Joelle Casteix on the Beatification of John Paul and the Better Path to Sainthood

As I've repeatedly said on this blog, I think that Australian bishop Geoffrey Robinson is absolutely correct when he says that, if the Catholic church is to have a future and is to find healing for the ills from which it currently appears to be sick unto death, the path to healing lies in the witness provided by survivors of childhood abuse by clerics.  The attempt to suppress or ridicule the voice of survivors of abuse, which appears to be gaining strength in some quarters of the Catholic church now, is not only deeply unChristian.  It's also tragically short-sighted, since the knowledge that survivors bring to the Catholic community at large is essential for the entire church, if it wants to negotiate its present crises.

And in that light, I want to recommend--very highly--Joelle Casteix's posting two days ago at her The Worthy Adversary blog.  It's entitled "The Better Path to Sainthood," and is a reflection on the beatification of John Paul II.  An excerpt:

Exposing the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church is not about politics, nor is an assault on religion or faith.  It is about the institutional cover-up of abuse, abusers and evidence. The transparency and accountability we demand are components of morals, ethics and justice.  It is about the safety of children and the healing of the most vulnerable and fragile among us.  It is about adhering to the law.

Charity and good works mean nothing when we are forced to pay for them with the lives of our children. Since the citizenry of the United States demands accountability from every other aspect of our society, it is now time to demand it from Catholic Church officials.  The American people don’t wax poetic about the career of Richard Nixon and ignore Watergate.  And we can’t do the same thing here.

Joelle argues that if the Catholic church wants to find some path to sainthood better than the one to which the legacy of Bl. John Paul II points, it needs to put the needs of vulnerable children and of survivors of childhood abuse by Catholic authority figures ahead of the reputation, coffers, secrets, and power games of the institution.  

And she's right.

Historian William Johnston on John Paul's Leadership Style: "Blind Spot" and "Acts of Personal Cruelty"

At several Catholic blog sites, Carolyn Disco has very helpfully linked in the past several days to a 6 April 2005 Australian National Radio "Religion Report" program, in which program host Stephen Crittenden discusses the legacy of John Paul II with British historian and Vaticanologist Peter Hebblethwaite and Melbourne professor of history William Johnston.  I would acknowledge the precise blog site or sites at which Carolyn has provided this link, but for the life of me, I can't track them down--though I did read and save the transcript of the Religion Report program to which Carolyn's helpful link pointed.  And I do remember that a comment posted by Carolyn Disco to some discussion(s) I was following contained this link.

And here's the segment of the program that will not leave my thoughts, now that I've read it: 

Stephen Crittenden: You say that there’s actually a disconnect between the Pope’s collective achievement and what you call a blind spot that this Pope had at a personal level, and you talk about acts of personal cruelty.

William Johnston: Well I call it a blind spot; I think that’s a kind way, it may have been deliberate. The example I was told from an eye witness when the American bishops had one of their joint visits to the Pope in the early ‘90s, he greeted each of them individually as they stood in a circle.

Stephen Crittenden: By name?

William Johnston: By name, he knew their names, their diocese and something about them. He went around the circle and charmed all of them. There was one man he wished to punish and each of the three times he came to that man, he was overheard to lean into him and say, ‘And what’s your name? What’s your diocese?’ He did that three times. Now that kind of humiliation among one’s peers smacks of Soviet governmental technique, and I think it was obviously deliberate, it’s cruel, it’s even vindictive and it’s now coming to light.

I find  John Paul's behavior as described here extremely troubling, given his role as a religious leader who claims to stand in persona Christi for the entire Catholic church.  And I have no reason to doubt that Johnston is speaking the truth here--or that he did receive this information from an eyewitness. 

I have no reason to doubt either Johnston's word or the word of his source, because John Paul's behavior in this story is consistent with his papal behavior in many other respects--including this eyewitness account from Dublin in 1979 by Irish writer Colm Tóibín, about which I posted some weeks back.  The coldness, the cruelty, the authoritarian bullying: these always seemed apparent to me from early in John Paul's papacy, and because I sensed--I saw--this side of him from very early after he was made pope, I have always been perplexed at the adulation so many of his followers continue to heap on him.  I cannot begin to imagine John XXIII or John Paul I or even Paul VI engaging in this kind of behavior.

I'm also not surprised to read this deeply troubling account, when I look at the cruelty of which many John Paul II generation Catholics appear to be capable, as they positively exult in the expulsion of yet another theologian and yet another dissident from the Catholic family.  I have great difficulty understanding how anyone reconciles expelling family members from a family and treating them as if they are dead with the most fundamental tenets of Catholicism.

Which is all about communitarian inclusion, about the fact that I cannot be myself if you are not at the table.  That I positively need you in order to complete myself.  And your walking away from the table due to my indifference or my cruelty actively implicates me.  It makes null and void all that I say about unique Catholic ownership of "the" truth and about how the Catholic celebration of the Eucharist is more real and valid than any non-Catholic eucharistic celebration.

And for all these reasons, I continue to shake my head at the choice of the current pope to move his predecessor so precipitously to the honors of the altar.  And I continue to wonder what this portends for the future of the church under Benedict's leadership.

Not much good, in my view: it portends not much good at all.  Unless one relishes the incorporation into Catholicism of those Soviet-style interrogation techniques to break the spirit of brother and sister Catholics one has decided to view as enemies to be expelled from the family's table.

Joan Chittister on Expulsion from Family and Minority Wisdom: Critical Questions for the John Paul II Era of Catholic Apologetics

When I posted yesterday about the recent NCR editorial re: the story of Bishop Morris in Australia, I had planned to post a follow-up about Joan Chittister's latest NCR essay, "Expulsions from Religious Orders, Family, and Minority Wisdom."  I thought of posting a comment about Chittister's piece because it's, to my mind, a perfect counterpoint to the discussion of what Benedict is doing to Bishop Morris, and of the inexorable, draconian logic of patriarchal hierarchy that underlies the pope's actions in this case.

And then I thought better of saying the same thing twice--and at length--in two postings in one day.  So I've decided to say the same thing twice in two postings on subsequent days.  Today, I want to pay attention to John Chittister's alternative logic, alternative vision for how the church might be structured and how its leaders might behave, as she articulates these in her latest NCR essay.  Alternative to how the men in charge in Rome now want to do things, that is . . . .

Chittister is commenting on the punishment Benedict is dealing out to Fr. Roy Bourgeois for his defense of women's ordination.  Bourgeois' dissent is not in question.  Nor is the right of the institution's leaders to punish him for dissent in question.  As Chittister points out, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Dietrich Bonhöffer, Franz Jägerstätter, Edith Stein, Dorothy Day: all contravened the prevailing cultural or religious mores of their time and place, and all paid a price.  All challenged institutions and laws governing the societies in which they lived, and all were subject to reprisal by the lawmakers of those societies.

The fact that institutions like the Vatican punish, and have the right to punish, is undeniable in the case of Fr. Bourgeois.  What's up for discussion, however, Chittister notes, is how Pope Benedict is choosing to punish Fr. Bourgeois for supporting women's ordination.  He is choosing not merely to remove his liturgical faculties or limit his priestly functions.  

He's choosing, instead, to decree that Bourgeois's religious community, Maryknoll--his family of the past 40 years--expel him.  Repudiate him.  Treat him as a non-person.  Take away his pension, access to financial support, and the entire network of sustenance that any good family provides any family member.

As I observed yesterday, according to the inexorable, draconian patriarchal logic that governs the hierarchical system of Roman Catholicism, the penalty for refusing to give unquestioning obedience to any and all orders that come down the chain of command from the top is precisely such expulsion: 

In an absolutist hierarchy whose central virtue is unquestioning obedience, no one in the chain of command dares to make decisions independent of the man above him.  He does not dare to give even the suggestion of asking questions or disobeying, because the reprisal is too great.  It is immediate expulsion from the hierarchical system itself.

The kind of punishment being dished out now to Fr. Bourgeois by Pope Benedict is entirely consistent with the logic of the system of governance on whose maintenance Benedict is banking the future of the church.  In fact, a patriarchal hierarchical system of governance grounded in belief that the man on top has every right in the world to issue orders and demand that they be obeyed with implicit and unthinking obedience: this kind of system has no choice except to expel a dissenter from its ranks.

To treat him or her as a non-person.  As someone who no longer exists for the family.  Someone who is dead to the family.

Whereas (and, again, I noted this in what I wrote yesterday), this kind of system does not regard the infractions of those who contravene many other kinds of moral norms with anywhere near the same severity with which it regards the failure to obey.  One can contravene other central moral norms of the institution--even norms forbidding the adult sexual molestation of children--and still find a home within the institution, provided one remains obedient.  Obedient to the man on top, that is.

One can still be a family member if one abuses children or protects the abusers of children, if one remains obedient to the all-powerful father figure who issues the commands from the top of the hierarchical structure.  And so Chittister points out that though Fr. Bourgeois is being savagely expelled from the family in which he has lived and to which he has contributed for 40 years, because he supports the call of women to be ordained,

After all, the Vatican did not expel pedophile priests or abusing bishops from the secular priesthood for violating children. In some cases, in fact, they protected the perpetrators repeatedly and even refused to defrock them -- civil law or no civil law. And are, apparently, doing it even now. Only behavior related to women’s issues, it seems, qualifies for expulsion.

And for many Catholics and many morally sensitive observers of things Catholic, this is where the severe cognitive dissonance I noted yesterday enters the picture.  By the choices Benedict is making as pope, by his behavior and the priorities for our church to which his behavior points, by the insistence on beatifying John Paul II post-haste: we're being asked to believe that a Catholic leader who has sexually molested a minor or protected a priest who has molested a minor is a better moral exemplar than one who has dared to call for open discussion of the question of women's ordination.

We're being asked by our current religious leader to rank a Cardinal Law or Rigali or an Archbishop Chaput or a John Paul II as higher on the moral scale, more significant in the moral scheme of things, than a Fr. Roy Bourgois.  Or a Sr. Elizabeth Johnson.  Or a Bishop William Morris.

And to many of us, something seems radically awry in the moral calibration on which this picture depends.  Something seems very wrong with this picture--and with the institutional logic (driven by patriarchial presuppositions rather than gospel mandates) that paints this picture for us.

As Joan Chittister points out, there are other ways to see things, and other ways to do things, than how Rome now sees and does things.  She points to the Talmudic tradition, in which minority wisdom (i.e., the viewpoints of dissenters) is carefully recorded and preserved.  Preserved because, in the course of historical development, it often happens that the viewpoint of the embattled dissenter turns out to be the one viewpoint that an institution or society sorely needed to preserve its humanity, at a particular point in history.  It turns out that Franz Jägerstätter was right about the meaning of the Nazi period and the Catholic pastoral officials, the successors of the apostles, who urged him to deny his conscience and obey the command of the Fatherland to give Nazi military service were wrong in the moral scheme of things.

Chittister's argument here (and the moral example of Bl. Jägerstätter and countless other similar examples over the course of history) implicitly counter the prevailing logic of those now promoting and defending the restorationist purge mounted by this pope and the previous one in the Catholic church.  I have hesitated to write much about this prevailing logic (which is an apologetic for the patriarchal logic sustaining the hierachical system of Catholicism as it is now arranged) because this logic is, frankly, crude.  It's not worth a great deal of intellectual effort.  It is not intellectually compelling, for anyone with a beyond-parochial knowledge base or outlook on the world.

And yet it is powerfully represented in the contemporary Catholic church and many of its most ardent defenders, particularly among Catholic youth who identify as John Paul II youth, and who have been schooled (and very badly so) in the John Paul II era of catechesis.  This logic goes something like this: we would not have gotten to the point we have reached in the development of Catholic truth, if what we now have is not correct.  If it's not true.  If it doesn't represent God's will for the Catholic church.

Truth wins, after all.  We have  won in history, and those minority positions and the dissenters who have defended them have lost, because our truth is the truth.  And theirs is error.  And not only does their minority error deserve altogether to be expunged from the record, but they themselves, the dissenters, deserve to be expelled from the Catholic family.  Forgotten.  Treated as dead.

To question any facet of what we now have is to question an entire system on which the Catholic church's claim to represent Christ in the world stands.  We cannot and will not change 2,000 years of Catholic truth merely because tired old liberals of the 1960s and the Vatican II era want to dismantle our system of divinely ordained truth.  The longer this truth has played out in our church and in the world, the more certain we are that it is God's truth at work through the Catholic church in the world.  The very fact that it is old--2,000 years old, we maintain--points to its legitimacy as divine truth.

There's so much wrong with this set of crude presuppositions, with this crude apologetic of the John Paul II generation in the Catholic church, that I hardly know where to begin to discuss what's wrong.  Or how to begin countering claims and presuppositions so laughably devoid of any historical basis or elementary logic that they hardly merit intellectual effort.

If one did want to stoop to an intellectual response to such a non-intellectual grab bag of ill-conceived notions about the Catholic church, what it teaches, what it has done over the course of history, here are some of the obvious points I think one might make in response to the prevailing logic of the new generation of apologists for Catholic truth, with their crude, defiant insistence that their truth has won and is validated as the truth simply because it has stamped out dissenting opinions (along with one brother and sister Catholic after another, ho happens to hold those opinions):

Those 2,000 year-old "truths" being defended by the John Paul II generation of apologists are not by any means what the church has held and taught forever.  The primary way in which those "truths" reach the current generation of younger Catholic is through the catechism.

Jesus would not recognize the catechism.  He would be mystified by what he would read in the catechism--by its enumeration of "truths" he supposedly delivered to the church as the deposit of faith to be safeguarded by the successors of the apostles generation after generation in the church.  The catechism would make no sense to him, as a devout Jew.  The notion of truth on which it depends--the notion that divine truth can be bundled up into little syllogistic package-statements and delivered as a "deposit" to be parroted and ardently defended by generation upon generation of faithful Catholics: that notion is worlds removed from the Jewish notion of religious truth with which Jesus's thinking was imbued.

The idea that someone walking into any Catholic church in the world today, and participating in its liturgical worship, is somehow doing and acting as followers of Jesus did and acted in the New Testament period is laughable.  The notion that any liturgical forms or ecclesial gewgaws venerated by Catholics today faithfully replicate the practice of New Testament Christians, who met in house churches for eucharistic celebrations that occurred in the context of meals, is so historically naive as to be absurd.

The belief that what the church says in its current catechism is what it has always taught, for 2,000 years, and that church teaching has not changed (over and over and over again) is equally absurd for anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of history.  What the church has taught and how those teachings have been formulated over the course of 2,000 years of complex history have changed repeatedly.  Change is, in fact, one of the most elementary truths of the church from its foundational period, from the time in which Paul corrected Peter when Peter argued that the community could not change, could not discard the Jewish mold in which the church was born, in its interaction with Gentile culture.

The church is commanded to change and has been commanded to change from its very inception, since it is commanded to go into all cultures and proclaim the gospel to every culture in the world.  That mission makes no sense if the church cannot constantly reframe how it sees and does things, in ever-shifting cultural contexts.

The belief that "the bishops may be bastards, but they're our bastards"; that the church is incapable of cruelty and had no role in the Inquisition or in promoting holy wars, etc.; that priests, bishops, and religious cannot be and have not been capable of extreme cruelty at many points in history; that the church clings to solid, unchanging truth while the state is constantly knocking about to find truth and is the real source of error and cruelty in the world: all these childish beliefs make sense only if Catholics choose to ignore reams and reams of easily accessed historical information available to any half-educated person with a desire to learn today.

Younger Catholics, Catholics miseducated in the John Paul II era of Catholic truth, pay a higher and higher intellectual and moral price for their refusal to engage the obvious and intellectually compelling critical arguments of many of their co-religionists and the culture at large today.  That price is the price of negotiating the cognitive dissonance created by, say, the expulsion of Fr. Bourgeois from a religious community for supporting women's ordination, while Cardinal Law, who protected one serial pedophile after another, lives in "spendorous surroundings" in Rome, in the following way: Catholic truth is the truth, and the bishops are our bishops.  And so any other truth that competes with the official narrative of the church must ipso facto not be truth at all, or must be tarnished truth.  Tarnished like what passes for truth in non-Catholic religious traditions that have departed from the successors of the apostles and have lost access to the deposit of faith in which real and complete truth is locked up.

And so we John Paul II apologists have to cut and paste, clip and patch, in order to ignore the many plain truths coming our way every day from the media, the internet, the world around us, the classroom--anywhere--as we cling to the truth taught to us only by the church.  The same truth it has taught to us for 2,000 years.  Which is mediated to us only by the bishops as successors of the apostles.  Who have the keys that lock and unlock the deposit of faith in which these salvific, unchanging truths are stored.

And we will defend that truth at all costs, and those who dispense it to us, no matter how cruel our defense begins to appear to people of good will, including some brother and sister Catholics, because that truth has prevailed.  We've won.  We won when John Paul II was beatified.

And only winners have the truth.  That's what truth is, by definition.  It's what wins in history.  Losers, by definition, have departed from the truth.  And in grinding the faces of the losers in the ground, we Catholic apologists modeling our practice of the faith on Bl. John Paul II's practice are actually doing a holy thing, since we're defending and vindicating the truth on which the salvation of all humanity depends.

This is, in a nutshell, the kind of crude logic I hear the John Paul II generation of Catholic apologists using, as they interact on various blogs these days (including this blog), and in other venues of discussion where the topic of Catholic truth is on the table.  It's embarrassing.  It's naive.  It demands a tremendously dehumanizing intellectual and moral price from those who push these arguments.  It is morally repulsive in its bellicose triumphalistic claim that truth is what wins in history and what loses is ipso facto untruth.

But it also happens to be the position that has "won" in the church, and it's an absolutely perfect fit for the logic of patriarchal hierarchy on which the governance system of the church depends.  And it will therefore not only not disappear now that John Paul II has been beatified, but it will continue to grow within the Catholic church.  It will continue to grow because it's being deliberately massaged from the top/center of the church now.

All things considered, I think Joan Chittister might just be right: a wiser and more humane institution might find other ways to deal with minority opinions.  Opinions which, though vanquished for the nonce, often turn out to have pointed the way to real humanity, while the dominant opinion of an era turns out to have pointed in quite the opposite direction.

The graphic is a photograph of Fr. Roy Bourgeois protesting at the School of the Americas, 1999.

National Catholic Reporter on Firing of Bishop William M. Morris: Pope's Priorities Now Clear

National Catholic Reporter has published an editorial addressing the recent firing of Australian bishop William M. Morris.  As the title of the editorial suggests, if anyone still remains in doubt about Pope Benedict's priorities for his church, she or he need doubt no longer: the priorities are clear after this action.  It's all about extending an "intellectual chill" in the church that goes beyond the excommunication of Fr. Roy Bourgeois for supporting women's ordination or the condemnation of Sr. Elizabeth Johnson's magisterial work on the theology of God.  

It's about suppressing any and all dissent, even the kind of pastoral thinking out loud that Bishop Morris did in the 2006 pastoral letter to his diocese that has resulted in his dismissal.  It's about asserting absolute control over any and all intraeccesial conversations, from the top or center of the church, and assuring that if those conversations don't march lock-step with the top/center, they're squelched.  Squelched along with the hapless brothers and sisters in Christ mounting the conversations because they imagine that the gospels (and Holy Spirit) have inspired them to do so.

A powerful excerpt from this powerful editorial statement:

First, it turns out it’s really not that difficult for the pope to give a bishop a pink slip. In the course of the quarter-century clergy sexual abuse cover-up, there’s been considerable handwringing over just this question. Bishops don’t “work for” the pope, we have been told. Bishops are “fathers” to their flock – with all the unconditional love and commitment that entails – not employees subject to the whims, well-intentioned or otherwise, of the boss. Canonical procedures must be followed.

Apparently, that’s just so much hooey. If the pope and his advisers care deeply about an issue about which a bishop has publicly raised questions – such as women priests and optional celibacy – a way can be found to dismiss that bishop.

And – noteworthy because it goes to some underlying issues – a bishop who acts against church teaching and law related to sexually abusive priests apparently need fear no such reprisal.

Philadelphia Cardinal Justin Rigali, for example, continues a life befitting a prince in splendorous surroundings, even as his flouting of church procedures (and perhaps civil law) resulted in nearly 30 diocesan priests facing administrative suspension and heat from local prosecutors.

And not to forget Cardinal Bernard Law, orchestrator of the Boston clergy abuse cover-up. His punishment?  An extended Roman holiday and a healthy pension. Meanwhile, Morris gets the door.

The pope’s priorities are clear. 

The context presupposed by the preceding remarks: one of the ploys the Vatican and some dioceses have sought to use to evade moral and legal responsibility for priests sexually abusing minors, who are permitted to remain in ministry after their abuse has become known, is the argument that bishops and priests don’t work for any big boss above them.  They are independent contractors, as it were.  And so those above them in the tightly controlled hierarchical system according to which Catholic governance is structured are not in any way responsible for the actions of those beneath.

As anyone who has given even cursory thought to the behavior of ethically challenged, morality-eliding corporations recognizes, this tactic of shielding the top or center from responsibility is a common evasive tactic of any corporate structure that is a rigidly structured hierarchy.  This evasive technique is a by-product of hierarchy, a predictable response precisely of organizations structured as top-down (or center-to-margins) hierarchies.  

Hierarchical corporate structures place supreme emphasis on the obligation of everyone in the hierarchical chain of command to obey everyone above him.  I use the male pronoun deliberately here, because these tightly controlled hierarchies demanding implicit, absolute obedience down the chain of command are far and away more typical of male-dominated institutions than female ones.  They’re common in institutions that have historically been male-bonded fraternities, like the military, the police, corporate boards, etc.  And the Catholic church. 

In most of those secular institutions, of course, change has been underway throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, and the rigid mechanisms of control are being vigorously challenged, primarily by women seeking full inclusion in the social and economic structures of various societies.  In the Catholic church, however, the structures of absolute control have grown only ever more stolidly authoritarian at this point in history, precisely in response to the claim of many women that they are called by the Spirit to be ordained ministers, and thereby to enter (and, from the viewpoint of the patriarchal system itself, to interrupt) the hierarchical chain of Catholic governance.

The response of the leaders of the Catholic church to that claim of many Catholic women and those in solidarity with women seeking ordination has been to fossilize the structures of control, the hierarchical mechanisms, even more decisively.  It has been to reassert the hierarchical motif within the Catholic system of governance, and, following Bl. John Paul II, whose ultimate response to the question of ordaining women was to decree that he could not change what God had set up within the church even if he wanted to do so, to call that inflexible patriarchal reassertion divine inspiration, an affirmation of what the Catholic church has always believed and practiced, which no pope has the right to change.

This reflexive gesture of self-protective, self-perpetuating patriarchy within the Catholic governing structures, in response to the valid claims of women to share in the ministerial life (and governing responsibility) of the Catholic church, locks the leadership of the Catholic church into patterns of patriarchal response typical of male hierarchical communities at their morally grossest.  To return to the evasive technique of the Vatican and bishops faced with questions about their moral and legal responsibility for priests abusing minors: one of the effects of the decision of the past two popes to hinge the future of their church on the maintenance of patriarchy as a divinely instituted ecclesial order for Catholicism is that Catholic governance structures are now ever more faithfully aping the behavior of male hierarchical institutions at their ethical worst, in secular society.

When faced with questions about the responsibility of those on top (or at the center) for those down the chain of command, leaders of rigidly structured hierarchies completely dependent on unquestioning obedience as the primary virtue of the leadership structure always, predictably shield the top or center from responsibility.  Though everyone observing the behavior of the structure under consideration, and examining how it fits together, knows that in the tightly controlled hierarchy, no decision ever takes place or can take place without the knowledge and consent of the man at the top/center.

Since total control of the top/center man is what the entire system is all about.  And total unquestioning obedience of every other link in the chain is what it’s all about as a corollary.  In an absolutist hierarchy whose central virtue is unquestioning obedience, no one in the chain of command dares to make decisions independent of the man above him.  He does not dare to give even the suggestion of asking questions or disobeying, because the reprisal is too great.  It is immediate expulsion from the hierarchical system itself.

And so here’s the situation that results from the decision of Popes John Paul II and Benedict to structure the Catholic church even more hierarchically, more patriarchally, than has been the case in the past: as the NCR editorial notes, while good, pastorally astute bishops (or priests or theologians) like Bishop Morris or Fr. Bourgeois or Sr. Elizabeth Johnson are chewed up and thrown away by the current system of Catholic governance, morally shady, ethically disreputable characters like Archbishop Chaput or Cardinals Rigali and Law thrive.  They are held up by the system as exemplars of its primary virtue: unquestioning obedience.

Cardinals Rigali and Law continue to live in “splendorous surroundings” despite their clear, undeniable protection of priests sexually abusing children, while Bishop Morris is out on his ear.  And the Catholic faithful are asked to identify Chaput, Rigali, and Law as moral heroes (they have, after all, served the church well through their unquestioning obedience), while they’re asked to view Bourgeois, Johnson, and Morris as morally questionable renegades.

Something’s wrong with this picture, with the picture the official Catholic church wants to paint for itself and adherents at this point in history—it’s morally wrong, in the view of increasing numbers of faithful Catholics.  Because we can see with our own eyes that those being chewed up and spit out by the rotten system have a moral integrity that vastly exceeds the integrity of the men being held up to us as moral exemplars.  And we find ourselves in a moral and spiritual bind, as a result.

When such harsh cognitive dissonance develops—particularly around central symbols of who or what is a moral exemplar—in an institution that claims to teach and exemplify moral values, here’s what usually happens: morally thinking, morally sensitive, upright people tend to shy away from the institution, and look elsewhere for sustenance for their moral lives.  But as they do so, true believers energized by the demand for absolute unquestioning obedience turn to the institution in question even more decisively, because it feeds their psychological need for unquestioning obedience.

The beatification of John Paul II is a rallying cry—a battle cry—of Benedict to the latter group, to carry the day for the Catholic church in the 21st century.  As Tom Fox notes in a statement today about the Bishop Morris story, Morris knew that he was to be fired the day following the beatification of John Paul II.  Pope Benedict himself told Morris this in a meeting 14 months ago (for further background information, see Anthea Gleeson’s interview with Bishiop Morris in The Chronicle [Toowoomba, Australia] and Tom Roberts and Joshua McElwee in this recent NCR article).

The date of Bishop Morris’s sacking was chosen deliberately by Pope Benedict to follow immediately on the beatification of the previous pope.  It was chosen, in other words, to be a concrete demonstration of what that beatification means for the whole church, and a signal to the true believers within the church who have called for the heads of Morris, Bourgeois, Johnson and others that they won a victory with this beatification.

And that, no matter what many Catholics or people of good will think, the leaders of the Catholic church will continue to demand that we regard Chaput, Rigali, and Law as unalloyed exemplars of the Catholic moral life in the 21st century.  Precisely as they also demand that we see Bl. John Paul II such an unalloyed exemplar.

This is a bold decision on the part of Benedict to continue at all cost hinging the future of the Catholic church on its remnant elements (and, it always has to be said when we speak of the remnant church, on the powerful economic European and American economic elites driving these Vatican decisions), on the ever diminishing cadre of true believers willing to identify unquestioning obedience as the central virtue of the Christian life.  Even if Jesus does inconveniently say that love is the primary calling of those who walk in his path of discipleship, and is the primary characteristic by which those called by his name must be known.

Australian Bishop Deposed for . . . No, Not That: He Wanted Dialogue about Women's Ordination

Bishop William M. Morris

A day to catch up on some of the significant blogs I try to follow, and then often fail to follow as faithfully as I should, when the news of the day catches my eye and saps my reading time:

There's an important story developing on the Catholic front in Australia, and Colleen Kochivar-Baker has been following it with outstanding commentary at her Enlightened Catholicism blog the past several days (here and here).  The story: immediately following the beatification of John Paul II, Pope Benedict removed from his position Australian bishop William M. Morris of Toowoomba. 

Morris's offense?  He wrote a pastoral letter five years ago stating that, as the number of priests diminishes radically in areas like the Australian outback, he'd be open to discussions about ordaining women.  Since the Catholic church faces a crisis as fewer and fewer ("celibate," male) clerical candidates come down the road, while there's a large pool of women and married men who indicate that the Spirit is calling them to priestly ministry.  For a church whose life of worship revolves around eucharistic celebration, in which the priest plays an integral role, the choice of Rome to limit ordination to celibate males has serious effects on the real lives of real parish communities around the globe, as the priestly ranks are depleted.

It seems callous, in other words, to many lay Catholics for the leaders of their church to deny them the Eucharist on which they are told their salvation depends, in order to keep the all-male, "celibate" clerical system alive.  It seems as if the whole church and its future is being sacrificed to a kind of idol that has everything to do with issues of control at the center and little or nothing to do with the gospels, in the view of many Catholics dealing with the concrete effects of the priest shortage in many parishes around the world.

As Colleen notes, though there's increasingly open discussion of this crisis in the Australian Catholic church, there's also a fierce watchdog group intent on punishing any bishop or priest who dares to speak openly about issues like women's ordination in the face of the crisis.  This group is actively promoted by the powerful (and, for many of us, odious) Cardinal Pell (on this character, see here and here).  

And America's own éminence grise Archbishop Chaput of Denver plays a role in the current Australian story, since he was, believe it or not, sent from far-away Denver to be the inquisitor visitator who compiled the report that got his fellow bishop Morris's head chopped off.  As anyone following Chaput and his activities knows well, he doesn't hesitate to involve himself in the affairs of dioceses distant from his own--and he has Roman backing as he engages in his meddling with the affairs of other dioceses. 

When Bishop William Lori decided to engage in some old-time diversionary gay-baiting in his Bridgeport, Connecticut, diocese in 2009, to divert attention from ongoing battles about his refusal to disclose information re: abuse cases in his diocesan files, there was Chaput, from half a continent away, in the thick of that battle, egging on the gay-baiting.  And when the Vatican needed an inside player to whitewash investigate the Legionaries of Christ after it became impossible for church officials to ignore the stink that Legionary founder Fr. Marcial Maciel had become, whom did church officials appoint to go around the world gathering information for that project except Chaput?

And so this is a story that has many ramifications, and which positively cries out for novelistic treatment, since it's replete with vivid characters, good guys and bad guys, villains and heroes.  And it's happening right now, in our own church, seemingly as a direct consequence of the vindication of the church of the mean machine as John Paul II is beatified, JPII who, in the opinion of many of us who were called to deeper, more vibrant faith by the reforms of Vatican II, set this mean machine with its machiavellian players into motion in our church.

Here's how Colleen frames her valuable comment on the story of Bishop Morris:  

I find it most fascinating that on the weekend dedicated to JPII, we find counter thrusts coming from people who are victims of JPII's two bigger failures.  His enabling of pedophiles, and his personal opinion about women in the priesthood which he attempted to dress up as God's will.  It just boggles my mind that in the the past month we have had one priest laicised and one bishop forced to resign over the idea of womens' ordination, while one self confessed Archbishop pedophile gets remedial treatment--treatment which not so coincidentally included his mandated removal from the jurisdiction in which he might face criminal prosecution--and one career Cardinal diplomat makes an ass of himself over the clerical pedophile JPII fawned over.  If I was keeping score it would be pedophiles 2, women's ordination -2.  But then, this is the Vatican that does classify women's ordination as a higher crime against the Church than clerical pedophilia in that one is a heresy and one is just a moral issue.

I urge readers to link to Colleen's two postings on the Australian story and to read more about it there.  Her commentary is valuable.  And to continue (and conclude with) the theme of this story as a novel in the making: I wonder, if the novel does get written, who'll be the Richelieu and who the Isaac Jogues in this story and the story of John Paul and Benedict's restorationist church in general?  

Or, perhaps more to the point, who'll be the Grand Inquisitor intent on crucifying Jesus all over again, if Jesus dares to show his hide in the church he founded?  And where will Jesus be in this story?

Hans Küng on JPII Beatification: Chronic Sickness in a Church of Sumptuous Pomposity Masking Total Emptiness

As Tom Fox notes in National Catholic Reporter, Paddy Agnew published a good overview yesterday of critical responses to the beatification of John Paul II.  Agnew is writing in the Irish Times.

Among those whose responses Agnew surveys are SNAP, Italian Vatican-watcher Giancarlo Zizola, and Swiss theologian (and peritus at Vatican II) Hans Küng.  Agnew excerpts comments Küng made about the beatification this past weekend in Frankfurter Rundschau:

In an interview last weekend with German daily the Frankfurter Rundschau , Küng says John Paul II does not merit being presented to the faithful as an example. He says: "John Paul II is universally praised as someone who fought for peace and human rights. But his preaching to the outside world was in total contrast with the way he ran the church from inside, with an authoritarian pontificate which suppressed the rights of both women and theologians."

In particular, Küng argues that John Paul’s harsh treatment of Latin American liberation theologians such as Gutierrez and Boff represented the "exact opposite" of decent Christian behaviour. Küng also sees it as totally “logical” that Pope Benedict would be keen to promote the cause of his predecessor but adds: "Wojtyla and Ratzinger are the people most responsible for the chronic sickness of today’s Catholic Church. Behind the sumptuous pomposity of the great Roman liturgy, there looms a total emptiness in many Catholic communities."

One of the most regularly touted criticisms of this beatification has been its fast-track time scale, given that it comes just six years after the death of John Paul II. Supporters of the late pope point to the fact that, to some extent, this is a beatification that has come about by popular acclamation, given the cries of "Santo subito" (Make him a saint immediately) that rang out in St Peter’s Square on the day of his funeral.

Küng dismisses this justification, arguing that the campaign was manipulated: "I remember those so-called “spontaneous” posters in St Peter’s Square – all neatly and carefully printed. The whole thing was just a con act by conservative and reactionary Catholic groups, especially those ones that are very strong in Spain, Italy and Poland."

"[H]is preaching to the outside world was in total contrast with the way he ran the church from inside": in a sacramental church, who we are and how we live proclaim our message far more decisively than our words do.  When the leaders of a church call secular society to a respect for human rights while they themselves trample on human rights in their leadership of their institution, their ultimate message to the world is, at best, opaque, unclear, ambiguous, and, at worst, the direct opposite of what their words say.  Their behavior as leaders of their own institution undercuts the message they want to proclaim to the world.

John Paul's treatment of various theologians, liberation theologians in particular, was the "exact opposite" of decent Christian behavior: silencing theologians without permitting those sisters and brothers in Christ any hearing at all, any chance to know the charges against them and the identities of their accusers, any chance to rebut the charges before they are silenced, is a violation of fundamental human rights.  The brutal suppression of liberation theology by Ratzinger and John Paul II also have had the dismal effect of silencing many of the most significant voices in Latin America challenging the oppression of the poor.  In key respects, John Paul's attack on liberation theology has aligned the Catholic church in Latin America with dictators whose behavior towards the poor in their countries is savage.

The "spontaneous" manifestation following John Paul's death calling for him to be made a saint immediately was a a "con act by conservative and reactionary Catholic groups."  It was an attempt to make the ideology of the Catholic political and religious right in Europe and the Americas appear to be the ideology of the entire church.  In beatifying John Paul, Rome sends a signal that the Catholic church has decisively aligned itself with right-wing movements, even fascist ones, and that Catholic identity at this point in history is tied up with support for movements resisting democracy and the extension of human rights around the world, including the rights of women and gay and lesbian persons.  In key respects, the beatification of John Paul II sends a signal to the world that the Vatican belongs to those wealthy and powerful corporate elites in North America who need the Catholic church to undercut movements for human rights in the developing nations, since those movements threaten the interests of the corporate elites of North America.

"Wojtyla and Ratzinger are the people most responsible for the chronic sickness of today’s Catholic Church. Behind the sumptuous pomposity of the great Roman liturgy, there looms a total emptiness in many Catholic communities."  Those who imagine that we have just seen a great victory of authentic Catholicism over jejune post-Vatican II liberal Catholicism in the beatification ceremonies are tragically deluding themselves.  Place the grand, expensive show (and who paid for that show, I wonder?) beside the real status of the Catholic church in nation after nation today, and you can only shake your head at the self-delusion of those who imagine that the spectacle, the numbers, the fanfare represent vitality for the Catholic church at this point in history.

A chronically sick church, sick unto death, mounting these spectacles to divert attention from its diagnosis: as  Colleen Baker wisely notes, "Those who wanted to believe that the beatification of JPII would put the abuse crisis and its corruption to rest . . . well, they are soooo wrong.  Justice will be served."  The beatification of the previous pope only exacerbates and deepens the crisis in which the Catholic church now finds itself, since band-aids seldom if ever cure cancer.

Online Commentary Connecting Beatification of John Paul II to bin Laden Assassination

Well, yes, now that I google a bit, I discover the following commentary in the blogsphere, seeking to link the assassination of bin Laden to John Paul: 

Micaela at the Catholic Community Forum blog site: it's "more than a coincidence" that bin Laden received justice on the day of JPII's beatification and Divine Mercy Sunday (!).

Indigo1941 commenting at HuffPo on Sam Stein and Jennifer Bendery's report of Osama's death: "Does this count as Blessed John Paul's second miracle?"  (And note the Twitter feed underneath the comment echoing this conclusion.)

Lilith at this Yahoo Answers thread responding to the question, "Is it a coincidence that Osama bin Laden was killed moments after Pope John Paul II was declared a Saint?": "Maybe this is John Paul's II second miracle."

Ajiryn at the Newgrounds site on bin Laden's assassination as JPII is beatified as " the miracle of a bitch slap from God from beyond the GRAVE."

Etc.: this is a selection from a very cursory review of what's popping up online today.  The google list of hits for the topics "John Paul II" and "Osama bin Laden" reveals many more pages of hits than I've read my way through.

Though some of these bloggers identify themselves as Catholics, there's no way of knowing, of course, if all of them are, even when they talk about miracles and divine intervention.  Belief in the (selective) intrusion of God into the affairs of the world to vindicate Americans and American causes is deeply woven into the fabric of American popular culture, and pop culture has never hesitated to borrow freely from Catholic iconography and the Catholic belief system when some icons and beliefs coincide with widely held popular beliefs, even when the culture doesn't buy the entire Catholic system.

I think we're seeing a certain hagiography in the making here, at a pop cultural level, which illustrates the growing split in the Catholic psyche between those who see John Paul II as the lord and master of a mean machine that just rolled over dissidents with the beatification ceremonies, and many other Catholics troubled by this use of the symbol of Bl. JPII to bless the taking of a human life.

And it's clear to me that one of the reasons some of the mainstream/centrist Catholic blogs are engaging this discussion today is to offset some of the more noxious statements now being made by some Catholics (and others) about the assassination of bin Laden as Bl. John Paul's second miracle.  I expect much more of this talk at the popular level in coming days, despite the attempt of some Catholic leaders (and the Vatican itself) to combat it.  

And in some key respects, it's a bona fide manifestation of the very cult of Bl. JPII that these leaders have worked so hard to rev up.

Holy Irritations Blog: "Professed Christians" Attributing Assassination of Osama bin Laden to Bl. John Paul II?!

Maybe some readers of Bilgrimage who have been paying more attention to television commentary following the assassination of Osama bin Laden than I have can decipher the following statement by ennie on his Holy Irritations blog today:  

Now, my fallen nature wants, so bad, to go off right now on the behavior that I saw displayed last night on social networks by professed Christians, but I'm not.  I could speak about how wrong on so many levels, it is for us to say in any way that Blessed John Paul II intercession had anything to do with the death of a man (see fall of communism), but I'm not.

Really? Are some fans of Blessed John Paul II really attributing the assassination of bin Laden to Bl. JPII?  

And if that's the case, then I wonder if this is why the Vatican has made this statement about the killing of bin Laden and the proper Christian response to it?

If any readers do know of statements by the JPII fan club that his intercession is responsible for the assassination of bin Laden, or that it's some kind of divine sign that bin Laden was assassinated on the same day JPII was beatified, I'd like to know about this commentary.  These are certainly the implications I'm hearing in what ennie says above.

John Paul's Beatification: A Solution for the Divided Church? Perhaps Not (2)

I'd like to append a brief theological postscript to what I posted yesterday about how the beatification of John Paul II has revved up the mean machine within the Catholic church in recent days, as some of Bl. JPII's most ardent fans use the occasion of his beatification to issue new, even more hateful reminders to many of their Catholic brothers and sisters that we're just not wanted in the lean, mean Catholic machine of the new millennium.  New, even more hateful reminders--and this boggles the mind--to survivors of clerical sexual abuse that they're unwanted, that they're self-absorbed whiners who can't appreciate that the real, true Catholic church is all about winners and losers.

And survivors are losers.  They became losers from the time they were molested by priests as young people.  And now they need--so I hear many of those celebrating the legacy of Bl. JPII in recent days saying--to disappear again.  Get lost.  Out of sight, out of mind.

The elevation of Bl. John Paul II to the honors of the altar has become the occasion for an outpouring of venomous hatred on the part of many Catholics--hatred directed explicitly towards many of their own brothers and sisters, including some of their brothers and sisters who should have the strongest claim on the heart and conscience of any community that seeks to be known as humane.  And to my mind, that outpouring of hatred deserves attention as a theological datum in and of itself--because of what it says about the legacy John Paul left to the church.  And what kind of church we've become in the wake of his papacy.

When I posted yesterday, murrbrewster left a comment in response to my posting that's very good.  This morning, I replied to murr, and because what I say in my reply is really a theological postscript to what I posted yesterday, I'd like to lift that exchange out of yesterday's comments section and turn it into a posting this morning.

Murr writes:

I'm at a loss to see what any of it has to do with your own relationship to the man on the cross, or the person sitting next to you. It's all pomp and nonsense.

And I reply:

Thanks, murr. At one level, I see the point you're making, and think it's absolutely right.

But the other side seems to me to be this: all symbols, religious or otherwise, are mediated to us by human communities. The church plays a significant role in transmitting to us over the course of history the memory of Jesus (and symbols based on that memory).

And so a serious problem ensues when the church's behavior occludes or even contradicts the symbols it wants to transmit to us. That problem is a problem of dissonance that causes great pain to many people who have first learned about and encountered Jesus as a symbol of the divine within the Catholic tradition, but for whom the Catholic church is now in many ways a counter-sign to the gospel it proclaims.

I think many Catholics live today in that tension between what the church has told us to believe, and what the church has become. And I suspect that the number of those living in that space of pain and tension is only growing larger, and will increase significantly following JPII's beatification. 

I'm not saying anything I haven't said in many previous postings, in the comment I've just excerpted above.  But I do think it's worth making these points again, in light of JPII's beatification, and, above all, how that beatification is being "received" by some of his most ardent supporters.  In light of the renewed hostility those supporters now find themselves energized to display against brother and sister Catholics they envisage as losers in a war in which they are the winners.

As I've said frequently in previous postings, I see the church as caught between the "already" of Jesus's death and resurrection and the "not yet" of the final eschatological fulfillment of Jesus's proclamation of the reign of God, a proclamation that culminated in his crucifixion and resurrection.  In this in-between period--in the period of history prior to the eschaton--the church is always imperfect.  It's never complete.  It's always on pilgrimage.  It's on pilgrimage with everyone else in the world towards a reign of God promised by God to all creation as the final fulfillment of Jesus's redemptive act on the cross.

It never possesses all truth in itself.  It learns from the Spirit's action in other religious communities and in the world at large.  The church never completely fulfills Jesus's vision of the reign of God.  It often tragically betrays that vision, sometimes in gross ways--as it has done in the period of "holy" wars, of the Inquisition, of pogroms and mass murders of the Jewish people, in its subjugation and exploitation of the native peoples of non-European nations, in its support of slavery, in its complicity with the Holocaust, in its historic, gross abuse of women (and execution of so-called "witches" for centuries), and in its historic abusive treatment of gay and lesbian human beings.

The church is not perfect.  It often grossly betrays the ideals it proclaims to the world.  It does so in its own behavior.  And when it does so, the church creates for many of its own adherents a serious theological, existential problem: this is the problem of knowing how to keep clinging to and finding meaning in the very symbols by which the church has mediated the memory of Jesus to these believers, when the church's practice betrays those symbols.

In my view, many Catholics live right now in that space of severe cognitive dissonance created by the disparity between what the church proclaims to us in its core symbols, and what it actually does with those symbols in its own practice.  My meditations in recent days, vis-a-vis the beatification of John Paul II, have had to do with the tragic disparity between the symbol of Jesus's crucifixion, a central Catholic symbol, and the real-life, real-time show of the John Paul II beatification--and its aftermath, in the outpouring of ugly, venomous remarks by many orthodox Catholics energized by the jubilation who are now intent on reminding some of their fellow Catholics that we aren't and haven't ever been welcome in the JPII mean machine.

And who are now even openly attacking and taunting their brothers and sisters who are coping with the effects of clerical sexual abuse when they were children.  Attacking and taunting these brothers and sisters precisely to demonstrate their support of the beatification of the former pope.

And so I conclude that not only do many Catholics already live within that space of severe cognitive dissonance created by the disparity between what the church proclaims to us in its core symbols, and what it actually does with those symbols, but that the tension, the space of cognitive dissonance, will only grow larger as a result of the beatification of the previous pope.  More and more Catholics will now find themselves marginalized--actively driven out--by the mean machine of the church of Bl. JPII.

To many of us, this response to the beatification of a pope--this way of celebrating the beatification of a pope--seems incomprehensible, because we have long understood catholicity to be all about including and not excluding.  About loving and not hating.  About welcoming and not slamming doors in people's faces.

About looking at Jesus hanging on the cross and remembering that the path to real victory in Christian faith lies in failure, weakness, and death, not numbers and muscle and power.  The real victory in Christian faith lies in opening one's arms to the other, particularly in her anguish, because in his own anguish on the cross, Jesus opens his arms to the entire human community and the cosmos.  The real victory lies in that gesture, Christian faith has long taught us, and not in the opposite gesture that seems all too prevalent in the mean machine that the Catholic church has become in the wake of Bl. John Paul II.

John Paul's Beatification: A Solution for the Divided Church? Perhaps Not

We won.  You lost.

Now please get lost.

That's the refrain I'm hearing over and over these days from those jubilant about the beatification of John Paul II.  That, and the refrain that success is counted in numbers--success is counted in numbers for the Christian church.  For followers of Jesus.  The bigger the crowd, the more awesome the show, the more obvious is the victory of Christianity.

Of us over them.

Of us over those who continue to point to Jesus dying virtually alone and powerless on the cross?

We won.  You lost.

The abuse crisis is over.  Get over it.  Get over yourselves, survivors.  Because it's all about you.  Can't you see the importance of this show?  And the numbers, for God's sake!  We won and you lost.  You don't count in any grand scheme of things--and that's what the leaders of the church have tried repeatedly to tell you for years now.  You're dispensable and you need to get over what has happened to you.  

Get the message now with this beatification?  We won.  You lost.  Get over yourselves.

Get over yourselves, tired old Vatican II liberals.  We won and you lost.  The numbers prove it.  (And the money.  And the power.  And the spectacles we can mount.  And the media attention we can attract and massage to our advantage.)

I hear many of my brother and sister Catholics exulting that John Paul II has been beatified and all kinds of refractory other Catholics have now been slapped in the face.  Decisively.  I hear what my brother and sister Catholics are saying to me.  Loud and clear.  

Get lost, finally.  And don't let the door hit you in the rear as you walk out.

And perhaps they're right.  

Perhaps they're right because their church, the church of John Paul II--of the John Paul II they love to use as a weapon against me and large numbers of their brothers and sisters--seems to have a serious problem on its hands for many of us who expect somehow to find the face of Jesus within our church.  If it's the face of the crucified one we hope to see in the church now, we might be well-advised to put the church of John Paul II behind us.

The problem that those using John Paul as a weapon have created for their church is this: it's the problem of finding some connection, any connection at all, between their church of numbers, big shows, wealth, power (and cruelty to survivors of clerical sexual abuse) and that tormented man who died virtually alone and a failure on the cross.

Because he, that man whose twisted, pain-racked naked body hangs on a cross in every Catholic church in the world, made himself one with the poor, despised, suffering, with rag-tag outcasts and, yes, with survivors of sexual abuse.  And neither I nor many Catholics being taunted to leave the church of John Paul II now seem able to see the face of that poor crucified man anywhere at all in the mean-spirited rhetoric that the disciples of John Paul II have been slinging around these days, as the previous pope is beatified.

Cardinal Angelo Sodano on John Paul Beatification: Shut Up about the "Peripheral Issues" of the Abuse Crisis

Here's another indicator (to me) that makes the upcoming beatification of John Paul II sickening:

Tom Roberts reports in National Catholic Reporter yesterday that, when asked Thursday by reporters about the scandal John Paul II created by his protection of Marcial Maciel, Cardinal Angelo Sodano replied, 

How can you, in such a great moment, get into such peripheral issues when the world is applauding the pope?  I'm stunned.

The implication of this cruel, callous, horrific remark seems clear to me.  The huge spectacle being mounted in Rome this weekend is all about shutting up anyone who wants to keep talking about the real and inescapable problems of the Catholic church right now.  The abuse crisis, in particular . . . .  

Problems created by John Paul and bequeathed to the church as a significant part of his legacy, because

1) he sought to undermine the reforms of Vatican II from the very center of the church

2) he made the entire church hostage to a hyper-sacralized notion of priesthood that has deepened the division between the clerical elite in whose hands all institutional power resides and the rest of the people of God

3) he not only ignored the abuse crisis that broke open to public view under his papal reign, but he protected one of the most notorious figures in the church connected to that crisis, Legionaries of Christ founder Marcial Maciel.

And we're supposed to remain silent about that now, Sodano tells us.  We're supposed to be in such shock and awe at the goings on in Rome that we're stunned into speechless wonder.

We're supposed to forget about the thousands on thousands of our brothers and sisters whose lives have been shattered by childhood abuse by clerics, and whose wounds are re-opened by this shoddy spectacle.  We're supposed to ignore the thousands on thousands of brother and sister Catholics who have walked away from the church and who continue to do so, due to the legacy left us by John Paul the Blessed. 

What kind of bona fide good shepherd within a Christian communion would even think of referring to survivors of clerical sexual abuse as "peripheral issues"?  Here's the kind of shepherd Sodano is: he is one of the most powerful figures in the Curia, after John Paul made him secretary of state.  And his direct connection to the Maciel cover-up is well-known and has been exhaustively documented by Jason Berry.

As Berry has shown, Cardinal Sodano's nephew Andrea Sodano, indicted for fraud and money-laundering in New York in 2008, had strong business ties to Maciel.  Maciel's connections to Cardinal Sodano go back to the 1980s, when they became friends in Chile, where they cozied up to dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose regime tortured and disappeared huge numbers of Chilean citizens regarded as threats to the regime.

When John Paul made Sodano the Vatican secretary of state, Maciel wined and dined Sodano to consolidate their bond and to assure Vatican promotion of the Legionaries of Christ.  There are strong suggestions that Sodano and his family benefited in overt ways--i.e., financially--from money Maciel used to grease the palms of Vatican officials and buy protection.  Sodano intervened directly and repeatedly in the Vatican process that was investigating Maciel and his activities, even declaring at one point--with no authority from anyone--that the process had ended and Maciel had been exonerated of all charges.

At Easter 2010, Sodano interrupted the Vatican Easter liturgy to praise Benedict and to dismiss any talk about Benedict's involvement in cover-ups of abuse cases before he became pope as "petty gossip."

Sodano is, in a word, corrupt.  He is not far from a Mafia figure in clerical garb.

And he wants everyone to shut up as the John Paul beatification show gets underway--back to business, MYOB, we clerics run the church and it's going to remain that way?!  Shut up and stop talking about those "peripheral issues" that happen to be standing outside the doors of your parish churches holding pictures of themselves as children, showing you the real-life faces of children sexually molested by Catholic priests?

Sickening in the extreme.  And yet another reason I will be boycotting tomorrow's big Roman spectacle in my own little powerless, peripheral way.  The signal clearly given to me by the man being beatified tomorrow, during his years as pope, is that I and my kind are not welcome in his church.  No more welcome than are those children who were molested by priests.  Or the poor of Latin America tortured by Pinochet and other dictators.  Or women who seek to respond to the Spirit's vocational call within the all-male clerical structures of the Catholic church.

We're not welcome, all of us, in the church of John Paul the Blessed.  In the church of Angelo Sodano.  And, on the whole, all the pain of the savage exclusion aside, I don't believe I'd have any interest at all in belonging to Sodano's little church, even if it did pretend to welcome me with open arms.

Anne Burke Continues to Speak Out: Laity Have Right to Expect Truth from Catholic Leaders

And, as a counterpoint to the commentary on the John Paul II beatification to which I've just pointed, I'd like to take note as well of a valuable statement Anne Burke published this week about the ongoing abuse crisis in the Catholic church.  This op-ed piece is in U.S. Catholic.

Burke continues the theme she highlighted in her new year's statement on the obligation of Catholic laypersons to demand truth from the pastoral leaders of the Catholic church.  In both statements, Burke notes that her formation in Catholic schools, from childhood forward, taught her to value truth-telling as an indispensable virtue for any society that expects to function at all--as a society.  Since truth-telling is a precondition for any and all social relationships, because, in its absence, trust cannot grow.  And where trust cannot grow, nothing can flourish.

The biggest damage--the incalculable harm--that the pastoral leaders have done to the Catholic church in how they have responded to the abuse crisis is, Burke thinks, the damage caused by their violation of the truth.  Which has undermined trust within the church--in a radical way that strikes to the communal foundations of Catholicism.  

Here's Burke:  

I believe that truthfulness has been a virtue in trouble for a long time in the Catholic Church. Who could ever see this coming? Not me. I was an obedient Catholic school girl, a true believer. It is not easy for us to unlearn being Catholic. I, for one, don’t want to.

But I expect truthfulness at all costs from our leadership. If that cannot be supplied then we must go back to the drawing board. Do we not have the right to truthfulness?

Perhaps a Council on Truthfulness might help to expand the importance of this critical virtue. Perhaps it could be a meeting for both bishops and faithful in which they could share ideas and dreams for the church. Perhaps we could let the power of the virtue of truthfulness help redefine the proportions of holiness in the church. Liberal or conservative, truthfulness is a gift to all.

The notion of church defended by John Paul II, around which he built his papacy, was not, to say the least, strong on the obligation of bishops and priests to tell the truth to the laity--particularly when the laity challenge them to do so.  It stressed, instead, another obligation: the obligation of the laity to obey.

And the results of that ecclesiology have been disastrous within the Catholic church, and remain disastrous as John Paul II is being beatified.  Anne Burke has walked through the fire to claim her right to speak about these issues.  When she speaks of the damage that a lack of truthfulness has done to our church, she knows whereof she speaks.  She is speaking out of her painful experience as head of the national review board, who experienced stonewalling, deception, evasion of truth from one bishop after another in her period heading that board.

As John Paul II is beatified, those who really care about the future of the church ought to be thinking about what Anne Burke is saying, it seems to me.  Even in the midst of the diversionary fanfare and the lavish image-management spectacle designed to make us imagine all is right with Rome.  Especially in the midst of the fanfare and the spectacle.

John Paul II Beatification Approaches: A Selection of Commentary

And from one royal spectacle to another: John Paul II will be beatified this weekend, and here's a selection of articles that, to my mind, provide valuable commentary as the beatification nears:

Maureen Fiedler, "Beatifications and Politics," National Catholic Reporter:

John Paul II actually stifled much of the optimism and hope that flowed from Vatican II. His condemnation of liberation theology disheartened the poor of Latin America. His failure to understand either feminist theology or the rising role of women in today's world contradicted many of his other commitments to human rights in the secular world. His misunderstanding of gays and lesbians was disheartening.

Jason Berry, "The Shame of John Paul II: How the Sex Abuse Scandal Stained His Papacy," The Nation:  

On John Paul’s role in the church’s long nightmare, the Rev. Richard McBrien, a distinguished University of Notre Dame theologian, wrote, “Indeed, he had a terrible record, full of denial and foot-dragging, on the greatest crisis to confront the Catholic Church since the Reformation of the 16th century.”

John Paul’s beatification may give a media boost to the Vatican, but Pope Benedict’s negligence earlier in his career has also done severe damage to the papacy; media coverage last year spotlighted how Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as Benedict was then known, failed to dismiss several known abusers. How can any pope be a voice for peace, proclaim the sanctity of life and speak for human rights while giving de facto Vatican immunity to bishops and cardinals who concealed child molesters? John Paul bequeathed a quagmire to Benedict: an archaic tradition of Vatican tribunals subservient to bishops and high church officials.

Kristine Ward, "Beatify but Verify," National Survivors Advocates Coalition News:    

The haunting question of why Pope John Paul did not lift up the innocent victims of sexual abuse by priests and nuns with the dynamism he displayed on other life issues or rid the Church of perpetrators with the vigor of annihilation that he showed toward communism should cling to St. Peter’s Basilica on Sunday like volcanic ash.

Only truth will clear the air.

Barbara Blaine, "SNAP Blasts Beatification of Pope John Paul II," Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests:

In more than 25 years as the most powerful religious figure on the planet, John Paul II did almost nothing to safeguard kids across the world. He repeatedly and effectively brought his unparalleled global influence to bear on other crucial issues but ignored or promoted stunningly complicit church officials. Church officials can’t have it both ways. They can’t claim to want victims to heal, while paying massive tribute to a man whom evidence shows turned a blind eye for decades to child sex crimes and elevated corrupt clerics like Cardinal Bernard Law.

When we honor those who enable or conceal wrong-doing, we essentially condone wrong-doing.

And so it goes, one spectacle to another, and things don't seem to change--not fundamentally--over the course of years.  Not easily.  And not frequently.  

Not even in an institution whose raison d'être is to keep the memory of Jesus alive in the world--a dangerous memory, as Johann Baptist Metz never ceases reminding us.*  Dangerous not merely for the world but also for the church, since the Jesus we remember in our eucharistic celebrations and proclamation of the gospels did not court power, wealth, and influence.

Instead, he rubbed shoulders with the wretched of the earth.  He invited himself to their tables.  He shared their meals and took upon himself their shame and exclusion from the tables of the powerful, wealthy, and influential.  And he was crucified as a result.  And his resurrection is a result of all the choices that led him to that humiliating death.  Those choices, with the solidarity with the wretched of the earth that they enact, are the precondition for the resurrection, which keeps Jesus alive beyond death, over the course of history.

I won't be watching the beatification spectacle any more than I watched the Kate and Wills show.  But as it takes place and the eyes of the world turn from the royal stage in London to the royal stage in Rome, I do wonder: will we catch any glimpse of the crucified one in this spectacle?

I tend to look for him elsewhere.

*On this theological concept, see Michael J. Iafrate's magisterial reflections at catholicanarchy.org.