Fr. Mankowski: The Truth About the Crisis in the Catholic Church

the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit directly beseech the o lord all our actions by the only inspirations and carry them on by the gracious assistance that every word and work of ours may always begin from thee and by the be happily ended through christ our lord amen our lady's seat of wisdom prayer name of the father the son and of the holy spirit on april 12 1959 in a speech given in indianapolis then senator from massachusetts john f kennedy said when written in chinese the word crisis is composed of two characters one represents danger and one represents opportunity i think an instructive to bring together the notions of danger and opportunity within the same field of view so to speak in as much as a time of crisis means that new defeats and new victories are equally imminent and equally dependent on human choice in the context of the crisis in the catholic church i want to examine with you the dangers the opportunities and which among the human choices resulting in defeat and triumph you or i might have the chance to make the crisis you don't need to be told made itself undeniably manifest by revelations of the sexual abuse of children by priests the scandal was itself deepened by the failures of bishops and religious superiors mendacious denials cover-ups revilement of good faith accusers but these crimes are only symptoms of the real crisis which i would describe as an ecclesial deadlock the counterpoise of contrary forces and objectives within the hierarchy and the governing agencies in the church that have brought about an impasse or stalemate no substantive and serious reforms are undertaken because no one trusts the conflicting motives of the reformers it is a ground floor mistake to see the crisis as a particularly vexatious large-scale problem susceptible of administrative correction in secular management terms in the only important sense there is no fix the crisis is unfixable because it is not a problem that a manager can stand outside of it's not a problem like falling sales or declining sat scores or difficulty in retaining partners in a law firm you don't gather in a committee room and toss the problem out on the table and brainstorm about it it's not a question of alternative means to a given end but of alternative ends and the contradictory mutually antagonistic ends subsist in the very persons the only persons with the authority to address the problem to borrow jargon from the football locker room you can only profitably plan an offense if you know both coaches and players want to score more than their opponents that they want to win games but when the very question at issue is whether games should be thrown or not no amount of football expertise can solve it robert weakland and raymond burke are not men working in different ways toward the same goal they want different teams to win sometimes our local ordinary will be a burke sometimes a weakling more often a man who oscillates between one position and the other those of us who are not bishops have no say whatever and the concrete decisions made yet we all to a greater or lesser extent have to play along with the fiction that we're all on the same team with the same purposes my gentler more tolerant friends urged me to make a bad faith effort at good faith better to pretend that cattle was lit they say than to curse the darkness only a bishop however can light the particular candle in question that's another hugely inconvenient doctrine that i as a catholic and compelled to believe my own bishop depending on where i happen to be domiciled may have no convictions at all about the apostolic nature of hierarchical governance and sacramental validity but it's greatly to his advantage that i do that said in june of 2018 the crisis provided all of us important new opportunities when the villainies of theodore mccarrick became public knowledge and for that reason discussable the mccarrick revelations made it possible to speak about his own misdeeds without being reproached for calumny and they also made it plain that the criminal and his crimes were protected by a network of powerful and covertly iniquitous churchmen at home abroad and in rome the new york times columnist ross douthat riley admitted his own naivete in the matter it was the early 2000s he says i was attending some panel on religion it was accosted by a type who haunts such events gaunt intense with a litany of esoteric grievances he was a traditionalist catholic a figure from the church's fringes and he had a lot to say about corruption and the catholic clergy the scandals in boston had broken so some of what he said was familiar but he kept going into a rant about cardinal mccarrick did you know he makes seminarians sleep with him invites them to his beach house gets in bed with them at this nauthat says i gave him the brush off that you give the maniacal and i slipped out this is before i realize that that continues that if you wanted the truth about corruption in the catholic church you had to listen to the extreme seeming types traditionalists and radicals because they were the only ones sufficiently alienated from the institution to actually dig into its rot it was also before i learned from journalists friends that mccarrick or uncle ted as he urged his paramour victims to address him had such a long history of pursuing seminarians and priests that a group of catholics went to rome to warn against making him washington's archbishop to no avail end of quotation so the mccarrick scandal may have taught us nothing new but it did give us permission to talk about what we had already learned through parallel cases and sharpen the focus of key elements of the crisis let me foreground a few first we're dealing with collusion with complicity in sin the crisis is not an instance of multiple isolated miscreants working mischief on a large scale but if men in authority concealing tolerating and sometimes abetting the crimes of priests and of their fellows i'm not arguing for the existence of a conspiracy in the strict sense a criminal pact secretly but explicitly forged between men who know the other conspirators and who share a common subversive purpose but there is certainly a network or interlocking plurality of networks operating to permit to protect and promote clerics committing crimes against the church and against persons subject to their authority second to use the terminology of the catholic scholar anthony esslin the whole of the metacrime was homosexual as this is a unfamiliar term i provided this visual aid which i produced that uh using every uh sparing no effort or expense it's beyond dispute that the clerical sexual abuse was itself overwhelmingly homosexual as the late richard newhouse put it between men who want to have sex with adolescent boys and men who do not want to have sex with adolescent boys the former are more likely to have sex with adolescent boys but eslin is making a different claim by the metacrime he means not the instances of sexual predation but the crime that permitted these other crimes to take place eslin explains we do not have examples of womanizing priests going out of their way to recruit other such priests forming a tight little cabal covering for one another suborning young men into this wicked way of life issuing veiled threats against anyone who would go public and snubbing those who did not approve eslin's point is crucial no sane observer denies the fact that there exists clergy who sin with women but there is no evidence that they collude in mutual recruitment mutual advancement mutual protection esslen concludes there was no network of abusers of girls this network was about clergy who wanted to do things with boys and men third it has become clear that the institutions of priestly formation that is seminaries novitiates scholasticates have in many places developed a culture that weakens rather than strengthens the moral fiber of the young men formed in it this weakness manifests itself not solely or even principally in susceptibility to sexual sin but in an ignoble moral timidity and an unmanly submissiveness that consents to indignities visited on itself and others that fails to oppose or denounce injustice when perpetrated by superiors here again the unease that many catholics have been feeling for decades was crystallized by the mccarrick affair in the mental image of the bishop spooning a series of seminarians on his beach house mattress an image that points the astonishing acquiescence of so many men to this treatment and in the case of any who declined to acquiesce to their equally astonishing unwillingness to make their refusal audible fearlessly intelligent initiative is an indispensable condition of moral leadership yet the seminaries operated such that several generations of priests not only failed to acquire such fearlessness but failed to attain the normal the moral imbalance of ordinary manhood including an ordinary resistance to institutional deceit and depravity yet the fact is that some men did protest and this brings me to my fourth point the harm done by what i will call the recursive authority loop that is a structure of governance whereby a given agency has total power to determine what counts as failure of the same agency and has total control and handling information concerning alleged failures this brings up the ancient problem of custodian custodes who will guard the guardians who will audit the auditors in the days of martial marcial deliado the constitutions of the legionaries of christ oblige its members to pronounce oval quote never to make outward verbal criticism written or otherwise of any act of governance or of the person of any rector or superior of the congregation and to inform forth with the immediate superior of the member who has made such a criticism in the quote only a saint could be could be given absolute power of judgment over his own conduct and not abuse it and we know that in the case of martial it did not have a happy ending yet the recursive authority loop while rarely as tight as that of the legion operates in other areas of the church governance as well the letters of complaint accusing mccarrick of predation were received stamped read and passed up the ecclesiastical ladder to the same authorities that made him a bishop in the first place and who had done so by ignoring similar communications even honorable men would find distasteful the task of investigating allegations that if proved sound would reflect poorly on their own conduct of office and here again the mccarrick affair showed us that this honor was in short supply the letters of accusation and memoranda had no effect except to make their writers into targets of official vindictiveness an old maxim of roman law says that no man can be a judge in his own cause yet in far too many cases of church life every man in authority is a judge in his cause this is true of the administration of religious orders the careers of diocesan priests and most particularly of seminary life the purpose of a seminary is to submit worldly young men to the instruction of prayerful and godly formators on the assumption that the students will be more ill-behaved and unruly and their instructors more silver ascetic and virtuous yet time and again we're told that it is the seminarians who are shocked by the profane worldliness of their superiors superiors who when a complaint of corruption is raised comprise both jury and judge the journalist jason berry in his 1991 book on the crisis gives this glimpse into the sand excuse me the saint francis seminary of the diocese of san diego mary jones first inkling that something was amiss barry writes came in autumn 1980. she let she left a check for her son bob at the seminary and looked into the piano room cushions were on the floor guys were in togas with wine goblets not all wearing underwear i started crying the priest came over and said gently this is not a time when parents are welcome why didn't she let bob continue in this seminary she continues i wanted to preserve our relationship at all costs it's like those cults once you lose communication you lose it all when bob told me he thought he was gay i went to a spiritual director and i practically tore his apartment up crying she said it's not that he's gay it's what he became gay because of the seminary i was the best mother i could be i educated him in catholic schools end quote mary's appeals for justice and decency got the same treatment we've come to expect sympathetic indignation on the part of those in authority uh excuse me sympathetic indignation on a part of those with no influence public affectation of interest on the part of those authority the sex abuse crisis got to the point where it could no longer be ignored the men who thrust themselves forward as reformers were far too often the perpetrators of corruption who saw to it that the network would remain intact and the metacrime unhindered take the notion of seminary screening at the bishops meeting in dallas in june 2002 all agreed that the seminary should do more rigorous testing to exclude potential abusers but here again everything depends on the persons you hire to do the screening which is to say everything depends on your notion of healthy manhood and of the role of the priest in catholic life look at it this way if you bring your camry into the dealer's garage and say fix it you don't need to inquire more deeply about the mechanic's belief system because you and he share the notion of what a well-running camry is but if you find your 15 year old wearing his mother's lipstick you don't drop him off outside the counseling center and wish him luck you need to know which particular therapist will make it his task to heal it and you need to know what view of the human person that therapist professes because the putatively healthy specimen the therapist returns to you will vary drastically radically depending on what he believes human life is meant for the same reason it is pointless for your seminary to congratulate itself on more thorough screening whom do you scream out and whom do you scream in the quality of manhood prized by one examiner as tenacity that is stalwart adherence to principle to honor and to the truth of the faith will be condemned by a different examiner as rigidity candidate shows uncooperative know-it-all attitude towards theology information notes the screening psychologist unsuitable for ministry so the rigid seminarian is rejected as the outset and replaced by one more flexible more adaptable shall we say to the contours of the archbishop's mattress and here's the rub the recursive authority loop ensures that all this takes place under the banner of reform it may seem that i've been painting in broad strokes with too little attention to detail let me supply some specifics so as to bolster my claims james rausch was a sexually active gay man made bishop at age 44 and four years later appointed bishop of phoenix 1995 a tucson priest and serial sexual predator named father robert trupia blackmailed the diocese of tucson by threatening to reveal his own sexual liaisons with bishop rausch with another tucson priest and an underage male so i asked to derail disciplinary measures that would enmesh him in the civil justice system dr richard sype a psychiatrist and an expert on the clergy abuse scandal had this to say in a 2003 article about rausch it says i've interviewed at length a man who is a sexual partner of bishop james rausch this is particularly painful for me since roush and i were young priests together in minnesota in the early 60s he went on to get his social work degree and succeeded bernadine as secretary of the bishops national conference in dc he became bishop of phoenix it is patently clear that bishop roush had an act of sexual life it did involve at least one minor he was acquainted with priests who are sexually active with minors priests who had at least 30 minor victims each he referred at least one of his own victims to these priests to those who knew him psych asks know nothing of his life perhaps so but he was in a spectacular powered grid of bright men he was a bernadine's successor at the u.s conference bishop thomas kelly of louisville was his successor monsignor daniel hoy and bishop robert lynch among others took over his job end of quotation three points first roush died young in office and in good standing second among those site includes in the roster of his spectacular power grid are bishops who in the wake of the scandals were commended on the national stage for being in the forefront of efforts for the protection of children kelly bernardine robert lynch i forget the third point next we might look at lawrence welsh a sexually active gay man who was appointed bishop of spokane at age 43. in august of 1986 bishop welsh was in chicago at the knights of columbus convention when he brought a male prostitute to his hotel room whom he throttled while the prostitute was performing a paid act of fellatio the prostitute was so shaken that he notified chicago police who in turn notified the spokane police who interviewed welsh and obtained a confession by an agreement with the metropolitan archbishop raymond hunthousen of seattle no charges were filed against welsh on the condition that he undergo therapy there is no evidence that this promise was honored here too note the effect of the recursive authority loop three years later welsh was arrested for drunk driving and finally obliged to resign his bishopric successor as bishop of spokane williams skillstead when asked in 2002 about welsh's having choked the chicago rent boy replied obviously he had a very serious drinking problem certainly it's very sad behavior associated with that drinking that would be my observation two years later skillstat was elected president of the united states conference of catholic bishops yet the lord's wealth story did not end with his regulation from spokane in 1991 in a move to my knowledge unparalleled in recent church history walsh was brought out of retirement to be made auxiliary bishop of saint paul minneapolis his squad police record notwithstanding when welsh died in 1999 then archbishop harry flynn praised welsh as quote an extraordinary man and a faith-filled servant of the church he had a special gift for touching others i'm not making this up with both his humor and his sincere witness to the gospel of jesus christ end quote and yes harry flynn was also one of the men who shouldered himself into the league lights as a great reformer in fact clinton chaired the drafting committee that at the dallas assembly in 2002 produced the charter for the protection of young people a charter which jd flynn of catholic news agency points out deliberately excluded bishops from their disciplinary protocols this brings us back again to uncle ted mccarrick the sensational way in which he ended his ministry may incline us to forget that mccarrick a sexually active gay man had the public reputation as a pioneer in the campaign to free the church from the muck of sexual abuse and set her to rights journalist melinda henneberger regarded mccarrick as one of the good guys she says those of us who lived through the horror of the clerical sexual abuse scandals in 2002 hamburger wrote in july 2018 we're so grateful that at least one american cardinal seemed to understand the depth and urgency of the problem yes that man was ted mccarrick someone i interviewed a number of times at the height of the scandals in my job as rome correspondent for the new york times while too many other church leaders were still denying deflecting minimizing and blaming the media he was the first to speak about a one strike in your out policy for new cases of abuse by priests henneberger says that the revelations mccarrick's true nature was a gut punch to her and she ends on a note of sarcastic disdain in 2002 renowned reformer ted mccarrick said the new standards would tell the laity they must have a role in rooting out abuse where while there's still our lady to have a role uncle teddy end of quotation my initial claim was that the true crisis is a kind of ecclesial deadlock a paralysis i've tried to show that it is precisely the renowned reformers who brought the criminal network into being who keep it alive in spite of urgent calls for a purge and who have brought about the deadlock in the first place the recursive authority loop and the dynamics of blackmail make it all but certain that the only persons with the authority to tackle the corruption and clean out the rot lack the interest or the will to do so the promised vatican report on the presumed to make clear how he scammed the system has been repeatedly and inexplicably delayed father raymond de souza pointing to what he calls the rather soviet feel to roman communications acknowledges that this report will eventually be issued but asks when it is released who will believe what it says when trustees have shown themselves untrustworthy how can trust be restored if i were addressing bishops instead of laymen i would say this the very condition of trusting a man is his total indifference as to whether you trust him or not that's to say we trust those who we know will tell us the truth regardless of how we'll react and will keep their promises regardless of how they appear in the eyes of others only a confidence man asks himself how can i get this guy to trust me as a distinct endeavor from what is the right thing to do in this situation when a pertinent body is a collectivity like a professional group we trust the outfit that is harder on its own members than we ourselves would incline to be they fired dr brown just for that captain jones lost his command just for that when we marvel that would appear to be trivial lapses to those of us outside the guild are deemed career-ending offenses of those within and when we see that the guild not infrequently pulls the trigger on its own members even at considerable cost to itself then we tend to think these are serious folks who have a serious mission a mission they see more clearly than we do and note if they surprise us often enough by a severity towards themselves we don't fully understand we can accept it as a good faith decision if occasionally they show a leniency we don't fully understand by acting consistently in conformity to objective standards without reference to the impression it makes on us they've earned our trust so once you've lost someone's trust how do you win it back by building a record of what lawyers call admission against interest i'm not speaking about the more popular sport of making public apologies for faults committed by one's predecessors in office by admissions against interest i mean voluntarily bringing to light truths about oneself that are damaging for which indeed one could have no motive to make public accept regard for the truth that goes beyond any possible consequences of its disclosure indeed we have the splendid example of the bishop saint augustine putting his sins before the world in his confessions might bishops follow his example in our own time consider how few have admitted not to their own misdeeds to having heard rumors of mccarrick's and you have your answer 17 years ago i took part in the discussion of the priest abuse crisis in which i made some somber predictions at the time i said i believe that the crisis will deepen though undramatically in the foreseeable future i believe that the policies suggested to remedy the situation will help only tangentially and that the whole idea of an administrative programmatic approach a software solution if i put it that way is an example of the disease for which it purports to be the cure those same predictions i would repeat today emphasizing however that societal antipathy toward the church and to catholic doctrine is increasing every month and is becoming institutionalized at the same rate will the coming hostilities have a happy ending yes it's the periods leading up to that ending that are going to be bloody as a church we've been here before and that more than once take the case of rodrigo borja who fathered at least six bastards by married women made two of them cardinals bought himself a papacy he's pope alexander vi and died one of europe's richest men in 1503. yet the moral indignation such decadence roused in a martin luther commendable in itself made common cause with hatreds that despised the church not for her vices but for her virtues virtues true catholics rose to defend at the risk of their lives the french writer george belnano saw the truth clearly he says it's a fact of experience that one reforms nothing in a church by ordinary means whoever pretends to reform the church by these means the means to which one reforms a secular society that only fails and is undertaking but infallibly ends by finding himself outside the church one reforms the church only by suffering for her when reforms the visible church only by suffering for the invisible church when reforms the vices of the church only by being prodigal of the example of her most heroic virtues it's well possible that saint francis of assisi was not less revolted than luther by the debauchery and by the seminary of prelate it's certain that he suffered more cruelly because of them for his nature was very different from that of the monk of weimar but he did not challenge the iniquity he did not try to confront it with himself he hurled himself into poverty plunged into it as deeply as he could along with his followers as into the source of all purity instead of trying to snatch from the church her ill-gotten gains he overwhelmed her with invisible treasures the church has need not of reformers he concludes but of saints heroic sanctity makes itself known in circumstances of heroically endured hardship and the good news i leave you is that this hardship is on the way and the saints will follow our lord has never given us and will not give us in the future all the saints we wish he will give us all the saints we need think back to henry viii's your suppression of the church prerogatives in 1530s england and the craving capitulation of every single english bishop save one saint john fisher of rochester listen to the letter fischer wrote to reproach the moderate bishops stephen gardner and cusper tunstall the team players who sided with king henry and ask if it doesn't ring more recent bells but thinks it had rather been our part to stick together in repressing these violent and unlawful intrusions and injuries daily offered to our common mother the holy church of christ then by any manner of persuasion to help or set forward the same and we ought rather to seek by all means the temporal destruction of the soul ravenous wolves that daily go about worrying and devouring the flock that christ committed to our charge and the flock that christ himself died for then to suffer them thus to range abroad but alas seeing we do it not you see in what peril the christian state now stands we are besieged in all sides and can hardly escape the danger of our enemy and seeing that judgment is begone at the house of god what hope is there left if we fall that the rest shall stand the fort is portrayed by them that should have defended it and therefore seeing the matter as thus begun and so faintly resist it on our parts i fear we be not the men that you'll see the end of the story wherefore seeing i am an old man and look not long to live am i not by the help of god to trouble my conscience and pleasing the king whatsoever becomes me but rather here to spend out the remnant of my old days in praying to god for him it took 20 years and the spilling of much innocent blood but amazingly enough the litter worked and helped change the hearts of the timid time servers let me quote from church historian james hitchcock he says by the logic of prudence as it is now understood the church should not have canonized john fisher the only bishop who withstood henry viii but instead bishop stephen gardner and cuthbert tunstall men who along not devoid of principle nonetheless managed to survive the ecclesiastical changes of three reigns although the fact is well known hitchcock says that all but one english bishop conformed to henry viii in 1534 much less well known is the fact that in 1559 no english bishop conformed to elizabeth the first and all were deposed including tunstall a fact which demonstrates the possibility of thoroughly reforming a national hierarchy end of quotation i believe the visible and doctrinal unity of the church will diminish and will be subject to new loyalties and realignments roughly comparable to the divergence at present between the german and bishops excuse me the german and polish bishops conferences i believe most of these fiefdoms will respond to persecution by compromising or throwing overboard conspicuously offensive and dangerous catholic teachings and practices i believe organized hostility toward the church will increase to the point where there is no reason at all to be a catholic no reason at all to be a nun no reason at all to be a priest apart from the unshakable personal conviction that the church is the supreme dispenser of truth and of spiritual goods and here i repeat my conclusions from 2003 i believe a reform will come though in a future generation and that the reformers whom god raises up will spill their blood and imitation of christ in short the pull for a line of frank sheed i find absolutely no grounds for optimism and i

Channel: Complicit Clergy

Views: 57,971

Keywords:

Id: U72DBzrv2tE

Length: 36min 31sec (2191 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 28 2021