Viewpoint
Sacred rage and rebuilding the church
By KEVIN CULLIGAN
One evening last June, I was
searching the TV channels for the NBA championship playoff game between the Los
Angeles Lakers and the New Jersey Nets when I stumbled across “Catholic
Church in Crisis,” a 60 Minutes II special on CBS. It was a Wednesday
evening, the night before the U.S. Catholic bishops met in Dallas to vote on a
proposed national policy to protect children and young people from sexual abuse
by clergy and church personnel.
I watched for several moments as Ed Bradley interviewed persons
associated with the church’s recent pedophilia scandal. Pretty soon I had
forgotten about the Lakers and Nets. Here was a documented report on the worst
tragedy in American church history. I sat back to watch.
In utter disbelief, I saw a 29-year-old woman tell Bradley how a
priest raped her in her bedroom following her first Communion. I observed years
of emotional turmoil in the eyes of a young man who, as an 8-year-old altar boy
in the early 1980s, had been sexually violated repeatedly by his parish priest.
I could not believe my eyes as news clips showed the official church arrogantly
dismissing the desperate pleas for help from parents whose young sons and
daughters had been sexually molested by priests. “Those bastards!” I
shouted at the TV at the end of the hourlong program. “Look what they have
done to the church!”
My anger startled me. Never had I called bishops or fellow priests
that before. The last time I can remember being so angry was 50 years ago when
I was a teenager. Since then I have been uncomfortable with anger. I’ve
been afraid if I let my anger out I would lose control of myself as I did one
night during halftime at a high school basketball game when I nearly put my
fist through the locker-room door. I might kill someone. I might do or say
something I would later regret or have held against me. I might become
irrational and lose my train of thought and look foolish in the eyes of others.
But that night last June was different. My rage felt pure and holy, like a
welcome gift from God.
I deliberately fed my anger by slowly imagining the horrid details
of a trusted young priest violating an innocent child in her own bedroom. I
pictured the blasphemy of his whispering in her ears as he abused her that she
is pleasing God and will go to hell if she ever tells anyone. I felt her pain
and terror as she prayed desperately for her parents to come into the room and
stop him. I let my disgust seethe as I imagined the hypocrisy of a bishop,
sitting securely in his wood-paneled office, a golden chain hanging vertically
across his black vest with the attached image of Jesus crucified hidden in an
inside pocket, listening to lawyers advise him on how to protect the financial
assets of his diocese. In my blood I could feel the heat of God’s wrath at
Israel’s ancient leaders when they betrayed the people they were anointed
to serve.
I remembered Jesus driving the animal merchants and moneychangers
from the temple in Jerusalem. He had gone to the temple to worship his Father
at Passover. He undoubtedly expected to exchange secular money for temple coins
to purchase an animal to sacrifice in worship. But when he discovered that the
religious leaders had allowed the moneychangers and animal merchants to make a
marketplace of the temple area, he became violent. Jesus quickly made a crude
whip from flax and lashed out at the offenders. He drove them and the animals
from the temple area. He overturned the moneychangers’ tables, scattering
coins across the floor. Luke 19:46 says he screamed at them: “My house
shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves!” The
disciples were astounded at his zeal for the temple. I pictured Jesus similarly
reprimanding the American bishops in Dallas: “My house of prayer! You have
let it become a den of sexual predators!”
Cleansing the temple was not the first time Jesus’ emotions
moved him to act for others. Earlier, in Galilee, he observed the people
abandoned in their spiritual needs by the religious leaders, like sheep without
a shepherd. His compassion for them moved him to teach them about the Father
and to proclaim God’s enduring love for them. At other times, seeing a
leper or a mother grieving for her dead son moved him to heal illness and to
restore life. One day, in a deserted place where he was teaching, he realized
his listeners were hungry. The sight moved him to feed more than 4,000
people.
God’s words through the prophet Ezekiel likely stirred
Jesus’ emotions. “Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of
Israel. … Woe to the shepherds of Israel who have been pasturing
themselves! Should not shepherds, rather, pasture sheep? You have fed off their
milk, worn their wool and slaughtered the fatlings, but the sheep you have not
pastured. You did not strengthen the weak nor heal the sick nor bind up the
injured. You did not bring back the strayed nor seek the lost, but you lorded
it over them harshly and brutally”(Ezekiel 34:1-4). Now, seeing what the
neglect of the religious leaders had done to the holy temple where the people
came to offer sacrifice to God, Jesus’ anger moved him to begin restoring
God’s house.
Anger in Christ’s body
The anger that moved Jesus to protest the failures of the
religious leaders to maintain a true house of worship for God’s people
continues to move Jesus’ risen body today. You can feel the divine outrage
in public demonstrations, talk shows, letters to the editor in newspapers --
wherever American Roman Catholics protest the sinful and criminal behavior of
bishops and priests who have served their own needs to the harm of their
people.
This anger in Christ’s body has finally shaken bishops out of
their indifference to the suffering that clerical sexual abuse of the young has
caused their flock. It led them to approve a policy in Dallas intended, in the
words of Bishop Wilton Gregory of Belleville, Ill., current president of the
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, “to end the scourge of sexual abuse
within the Catholic church in America.” This anger will now be necessary
to move the whole body of Christ -- bishops and priests, laity and religious --
to rebuild God’s house in the United States, so badly damaged by the
neglect of the clerical system.
There is much work to do. In fact, as Gregory candidly reminded
the national media at the Dallas meeting, much has been done since 1985 when
NCR published Jason Berry’s investigative reporting on the alarming
extent of clerical sexual abuse in the United States. Some dioceses have
already enacted and enforced sexual abuse policies for clergy and church
personnel. The understanding and treatment of pedophilia have grown within
church. Seminaries have tightened their screening procedures and promoted
programs for healthy sexual development. But many other issues remain to be
faced.
The national policy passed in Dallas must be continually refined
until it reassures parents that their children are safe in Catholic
institutions and guarantees due process and the possibility of forgiveness,
reconciliation and restoration to church ministry for those accused of sexual
misconduct. Bishops, too, must be held accountable for their actions that have
protected criminal behavior in their dioceses.
We must honestly reevaluate mandatory celibacy as a requirement
for priestly ordination in the Roman rite. Has it indeed fostered a pedophile
subculture in the American Catholic priesthood? Does it really ensure the best
pastoral care of God’s people?
We have to look openly at homosexuality in the priesthood. We must
recognize and affirm celibate homosexual bishops and priests and their faithful
and effective ministry in the church; at the same time, we must examine to what
extent the gay subculture in the American Catholic priesthood contributed to
the present pedophilia crisis.
We must continue to remove the abuses of clericalism -- privilege,
exemption, secrecy, a cushy lifestyle, the exclusion of women -- so that the
person of Jesus might be more visible in the everyday lives of bishops and
priests. And we all, but especially bishops and priests, must rededicate
ourselves to answering Jesus’ call to holiness by living daily in union
with his life, passion, death and resurrection.
Energy for church reform
Will our anger give us the strength necessary to tackle these and
other complex and interrelated issues arising from the pedophilia crisis as we
rebuild the church in this country? It will if we have the courage to imagine a
different kind of church.
If our imagination enables us to realize the horror of the
blasphemous and hypocritical behavior of some priests and bishops, so it can
also point us in the direction of needed church reform. For example, we have
been conditioned for centuries to see the Roman Catholic presbyterate only as
male, celibate and clerical, with mandatory celibacy as the essential entrance
requirement. But imagine a Roman Catholic priesthood that is open to all
God’s people -- men and women, single and married, gay and straight --
whose conditions for entry are a chaste Christian life, a spirituality centered
in Jesus’ paschal mystery, and an established competency for serving
God’s people in teaching, preaching, healing and worship. Would this
presbyterate be immune from sin and crime? No. Would it provide new
possibilities for a church more responsive to people’s deepest needs? I
think so.
Our emotions are another source of energy for church renewal.
Unfortunately, many current spiritualities regard strong emotion -- fear, joy,
anger, sadness, hope, pity -- as obstacles to spiritual growth. Jesus
exemplifies the opposite. His emotions moved him to fulfill his vocation as
Yahweh’s faithful servant to an abandoned and neglected people --
teaching, preaching, healing, exorcising, building community, celebrating life,
even purifying the temple. Our emotions, too -- our rage as well as our
compassion -- are sacred. They are God’s gifts that enable us, the risen
body of Jesus, to continue his work on earth, especially rebuilding his
church.
Kevin Culligan is a Discalced Carmelite friar who writes from
the Edith Stein House of Studies in Chicago. A priest and licensed
psychologist, he was formerly both formation director and provincial for his
religious community. Currently he coordinates ministry planning for the
order’s Immaculate Heart of Mary Province.
National Catholic Reporter, September 13,
2002
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