Category: Religion

SAID THE BISHOPS TO THE PRESIDENT: DO AS WE SAY OR NO COMMUNION

Bless the bishops, Father, for they have sinned.

A substantial majority of U.S. Catholic bishops voted last week to initiate a process that could force President Biden to either alter his position on abortion, or never be allowed to take Communion again.  It’s a new spin on the old stick-up trope of “Your money or your life.” The operative dichotomy here is: “Your politics or your faith.”

You’d think the hierarchy of American Catholicism would be enthralled with having the first Catholic president in 60 years – only the second in the country’s history.  But come now the bishops with a theological ransom scheme designed to extort the White House. 

As a recovering Methodist, I mean no sacrilege.  Although I disagree with the Catholic position on abortion, I have always respected it as an understandable extension of the Church’s sanctity and dignity of life presumption, a principle it has applied to a panoply of social justice issues.  (See capital punishment, gun control, medical care, racial justice, income inequality and the just war theory.)

But these bishops have taken their anti-abortion advocacy to an utterly cruel and immoral level.  Catholics regard the Eucharist, or Holy Communion, as the Church’s most important sacrament. According to its teaching, the bread and wine taken during Mass literally transforms into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. To deny Communion to an observant Catholic is to deny the presence of Christ (here and here).

Although he has never worn his religion on his sleeve, Catholicism has long been an important part of Joe Biden’s life.  According to the Washington Post, he was taught by nuns in Catholic schools, seriously contemplated entering the priesthood, rarely misses Mass and clutches rosary beads when making major decisions. The bishops’ threat is built upon the leverage of Biden’s deeply held faith.  And that is why this extortion effort is so very wrong.

Without getting deeply into the weeds of Canon Law, the bishops going after Biden cite a provision that says Catholics cannot receive Communion if they are “conscious of grave sin.” That basically means knowingly and repeatedly engaging in a mortal sin without repentance. Since the Church views abortion as murder, the bishops argue that the president’s support for abortion rights is a disqualifying “grave sin.”  

Over the centuries, Catholic theologians have drafted numerous lists of acts rising to the mortal sin level.  Among the entries is extortion.  Threatening someone with an adverse action in order to achieve something of value is seen as a “grave sin.”   That’s why I wrote what I did in this piece’s first sentence. The bishops trying to extort the president of the United States are, themselves, committing a grave sin. 

Of course, grave sins are nothing new to many of the Church’s priests and bishops.  According to the Bishop Accountability Project, more than 7,000 American Catholic clerics have been credibly accused of sexually assaulting more than 20,000 victims, most of them children.  For years, many bishops and other Church leaders were aware of the problem but covered it up, thereby allowing assaultive priests to continue offering Communion to their parishioners. Sins don’t get much graver than that.

Clearly, the bishops’ motive here has far less to do with the sanctity of the sacrament and far more to do with attempting to strongarm the president.  In their rhetoric, the bishops would have us believe that they would deny Communion to any political figure who supported either abortion or capital punishment.  Yet, none of them denied the Communion chalice to former Attorney General William Barr as he expanded the number of federal executions.  

My immediate visceral reaction to the bishops’ vote last week was directed at the raw meanness of it all.  Here’s Joe Biden, the person. At 78 he is actuarily in the twilight of his life, a life defined by his losses and his victories. He buried a wife and two children. His religion is deeply important to him. The hymns, the Bible verses, the prayers, the sacraments and all the other rituals come together as a tapestry that somehow sustains him, Joe the guy.  How dare men of power in this Church even think of ripping out major threads of that tapestry by converting the Sacrament of Holy Communion into a political weapon. 

This ugly predicament, however, offers up another consideration:  What if the bishops’ extortion plan worked?  What if the president, in order to be assured of access to Communion, pulled back all of his executive orders supporting a woman’s right to choose, and made it clear that, from this point forward, his administration would do everything possible to make abortion illegal?  Never mind the fact that 60 percent of the country – and 57 percent of Catholics – support abortion rights.  The result of such a power play is almost unthinkable: a bunch of men with “bishop” in their title would have commandeered the presidency of the United States.

Fortunately, that’s only a hypothetical, and one very unlikely to ever surface.  Biden would never cave to this extortion attempt. Asked about the threat last week, he told a reporter, “It’s a private matter, and I don’t think that’s going to happen.”  The leaders of the two dioceses where he worships most frequently, Washington, D.C. and Wilmington, Delaware, have made it clear they have no intention of keeping Biden away from Communion in their jurisdictions. Yet, the mere fact that a sizeable group of Catholic leaders in this country have come this far in their threat to force the president’s hand on one of the most volatile issues of the day is, to say the least, cause for great alarm.  

It is very possible – even likely – that the U.S. Supreme Court will one day drive the final nail into the coffin of Roe v. Wade. As sad as that would be for a majority of Americans, it would nevertheless be in accordance with our democratic, three-branch system of government.  A similar result coming from a takeover of the Executive Branch by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops would be more than catastrophic.

It would be a grave sin.

THE CHALLENGE OF A NEW YEAR: TURNING DESPAIR INTO HOPE

The single unifying principle in this year of discombobulation is an intense desire to see the end of 2020. Consensus evades us on everything else; like who won the election, the value of social distancing, the amount of viral load in droplets of Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye.  But when it comes to seeing the backside of 2020, we are truly one nation, indivisible. The masked and unmasked masses – in states red and blue – are more than ready to adjourn this year from hell. 

England’s 19th Century poet laureate Alfred Tennyson prophetically captured our antipathy  for this abysmal year:  “Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering ‘it will be happier’.”  

But, as we approach the threshold of 2021, is there hope?

It’s hard to imagine a more relevant question right now.  This year kicked us in the head. A deadly pandemic took our oxygen away, literally and metaphorically. Many hospitals remain filled to capacity, giving a new and cruel meaning to the seasonal refrain of “no room in the inn.”  Despite the most important election in our lifetime, the nation remains toxically divided. Hatred and blinding rage flow from the middle fingers of both sides, poisoning families, friendships and neighborhoods. 

Is hope still alive?

The early Greek thinkers took a dim view of hope. They saw it as wishful thinking and an impediment to building knowledge-based strategies. That concept evolved quite profoundly over the centuries. Thomas Aquinas and other Christian theologians elevated hope to the status of an “irascible passion” for good, one that counteracts our immediate and baser impulses.  To Aquinas, hope is the opposite of despair.  With despair, he wrote, we “withdraw” from the source of our concern, while hope pushes us to “approach” that source and endeavor to make it better.

I thought about this hope/despair continuum recently after viewing an email exchange between two people who pride themselves on their radical left political credentials.  One of them expressed relief that Trump is on his way out, but then went on to wax prolifically on what he sees as the evils of a Biden-Harris administration.  Biden, he said, has been on “the wrong side of every issue in his 47 years in government,” and is filling his cabinet with the “same old warmongering corporatist, neo-cons who have eroded the poor and middle class throughout the Obama era.” 

On the other side of this email dialectic, was a guy in his early 70s who cut his Bolshevik teeth as a Vietnam War resistor, Black Panthers’ supporter, and an American Indian Movement activist, not to mention extensive involvement in various underground guerilla action groups that aren’t listed here, just in case the statute of limitations has not run out. 

Without challenging a word in the anti-Biden elocution, this aging radical emphasized the enormous value of removing Trump from the White House, all in a strategic hopefulness that would have pleased Aquinas.  “My approach,” he wrote, “ is to fuel my own optimism for the sake of my own health and happiness . . . I give Harris and Biden blanket forgiveness for all their past evils (because) I feel more optimistic and peaceful that way.”  He hopes for good governance from the new administration, but will be ready to “write letters and sign petitions” if they go astray.

Two people with shared political beliefs, principles and values, yet one is filled with despair and the other with hope.  The takeaway from this anecdotal exchange is that the difference between these two extremes is a choice we, alone, control.  We can give up hope and cast the entirety of our focus on the darkness of our despair.  We can also choose to turn away from that darkness, and forge our way into a new day with the light that hope brings. 

Playwright Tony Kushner takes this hope/despair dichotomy to a whole different level.  His Pulitzer-Prize-winning play, Angels in America, focused on an era as bleak as the one we are now in, the AIDS crisis during the Reagan Administration.  The play is filled with the ravages of horrifically painful deaths, rampant homophobia, and the utter lack of empathy and action from political leaders.  Yet, the piece ends with an uplifting, hopeful speech.  Asked about that closing scene, Kushner insisted that hope is more than a mere choice.  “It is an ethical obligation to look for hope;” he said, “it is an ethical obligation not to despair.”

Sometimes the facts overwhelmingly support despair.  Think of the enslavement, the lynching, the brutal persecution of Black people. Think of the total subjugation of women in every aspect of their lives, denied the right to vote, to own property, to make decisions.  Think of the horrors faced by LGBTQ people, jailed for loving the wrong person, murdered for being different.  They all had every right to choose despair. It was a deeply rational choice.  Yet the leaders of those movements opted for hope, even while the destination seemed unimaginable. To be sure, those struggles continue, but the enormity of their progress was driven by hope.  

So, yes: there is hope as we cross into a new year. There is hope, not because of a change of calendars or circumstances. There is hope because we can choose it, because it brings us far more peace and health than despair. There is hope because we have an ethical obligation to do what we can to make this a better world. 

This holiday season seems an especially apt time to choose hope.  Our various faiths and traditions all involve symbols of light bringing us hope out of the darkness of despair. The winter solstice celebrates the return of the light and hope of the sun following the longest night of darkness.  Christians decorate Christmas with all manner of lights, signifying that bright and hopeful star that announced the birth of Jesus. Hanukkah is an eight-day “festival of lights” commemorating the power of hope over the forces of darkness. Kwanzaa is celebrated over seven days, with families lighting one of seven candles on the Kinara (candleholder) every night. Each candle represents a basic principle reflective of African culture and the hope it brings to every family. 

So ignore your apocalyptic social media feed for a few days, light a candle, lean back and let hope triumph over despair. As Leonard Cohen taught us, the darkness isn’t forever: “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”  

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH’S CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE SCANDAL REVISITED

A few days ago in this space I kicked off Holy Week with an expression of dismay over the Catholic Church’s incorrigible ineptitude in dealing with its never-ending child sex abuse scandal. I wrote about being stunned over the Church’s legislative campaign to make it more difficult for people to sue their rapists and molesters.

The subject was out of my wheelhouse. I am neither Catholic nor a theologian. Yet, the concept of the country’s largest Christian denomination serving, in effect, as a pedophile lobby seemed preposterously creepy. The post triggered more reaction than anything I’ve written since the inception of this site. It was read by hundreds throughout the United States and 12 other countries. Thanks to the comments, email and private messages it produced, I know more about this ecclesiastical quagmire than I did a week ago.

Here’s a smattering of what I learned:

• Holy Week is treacherous for many sexual abuse survivors. It ignites memories of torture that defy comprehension. For some, it means reliving a boyhood Good Friday ritual in which they were tied, naked, to large wooden crosses by their parish priests, and then molested. For other survivors, a term that carries more positive energy than “victims,” the week brings back images of when, at 11 or 12, priests sodomized them in a confessional.

• A 48-year-old man, after multiple suicide attempts and several breakdowns, finally came to grips with the reality that, at age 11, his priest repeatedly raped him, always assuring the boy that this was part of God’s plan. The statute of limitations in his state barred him from filing suit.

• A man in his 20s filed a complaint with Church officials detailing the sexual abuse he encountered years earlier by a priest who ran a boys prep school. After a lengthy internal investigation, the Church exonerated the priest. The man killed himself years before other victims came forward and the state lifted the deadline for filing suit.

• The statute of limitations issue is not just about money. For the survivors, it is about truth telling, pulling back the Church’s veil of secrecy that has draped this scandal, to one extent or another, since the beginning.

With apologies for burying the lede, that last bullet point is the most important one. I always believed plaintiff attorneys had their fingers crossed when they told jurors that, “This is not about the money.” These survivors have nothing crossed. The salve for their unimaginable wounds is not a seven-figure damage award. It is total and complete transparency. They want to open up every dark nook and cranny of this scandal and let the light of day shine in.

The civil court process rests on a foundation of discovery, a system requiring litigants to share records, documents and other evidence relevant to the dispute. The Church, I am told, is a masterful record keeper. Filed away in the deep recesses of parish and diocesan offices is the entire, unvarnished story of priestly pedophilia and the bishops’ cover-up. Thanks to the discovery process, a good hunk of that data is now publically available. But a lot more remains under the Church’s lock and key. Civil suits open the lock box. That’s why the Church is lobbying against lifting the statute of limitations.

If you want to see just how vile and entangled this scandal is, click here. It will take you to an amazing data base compiled by a group of Catholic laity under the banner of “Bishop Accountability”. You will find an “abuse tracker”, filled with letters, notes and documents representing more than 50 years of systemic child sexual assault and the Church’s elaborate efforts to keep it all quiet. Most of it came from litigation. Webmaster Kathleen Shaw, a former religion reporter for the Worcester, MA Telegram & Gazette, says she has logged more than 100,000 stories of abuse.

Through court records and crowd sourcing, the site has assembled an astonishing list of pedophile priests. There is a pull-down menu, like you were looking for a Starbucks in a foreign location. It goes by states, then cities. I picked small, remote towns I’d never heard of, only to see as many 15 or 20 priests entered there. There is another database for assignments, showing how abusers were moved from parish to parish by bishops who knew they were sexual predators.

These survivors do not want to be forgotten. They want their pain to make a difference, and that can’t happen if this full story, in all of its awful terror, is not made public. I got the sense that this is a tough time for them. This issue was front burner stuff for so long. There were Sixty Minutes pieces, magazine covers, an academy award winning film. We’d go to dinner parties and shake our heads over this tragic abuse. Then the story fades. But their pain does not.

I mean no disrespect to Catholicism and the spiritual nourishment it has given to millions, but there is no escaping this basic truth: the powerful men who run this institution are responsible for the largest and most pervasive moral organizational failure in recent history. They turned their collective back on massive child sexual abuse by their agents. Then they tried to cover it up. Now they wield their power to cut off the rights of those abused to file suit. It is a moral outrage larger than Enron, Arthur Anderson, Dalkon Shield or Ford Pinto. Those were organizations in business to make money that knowingly hurt people for the sake of profits. The Roman Catholic Church, in business to deliver God’s love, knowingly hurt its own followers for the sake of protecting the power of the men in charge. Only through pure artifice and audacity do these moral charlatans now ask state legislatures to protect them from their sins. They deserve the sternest rebuke possible.

LONG OVERDUE IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH: JUSTICE FOR VICTIMS OF ITS PRIESTS

I am told there is a special perch in hell for anyone who speaks ill of the country’s largest Christian denomination on the eve of Holy Week. It’s a risk I am willing to take, because I’ve really had it with corporate Catholicism and its relentless and unforgiving campaign against the victims of pedophile priests. This is a tragedy of gigantic proportions that keeps finding new ways of inflicting pain on those whose suffering is beyond comprehension.

In the beginning, there was the cover up. The Catholic hierarchy was well aware that many of its priests were molesting and raping children. For years, the Church did everything possible to keep the sexual attacks quiet, moving its collared pedophiles from parish to parish when things got hot, letting them start from scratch with a new crop of unsuspecting altar boys.

That routine began to slowly fail in the 1980s when, one by one, victims of the Church’s atrocity stepped out of the shadows with stories the bishops could no longer silence. According to informed estimates, 17,651 American children were sodomized by their parish priest, a number that keeps growing as people now in their 50s and 60s finally come to grips with the pain they’ve silently carried for decades.

Until a few days ago, I figured this story had ended, except for the healing. I hadn’t thought much about it since I saw “Spotlight”, the 2015 film based on the Boston Globe’s stellar coverage of this nightmarish scandal. Then I came across a local news item about the Maryland Legislature finally passing a bill to extend the statute of limitations on filing child molestation suits. It was an intriguing piece. A legislator had tried unsuccessfully for years to change the law so that adults had more time to sue over childhood sexual assaults. The old law banned such litigation after the victim’s 25th birthday. The rationale for the change seemed solid: abused children bury the pain and trauma for decades. By the time they are ready to deal with it, the filing deadline has passed. The bill’s sponsor should know. C.T. Wilson, a Democrat from Charles, MD, was repeatedly raped by his adoptive father between the ages of 8 and 16.

As I read the story, I couldn’t figure out what the controversy was about. The bill struck me as one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie issues that should have unanimous support. Yet, until this year, the measure couldn’t even get a committee hearing. Ten inches into the story, the mystery was solved: “Wilson’s bill had been strongly opposed by the Catholic Church.” It passed this time with the Church’s blessing, only after Wilson amended it so that it would not apply to prior victims. The new law extends the age limit for filing child molestation suits from 25 to 38 only for those going forward. The Church managed to block all of its past victims from filing suit.

Christians will spend this coming week celebrating the resurrection of their savior, the original advocate for restorative justice, a preacher who told his followers to be peacemakers and reconcilers in order to transform brokenness and effect healing. Meanwhile, Catholic leaders are expending political capital to deny victims of its despicable sexual assault debacle access to the only forum that offers even a modicum of healing. Like it did in the beginning, and has ever since, the Roman Catholic Church has been anything but Christ-like when it comes to the thousands of children raped and assaulted by its priests.

That’s not to say that the Church hasn’t paid a price for its sins. According to one estimate, the scandal has cost U.S. Catholics nearly $4 billion. Bankruptcy has been declared in 13 dioceses. Some of the largest losses came in states that lifted, at least temporarily, the statute of limitations on sexual assault suits. That’s why the Church is trying to block further litigation by spending millions of dollars on legislative lobbying in heavily Catholic states like New York and Pennsylvania. From a business standpoint, it is easy to understand the desire to stop the bleeding. Clearly, barricading the courthouse door in order to turn off the spigot of compensatory and punitive damages helps the Church’s bottom line. But for a religious organization in the business of absolution, the strategy is far more Machiavellian than Christian.

Granted, tort law is not a perfect venue for closure. But, thanks to the Church’s earlier choices, it is the only place offering Catholic molestation victims a shot at justice. In the early 1980s, when the tip of the scandalous iceberg was first noticed, a group of priests, led by Dominican Father Thomas Doyle, drafted a manual for dealing with the problem. It called for immediate ministering to the victims, paying for their therapy and counseling, rooting out the offending priests and the bishops who covered for them, all as a way of saying this should never happen again. Their proposal was rejected by the U.S. Conference of Bishops. The Church thought it would be better off taking its chances with the courts and confidential settlement agreements. Billions of dollars later, it learned how foolish that decision was. As Fr. Doyle told the National Catholic Reporter, “The civil law arena has been the only path whereby victims and survivors could pursue justice with hope of success because the courts and the American legal world represent a power that cannot be controlled or compromised by the institutional church.”

Thousands of broken men and women, sexually assaulted by priests during their childhood, have carried their tortuous psychic and emotional wounds into old age. The courts are their only chance of being heard and at least partially healed. That could cost the Church another billion, a heavy cross to bear. Then again, it is worth noting, particularly during Holy Week, bearing a heavy cross is not foreign territory to Christians.