Millstones Galore
Dreadful as it is, words cry out to be spoken about the hemorrhaging sexual misconduct among priests. Priests who struggle to be good find this subject nauseating. Even when the facts are true and exposed to the public, we demure comment. Words, even analytic ones, seem only to add infection to an already oozing wound. Moreover, to good Catholics mere passing comment seems to violate the sacred Pauline injunction, “But immorality and every uncleanness or covetousness, let it not even be named among you” (Eph. 5:4).
All of that being said, the horror is so deep and touches so many, it demands jeremiads. It is raw corruption of a child’s innocence whose “angels gaze upon the face of God.” It is committed by a priest and therefore the highest blasphemy that could be perpetrated against the Divinity. It is a spastic laceration of the face of Christ by the consecrated hands of alter Christus (another Christ). It is willful and shocking embrace of the frightening condemnation of Christ, “But he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matt. 18:6). The sin is unworthy to even cry out to heaven for vengeance. It is not murder; it is worse. Not genocide; it is far worse. Those atrocities destroy only bodies and races, this one sucks out the soul of its victims. It leaves them to a life of near suffocation, like some cruel circle in Dante’s Hell. Living men with nearly dead souls gasping for, but never quite able to breathe, the air of God. It is horror compounded by disgrace enveloped in shame.
But speak we must, if for nothing than to have our revulsion on record. As we speak, other things must be noted for the record. Let it be said that priestly misconduct does not appear in a vacuum. A congenial atmosphere must be actively or passively cultivated for such things to proper. Those conditions became fertile with the collapse of the traditional disciplines that surrounded the Priesthood.
No more savvy analysis of human nature exists than the Roman Church. Since her wisdom is Revelation fused deftly with the philosophia perrenis, it is quite perfect. That wisdom was especially brought to bear upon the training of priests. Holy Church knows Man; his darkness, his lights, his inclinations, his potencies, and his aspirations. Seminary time was a template where strengths could be perfected and weaknesses shaved away. This constituted a formational ensemble unparalleled in the West. Yes, it was not perfect. No attempt of man here on earth can be. But given the complexity of man and the high ideals to which Holy Church calls her priests, it was nearly perfect. It furnished the priest with two things: an arsenal of discipline which would tame whatever needed training and the reason for it: sacerdotal identification with Christ Crucified. No sacrifice too great for Him. It never pretended to create perfect priests, only priests who knew they ought to strive to be perfect.
All of this collapsed nearly overnight. Between 1965 and 1970 the majority of Bishops thought it a divine mandate to dismantle brick by brick the classical seminary structure. Many invoked the Second Vatican Council, not realizing that it was a vain invocation. Not a sentence of Optatan Totius (October 28, 1965 – Declaration on the Formation of Priests) furnished warrant for anything but he slightest refinement and re-emphasis.
More tragic still was their shift in thinking about man. The classical seminary model correctly saw man as Poor Sinner; the bishops’ new model was man as Promethean Dreamer. The former engaged man in daily battle against the fons concupiscentiae, the latter invited man to the celebration of the Imperial Self. Consequences of this shift are seen in the moral ruins about us. Even priests shaped by the classical system eagerly jettisoned the reliable disciplines which guaranteed fidelity to Christ, and stepped onto the new terrain of the Emancipated Self which insured fidelity only to me.
Many bishops recast the whole moral index: the hero’s mantle was bestowed upon priests felled by vice, which was now reconfigured as a fruitful resolution on the way to Authenticity. While punishments for priests did not entirely disappear, they became reserved for those clerics who persisted in the dated thinking of the Old Church.
This brief historical context aids in understanding things otherwise incomprehensible. Take the remark of a prominent Ordinary of a major Northeastern diocese made shortly after the Boston disclosures. When asked how Bishops could allow this clerical misconduct to go unpunished, he defensively snapped, “Bishops are not policemen; they are shepherds.” Is that so? Did it perhaps escape His Excellency’s attention that shepherds also police, lest any harm come to the sheep? Why would the Bishop chafe at the suggestion of performing a task execute so ably by his predecessors? Could it be that his impatience at policing comes from a skittishness about an unblurred gasp of right and wrong? Perhaps he has become too cozy with the attenuations of moral “new-think”. A Bishop is alter Christus, after the true Christ Who rebuked as robustly as He loved. It was this episcopal confusion that invited John O’Sullivan’s trenchant inditement:
Christ Himself would have spoken far more harshly to John Geoghan and the other priests who destroyed the innocence of those in their care. Yet in speaking harshly He would have loved them more. For He might have turned them away from the sins that corrupted their souls and attacked the bodies of children in their charge. Geoghan can only hope to find in prison the stern but loving Christ whom he evaded all too easily in the Boston Archdiocese.
National Review Online | Jan. 31, 2002
The preposterous remark of the Bishop shall be preserved alongside the equally fatuous, “It all depends upon what you think the meaning of ‘is’ is.” Both remarks shamelessly try to defend the indefensible. It is such a scandal that Catholics will now rank Bishops alongside an impeached president when they choose whom it is they will believe.
Charles Peguy remarked over a century ago, “We shall never know how many acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of seeming not sufficiently progressive.” Ah, Mr. Peguy, yes we will. What we never wanted to know was that the cowards would be Bishops.
Excelsis File | 2002
