THE CHURCH ADRIFT / THE NEW YORK TIMES OP EDITORIAL ( RECOMMENDED READING )

April 14, 2010

I.H.T. Op-Ed Contributor

The Church Adrift

By PAUL KENNEDY

On Good Friday 1613, the English poet John Donne (then dean of St. Paul’s, London, but probably still a Catholic) was dispatched to the west of England on an official mission. As he rode toward the setting sun, he realized with dismay that he was riding with his back to Jerusalem, farther away from the place of the crucifixion and death of Christ. In remorse, he penned one of his most beautiful, famous and difficult poems: “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward.”

On the afternoon of Good Friday 2010, I attended the solemn 3 p.m. service at the Catholic chaplaincy of Cambridge University, and then walked westward, to a little cottage on the city’s fringes. And my mind was deeply troubled by an apprehension that today’s Catholic leadership is somehow also going in the wrong direction, is adrift, and appears completely unable to handle the international crisis of the many charges of sexual abuse made against an earlier generation of priests and of their superiors.

The church, my loyal pew-mates will assure me, will survive this crisis as it has survived many greater ones over the past two thousand years, and I suppose they are right. But does it have to “survive” so ineptly? I think not.

To my mind, the present crisis needs a much more decisive proclamation about where the Church stands on this very troubling issue. This should not be a proclamation to the bloodhounds of the media. It should not hold a press conference. It should not make stupid comparisons with anti-Semitism. All that will disappoint Catholics waiting for a better reply.

Of what should that proclamation consist? It surely doesn’t need a rocket scientist to figure out a logic chain. The pronunciation might consist of four interconnected parts.

The first is the strongest possible affirmation of the doctrine of the sheer evil of the abuse of power and trust, especially the abusing of the defenseless and the young. On this Christ himself seems to have been the most adamant. He could forgive the woman taken in adultery. He could forgive Mary Magdalene for her prostitution. He could forgive the thief on the cross. Indeed he seems to have forgiven all sorts of folks.

But not those who abused the young. The translation in King James Bible (Luke, Chapter 17) seems as good as any. It will be “impossible” for members of the Church, being human, to avoid future offences, he told his disciples. “But woe unto him through whom they come! It were better for him that a millstone were hanged around his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.”

This seems to me a much more serious matter than many of those that the Church pays excess attention to.

The second is to remind all clergy that sexual abuse is not only a mortal sin but also a major transgression of criminal law. The perpetrator is liable for trial and punishment by the secular courts of any civilized society.

If a member of the clergy steals or cheats — or whatever else is forbidden in civil law — then that person should go to trial. There should be no dodgy transfers to offices outside the diocese.

The third is to articulate a sensible and just way of dealing with the superiors of the abusers. This is easier said than done, and it is probably worthwhile to make several distinctions.

If a Church superior really knew (or had the heaviest suspicions) that a member of his clergy had been abusive but sought to cover it up, then that superior is complicit both in the moral/religious and in the civil-law sense. What the civil system will do is up to the civil system itself. But the superior himself should certainly be moved on: There is many a Benedictine abbey with a spare cell for those who wish to reflect on the problems of good and evil, and many a foreign mission or medical station that could take a “worker priest,” stripped of hierarchical privileges, and now devoted to following the path of St. Vincent de Paul or Mother Teresa.

The fourth and final point tilts in a different direction. It would be a firm reminder that anyone who falsely and knowingly accuses an innocent clergyman of abuse some 20 or 40 years ago not only commits a dire mortal sin but also breaks the law. Bearing false witness is both a sin and a criminal offense.

This seems worth saying since one gets the impression that some bishops, in frantically responding to their earlier neglect, are reversing the old Anglo-Saxon legal principle that a person is innocent until proven guilty, and hastily suspending priests once an accusation has been filed.

In some cases the truth may never emerge; it will be a frustrating “he said this, but he said that” situation. And someone will have perjured himself. If you still believe in life after death, that perjury will take some explaining to St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. Nonetheless, it seems to me that reminding all present and former members of the Church that making false accusation is a heinous offence could be a reasonable part to the proposed Proclamation.

Looking back, I guess I was lucky. I was a Catholic altar boy from the ages of 7 to 21, often working early mornings and late at night with priests, canons, monsignors; nothing happened. I was in a Catholic boy-scout troop, with Catholic scoutmasters; nothing happened. I attended a superb all-boys Catholic high school from the age of 11 to 18, and we went out with our Catholic teachers to camps, marches, youth hostels; still, nothing happened. I have rarely missed Sunday Mass over the past 60 years.

The best thing that happened in those abuse-free places — apart from massive, massive learning of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Wordsworth, Browning, Hardy, Orwell and P.G. Wodehouse — was to be taught how to think in a clearheaded manner and to write intelligible paragraphs. One gets the sense that Holy Mother Church is not only mishandling the sexual-abuse scandal in a way that would have astonished the great Vatican diplomatic service of the past, but that it has no idea of how to explain itself; how to understand why people outside and inside the Church are so angry and disturbed.

The Church’s destiny has variously been described as akin to a person on a lengthy pilgrimage, or a caravan wending its way across the desert. If those are apt analogies, then it seems to me that the pilgrim has become lost in a forest, or the camel train has encountered a sandstorm. It is time to face the matter with grace and intelligence, and leave the belated breast-beatings and obfuscations behind. And read a few more of John Donne’s poems, both the sacred and the profane, to get a better sense of our round earth and humankind’s curious place upon it.

Paul Kennedy is a professor of history and director of International Security Studies at Yale University and author of “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.”


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