[The original is here.]
During a frustrating argument with a Roman Catholic cardinal,
Napoleon Bonaparte supposedly burst out: “Your eminence, are you not
aware that I have the power to destroy the Catholic Church?” The
cardinal, the anecdote goes, responded ruefully: “Your majesty, we, the
Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last
1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.”
Two centuries later, the clergy has taken another shot at it. What
the American and Irish churches have endured in the last decade and what
German Catholics find themselves enduring today is all part of the same
grim story: the exposure, years after the fact, of an appalling period
in which the Catholic hierarchy responded to an explosion of priestly
sex abuse with cover-ups, evasions and criminal negligence.
Now the scandal has touched the pope himself. There are two charges
against Benedict XVI: first, that he allowed a pedophile priest to
return to ministry while archbishop of Munich in 1980; and second, that
as head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in
the 1990s, he failed to defrock a Wisconsin priest who had abused deaf
children 30 years before.
The second charge seems unfair. The case was finally forwarded to the
Vatican by the archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert Weakland, more than 20
years after the last allegation of abuse. With the approval of
then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s deputy, the statue of limitations was
waived and a canonical trial ordered. It was only suspended because
the priest was terminally ill; indeed, pretrial proceedings were halted just before he died.
But the first charge is more serious. The Vatican insists that the
crucial decision was made without the future pope’s knowledge, but the
paper trail suggests that he could have been in the loop. At best,
then-Archbishop Ratzinger was negligent. At worst, he enabled further
abuse.
For those of us who admire the pope, either possibility is
distressing, but neither should come as a great surprise. The lesson of
the American experience, now exhaustively documented, is that almost everyone was complicit
in the scandal. From diocese to diocese, the same cover-ups and gross
errors of judgment repeated themselves regardless of who found
themselves in charge. Neither theology nor geography mattered: the worst
offenders were Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston and Cardinal Roger
Mahony of Los Angeles — a conservative and a liberal, on opposite ends
of the country.
This hasn’t prevented both sides in the Catholic culture war from
claiming that the scandal vindicates their respective vision of the
church. Liberal Catholics, echoed by the secular press, insist that the
whole problem can be traced to clerical celibacy. Conservatives blame
the moral relativism that swept the church in the upheavals of the
1970s, when the worst abuses and cover-ups took place.
In reality, the scandal implicates left and right alike. The
permissive sexual culture that prevailed everywhere, seminaries
included, during the silly season of the ’70s deserves a share of the
blame, as does that era’s overemphasis on therapy. (Again and again,
bishops relied on psychiatrists rather than common sense in deciding how
to handle abusive clerics.) But it was the church’s conservative
instincts — the insistence on institutional loyalty, obedience and the
absolute authority of clerics — that allowed the abuse to spread
unpunished.
What’s more, it was a conservative hierarchy’s bunker mentality that
prevented the Vatican from reckoning with the scandal. In a
characteristic moment in 2002, a prominent cardinal told a Spanish
audience that “I am personally convinced that the constant presence in
the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United
States, is a planned campaign ... to discredit the church.”
That cardinal was Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI. Since then,
he’s come to grips with the
crisis in ways that his predecessor did not: after years of drift and
denial under John Paul II, the Vatican has taken vigorous steps to
promote zero tolerance, expedite the dismissal of abusive priests and organize
investigations that should have happened long ago. Because of
Benedict’s recent efforts, and the efforts of clerics and laypeople
dating back to the first wave of revelations in the 1980s, Catholics can
reasonably hope that the crisis of abuse is a thing of the past.
But the crisis of authority endures. There has been some
accountability for the abusers, but not nearly enough for the bishops
who enabled them. And now the shadow of past sins threatens to engulf
this papacy.
Popes do not resign. But a pope can clean house. And a pope can show
contrition, on his own behalf and on behalf of an entire generation of
bishops, for what was done and left undone in one of Catholicism’s
darkest eras.
This is Holy Week, when the first pope, Peter, broke faith with
Christ and wept for shame. There is no better time for repentance.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
My mistake was corrected by MOJ reader David Nickol. Here is the language he sent along with a link to the whole interview:
Stupak said that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had enough votes to pass the health bill without him and the bloc of six or seven votes he brought with him, and that she released some vulnerable Democrats from voting for the bill after he agreed to support it. . . .
Stupak told The Daily Caller that the president’s order does nothing to change the law as it’s written.
“You can’t. It’s the next best thing,” he said.
It was that or nothing, he insisted, saying he knew for a fact that Pelosi released certain House Democrats from voting for the bill after he and his bloc of six or seven votes swung into the yes column.
“A number of them came up and thanked me … said, ‘Thanks for getting us off the hook,’” Stupak said. “I’ve been around here long enough to know that the speaker, Democrats or Republican, always carries a few votes in their pocket.”
“So I had a choice: to come up empty-handed and a bill passes with language that I totally disagree with, or I do the next best thing.” http://dailycaller.com/2010/03/23/stupak-says-catholic-bishops-pro-life-groups-tried-to-use-abortion-to-defeat-health-bill/
According to the article, Pelosi claims that she never lets any Democrats off the hook, but this seems implausible to me. So I think Stupak is telling the truth.
Some may find the following data and perspective, which come from Fr. Raymond de Souza, to be of assistance in discerning the truth in what is being widely reported as we move into Holy Week.
If the federal courts behave as they have in the past (see the very solid USCCB analysis of prior cases), the new healthcare law, despite the slightly pro-life wording of the executive order, will dramatically promote abortion. Funding for elective abortion will be included in healthcare wherever it is not specifically excluded. So pro-life Representative Lipinski (D-IL) was prudent in voting against the bill and in stating: “I do not believe the last-minute effort to address these [pro-life] concerns through an Executive Order is sufficient because there is every indication that federal courts would strike down this order, and the order could be repealed at any time in the future."
But it is also true that the Administration's interpretation of the new law, through Obama’s EO, could positively affect the federal courts (especially the five justices on the Supreme Court who are more open-minded on abortion); those justices might ultimately say the EO provides a reasonable way to understand the law. Abortion will then (to some degree, though not perfectly) be excluded from healthcare funding where it is not specifically included. So Stupak was prudent in voting for the bill if that was the only way to get an ameliorative EO onto a bill that would have passed anyway.
But, it will be said, “By counting votes we can see that the Senate bill clearly could not have passed in the House without the help of Stupak and his group. So he could have altogether stopped an expansion of abortion funding, but settled (at best) for just limiting that expansion.”
Such a criticism may, however, be misguided. According to information I believe trustworthy, Pelosi had told Stupak that she had the votes to pass the Senate bill without any pro-life support, but she would have had to lean on a number of new Democratic House members from very conservative districts where voting for the healthcare bill would have greatly threatened their reelection in November. That is, the leverage Stupak had was not "If I and my group don't vote for this, it's dead." His leverage may well have been only "If I and my group don't vote for this, you'll have to call in votes from marginal districts and thus make it harder for the Democrats to keep their majority in the next election." In the latter context, getting a moderately pro-life spin on the bill via the EO was an achievement. It was arguably a deal worth making.
If I am right about the politics, then Stupak et al. voting against the bill (though perhaps making them look heroic, like General Custer) would have accomplished nothing legally and would have made pro-life Democrats look irrelevant rather than (as they do now) a group with some clout, one that must be dealt with.
But Stupak cannot come out and give this defense of himself in public, I think, because it would undercut the voter support for those marginal Democrats that Pelosi wanted to secure by her deal with his group, and would thus make her less likely to strike a deal with him again. Thus, perhaps, the poor guy has to put up with being accused again and again of having brought a federal abortion funding mandate to America when he knows that’s not true.
A few recent posts struck me as having arrived at a felicitous moment. The first pair were Rick Garnett's posts on the fifth anniversary of John Paul II's death and on Catholic moral anthropology. A third was Patrick Brennan's post on understanding. They were particularly timely for me, having just returned from giving a short talk to a group of economists on the topic of John Paul II's moral anthropology.
A critical dimension of John Paul II's thought on the human person is related to the impossibility of comprehending the person. I mean that he believed that because the human person bears the image of God (imagio Dei), the person is incomprehensible as God is incomprehensible. This is a consequence of the Majesty of God and the noetic effects of sin. This is not to say that either God or the person is unknowable. God is absolute in being open to the human person. But, John Paul II's thought does not equate comprehension and knowledge. He sees persons as unfathomable in human knowing. It is not that the person is unknowable, indeed we can and do know others. It is as if we can always dive deeper and deeper into knowledge of the person, and yet never "touch bottom." And for that reason, we can never master intellectual control over human nature. And he affirmed that the mystery of the person is essential to our personal experience to being human. In Fides et Ratio, he taught that:
Man is seized with the awe to see that he
has been placed in the universe, in fellowship with others like himself with
whom he also shares a common lot. This is the beginning of the journey which
will lead him to discover new realms of knowledge. Without this sense of
wondering amazement, man would subside into deadening routine and would bit by
bit lose the power of leading a proper personal life. (Section 4)
For John Paul II, the human person is a mystery to himself, and that mystery is tied fundamentally to human dignity. This dimension of the mystery of the person is deeply tied to Christian Neo-Platonism and the mystical tradition of figures like St. John of the Cross--the subject of John Paul II's doctoral dissertation written as Karol Wojtyla.
A deep difficulty with much of modern thought is that it seeks to avoid the mystery of the person by reducing the person to a conceptualization over which one can achieve intellectual control and dominion. In doing this, it creates an idolatrous image of God within the human person. Kenneth Schmitz has called this the "secularization of the interior." For John Paul II, this secularization has to do with the exclusive preference for mental objects (intentionality) in modern epistemology and philosophy of mind, which seems to preclude knowledge of unfathomable truth. (He differs from Lonergan on this point).
John Paul II's critique of modernity seems particularly applicable to Analytic philosophy, which underwrites much of contemporary Anglo/American jurisprudence. And post-modernists fair no better. For them, the Other is absolutely unknowable, not unfathomable. By denying the possibility of knowledge of the Other, post-modernity replays the modern reduction of knowledge to conceptual control and then denies its possibility. And therefore, post-modernity is only hyper-modernity--modernity turning its critique back on itself.
For John Paul II, the truth about the person is approached indirectly, through the analysis of the lived experience of moral action. While he did not deny any aspect of the Thomistic metaphysical account of the person, he believed that it was incomplete (as any account is) and in need of a personalist account of the subjective experience of acting with moral purpose. This was the starting point of his moral philosophy. And, his analysis of such experience informs us that human beings know one another most perfectly in shared acts of charity and love--acts in which the mystery of the Other can be honored and venerated.
He warned us that a proper understanding of the person is essential for avoiding the totalitarianism that he experienced in his youth. The political and economic systems of Fascism and Soviet communism that he endured were out-workings of misunderstandings of the person. Assuming away the mystery of the person is perhaps the ultimate modern fantasy. It renders God and humans as beings among beings, and thereby undermines the Majesty of God and the Dignity of the human person.
It seems quite likely that over the next thirty years or so, Catholic conceptions of the dignity of the person will confront new, in some ways unprecedented, challenges brought about by the economic decline of Europe and the US, the cultural consequences of globalization, and emergence of new technologies that will radically question what it means to be human. John Paul II speaks to us today by cautioning that in confronting these challenges Catholics must adhere to the mission of seeking to know the truth.
Let me close by encouraging you to read, this Holy Week the "Ode for the 80th Birthday of Pope John Paul II" by Czeslaw Milosz. I quote the last stanza:
You are with us and will be with us henceforth.
When the forces of chaos raise their voice
And the owners of truth lock themselves in churches
And only the doubters remain faithful,
Your portrait in our homes every day remind us
How much one man can accomplish and how sainthood works.
I have turned on the comments.
