MAY 18, 2010
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This early in the twenty-first century, the rulers of the Catholic Church have suffered an earthquake of crumbling credibility. Nearly ten years ago, with the initial revelations about sexual abuse of the young by priests, some argued that the problem was limited in time and place, since most of the abuse cases had occurred 30 or 40 years before, and they took place in the United States. There was hope that an investigative and reformist effort would restore the U.S. Church’s authority. An emergency Dallas meeting of American bishops in 2002 and a lay inquiry with its recommendations in 2004 were supposed to make the problem go away.
But, ten years later, all across the globe, the problem has shown a stubborn refusal to subside. Pedophile scandals have devastated the Church in Ireland. Fresh horrors have come to light in the United States, especially in Wisconsin and Arizona. There are urgent investigations in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Australia, and Italy. And the Pope himself has been implicated in the scandals, some of which occurred when he was Archbishop of Munich and some when he oversaw the treatment of pedophile reports at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This has led to calls for the Pope’s resignation, or arrest, or criminal indictment—things not even imaginable ten years ago.
It should come as no surprise that a world scandal has succeeded the American troubles. Leading members of the hierarchy in country after country dismissed the U.S. reports of abuse by priests as a thing made up by the hyperthyroid American press, out of an anti-Catholic animus, a pro-Jewish zeal, or the hope to cash in on Church wealth. It is no wonder these foreign cardinals have been blindsided by their own neglected scandals. At first, the Vatican rejected the measures taken by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, after their meeting in Dallas, as not being fair to accused priests, giving too much scope to lay panels of critics, and violating the confidentiality of confessions.
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, at the time a second-in-command to Cardinal Ratzinger at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and later the second-in-command (secretary of state) to Ratzinger as Pope Benedict, set the tone in an interview with an Italian magazine:
[T]here is a well-founded suspicion that some of these charges [of abuse], that arise well after the fact, serve only for making money in civil litigation. ... In my opinion, the demand that a bishop be obligated to contact the police in order to denounce a priest who has admitted the offence of pedophilia is unfounded. ... If a priest cannot confide in his bishop for fear of being denounced, then it would mean that there is no more liberty of conscience.
Bertone was soon chosen by the Vatican to serve on a panel that would soften the directives adopted by the American bishops for punishing pedophile priests. Another member of this panel, made up of eight bishops, was Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, the head of the Congregation for the Clergy, which handled all issues having to do with priests. Castrillón Hoyos was delegated to read a papal letter that mentioned the scandals, where he defended a policy of “keeping things within the family.” A third member of the panel was Archbishop Julián Herranz Casado, who attributed the pedophile scandal to American “exaggeration, financial exploitation, and nervousness.”
Some critics of the American bishops’ treatment of the pedophile problem cited an article from the Vatican-monitored newspaper Civiltà Cattolica, written by the dean of the canon law department at Rome’s Gregorian University, famous for training the clergy. It said that “the bishop and the superior [of religious orders] are neither morally nor judicially responsible for the acts committed by one of their clergy.” Among those attacking the Jewish press in the United States for causing the scandal was Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, who said that the Vatican’s reception of Yasir Arafat had offended the media, that a supporter of feminism was judging the priests’ cases in Boston, and that Cardinal Bernard Law had been subjected to “Stalinist processes against Churchmen.” At a press conference in Rome, Rodriguez called the emphasis on the scandals by U.S. newspapers an “obsession [that] is a mental illness,” and a trick to get money from the Church:
When I was in the United States in the 1970s, there was a fashion when one slipped on a sidewalk to sue the owner of the house for millions. This became a kind of industry. I remember that people used to put on a neck brace and go find a lawyer. ... So why now is there such interest in taking up these [pedophile] cases from the past? Because there is money in play. But we know that money doesn’t heal any wound. ... If it were up to me, I would give the money neither to the lawyers nor even to the victims. ... For me it would be a tragedy to reduce the role of a pastor to that of a cop. We are totally different, and I’d be prepared to go to jail rather than harm one of my priests.
The harm, you notice, was to the priests, not to the children they preyed on. The priests, Rodriguez said, can “also be victims.”
Members of the hierarchy outside the United States regularly called accusations against priests the real scandal. Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera of Mexico City said there was “an orchestrated plan for striking at the prestige of the Church” that constituted a “ferocious persecution.” Cardinal Jan Schotte of Belgium (where new scandals have now been reported) cited with approval the Civiltà Cattolica article by Father Gianfranco Ghirlanda, saying that the priests should not be accountable to secular authorities and noting that the Belgian bishops had successfully avoided turning over their records on the grounds that they were official Church documents. Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez of Guadalajara claimed that the Church was being persecuted for its opposition to abortion and its support of Palestinians:
The powerful don’t like what the Church affirms and testifies to regarding the defense of life and of the family. For the powerful of the world, the positions of the Church against the financial strangulation of the countries of the Third World and in favor of the millions and millions of robbed and exploited poor don’t go down well. The powerful also won’t tolerate the balanced position of the Church regarding the dramatic situation in the Holy Land.
Most of these reactions by the hierarchy date from two to four years after my book, Papal Sin, was published. But they show the same patterns of denial, evasion, defensiveness, accusation, and protestations of innocence and holiness that I had already analyzed. The U.S. scandals had not reached their height in 2000, and they did not lead me to write the book. The occasion for my doing so was a careful reading of Lord Acton’s collected historical writings. Though Acton was a lifelong Catholic, he had been a scathing critic of the First Vatican Council, and of the dishonest way Pius IX extracted from it a definition of papal infallibility. But he assured William Gladstone that a papacy that had survived the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and had based its claims on fraud and forgery for centuries was just acting true to form.
Acton’s most famous criticisms of the papacy occurred in his dealings with Mandell Creighton in 1887. Creighton would later become the Anglican bishop of London, but, at the time, he was a professor of history at Cambridge University and the editor of the English Historical Review. He asked Acton to review in that journal volumes three and four of The History of the Papacy, which Creighton had just published. Acton attacked the volumes for whitewashing papal crimes. Creighton honorably published the review, despite its criticism of him, but, when Creighton wrote objecting to certain matters in the review, Acton sharpened his attack. His letter of April 5, 1887, contains this famous passage:
I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. ... There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
Though Acton lived before the Second Vatican Council defined the Church as “the people of God,” the entirety of Acton’s writings prove that he never equated Catholicism with the papacy. He was too good a historian for that. The Pope is a freak of history—specifically, of medieval history. His office does not date from the early history of the Christian community. Peter was not a Pope, or a bishop, or a priest—offices that did not exist in his lifetime. There are no priests in the New Testament. Peter was not the leader of the Church in either Jerusalem or Rome—communities led, respectively, by James, Jesus’s brother, and Clement. Paul, at the famous clash in Antioch, showed that he did not think Peter a sound interpreter of Jesus’s message. Males were not the only ministers at the outset, as the apostle Junia proves. In fact the early preachers of the Gospel were often a husband-and-wife team.
When the current Pope was Cardinal Ratzinger, he was asked how so many Catholics could disregard official teachings of the hierarchy. He answered that doctrine is not set by majority vote. But that is precisely how creeds and doctrines were formulated. At the great Eastern councils, like that of Nicaea, hundreds of bishops from around the world voted on the deepest mysteries of the faith—the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Resurrection. And there was no Pope at any of those councils. The democracy that would be denounced by Pius IX had been practiced in the early Church, where priests and bishops were elected by the people, and bishops could no more leave a people, once elected, than a man could leave his wife. (That is why, for a long time, no bishop could become a Pope—he could not leave his diocese.)
In the Middle Ages, it was the worldly assumption that all authority had to be feudal or monarchical in character. So the Pope became a monarch. He ruled territories. He had armies, prisons, spies. These things were finally stripped from him, but not until the nineteenth century, and despite the frantic efforts of Pius IX to retain them. Even now, the vestigial papal state is being invoked to show that the Pope, as ruler of a sovereign government, cannot be called to account for priestly sins.
In keeping with its ahistorical and medieval roots, the papacy has been reflexively opposed to social changes. Pius IX condemned democracy as an evil and illegitimate form of government. The papacy has historically been at war with science—against the Enlightenment, against textual criticism from Erasmus’s time onward, against cosmology and astronomy in Galileo’s time, against the “liberalism” of Lamennais and others, against biology and geology in Darwin’s time, against psychology in Freud’s time—and, at present, against prenatal scans, in vitro fertilization, artificial insemination, surrogate motherhood, fetal stem-cell research, and condoms to prevent AIDS in Africa.
In order to protect what are considered timeless truths, for centuries, the papacy prevented the study of the Bible in its original Hebrew and Greek forms, insisting that only the Latin Bible of the Catholic liturgy be considered authoritative. It made it a condition of ordination that would-be priests take an oath against modernism, subscribing to the biblical simplisms of Pius X’s encyclical Pascendi. It tolerated when it did not encourage—until the 1960s!—the idea that the Jewish people were guilty of deicide.
Since the papacy has been frozen in a defensive crouch, defying historical fact and free inquiry, it has been opposed to anything that might diminish the power of the Church to define reality. The authority of the bishop, of the priest, of the papacy, was more important than the Gospel. It was considered the only power that could say what the Gospel is or demands. Thus, the covering-up of sacerdotal sins and errors was a given in the Church. The infantilism of priests, the combined sexual inexperience and prurience resulting from celibacy, the belief that a celibate male is more attuned to spiritual reality than a married man—all this created a framework where sins, when they occurred, had to be denied, the victims had to be blamed, the solution to the problem was simply one of praying harder. Where therapy failed, the confessional would take the sinner with spiritual force beyond the worldly wisdom of psychiatrists.
Even now, as Church leaders belatedly try to repent and repair things, the mythical underpinnings of the priestly system continue to be taught—that only celibates can be priests (the apostles were married, all but Paul), that refusal to marry gives a man a superior caringness, that it makes him unworldly and concerned with other souls. What real change can occur when such myths are clung to with a blind ferocity? The resistance to change can be seen in the fact that the papacy has not faced the facts of a priesthood dwindling in both numbers and quality, of a financial base eroding as Church attendance goes down and donations dry up, even as damages in the billions must be paid to victims of “holy” predators. The wonderful teaching and nursing services of the nuns have evaporated.
The reaction of the hierarchy has been to dig itself even deeper into the past—to blame the Church’s troubles on such old evils as secularism, relativism, positivism, pluralism, and a “permissive” culture. The Second Vatican Council is blamed as well, and the Popes have tried to blunt or reverse its changes. Pope Benedict wants to go back to the Latin mass, with the priest turned from the people. He has cut back ecumenical initiatives, denying again the validity of Anglican orders, forbidding concelebration of Mass with Protestants, declaring (in Dominus Iesus) that all other churches are “gravely deficient.” He wants to put nuns back in their habits. He is driving to canonize the anti-Semitic Popes Pius IX and Pius XII. These are further signs of the structures of deceit—of self-deception as the first step to defying “worldly wisdom.”
I am asked, if I believe this, why I remain a Catholic. I do that precisely because I do not equate the people of God with the papacy. Well, I am told, other churches honor the Creed and the Gospel without the burden of a papacy as outdated as the medieval costumes it affects. I want to be at one with Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and others; but I want all of these communions to come together, and I cannot do that by renouncing the Catholic membership in such an ecumenical Christianity, saying some churches are better than others. When the disciples of Jesus came back from their first mission away from him, the apostle John reported, “Master, we saw a man driving out evil in our name, and he was not one of us, we tried to stop him.” Jesus asks why they did that: “No one who does a work of divine power in my name will be able the next moment to speak evil of me” (Mark 9:38-39). All of us who honor his name must come together. When a Catholic tells me—often these days, it is a young woman—that she can no longer put up with the male monarchical Church, I tell her, “Stay with us, we need you. The people of God need you.”
All those who honor the name of Jesus are engaged in a joint search for the Jesus who will not be found in marble halls or wearing imperial costumes. He is forever on the run. He is the one who said, “Whatever you did to any of my brothers, even the lowliest [elackistoi], you did to me” (Matthew 25:41). That means that the priests abusing the vulnerable young were doing that to Jesus, raping Jesus. Any clerical functionary who shows more sympathy for the predator priests than for their victims instantly disqualifies himself as a follower of Jesus. The cardinals said they must care for their own, going to jail if necessary to protect a priest. We say the same thing, but the “our own” we care for are the victimized, the poor, the violated. They are Jesus.
Garry Wills is the author, most recently, of Bomb Power. A tenth-anniversary edition of his book Papal Sin will be published later this year.
14 comments
This is an excellent piece by Gary Wills. I wish the situation were different but I could not agree more. Recently I wrote: There are times when the power of theology bends reality and creates a better world for ourselves and our children. And there are other times when theology blinds us and distorts reality. The vision exalted by our prophets is an example of the former. The latter describes the current situation of the Catholic Church. Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King are as well examples of the power of theology to transform reality for the better. Theology and faith in God can summon us to be better, can call us to transform our world. Faith is intended to give us strength day in and day out. It is our source of confidence during troubling times. This is why it saddens me to read of the growing scandal in the Catholic Church. Today I read yet another article about the church's handling of priests accused of pedophilia. Pope Benedict appears to have addressed this issue more forthrightly than any of his predecessors. Yet there still appears to be a tendency to blame the crimes of priests on contemporary sexual mores rather than looking more closely within the church and in particular examining its theology of sex. I admit I am biased. I am of course Jewish and not Catholic. I fail to understand celibacy. I do not believe that sexual passion can be suppressed. I believe it can be framed. Judaism frames sex within the holiness of marriage. Suppressing such a powerful drive leads to pain, confusion and… I have no doubt that many priests are faithful to their vow of celibacy. I also know that there are rabbis and ministers who abuse the power of their pulpit, using it primarily for the fulfillment of their own passions. Despite this I do understand one part of the theory of celibacy. It offers the priest the ability to be singularly devoted to his calling. He can do what is best for his church. His entire life can be about providing meaning for others. His theology need not ever be compromised, in particular by the concerns of a spouse or family. Sometimes I wonder what sacrifices my family has been called to make by my choice. What have they lost in order that I can devote myself to this life of providing meaning for others? I prefer of course this balancing act. (I hope my children do as well.) I would have it no other way. I believe I am a better rabbi, not only because of the choices that were made for me, that I am a son and a brother, but more importantly because of the choices I made for myself, that I am a husband and a father. There are times when I admire Catholic theology. I admire the Catholic Church and Pope John Paul II for using the power of theology and faith to help bring down the Berlin Wall and end the tyranny of Communism. In the cases we read about today, however, the church's theology is drawing a veil over reality. It would be best if the Church examined itself and in this case allowed reality to bend theology. Sometimes that makes for the more powerful faith. Rabbi Steven Moskowitz http://www.rabbimoskowitz.com/
- ravmosk
May 10, 2010 at 9:28am
I appreciate the insistence that no church is better than any other. It's a beautiful thought. The question is, how much reality are you willing to overlook in the service of this beautiful thought? If other denominations are less misogynistic and less homophobic, if they do not suffer from widespread child-rape epidemics, if they address their problems transparently instead of staging elaborate cover-ups, then they just plain-and-simple ARE better churches. Do you disagree? The Pope, the Cardinals, and the pedophile Priests are all desperately hoping that people like you will keep repeating that no church is better than any other, because this is exactly the cover they need to avoid actually taking the steps that really WOULD make the Catholic church no worse than any other church.
- homerreid
May 17, 2010 at 2:58am
This is indeed a superb essay. I have read the better part of two dozen books by you, Mr. Wills, as well as countless articles, and I should like to take this opportunity to thank you for all of your labors. You truly have a first-rate mind and you write with a great eloquence. I just read Bomb Power a month or so ago and it is an excellent account of the accretion of presidential powers since the rise of the National Security State, beginning with the development of the atomic bomb.
- liberal reformer
May 17, 2010 at 3:48am
"I am asked, if I believe this, why I remain a Catholic. I do that precisely because I do not equate the people of God with the papacy. Well, I am told, other churches honor the Creed and the Gospel without the burden of a papacy as outdated as the medieval costumes it affects. I want to be at one with Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and others; but I want all of these communions to come together, and I cannot do that by renouncing the Catholic membership in such an ecumenical Christianity, saying some churches are better than others." This summary plea by Wills seems out of step and place with the rest of this fine writing. Why indeed, if the Catholic church is so corrupt, not choose to join and worship with another confession? Wills himself argues that the church has been and should be more Democratic, and what better way to make it so than to see the "People of God" as encompassing the great diversity of Christian churches, and vote with your feet? Here, I think, we see the corrupting power of a natal creed, holding even so careful a thinker as Gary Wills to institutions and ideas that have long since lost their legitimacy. Because Wills IS a Catholic, he apparently cannot choose to be NOT BE a Catholic. Too much certainly and rightness are bound in his own mind to take that step, even though he lays out its necessity forcefully and convincingly. If you want to change the church, leave it. Based as it is on the power to hold its adherents, and money, the Catholic church will understand no criticism that is not a threat to these foundations. This is the lesson of history, and one for which Wills lays out the essential underpinnings in this screed, yet one which he cannot in his faith, misplaced though it is, take. Natal convincement - these things from our upbringing we refuse to question - not knowledge, is our original sin.
- IowaBeauty
May 17, 2010 at 7:46am
What Iowa said. The lessons of the reformation (for the Catholic Church) are still valid today, it would appear.
- Nari224
May 17, 2010 at 8:37am
What Paul Meant has been the most helpful of Wills' books in my journey (but that's a subject for another day - or is it?). With the schism in my own (Catholic but not Roman Catholic) church (Anglican, or Episcopalean), I appreciate Wills' strong desire to stay with the Church of Rome. I also understand that hoping for ecumenism does not justify renouncing one's church. Or more to the faithful point, Baptism and the Eucharist (or the Lord's Supper or Communion) are the two Sacraments ordained by Jesus Christ in the Gospels, and Wills, having been minstered the Sacraments in the Church of Rome, cannot now renounce it because the Church of Rome has erred, for all churches have erred, including in matters of Faith.
- rayward
May 17, 2010 at 10:28am
Young children accept everything they are taught. As they grow older and realize that they have been lied to about some things, they wonder: What other articles of faith that I have accepted unquestioningly are untrue? Sexual assaults by priests and the cover-ups of them, the sexism and misogyny that pervade Catholic teachings, and other offenses of the clergy and hierarchy have caused many to lose not only their allegiance to the Church but their belief in God. I would consider this the most tragic consequence of the evils described in this article and in "Papal Sin" if I still had any remnant of religious faith left. But I no longer care.
- heppner52
May 17, 2010 at 12:14pm
As one who lived through Watergate here in America, I know a cover-up and corruption of an institution from the top when I see it. No individual, nor any institution, can today claim to have a “communications” problem. Not in the age of the internet. In the age of the internet everyone knows what you or your institution is doing, and they can see when you’re lying, and trying to cover up, or when you’re engaged in a conspiracy to cover up criminal conduct. The church now finds itself looking and acting ridiculous because it is speaking to a global public that who won’t even consider hearing anything other than well crafted, finely honed lies. The church has no experience (borne of the necessity of speaking to a literate, rational, public) in crafting such lies to explain away its conduct. So now it finds itself speaking to the faithful and the general public in the west; without the ability to make consonant, the panoply of lies that it is speaking. The spectacle would be funny, if the subject matter (conspiracy to cover up and conceal child sexual abuse; and the criminals who perpetrate such crimes), weren’t so serious. And yes, absolute power corrupts absolutely. There are no divine agents or entities operating here on earth. Not the Emperor of Japan, Not the Imams of Iran; not the President of the United States (“I am not a crook.”). The men (and in our enlightened age, a few women) who inhabit the leadership of our human institutions are small, cruel, venal, scheming, sanctimonious, ignorant, vicious, dishonest, fawning, stupid, and dangerous. For these reasons they have to be watched very closely, helped (forced) out of the jobs they have, and never, never, never, trusted fully, with absolute power, absolute trust, or absolute anything. Never in its history has the Catholic Church had a more intelligent and observant communion of the faithful. In a world of the internet and the 24 hour news cycle, the lies and prevarications of the Catholic clergy are like the lies of the “Wizard” in the “Wizard of Oz”. In “Wizard” so many years ago, the Wiz is standing before the microphone, with no curtain to hide him, yelling and frantically pulling levers; he does not realize that the people are looking at him; not looking at his lie(s). Remember what the actor (Frank Morgan) says when, the curtain is pulled back, and the lies are revealed to be just that, lies? He orders his believers to not believe their eyes, their ears, or their senses. He asks (no, he orders) them; to pay no attention to the lies that are smacking them in the face. So here is what is like Watergate, smacking Catholics in the face. Let us assume that there are some eligible Bishops, Archbishops, & Cardinals who are not directly implicated in the Church’s child sex abuse scandals. When John Paul II died there was a choice of whom to replace him with. There were two courses of action open then; and who we have as Pope now is a direct result of what course was chosen. And that choice reveals everything that we need to know about the culpability and responsibility of the Clergy and their Church for these crimes. The choice was as simple as this. The College of Cardinals could have ended the cover-up, by explicitly deciding that any otherwise eligible Bishop in the Euro-American or Third-World Church, who was touched in any way by the scandal, was ineligible for nomination as Pope, period. That is if you were a Monsignor, or higher in a Diocese where there had ever been an alleged incident, you simply could not be eligible for consideration. This draconian measure is fully justified by precisely what has happened since the elevation of Pope Benedict XVI. Not only is it revealed that there was a scandal on his watch while he was in Germany; but he was running the headquarters (Vatican) operation which should have been the focus of rooting out and destroying this cancer in the Church; and yet he consensually joined the conspiracy to continue the cover-up of the scandal. What this reveals so clearly is that the either entire Church leadership is so ignorant and clueless about the actual organization that they are charged to lead, that they do not recognize the depth of the cover-up (and their obstruction of justice crime(s)) or the College of Cardinals was and is fully engaged in the crime, in the continuing conspiracy of cover-up; and therefore, of course they chose an individual who, was as deeply involved in the cover-up, prior to his elevation as Pope as the Church is; and therefore would be assured to continue the cover-up once he had been elevated.
- 12alainu
May 17, 2010 at 1:34pm
Shouldn't the Catholic Church be held to at least the same standards as ACORN? And receive the same civil or criminal rewards/punishments?
- drofnats1
May 17, 2010 at 3:37pm
"When a Catholic tells me—often these days, it is a young woman—that she can no longer put up with the male monarchical Church, I tell her, “Stay with us, we need you. The people of God need you.”" But really, how can you say that and not equate "the people of God" with the Catholic Church? How is it beneficial to any Christian outside the Catholic Church (you do believe they exist, don't you?) for said young woman to remain a Catholic? And why the false either/or of either remaining Catholic or renouncing faith altogether? It all has the stench of codependent rationalization.
- cspencef
May 17, 2010 at 4:46pm
Wow. I literally could not have said it better myself. I truly enjoy reading well-reasoned, well-presented arguments that I disagree with. But I remain baffled by the last little bit, about why Mr Wills remains in this organization. By and large, it is true that ideas should not be held responsible for the people who believe in them. But doesn't there come a time when the fruits of an idea become so rotten, so blatantly wretched, that the idea itself must be re-examined or tossed out completely? In my mind, communism would qualify, and I reluctantly conclude that the Catholic Church, as currently constituted, qualifies as well. Apart from political considerations, how is it that this church does not qualify for prosecution under the federal RICO statute?
- gwcross
May 18, 2010 at 3:56pm
I concur with the anger, but I'm not sure that the quotations provided justify the ideas of conspiracy and cover-up. Most, but not all, of the quotations from Cardinals and others can reasonably be construed, although none of them totally embrace the situation nor were they meant to by the speakers, I imagine. Trying to seque the sex abuse matter into a delegitimation of the Papacy is, I think, a bridge too far. And frankly, as a Catholic myself, I'm not sure what the 'people of God' would look like at this point if it weren't for some centralizing fulcrum - perhaps more like Protestantism's many groups (and some of them kind of outre); an orchestra without a conductor or a score is going to make something that isn't quite music. I put up a Post on my site: http://chezodysseus.blogspot.com/2010/05/garry-wills-and-abusive-popes-i-have.html.
- Publion
May 19, 2010 at 2:01am
I agree with Publicon, though from a different angle. I am an agnostic and a lapsed Catholic. I know a lot of very traditionalist Catholics. They must be counted as the People of God, too, or the concept has no meaning. They love both the current pope and the papacy. Heirarchy sits very well with them, and the liberal ideas they oppose--research on feritilized embryos, gay mariage--are as virulently opposed by many protestants. A gathering of all those who honor the name of Jesus would be a) include some very frightening people and b) include at minimum a solid minority who would not care for Mr. Wills or TNR. And who is this Jesus? Mr. Wills is contemptuous of the papacy for not being historical but for being medeival. What are we to make of Jesus? Was he any more historical? Was he not a contstruct of the Hebraic-Hellenic age? Was the papacy any less "whooshed" out of the air than Jesus was? And let's remind ourselves that honoring the victims of this wretched affair means that we shouldn't use their agony for political gain, but that we should redouble our devotion not to the name of some ancient savior who has little to offer our time, but to the prosaic truths of no glamore: Catholic Priests are no more likely to commit pedophilia than the male members of any other profession. Ending celibacy will do nothing for this problem. Prosecuting the hierarchy will.
- masmith
May 24, 2010 at 7:27pm
Per my last comment: Sorry for the spelling! If I left any doubt, I admire Gary Wills a great deal...
- masmith
May 25, 2010 at 1:29pm