Woman stoned to death for adultery live a life of isolation and formation.
The putative ‘sacred calling’ may have often been difficult to disentangle from juvenile aspiration and collective affirmation, but the level of expectation to persevere through ‘trials’ was matched only by the stigma of failure to achieve the desired goal of ordination.
Then, having been isolated from society for a lifetime of relentless intellectual formation and emotional Every now and then a scandal comes along which grips the public attention and rocks society to its core. Recently we’ve had quite a few of them:
Stephen Lawrence and institutional racism, MP’s expenses, Baby P and the Social Services, clerical paedophilia …So it goes on. The common feature of all these scandals is not only about the behaviour of the individuals involved in them – though these usually get the headlines – but the institutional implications. Here we have the structures which provide the very framework of social stability and order – the police, Parliament, the Social Services, the Church – being exposed as seemingly deeply corrupt. This is disturbing.
In fact, it is so disturbing that denial and the attempt to deflect guilt or responsibility is understandable. Answers are needed and provided: regret that this has happened is announced, lessons have been learnt, individuals punished, procedures have been put in place and it will not happen again. Or so the mantra goes – until the next time! the culprits are mostly older men with a lifetime of wellrespected service in the church … not obvious monsters or criminals Yet the rapidity with which ‘the next time’ comes around indicates the ‘quick fix’ is not so easily applied. This itself is indicative of much deeper, societal problems which by their very prevalence are more intractable. The problems are not just about individuals or groups of individuals or even the institutions in which they work, but the values and culture which embraces all of us.
It’s easy to find a scapegoat – ‘shoot Dreyfus’ or sack Derek Conway – less easy to address the root cause. For scandals tend to mirror the sort of society we are, our patterns of behaviour, our collective failure of responsibility and changes which we may need to make to our lifestyles and values.
Perish the thought, but when was the last time we massaged the works mileage sheet or fiddled a home insurance claim? And in a modern liberal society is not one person’s perversion another’s private right? Is there not, for example, widespread support for the view that parental punishment of children is nothing to do with the abuse of minors? All these issues, and others, are surrounded by large grey areas of blurred the morality. One thing we may agree on – if rather hypocritically – is that we expect better from those in public office than in ordinary life: even our footballers we would prefer to be paragons and virgins!
It is perhaps this disposition which makes the clerical abuse scandals within the Catholic Church so shocking. Not only have we here an institution which is, purportedly, very clear about its values but much given to directing others how they should behave. Its clerical practitioners also have a view of the world which sets them and the religious way of perfection decidedly above their secular contemporaries. In many ways its privileged position stems from its own elevated aspirations and the general sense of responding to a ‘higher’ calling, with which many concur.
Paradoxically, it is the common affirmation of this situation – at least in some societies or communities – that makes the problem harder to address, with the temptation rather to cover it up for fear of causing even greater scandal.
In the case of recent clerical abuse scandals one thing that is noticeable is that the perpetrators or culprits are mostly older men with a lifetime of well-respected service in the church. They are not obvious monsters or criminals. Rather, they are the products of a system and, unpalatable though this may seem, their lives are so closely enmeshed in the institutional church as to epitomise some of its features. I have known many men, who grew up in families where to have a son enter the church and become a priest was the highest aspiration. So much so that a boy would, typically, be singled out and sent to a Junior Seminary to The Abuse of Perfection as an Exercise in Power Dominic Kirkham considers the cover-up of clerical child abuse and other misuses of power in the Church. live a life of isolation and formation.
The putative ‘sacred calling’ may have often been difficult to disentangle from juvenile aspiration and collective affirmation, but the level of expectation to persevere through ‘trials’ was matched only by the stigma of failure to achieve the desired goal of ordination. Then, having been isolated from society for a lifetime of relentless intellectual formation and emotional frustration, these men would be returned to ‘the world’ in positions of unchallengeable authority with the expectation of being exemplary leaders.
When critical voices were raised about such a formation they could easily be dismissed as the siren call of secular subversion. When the German theologian, Dr Eugene Drewermann, suggested not so long ago that the seminary formation seemed guaranteed to stunt emotional growth, producing clones with an infantile dependence on authority, he was of course censored. If at some point along the way of their future careers something cracked, one can hardly be surprised.
And crack it often did! As when Bishop Casey owned up to having a lover and child, or a priest left to get married, these things often seemed to take parishioners by surprise. Research by the American sociologist Richard Sipe revealed just how extensive and numerous were the illicit relationships amongst the clergy. And then there was the more secretive world of guilty abuse, which is only now coming fully to light. But these were always seen as cases of individual failings. For such deviance on the way to perfection the Church had its traditional answer: confession, absolution and try again. So, the priest who would spend his weekly day off with a prostitute could always call in to a presbytery on his way home for a quick confession and then it was back on the road again, like a car after a puncture repair. As one phrase has it, ‘Stuff happens’!
It is not uncommon to hear some ask, ‘If these priests had lost their faith, then why did they not leave the Church?’ Such a question shows a total misunderstanding of the problem. The whole faith picture was one of being in transit to perfection with challenges en route, failures to be overcome. Some may not always succeed, others did. For example, when Angelo Roncalli became the surprise choice for pope, one further surprise was the publication of his personal diary. The Journal of a Soul became an overnight best seller, chronicling with moving devotion how one individual persevered along the path of perfection from the humblest origins to the highest office and threshold of sanctity. Yes it could be done.
But having made it to the top John XXIII realised something more important. That such a system was unsustainable in the modern world.
Fundamental change was needed in a changing world – an approfondimento and an aggiornamento: a reassessment of tradition. Such profound change would be the work of an unprecedented pastoral council of the whole church, Vatican Council II.
Essential to its working would be openness and accountability, collaboration and collegiality, so that issues could be brought to light and openly discussed without fear or recrimination. In other words it called for a radical change from the previous regime of secretiveness and unaccountability. It was likened to a new Pentecost, bursting open closed doors and windows onto the world.
But it failed. Or rather, it was frustrated and prevented from carrying out its promise by a traditionalist reaction, horrified at the possible consequences, in particular, the challenge to the central power and authority of the clerical elite focused on the papacy. The story of the strangulation of reform is of a power struggle filled with subtle cunning and deception. I mention this drama now because it sets the essential context of the present scandals of clerical abuse, which have been characterised by unaccountable evasiveness and the suppression of evidence characteristic of the ancien regime: a missed opportunity for genuine preventative action.
The leader of the authoritarian reaction became John-Paul II and the fact that he was Polish is also of importance. For those who now remember the communist era, one of the bastions of resistance to its ideology was the Polish church. Here was an alternative institution with its own ideology of perfection, total control and unflinching authority.
Its clerical elite could match the communist apparatchiks step for step, but only if they stood in solidarity (the title of the trade union movement was not accidental) behind an unquestioned leader. In this we glimpse the controlling model of the church in the mind of Karol Wojtyla (later John Paul II) which had served so well whilst under siege in Poland. It was a model he would re-export to the Church in the West, now perceived to be under threat from liberalism and secularism. ‘the ontological and moral superiority of celibate males’ A study of the interventions made at the Vatican Council (cf. Jan Grootaers in Vatican II and John Paul II) is revealing. It shows that he did not much like the idea of a pilgrim Church in need of constant reformation, as this implied deficiencies and would undermine the teaching authority of the hierarchy.
Nor did he much like the idea of the Church as ‘the people of God’, as it failed to reflect the Church’s nature as a ‘perfect society’. For him it obscured the vital distinction between clergy and laity based on the ontological and moral superiority of celibate males. In short, renewal was more about repackaging the past rather than the radical overhaul envisaged by his predecessor. This would lead to constant tensions: for example, over the understanding of ministries, of the role of women, of relations with other churches, of acknowledgement of the right to freedom of thought within the church and in relations with secular society. After all, a ‘perfect society’ has little to learn from an inherently defective and sinful world.
In John Paul’s ‘perfectionist model’ of the Church any deficiencies were entirely the result of deviant (‘sinful’) individuals. So, the phase of repenting for past failures of the Church – over antiSemitism, the Inquisition, the Galileo affair, etc. – was not quite what it first appeared to be. There was no failure on the part of the institutional Church – breathtaking as this may seem to be – but only an acknowledgement that certain individuals had been deficient in morals or understanding.
The significance of the scandal of clerical sexual abuse was not just its moral repugnance but that it brought into question the whole status of ‘the perfect society’ and the culture unaccountability and secrecy in which it operated. The scale and spread of this abusive behaviour – only now becoming fully apparent – indicated that this was about more than just deviant individuals. It was expressive of an institutional malaise. Because it was incompatible with the traditionalist principles of perfection, knowledge of it was suppressed rather than confronted. The enforcer of such procedures – as with all the other traditionalist positions – was, of course, Joseph Ratzinger. The whirlwind of outrage he now reaps as pope is not the result of some secular conspiracy but the consequences of his own theological sensibilities and the policies he chose.
There is both an enigma and irony about the papacy of John Paul II. The enigma is that he was convinced that whatever changes needed to be made to the Church could be made within the traditionalist framework whilst following in the footsteps of John XXIII, who was convinced that they couldn’t. The irony is that whilst the Polish Church played such a crucial part in the collapse of Communism Karol Wojtyla’s way of thinking mirrored exactly that of Gorbachev in the old Soviet Union whose fatal illusion was that reform (glasnost was remarkably similar in many ways to aggiornamento) could be promoted through the Communist Party, just as the Polish pope thought the same of the Vatican Curia. Those who gave such uncritical acclaim to that papacy now also bear some responsibility for the consequences.
There is an old saying that every parish priest is pope in his own parish, meaning that the behaviour at the top tends to replicate itself down the line: no one judges the Pope (another medieval saying) and certainly no parishioners question the PP – or at least that’s what they would like! The model of absolute ecclesial power centred on one man, the pope, achieved its apogee under the predecessor of John XXIII, Pope Pius XII. It was this model that Pope John sought to change and which John Paul sought to re-impose. In now seeking to canonise Pius the present pope, Benedict XVI, is none too subtly trying to ensure that henceforth this model will be unassailable.
But there is a consequence. In the challenging and controversial portrait of Pius XII, Hitler’s Pope, the author John Cornwell noted that his story reflected ‘a fatal combination of high spiritual aspirations in conflict with soaring ambition for power and control.’ Cornwell would say that Pius XII, in his desire to protect his position of power and church property in the face of Nazism, was blinded to the plight of the weakness of the Jews.
It is a story reflected in every abusive relationship: the blindness or indifference of power to the consequences of its exercise. This, as Cornwell notes, is as much tragic as monstrous.
Of this equivocation I was reminded some years ago when discussing with a confrere of Fr Brendan Smyth the consequences of his actions.
To many he was the monster whose trail of abuse brought down not only his abbot but the Irish government. I was therefore somewhat taken aback by the statement that, despite all this, ‘in many ways he was a very moral man’. But to all outward appearances he was – just blinded by his failings.
The responsibility of Pius XII for Jewish lives may be controversial. What is not controversial is the larger thesis that dawned upon Cornwell as he studied the events surrounding the pontiff’s life.
This thesis was that, ‘the more elevated the Pontiff, the smaller and less significant the faithful.’ The more authoritative the pope became, the less enfranchised the laity, and even the bishops, became. All power emanated from the centre paralysing action at the peripheries.
This seems to be part of the corrupting nature of power and a commonplace of dictatorships, which in the end causes their self destruction: colossi with feet of clay. At the Reformation this very nearly happened to the Church. Now, in the face of growing evidence of clerical abuse, bishops, congregations of bishops and even cardinals were seen to be paralysed by the overbearing power of the pontiff. It is therefore disingenuous of the promoter of this state of affairs, the current pope, now to seek to blame bishops and local hierarchies for their failure.
Similarly, it is fatuous to pretend that solutions are to be found in the locality by papal visitations and reorganisation, when the problem lies at the administrative power centre, in its values and presuppositions. The lesson to be learnt does indeed seem to be that the more elevated the pontiff, the more corrupted the peripheries. So effective reform has to start at the top.
This has taken us on a long journey from the abusive closet. But it is an integral picture; one that because of its implications many would prefer not to dwell on. It is indeed easier to find scapegoats. But the scandal does in fact provide opportunities for those who are prepared to confront it. The main opportunity it affords is an occasion to look again at the whole structure of the Church and its operation, in the manner that John XXIII envisaged: to go back to the roots of Christianity and see what exactly is essential and ‘Christ Washing Peter’s Feet’ by Ford Maddox Brown what is excrescence.
In particular, one may want to look at the whole ecclesiastical caste system, which has grown up amongst clerics and religious orders. Is this really what Christ had in mind when he stooped to wash the feet of his disciples in service and bade them not to lord it over others and have no one call them Father? Is the exclusion of laity and women from significant roles within the Church truly expressive of a Christianity which teaches there is to be no more distinction between slave or free, male and female, Jew and Gentile, but all are to be one inclusive humanity? Is the notion that celibacy is an adequate or necessary way to manage sexual desire defensible in a world which has long since rejected the untenable medieval dualism of spirit and flesh? And, more to the point, are clerical celibates to be any more impartial in their judgment of such affairs than are MPs over their own expenses?
If the Church has a future representing Christianity it needs, in secular parlance, to get its act together. It could begin by rejecting those traditions which are fossilised in past worlds, reappraising its theological sensibilities, engaging in genuine dialogue with ‘all people of good will’, leading to a collective act of reconciliation and papal foot-washing of the abused. But will it happen? Rather, put it the other way: If it doesn’t the Church will have no credibility and no future.
To dismiss the whole matter as ‘petty gossip’, as Vatican apologists do, may well be ‘a Marie Antoinette moment’ of fatal miscalculation!
Dominic Kirkham is an interested follower of SOF and writes regularly for Renew (Catholics for a Changing Church).
ONLY TOO OFTEN THE VOICE OF THE COMMON MAN IS AIRBRUSHED OUT OF HISTORY Cartoon by Josh Joe Hill Perhaps of interest – there is a CD of Paul Robeson’s controversial concert in Moscow in June 1949, which includes two versions of Joe Hill. I’m not sure of the law of copyright in respect of such recordings.