Mark Shea in the past has posted that we get the bishops we deserve and he recently posted a quote from Scott Hahn:
“God’s wrath, throughout history, basically means giving us what we want.”
I can understand how this well might be true. When looking at the current scandals in the Church we see that some priests were moved around from parish to parish when it was known that they were fallen from their priestly vows. I would really doubt that Bishops moved these priests around because they wanted to cause scandal or to victimize parishioners so there obviously were other reasons.
1. God’s grace and forgiveness and the ability to transform people is something Christians believe wholeheartedly and I can understand that with a seemingly repentant priest that a Bishop would take this in to account.
2. The science of psychology also played a factor where bishops relied on their diagnosis of fallen priests who had supposedly been rehabilitated, this also plays back on the first item. (See update at bottom)
3. Another factor I believe is the pressure of the shortage of priests. If there had been a large pool of priests available, would the Bishops then have acted more prudently and decided not to move these priest around. Would they have been less influenced by item 2 and have seen item 1 in it correct proportion as compared to protecting the laity?
This is where I believe the laity is complicit. I think the number one factor to the priestly shortage is the contraceptive attitude in Catholic families. Smaller families usually don’t encourage vocations to priestly or religious life because of the desire of grandchildren. There is a selfishness in the desire to control family size so as to have more material gains. A larger family in and of itself is not the goal but the attitude of openess to life. The majority of Catholics practice some form of birth control which means that that same majority also receive communion. Since contraception is a grave sin they are in effect committing a “Real Sacrilege”. The Catholic encyclopedia defines this as:
Real Sacrilege. Real sacrilege is the irreverent treatment of sacred things as distinguished from places and persons. This can happen first of all by the administration or reception of the sacraments (or in the case of the Holy Eucharist by celebration) in the state of mortal sin, as also by advertently doing any of those things invalidly.
The culture of dissent which mainly started against the Churches teaching on contraception has bore its rotten fruit. Many Catholic don’t understand or believe that contraception is a grave sin so they might not be a culpable as to the level of mortal sin, but regardless this is a blight on the church that has blurred many eyes to the truth.
I can well understand the resistance to larger families that happens in our society. Before my conversion I was a card-carrying member of the culture of death. After the birth of our second child I went and had a vasectomy some 20 years ago. Even though I love our children I was selfish and indoctrinated in relation to family size. The seventies were loaded with doom and population bomb thinking. I did not believe in God but I believed in replacement levels for a population equilibrium. I thought well we have two children, one boy and one girl – a matched set and I have bagged my quota. People talk of trophy wives and I think our society views children as either trophies or something you should have just as long as they are not too many of them, especially since they consume resources better spent on yourself. There was absolutely nothing coming from society saying I should question my decision or that there was any ethical dimension to this. In a distorted way I also thought that by getting a vasectomy that I was showing commitment to my wife by showing that I only planned to have children by her and that I was saving her from having to get an operation or to take the pill. While I have done much that has weighed down on my soul, the consequences of this act of self-multilation weighs the heaviest.
With Catholics getting divorced and remarried at roughly the same rate as non-Catholics and with Catholics in general not being open to life then why should we be surprised at the priests and then bishops this culture can generate. We expect to go on living highly secular lives and to do what we please and define our own truths and then also to expect holy priests and bishops. There is a saying that “Holy priests make holy people and that holy people make holy priests. The real surprise is not that there are some bad bishops, but that despite the lack of faithfulness that we have so many good bishops.
Update: I updated point two since I was hasty and used an overly broad brush on psychology. I stand corrected and defer to Gregory Popcak‘s statement he made in the comments. That clericalism was also tied up in some of these treatment centers which were run by clergy.
10 comments
I have heard of some, both male and female, having sterilization reversal as an act of penance and openness after having experiences conversion or reversion. One of the saddest things I have to do is tell women that our publicly funded health center will pay for sterilization, contraception, etc, but has limited funds for infertility (I actually slip a few things in between the cracks, including fertility awareness/NFP) and zero $$ for sterilization reversal.
Thanks for a thoughtful commentary, Jeff. Certainly has made me offer some thanksgiving for the Diocese I live in, where there is no shortage of priests right now, and the Bishop is joyfully Orthodox. Very helpful to me, as a new Catholic.
–Sparki
You’re on a roll, Jeff.
Dear Jeff,
Wow! And thanks,
shalom,
Steven
Jeff, this is absolute nonsense. Your essay is a bunch of non-sequiturs. What do divorce and contraception have to do with the sexual molestation of the young by priests? Do you seriously believe that if every Catholic practiced NFP and if divorce were non-existant, that such molestation would not have happened? The Washington Post recently published documents from 1957 — way before commonplace divorce, contraception or even Vatican II — about a perverted priest who was shifted around w/o the knowledge or consent of the laity or the pastor in question.
Your essay insults molestation victims and their parents who were taught to trust “men of God” implicitly and w/o question. Most of these parents were devout, orthodox Catholics who wouldn’t dream of getting a divorce or practicing contraception.
The problem, which you obviously refuse to see, is a centralized hierarchy that holds none of its members accountable and that, in turn, is led by a pope who would rather travel, proclaim saints and engage in political lobbying than confront forthrightly the moral, intellectual and spiritual chaos and corruption that is contemporary Catholicism. It’s that same hierarchy that has brainwashed faithful Catholics into the kind of blind deference to authority (including priests) that justifies the Church’s autocratic, imperial pretentions.
Joseph,
My post was not addressing the issue of molestation but how that was handled by some bishops.
There has always been some priest that abused their sacred orders and some bishops who did not prudently act in response to this. There has been a extremely large occurrence of these incidents in relations to the first half of this decade. To say that divorce and dissent from church teaching has had no effect on this situation is I believe mistaken.
I don’t see how the hierarchy can be at the same time be both autocratic and also to hold no one accountable.
It was a minor point, I know, but I did want to take issue with point two regarding therapy.
First, think about the treatment centers to which the priests were sent. Servants of the Paraclete, St. Luke’s. The personnel are all priests and religious. My point is that it is clericalism, not therapy that is at the root of the problem. I knew as an UNDERGRAD in 1986 that pedophilia couldn’t be cured. Yet these bozo/priest/”clinicians” were recommending them for ministerial placement in 2001? That’s not psychology’s fault, that’s clericalism.
Second, to talk about psychology as a mostly false science is simply untrue. Psychology is no more a monolith than theology. Some theologies are better and more scientific than others. Likewise, the results of clinical psychology are being demonstrated time and again by advances in neuroradiology, quantum physics, and chaos theory (the last on the list being applied to marriage counseling, of all things).
In fact, psychotherapy is proving to be MORE effective than medication in treating many mental disorders (meds most commonly reduce suffering by 30-40% for only 60% of patients while therapy is demonstrating 80% CURE rate).
For more info, please see The Mind and the Brain, by Jeffrey Schwartz.
Thanks for hearing me out.
Jane, does “modernism” explain Cdl. Law, who toed the papal line on every important subject yet was the first to resign in disgrace? Rod Dreher, who has done far more research on this subject than either of us, says that “orthodoxy” isn’t a factor; contact him at rdreher@dallasnews.com if you don’t believe me. Where was Law (or his predecesor, Cdl Medeiros) when Paul Shanley as an official representative of the Boston Archdiocese proclaimed his support for “man-boy” love?
For that matter, where was John Paul II, who is no “modernist,” at least on sexual issues?
The common thread woven throughout this crisis — regardless of decade or theological stance — is the lack of accountability and transparency that bishops have traditionally enjoyed. That lack of accountability has been fostered by the demand for blind deference from laity, clergy and religious — and by a centralized, hierarchical system that engenders an arrogant sense of entitlement.
Jane, the Jester’s assertion that the root of this crisis is a “contraceptive mentality” that has denied the Church priests is, to put it politely, nothing but a pile of “brown sugar”. It shifts the blame from the people who are responsible for reprimanding the behavior of perverts like Shanley onto people who have absolutely no ability to do so. The Jester’s thesis is the last refuge of theological scoundrels and sentimentalists who believe that “Holy Mother Church can do no wrong” (another pile of “brown sugar”; just ask the molestation victims). Such people worship the Church as God rather than God as God — and, in my book, Jane, that’s idolatry, pure and simple.
Thanks, Jeff, for the amendment. You’re a blogger and a gentleman.
“Jane, does ‘modernism’ explain Cdl. Law, who toed the papal line on every important subject yet was the first to resign in disgrace?”
No, but it does explain why Boston and it’s archbishop were the focal points of the crisis instead of Los Angeles or other dioceses with more “acceptable” bishops in the modernist press’s eyes. Law was the most orthodox and “conservative” bishop who oversaw reassignment of predators. That’s why he was taken out, so to speak. The sex abuse was just ammo. The same priests and laity who were pals and defenders of Shandley back in the “glory days” were the ones who led the petition movement. Hell, Shandley and his pals were preaching the same kinds of “reform” back then that his pals have continued to champion as a response to the situation that Shandley and his ilk created. The irony is too rich..