crimes initially came to light. At Penn State, the wagons were circled, Sandusky was mildly chided while everyone in charge from the University president and Joe Paterno on down denied any knowledge or responsibility. The attitude that “boys will be boys” threatened to carry the day.

The equivalent of that attitude and (non)response still prevails within the Holy City despite the shameful involvement of priests in raping and otherwise sexually abusing children on a worldwide scale that absolutely dwarfs anything that happened in Happy Valley. In the face of thorough investigations by independent groups (e.g. the absolutely devastating indictment published last year in Ireland) the Cardinal of New York invoked the “bad apples” defense, and protested that “only” a small portion of the clergy was tainted.

But what would it have looked like if (impossibly!) the Catholic Church had responded like the NCAA?

If it had done so:

  • Pope Ratzinger would have resigned immediately.
  • All cardinals and bishops who had covered up the scandal would have been removed from office.
  • The canonization process for John Paul II would have been terminated, because of the way he down-played the sex scandal. This would be the equivalent of removing Joepa’s statue.
  • An investigation independent of the Vatican would have been launched headed by an unimpeachable figure — say the Dali Lama, perhaps joined by Sr. Pat Farrell, President of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) which is currently being investigated by the Vatican.
  • Upon completion of its investigation (assuming it would have reached conclusions similar to the one in Ireland), the commission would have:
  • Fined the Catholic Church $500 billion — the equivalent of one year of the R.C. church income. The money would be used world-wide to aid victims of sex abuse and to institute programs to educate clergy about human sexuality using the best insights of current sociology and psychology.
  • Removed from the list of genuine popes all those whose public crimes made them unworthy of the title “Vicars of Christ.” Here the Borgia popes come to mind, as well as Pope Pius XII for his silence about the Jewish Holocaust. (Obviously, the process of his canonization would be abruptly ended.) This would be the rough equivalent of Penn State’s vacating its football wins since 1998.
  • The exclusion of women from the priesthood would be reversed, and seminary scholarships would be extended world-wide to women desiring to receive Holy Orders.
  • Mandatory celibacy would of course be set aside as a requirement of the priesthood — and a major contributor to the issue at hand.
  • A reforming Church Council (Vatican III?) would be ordered to deal with the sex abuse and related problems — to be attended only by bishops not involved in the abuse scandal and subsequent cover-up. Their places would be taken by women elected by national bodies equivalent to the LCWR in the United States.

Of course, nothing like the results just described is remotely possible. Roman Catholic insulation from the external processes necessary to achieve such outcomes prevents that eventuality. The only external source capable of moving the church in the desired direction belongs to the Catholic faithful itself. It alone has the authority to withhold church attendance and contributions till the desired decisions of reform are taken.

But not to worry: such pressure from the faithful will eventually be applied willy-nilly. That is, the faithful will either wage a purposeful campaign of withholding attendance and financial support in the light of failed church leadership.

Or alternatively (and more likely) the once-faithful will be driven away from the church as the realization dawns that a college sports organization possesses sounder moral character than what pretends to be the “Mystical Body of Christ.”

Complete Article HERE!

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Bishops, Oaths, and Conscience

Today’s Washington Post reports on a highly troubling story (Arlington Diocese parishioners question need for fidelity oath) about a rising trend in Catholic dioceses to require workers — including volunteers who teach religious education — to affirm some sort of “fidelity oath” in order to continue their work or ministry. The story ends with this:

The Rev. Ronald Nuzzi, who heads the leadership program for Catholic educators at the University of Notre Dame, said many bishops “are in a pickle.” They want Catholic institutions to be staffed by people who not only teach what the church teaches but whose “whole life will bear witness.”

Nuzzi said he keeps a photo on his desk from the 1940s that shows all the German bishops in their garb, doing the Nazi salute.

“I keep it there to remind people who say to do everything the Church says, that their wisdom has limitations, too.”

Anyone who fully understands and values the breadth and depth of Catholic Christianity must be appalled by this trend, especially when such oaths appear to be written in ways that clearly are contrary to Catholic teaching. What is more troubling, however, is the perspective expressed by some — both clergy and laity — who see no problem with such a practice.

Complete Article HERE!

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Flaccid ‘Fortnight for Freedom’ fizzles for fathers

COMMENTARY – Fred Clark

The “Fortnight for Freedom” was a flop.

This was supposed to be a game-changer — the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ big display of political might. But instead it exposed the bishops as inept campaigners and as generals without an army.

I thought they’d be better at this sort of thing. They had some formidable assets to work with. For weeks ahead of time, Fortnight events were publicized and promoted in every diocese and every parish across the country. And they had some serious money to work with thanks to deep-pocketed (anonymous) donors. They even got a big boost of support from their allies in the evangelical religious right.

But still, it flopped. Big time.

This two-week extravaganza was supposed to redefine the political conversation, but instead it went mostly unnoticed and unattended. It was supposed to show massive grassroots support for the bishops’ contention that allowing women to purchase comprehensive health insurance constitutes an intolerable threat to the religious liberty of employers who wish to prohibit that. But instead it showed, definitively, that there is no grassroots support for that strange argument.

The bishops declared themselves the grand marshals of what was to be a glorious parade, but no one showed up to march behind them and only a meager handful turned out to line the route as spectators.

It was pathetic, really. A bunch of nuns on a shoestring-budget bus tour drew more enthusiasm and more support for their polar-opposite message. For all the millions spent and all the weeks of elaborate, top-down fanfare, the Fortnight for Freedom came and went almost without notice.

“Oh, right, the bishops’ big rally, when is that again? Oh, it happened already? Oh.”

Yawn.

All that time and money invested and almost nothing to show for it.

Part of what we learned here, I think, is that if you’ve got a top-down, hierarchical mentality that regards listening to anyone else as beneath you, as an affront to your righteous authority, then you’re probably not well-suited to rallying grassroots support. When that arrogant mentality shapes your outlook, it seems, you’re probably not even capable of recognizing that you’ve utterly lost all grassroots support.

The bishops did their best to put a happy face on their embarrassing fortnight of failure. “Thousands rally in Washington,” one press release said. And that was true — “thousands” plural because two is a plural number. The largest Fortnight event drew about 4,000 — or, in other words, it was a bit smaller than the crowd at a Bowling Green Hot Rods game on Fireworks Night. (Yes, the Rays’ single-A farm team may outdraw the bishops despite a much-smaller PR budget, yet as far as I know the Hot Rods are not making any claims that this gives them the right to dictate national policy to the president.)

By the end of the fortnight, the affiliated Republican effort “Conscience Clause” had also collected 6,000 signatures for a petition in support of the bishops — or nearly half the number of signatures collected so far in the “Save Pan Am” campaign to get ABC to revive that failed show.

The Fortnight for Freedom was a failure. I suppose, though, that it did succeed in at least one way: providing a handle for plenty of insightful commentary on the bishops’ demands for religious privilege and their increasingly partisan political activism. A sampling of some of that commentary below the jump.

Jessica Coblentz: “Fortnight for Freedom: Whose Religious Liberty?”

In the reaction against Fortnight for Freedom, some are responding to the bishops on their own terms. If the campaign is about religious liberty, they ask, then whose liberty is at stake? The bishops present the Catholic exercise of religious liberty as the ability to reject the use of contraception, or at least the financing of insurance plans that cover contraceptive services. The irony, to those on the other side, is that a campaign meant to promote religious liberty actually denies the religious freedom of many Catholic women, who rely on their personal religious convictions to determine their stance on contraception and the mandate. Studies show that as many as 98 percent of sexually experienced American Catholic women over the age of 18 have used contraception. A recent PRRI/RNS poll reports that a majority of American Catholics do not see the contraception mandate as a threat to religious freedom, indicating that many hold a broader understanding of religious liberty than the bishops maintain. The debate surrounding the mandate, then, is not only about contraception and religious liberty. It is also about who gets to define religious liberty’s very meaning.

… Critics of the bishops’ current battle can call on this Catholic history of religious liberty and individual freedom. In their view, women’s choices are an issue of religious liberty — not merely a threat to it. Still, who defines religious liberty remains a matter of authority — and a highly gendered one at that. When the USCCB conveys that the rejection of contraception is the only religiously-motivated choice that warrants the protection of religious liberty among Catholics, they assert the message that only church leaders have the authority to determine what counts as religious behavior. This strips other Catholics of the legitimate authority to negotiate their tradition when determining their own religiously-motivated actions. What is more, so long as the all-male Catholic clergy solely possess the authority to identify what does and does not constitute a free, religiously-motivated choice worthy of legal protection, women have no official authority in Catholic religious liberty conversations whatsoever. As it stands, the religious decisions and actions of all Catholics other than clergy — be they for or against contraception and contraceptive coverage — are seemingly insignificant in “Catholic” concerns about religious liberty.

… The bishops, or anyone for that matter, need not theologically condone the contraceptive decisions of Catholic women in order to recognize them as exercises of free, religious choice. Yet the current rhetoric of the USCCB’s “Fortnight for Freedom” campaign does not. … If the bishops continue to exclude so many American Catholics from their representation of religious liberty — notably, the majority of Catholic women — the USCCB fails in its own stated aim to protect the religious liberty of all.

Katherine Stewart: “How Corrupt Catholics and Evangelicals Abuse Religious Freedom”

In the writings and speeches of Catholic bishops and evangelical leaders in recent months, “religious freedom” has come to mean something close to its opposite. It now stands for “religious privilege.” It is a coded way for them to state their demand that religious institutions should be allowed special powers that exempt them from the laws of the land.

… This is a war of conquest, designed to expand the power of religious institutions at the expense of the rest of society and the state. It is about carving out an even larger share of the special privileges and exemptions that are already made available only to organized religious institutions.
Such privileges are already substantial. Religions already receive hefty subsidies – by some estimates, as much as $71bn a year – through broad tax exemptions, deductions, and faith-based government programs. A “ministerial exemption” allows them to hire and fire people directly involved in religious activity without regard to anti-discrimination laws.
But they want more. And they are willing to turn the meaning of the word “persecution” on its head to get it.

Sally Rasmussen: “The Bishops on Religious Freedom: ‘We Get More Than You’”

The Catholic bishops have been talking a lot recently about the First Amendment. They’ve made the remarkable claim that their tradition is a source of First Amendment freedoms, but their interpretation of such freedom is that it should shield them from prosecution for collaborating in the sexual abuse of children, at the same time that they are doing their best to deny freedom of religion, speech, and assembly to American nuns. Nor do they believe in freedom of conscience for the Catholic Church which is the people of God – a Church that has thoughtfully concluded that contraception is morally acceptable.

Mark Silk: “Religious Freedom, Becket Style”

I can’t help suspecting that the bishops’ rage against the contraception mandate is actually displaced anger at losing their de facto power to decide the fate of sexually abusive priests.

The real lesson of the conviction of Msgr. William Lynn in Philadelphia last month and the impending trial of Bishop Robert Finn in Kansas City is that if church authorities don’t behave like secular executives when confronted with a subordinate suspected of abuse, then they too will be criminally prosecuted. Archbishop Becket would have considered that an assault on his religious freedom. No one in America can do so anymore, Fortnight or no Fortnight.

Complete Article HERE!

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Exit, Don’t Enable the Roman Catholic Church

By Wayne Besen

If there is one thing that irks me, it is having the Roman Catholic Church preach to me about sexual morality. It is a religious sect led by a virulently homophobic Pope that goes out of its way to trash my family. Yet, my family hasn’t spent a cent defending itself against nonexistent charges of child rape, while the Vatican has spent $2.5 billion on legal fees, prevention programs, and settlements relating to the sexual abuse of minors.

Exactly why should I listen to what these “holy” men have to say? I’ve been out of the closet for twenty-four years, during which time I worked in the center of the LGBT movement, but can’t think of a single friend or colleague arrested for child molestation. None of the people I associate with have shielded, shuffled, or offered severance packages to pedophiles to protect the institutions that they work for. But such obscene behavior is precisely what the Vatican did, all the while turning my loved ones into scapegoats to obscure their criminality.

The latest preoccupation of the Catholic Church, as well as their brethren in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Community, is fiercely lobbying state legislatures to not change the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse cases.

“Even when you have the institution admitting they knew about the abuse, the perpetrator admitting that he did it, and corroborating evidence, if the statute of limitations has expired, there won’t be any justice,” Marci Hamilton, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cordozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, explained to the New York Times.

It seems the hierarchy is only interested in saving its own skin, instead of paying a price for those whose skin it violated. For a church built on a human sacrifice, there is scant evidence of noble virtues as the church lies and litigates against its victims.

Which brings us to a burning question: Why do liberal Catholics continue to support an intolerant, homophobic, misogynistic institution capable of covering up heinous crimes against children?

I’m not the only one asking this pertinent question. On June 1, the Freedom From Religion Foundation placed a full-page ad in USA Today headlined, “It’s Time to Quit The Catholic Church.”

According to the ad: “If you think you can change the church from within – get it to lighten up on birth control, gay rights, marriage equality, embryonic stem-cell research – you’re deluding yourself. By remaining a ‘good Catholic,’ you are doing ‘bad’ to women’s rights. You are an enabler. And it’s got to stop.”

New York Times columnist Bill Keller also urged moderate Catholics to find a new church: “Much as I wish I could encourage the discontented, the Catholics of open minds and open hearts, to stay put and fight the good fight, this is a lost cause…Summon your fortitude, and just go. If you are not getting the spiritual sustenance you need, if you are uneasy being part of an institution out of step with your conscience — then go.”

It does seem as if diehard liberal and moderate Catholics are not fighting so much as being beaten to a pulp by ideologues. If this were a boxing match, it would have been stopped many rounds ago. Indeed, attacks from the right have become so extreme that the Church is even going after American nuns. If nuns aren’t Catholic enough for these fanatics, liberal Catholics sure aren’t going to be embraced any time soon.

This whole debate reminds me of when gay people from conservative backgrounds complain to me that they can’t come out because of the environment in which they were raised. One says, “I grew up in a traditional Chinese household, so I can’t tell my parents.” While another person says, “I grew up in a Pentecostal family, so I can’t tell anyone.” And yet another proclaims, “You wouldn’t understand, it’s not that easy coming out because my parents are from a rural area.”

Everybody has an excuse or explanation, and, no, it’s never easy to come out – but at the same time, it really is a simple process. Saying “I’m gay” works like a charm every time and frees a person to be their authentic self.

Similarly, it may be incredibly difficult to leave the Catholic Church. But, it is also as easy as going to a computer search engine and typing “church” or speaking into your iPhone, “Siri, find me a church.” Within moments dozens of alternatives will pop up – many of which are more concerned with spirituality than the statute of limitations.

Are you tired of being treated like an abused dog by the Catholic Church? Then drop the dogma and quit. After all, they quit you, your family, and your moderate belief system a long time ago. Exit, don’t enable.

Complete Article HERE!

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QUOTE OF THE DAY

“Too many of my sisters and brothers in the gay community don’t seem to understand the power of religion,” White lamented. “They have been rejected by religion. They hate the idea of religion. Therefore, they’re not going to deal with religion, which is fatal, because religion is the heart of homophobia. Without religion there would be no homophobia. What other source of homophobia is there but six verses in the Bible? When Bible literalists preach that LGBT people are going to hell they become Christian terrorists. They use fear as their weapon, like all terrorists. They are seeking to deny our religious and civil rights. They threaten to turn our democracy into a fundamentalist theocracy. And if we don’t reverse the trend, there is the very real possibility that in the end we will all be governed according to their perverted version of biblical law.”

Gay activist and Christian pastor Mel White quoted in a post by Chris Hedges over at TruthDig titled, The War on Gays.

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Vatican’s term ‘radical feminist’ says more about cardinals than nuns they rebuke

COMMENTARY

It surprises me a little that the men who run things at the Vatican did not use their most favorite recent pejorative – “feminist” — when they rapped the knuckles of Margaret Farley, a nun who has long been a professor at Yale, for having written a book about sex and love that condones masturbation (and as of Thursday morning was in Amazon’s top 20). In a million other ways, it doesn’t uphold their view of Christian sexual morality.

Because unlike the other nuns the Vatican has been reprimanding recently, Sister Farley is, in fact, a feminist. An ethicist who has worked on the problem of HIV/AIDS, Farley was commended in 2005 by her Yale colleagues for her contributions to feminist theory.

A nun looks on as Pope Benedict XVI leads a ceremony commemorating Christ’s gesture of humility toward his apostles on the night before he died at the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome April 5, 2012. Pope Benedict recently re-stated the Roman Catholic Church’s ban on women priests and warned that he would not tolerate disobedience by clerics on fundamental teachings.

Members of the Vatican hierarchy are using the word “feminist” and even “radical feminist” the way third-graders use the word “cooties.” In April, the Vatican accused the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which represents 57,000 nuns nationwide, of allowing “radical feminist” ideas to flow, unchecked, in their communities. In 2008, after he launched an investigation against American nuns (the results of which have not yet been released), Cardinal Franc Rode told a radio interviewer that the nuns are suspected of “certain irregularities,” a “secular mentality,” and “perhaps also a certain feminist spirit.”

The authors of these rebukes never define “feminism” or “radicalism.” In their hands, these words, which can carry legitimate intellectual meanings, appear to signify something like: “Yucky women who fail to heed our instructions and, anyway, don’t meet our standards of womanhood.” In other words, the sisters aren’t behaving as girls should.

Their casual use of these terms convinces me that the cardinals, in their vast experience, have never actually met a radical feminist theologian. Such creatures do exist, although American religious orders are hardly their breeding ground. What the Vatican hierarchy sees as a “radical feminist” is a woman who dares to believe that she’s equal to a man.

“Even large sectors of the church itself have legitimate concern and want to continue to talk about the place of women in the church, and rightful equality between men and women,” Sister Pat Farrell, a member of the LCWR, told the New York Times last week. “So if that is called radical feminism, then a lot of men and women in the church, far beyond us, are guilty of that.”

Lisa Isherwood is a real-life radical feminist theologian. She is editor of the journal Feminist Theology and a professor at Winchester University in England. She believes that the men at the Vatican are using the term “radical feminist” as a right-wing scare tactic, for it evokes other enemies far more dangerous than nuns. Their thinking goes like this, she says: “We hear the word radical Islam, and everyone panics, so let’s chuck that at them.”

The mother of radical feminist theology was the late Mary Daly, who started life as a committed Roman Catholic and spent most of her career teaching at Boston College, a Catholic institution.

She was driven to critique her beloved church after she sat in on sessions of the Second Vatican Council in Rome and felt that women had no meaningful part in the proceedings.She was, she wrote later, appalled by “the contrast between the arrogant bearing and colorful attire of the ‘princes of the church,’ ” she wrote later, “and the humble, self-deprecating manner and somber clothing of the very few women. … Watching the veiled nuns shuffle to the altar rail to receive Holy Communion from the hands of a priest was like observing a string of lowly ants at some bizarre picnic.”

In her breakthrough 1974 book, “Beyond God the Father,” Daly wrote, “If God is male, then the male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long a he is allowed to live on in the human imagination.” Now that’s a radical feminist for you. Daly’s work gave voice to generations of feminist scholars.

Isherwood, for one, wears the labels “feminist” and “radical” with pride. She is a Catholic — “in as far as anyone’s trying to hang in there” – she says.

She deeply loves her church and believes that at its core, Roman Catholicism has a radical feminist message. “The church should be radical. It should be saying, ‘More inclusion, more equality.’ An abundance of life is a fundamental Catholic value. The idea of ordination of women and so on is just one very small, very significant point. Radical feminism would want the church to be more proactive in terms of working for a life of abundance for the marginalized.”

Now that’s a threatening idea.

Complete Article HERE!

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Vatican’s assessment of LCWR about fear, not doctrine

COMMENTARY

The Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith’s April 18 doctrinal assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious is not about doctrine. It is not primarily about protecting the faith or ensuring an ecclesiology of communion, no matter how many times these terms are woven through the report. It is fundamentally about fear — fear of the loss of power — and the willful use of dominative control to defend that power.

The abundance of religious themes and language do not mask this punitive effort to shore up the crumbling authority of hierarchical leaders. Nor does the document hide the anger that roils beneath the protestations of gratitude and concern. The final report of the LCWR assessment reveals a desperate attempt on the part of some fearful and angry church leaders to protect their turf — to maintain an all-male church leadership, to keep women and laypeople under their authority, and to shield the homophobic-homosexual subculture in the leadership of the Catholic church.

When fear rules

The pattern of using coercive intimidation to control others in one’s household is called domestic abuse. Domestic abuse does not need to involve physical violence — in fact, many abusers never beat their partners. Instead, the threatened person strikes out psychologically to evoke compliance. Public humiliations, corrections, threats, accusations of disloyalty and demands for absolute obedience make up the typical arsenal of the abusive person. In extreme cases, the abuser monitors the actions of the other, keeps a record of his or her transgressions, restricts his or her activities, discredits his or her reputation, takes charge of his or her decisions, and threatens to withdraw support if unquestioned compliance to demands is not maintained.

These abusive acts will sound curiously familiar to anyone who has read the proposed implementations of the Vatican doctrinal assessment.

While females can and do commit domestic abuse, statistically, they do so at much reduced rates, inflict less physical harm and commonly have different motivations than male perpetrators, making domestic abuse primarily a crime against women. Yes, a crime — like child sexual abuse — something many bishops, archbishops and cardinals in the Catholic church failed to take seriously until they were forced to do so by lawsuits and public outcry.

But has transfer of learning taken place? Do they get it? Do they get that they cannot treat women and children as stepping stones to power, privilege and pleasure?

Whether through hits or humiliations, broken bones or broken spirits, threats of bodily harm or warnings of impending excommunication, the goal of abusers is the same: Assert absolute control. Wear the person down until he or she gives in or gives up. Use punishment if he or she dares to claim his or her own authority.

The most dangerous time in a household where domestic abuse is present is right after the person being abused has stood up to the abuser. Have too many members of LCWR claimed their own authority? The classic domestic abuser seeks one thing above all else: obedience to dictates. It is not surprising that obedience is alluded to on every page of the final doctrinal assessment document.

In fact, the mandate for implementation of the results of the doctrinal assessment reads like a how-to manual for the most common form of domestic abuse — no physical violence, just a resolute campaign to rein in those who have dared disobey the master, or, in the case of LCWR, the pope and bishops: “to implement a process of review and conformity to the teachings and discipline of the church, the Holy See” (page 7). Pretty clear.

Diagnosing the abuser

Mental illness, including personality disorders, compound domestic abuse but are not its primary cause. Domestic abuse is power abuse. In its most prevalent form, it is conscious, coercive conduct by men those believe they have the unconditional right to use forceful tactics to enforce their rules and maintain absolute control over those they deem subject to them.

What kinds of people abuse others? While there is no single profile of the domestic abuser, research has identified characteristics frequently seen among perpetrators of all types. Ironically, there is not much difference between those who use their fists and those who use words alone to demand obedience.

* Abusers believe they are entitled to maintain power and control over those in their households (institutions).
* They may believe they have an obligation to compel obedience for the benefit of the victim and the good of the household (church).
* They do not identify their controlling and hurtful tactics as abusive and are insulted when others perceive them that way.
* Perpetrators tend to perceive all interactions within relationships through a prism of compliance or disobedience.
* Abusers tend to be insecure men who need to establish dominance to feel confident.

The single most conclusive thing we know about domestic abuse is that it is learned behavior. Abusers have gained knowledge of abusive behaviors by seeing them in action, either in their families or in the various cultures to which they belong. This applies to religious cultures where the seminarian is taught early to bow to the wishes of his rector, to obey his bishop and to submit to the cardinal — all of whom kiss the ring of the pope.

All of this bowing, obeying and willful submission programs the brain to normalize hierarchical authority, and in some less secure individuals, to deeply internalize this way of relating and to replicate it.

As in sexual abuse, church leaders who have witnessed domestic abuse in their families or who have experienced such abuse as children may be particularly susceptible to behave abusively themselves. When a fragile ego combines with learned patterns of abuse, the stage is set for domestic abuse.

While abusers do not fit neatly into any particular diagnostic category, their behavior is not considered “normal.”

Psychologically healthy adults do not mandate obedience, forbid dialogue about subjects they do not wish discussed, or use oppressive tactics to gain control over others. Personally secure leaders don’t issue orders to other functioning adults, threatening punitive measures if they are not obeyed.

Often described as having a “Jekyll and Hyde” personality, most abusers can be quite civilized and even charming when they need to be. Their ability to function as CEOs of companies and preside over large corporations does not eliminate them from the pool of the insecure who strike out against those who threaten them. Some male abusers have been found to harbor a secret loathing of females, considering them inferior. Since such attitudes are certainly present in the history of the church (read St. Jerome), it is possible that its influence still inhabits, consciously or the unconsciously, the collective mind of church leaders.

The persistent desire of hierarchical leaders to keep women under their control and out of their sphere of leadership, especially women theologians, suggests that the “Jerome Syndrome” might still be operative.

[Fran Ferder is a Franciscan sister, clinical psychologist, author and professor at Seattle University.]

Complete Article HERE!

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Dionne: Is Catholic spring on horizon?

There is a healthy struggle brewing among the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops.

A previously silent group, upset over conservative colleagues defining the church’s public posture and eagerly picking fights with President Obama, has had enough.

The headlines this week were about lawsuits brought by 43 Catholic organizations, including 13 dioceses, to overturn regulations issued by the administration requiring insurance plans to cover contraception under the new health-care law.

But the other side of this news was also significant: That the vast majority of the nation’s 195 dioceses did not go to court.

It turns out that many bishops, notably the church leadership in California, saw the litigation as premature. They are upset that the lawsuits were brought without a broader discussion among the entire membership of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and wanted to delay action until the Conference’s June meeting.

Until now, bishops who believed that their leadership was aligning the institutional church too closely with the political right had voiced their doubts internally.

While the more moderate and liberal bishops kept their qualms out of public view, conservative bishops have been outspoken in condemning the Obama administration and pushing a “Fortnight for Freedom” campaign aimed at highlighting “threats to religious freedom, both at home and abroad.”

But in recent months, a series of events — among them the Vatican’s rebuke of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious encouraged by right-wing American bishops — have angered more progressive Catholics and led to talk among the disgruntled faithful of the need for a “Catholic spring” to challenge the hierarchy’s shift to the right.

Bishop Stephen E. Blaire of Stockton, Calif., broke the silence on his side Tuesday in an interview with Kevin Clarke of the Jesuit magazine America. Blaire expressed concern that some groups “very far to the right” are turning the controversy over the contraception rules into “an anti-Obama campaign.”

“I think there are different groups that are trying to co-opt this and make it into political issue, and that’s why we need to have a deeper discussion as bishops,” he said. “I think our rhetoric has to be that of bishops of the church who are seeking to be faithful to the Gospel, that our one concern is that we make sure the church is free to carry out her mission as given to her by Christ, and that remains our focus.”

Clarke also paraphrased Blaire as believing that “the bishops lose their support when the conflict is seen as too political.”

Blaire’s words were diplomatic. But in a letter to the national bishops’ conference that has not been released publicly, lawyers for California’s bishops said the lawsuits would be “imprudent” and “ill-advised.”

The letter was not answered by the national bishops’ group before the suits were announced.

Already, there are reports that some bishops will play down or largely ignore the Fortnight for Freedom campaign, scheduled for June 21 to July 4, in their own dioceses.

These bishops fear that it has become enmeshed in Republican election-year politics and see many of its chief promoters, notably Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore, as too strident.

The irony in the current acrimony is that Catholics were broadly united last January across political lines in opposing the Department of Health and Human Services’ initial rules on contraception because they exempted only a narrow category of religious institutions from the mandate.

Facing this challenge, the president fashioned a compromise under which employees of Catholic organizations such as hospitals and social service agencies would still have access to contraceptive services but the religious entities would not have to pay for them.

This compromise was accepted by most progressive Catholics, though many of them still favor rewriting the underlying regulations to acknowledge the religious character of the church’s welfare and educational work.

But where the progressives favor pursuing further negotiations with the administration, the conservative bishops have acted as if it never made any concessions at all.

Significantly, Blaire identified with the conciliatory approach. As Clarke wrote, “Bishop Blaire believes discussions with the Obama administration toward a resolution of the dispute could be fruitful even as alternative remedies are explored.”

For too long, the Catholic Church’s stance on public issues has been defined by the outspokenness of its most conservative bishops and the reticence of moderate and progressive prelates.

Signs that this might finally be changing are encouraging for the church, and for American politics.

Complete Article HERE!

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Catholic Clergy Sexual Abuse In The U.S. Context And Causes

COMMENTARY

CATHOLIC CLERGY SEXUAL ABUSE IN THE U.S.
CONTEXT AND CAUSES
A.W.RICHARD SIPE
Santa Clara University
11 May 2012

The context of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic bishops and priests is the culture of the priesthood. Roman Catholic bishops and priests constitute a privileged cast. This persists as a centuries-long reality perpetuated by the monarchical structure essential to the operation of the Roman Catholic Church. The world of RC clergy forms the setting, circumstances, and opportunities that surround the sexual activity of bishops and priests with minors and others. Clergy rule supreme in their spheres of operation—ministry of the sacraments (especially hearing confessions and celebrating mass) religious instructions/teaching, and the administration of their institutions. Parishes (and seminaries) are the most common sites of sexual contacts between priests, minors and others. The climate and culture and power of Catholic bishops and priests put the vulnerable and minors at risk for abuse within areas of clerical control.

The causes of sexual abuse by clergy are solidly rooted in human nature as it is fostered, lived, and expressed in clerical culture. Ordination into major orders (and preparation for them) marks the entrance into the clerical culture. Catholic clerical culture is characterized by homogeneity: it is an exclusively male province—males over twenty-five years of age alone are ordained priests—and they form a homosocial society where women are deprived of any authority. Candidates must promise “perfect and perpetual chastity, therefore celibacy” as a prior condition for ordination [Canon 277 #2]. That requirement confers social power on a priest. [“It was from sexual purity that the priesthood was believed to derive its power.”]

Cardinals and bishops vow absolute obedience to the Pope as the supreme authority. They, the pope’s legitimate surrogates, demand this obedience of their subordinates. [Father Yves Congar once said, “In the Catholic Church it has often seemed that a sin of the flesh was the only sin, and obedience the only virtue.”]

If a priest is apparently compliant with the demands of the culture he receives automatic status regardless of any individual merit. The culture provides an assurance of employment and continued material compensation for the duration of his life. The identification with the power system and subordination to it relives individuals of responsibility for the consequences of their individual actions. Truth telling is curtailed and subjected to the welfare of the organization (the good of the church). The prevailing rationale is that clerics’ first duty is to the higher law of God. Secrecy and loyalty are essential binding elements operative to the function of clerical cultural. Men within the clerical culture are labeled “special” since ordination confers an “ontological” superiority. Clerics thus incorporated into the culture often demonstrate qualities of dependency, entitlement, superiority/arrogance, variable degrees of psychosexual immaturity, but in many cases “they posses enormous powers of empathetic discernment—albeit for purposes of self-aggrandizement.”

These are the fundamental elements operative in the CONTEXT and CAUSES of the sexual abuse of minors and the vulnerable in whatever broader secular culture that clerical sexual abusive behavior occurs.

At the First National Conference for Victims & Survivors of Roman Catholic Clergy Abuse held in Chicago, October 1992 I said: The crisis of sexual abuse by Catholic bishops and priests “now visible is the tip of the iceberg. When the whole story of sexual abuse by presumed celibate clergy is told, it will lead to the highest corridors of Vatican City.”1 Those words that might have seemed shocking or prophetic 20 years ago simply reflect known and documented facts today.

Sexual abuse of minors by Roman Catholic clergy is a long-standing problem. It is historical, but not “history”—the crisis is not over as some bishops and others declared in 2004 and since. Detailed historical accounts of priests abusing minor girls and boys and being sexual with each other are reliable and indelible [Basil 4th Century, Peter Damian 11th Century].[i] The U.S. bishops named the situation a “crisis” in 2002 when they set up a National Review Board. That group made a public presentation of A Report on the Crisis in the Catholic Church in the United States on February 27, 2004. That is the same release date of a report on the investigation on the Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States 1950—2002 conducted by staff members of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice under the direction of Dr. Karen Terry. She served as the principal investigator of a second study on the Context and Causes of clerical abuse released in 2011. Both of these studies were sponsored by the USCCB who established the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People in 2002. The cumulative force of media exposure [Boston Globe series on priest abuse beginning January 6, 2002] civil and criminal law suites, pressure from victim advocates, and outrage of the general public precipitated and propelled American bishops (and the Vatican) into measured reactive responses. The documentation provided for the John-Jay studies comes from diocesan files. The criminal trial in Philadelphia (2012) provides one testimony to the inadequacy of Church reporting and file production. I am not alone in reviewing thousands of documented cases of clergy abuse from 1908, 1917 and a continuous supply of reports from1923 up to the present day most not listed by bishops

The ongoing phenomenon of the sexual abuse of minors is a worldwide problem among Roman Catholic clergy. Clergy abuse is not an American problem as proposed by Pope John Pau II, although it is remarkable here. Over all between six and nine percent (6-9%) of U.S. Catholic priests get sexually involved with minors: ten percent (10 %) have been documented in Boston. Eleven and one-half percent (11.5 %) of all the priests active from the Los Angeles Archdiocese in 1983 were subsequently identified as abusers.3 In 1988 the “Sensitive Claims Committee” of the Tucson, AZ diocese held the names of twenty-three percent (23%) of its priests. Ireland, England and European countries were ten to fifteen years behind the United States in bringing the problem to public attention. That is no longer the case. [On May 3, 2012 an Italian priest, Father Riccardo Seppia, of Genoa was sentenced to nine and a half years in prison for child sex abuse and attempting to recruit minors into prostitution.]

Sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy is a symptom of a culture in distress. It constitutes part of a larger pattern of sexual involvement by priests and bishops with others—some with minors, but more commonly with adult women and men. Although the latter is not illegal, such behavior by a bishop or priest is still marked in most cases by moral negligence, abuse, professional violation and hypocrisy. More importantly, ecclesiastical authority tolerates this behavior in its own ranks as long as it does not cause scandal. This indulgence characterizes the pattern and practice of clerical culture. As one bishop said on his return from a visit to Rome, “The organization to which I belong is rotten to the core and it comes from the top”. [Two conclusions are reasonable: one must assume that in any group of priests a certain number of sexual abusers are active. Second, the clerical system is not capable of monitoring itself. Grand Jury Reports form the most reliable source of the pattern and practice of clergy sex abuse and supervision/cover up by superiors. Also: Cf. Stockton ruling, Judge, May 2012]

Seminary training still does not prepare clergy for celibate/sexual reality. Seminary training produces many psychosexually impaired and retarded priests whose level of adjustment is adolescent at best.4. This tends to create a psychic and moral field and situations in which immature liaisons with young children not only become more possible but are psychosexually over-determined because children are actually on a developmental par with these men.

The celibate/sexual system that surrounds clerical culture fosters and often rewards psychosexual immaturity. Conformists and even sociopaths have a greater chance of ecclesiastical advancement than more mature and healthy clerics.5. [This is one consequence of clerical culture.]

The homosocial system of the Catholic clergy excludes women categorically from decision-making power. At the same time this male-only system glorifies the roles of virgin and mother; this juxtaposition creates a psychosocial structure that reinforces male psychosexual immaturity and malformation.

A significantly larger proportion of Catholic clergy has a homosexual orientation than does the general population.6. This has always been the case, with many saints among them; this is due in part to natural sexual biodiversity [homosexual orientation is a natural variant], a high genetic correlation between homosexual orientation and altruistic drive, and a culture dependent on control and external conformity [Absolute obedience is a cultural factor that can serve both the strong and the weak character.]

By refusing to deal honestly with the reality of homosexuality in the clerical state (and in general), Catholic teaching fosters self-alienation, and psychosexual immaturity of its clergy and encourages and enables identity confusion, sexual acting out, and moral duplicity. Clerical culture is redolent with clergy living “double lives”.

Catholic moral teaching on sexuality is based on a patently false anthropology that renders magisterial pronouncement non-credible. “Every sexual thought, word, desire, and action outside marriage is mortally sinful. Every sexual act within marriage not open to procreation is mortally sinful. In sexual matters there is no paucity of matter.” [This is irrational and unacceptable as are the rationale and pronouncements on contraception.]

Clergy deprived of a moral doctrine in which they can believe founder for moral guidance and leadership in their own lives and behavior. Sexually, priests and the hierarchy resort to denial, rationalization, and splitting in dealing with their own sexual behavior and that of their colleagues. With the laity they often apply the full wrath of the “law” [including the threat of hell].

The hierarchy cannot claim ignorance and deny the sexual practices of their own—themselves and their fellow-priests—and at the same time assert that they are credible and authoritative sources of leadership in sexual morality for the laity. They cannot responsibly [and legally] sidestep their personal and corporate roles as enablers.

Chief justice Anne Burke (IL) who served as the interim Chair of the National Review Board established by the U.S. Bishops in 2002 said after extensive personal contact with the hierarchy, “they do not want to change. They want Business as usual”. [Governor Frank Keating who served as Justice Burke’s predecessor as Board Chair said that the bishops operate like “cosa nostra”.]

In the past ten years the U.S. bishops have instituted some productive and useful educational ventures that alert certain populations to the dangers of abuse. Certainly these will protect some children from sexual predators. [They fail to notify parishioners that priests can be dangerous. Bishops were not included in the Dallas Charter Zero Tolerance policy. There still is no system for holding bishops accountable. The person charged with oversight of alleged bishop abusers is Bishop Robert Brom, a credibly alleged abuser himself.]

The context of child abuse by Roman Catholic clergy—the tip of an iceberg so painfully visible to us now—does not stand on its own. Sexual abuse by clergy is the product of a well-established clerical culture. The fundamental causes of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy are within the clerical culture. Only an honest examination and Reformation of that culture will address adequately the problem of clerical malfeasance about which sex is central.7.

I repeat what I said in 1992: “Difficult as it is to accept, we are certain that the hierarchical and power structures beneath the surface of dioceses and religious societies form the essence of a secret world that selects, cultivates, supports, and will continue to produce and protect child abusers within the ranks of the Catholic clergy. These hidden forces are elements far more dangerous to the sexual health and welfare of Christ’s Church than those already identified”

Complete Article HERE!

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Rome vs. the Sisters

Commentators offer a range of explanations for last week’s Vatican “assessment” charging a group that includes the largest number of US Catholic sisters, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) with “serious doctrinal problems” and “radical feminism.”

One frequent explanation is that the report was issued in retaliation for support given the 2009 Affordable Care Act (ACA) by Network, a Catholic social justice lobby with close ties to the LCWR. For example, in a BBC News interview several days after the release of the assessment, Sister Simone Campbell, Network’s executive director, acknowledged “a strong connection” between Network’s challenge to the US bishops over the ACA and the Vatican accusations.

No doubt there is some truth to this analysis. But it’s worth noting that the Vatican launched the investigation that culminated in this document in January 2009, more than a year before Congress passed the ACA. Given the speed with which Rome does things, it’s more than likely that while the sisters’ support for the ACA contributed to the harshness of the statement, it by no means caused it. Indeed, Pope John Paul II mandated a previous investigation of US religious in 1983, though the outcome of that process was less brutal than the current one has proven to be.

In point of fact, throughout the history of the Church, bishops and popes have struggled mightily to keep committed celibate Catholic women under control. Already in the early Christian centuries male church leaders forced virgins to describe themselves as “brides of Christ” rather than use the male martial imagery they had come to use during the Roman persecutions. The early equality between male and female desert monastics was likewise undercut when eighth century bishops began taking control of women’s monasteries and ordained monks to the priesthood for the first time (but not nuns, of course.) And as, throughout the following centuries, groups of dedicated Christian women came together—canonesses, Beguines, beatas, recluses—popes, bishops, and male theologians went to great lengths to rein them in.

In the 12th century, Aelred of Rievaulx forbade women recluses to so much as talk alone with their confessors; Gregory IX imposed cloister on all Franciscan sisters except those in the house led by their foundress, Clare of Assisi; and in 1917, after a century marked by the foundation of innumerable active (that is, non-cloistered) congregations of sisters dedicated to serving the needs of the sick and the poor, the new Vatican Code of Canon Law cloistered them all, imposing rigid rules that undercut their ministries.

As the century moved on, however, relations between the Vatican and the sisters seemed to improve. In its effort to respond to the horrors of the twentieth century, the Vatican ordered the sisters to become better educated, to update their rules and habits, and to begin meeting together for the sake of greater effectiveness.

Already in 1929 Pope Pius XI had stressed the need for better prepared Catholic school teachers; in 1950, Pius XII called a meeting of the heads of all religious orders for the purpose of further advancing their collaboration; and in 1952 he called a meeting of women’s superiors, during which he urged the sisters to update and educate themselves for the purpose of attaining attain equal footing with their secular counterparts.

The Vatican also called for the formation of the US Conference of Major Superiors of Women, the group that eventually morphed into the currently-maligned LCWR. Ironically, the American women’s congregations at the time felt no need for the Conference, but organized it out of obedience to the Pope. Finally, the Second Vatican Council called the sisters to renew their congregations, return to the charism of their founders, and revise their constitutions, a call Pope Paul VI seconded. The sisters embraced Vatican II renewal immediately, with all their hearts, more so than any other group in the church.

So how, you may wonder, did the sisters and the Vatican get into the current conundrum? In much the same way that the rest of the Catholic Church did in the decades after Vatican II.

Conservative commentators argue that the sisters misinterpreted the teachings of Vatican II, or didn’t study them at all, and abandoned the way of life to which they were vowed. More illuminating, I believe is a comment made in 2005 by Sister Mary Daniel Turner, an LCWR executive director who, in the 1970s, led the organization through some of its most significant transformations: “Each time the church takes a step forward,” she said, “it takes a step back.” At Vatican II, the church called its members to respond to the “signs of the times,” to recognize “the universal call to holiness” that made clergy, religious and laypeople equal, to respond to the “joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties” of modern men and women.

But when the “People of God” began to do this, the Vatican and the bishops realized with a shock what it actually meant, and they didn’t like it.

In point of fact, according to papers released in 2011 by the moral theologian Germaine Grisez, papal buyers’ remorse had become evident even before the closing of the Council, when Pope Paul VI made clear that he would not reverse the church’s earlier condemnation of artificial contraceptives under any circumstances. And in 1968 he was true to that promise, absolutely forbidding, in his encyclical Humanae Vitae, the use of artificial contraceptives. In so doing the pope overrode the recommendations of the birth control commission formed during Vatican II, a commission that included married lay people. So much for the equality that came with the “universal call to holiness.”

US sisters themselves began slamming into the buyers’ remorse of the institutional church around the same time. Already in 1967, the rollback of the renewal the sisters had undertaken with such commitment began to come into focus. When the cardinal archbishop of Los Angeles forbade the Immaculate Heart Sisters there from implementing the changes agreed upon at their renewal chapter, including modernizing their habit and educating their young sisters before sending them out to teach, the Vatican backed the cardinal, although these were changes the Vatican itself had called for. Ultimately, a majority of IHMs abandoned their status as Catholic sisters under canon law.

When LCWR members proposed a motion protesting the treatment accorded the IHMs, the Vatican representative at their meeting prevented the motion from coming to a vote. In the years that followed, the LCWR protested to Rome repeatedly what appeared to them unjustifiable intrusions by the Vatican and the bishops in decisions over which the Council had given them discretion.

I could go on but you get the idea. The recent investigation of the LCWR and accusations of doctrinal infidelity and radical feminism against the group are one more sad chapter in the long history of popes and bishops attempting to bring Catholic sisters to heel.

There is one significant difference, however. In part because of the Vatican’s own demand that they become so, the sisters currently under attack are the most highly educated women in the history of the church.

And because of the sisters’ hard, able, for the most part financially uncompensated work, Catholic women in the US today are also vastly more educated, competent, and professional than Catholic women of any previous generations. Think here, if you will, of Nancy Pelosi, recent occupant of the highest position of power a woman has held in the history of the US government. Think of Kathleen Sebelius. Think, for that matter, of me. We Catholic women understand the enormous debt we owe our sisters, and we are not pleased to have their faith denigrated in such a vile fashion even as they move into old age.

To paraphrase Sister Simone Campbell, I don’t think the boys have any idea what they’re in for.

Complete Article HERE!