The Next Catholic Reform, Part III

[Saint] Francis wanted to call the outcast, ready to revolt, to be part of the people of God. If the flock was to be gathered again, the outcasts had to be found again. Francis didn’t succeed, and I say it with great bitterness. … Excluded as they were from the flock, all of them were ready to hear, or to produce, every sermon that, harking back to the word of Christ, would condemn the behavior of the shepherds and would promise their punishment one day. The powerful always realized this. The recovery of the outcasts demanded reduction of the privileges of the powerful …

—Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

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Brass tacks, then. If my evaluation of how the Catholic Church got into this mess is mostly or even largely accurate, then we can identify a few reasonable, workable ways to confront the mess and clean it up. The summary is: we have a hierarchy that feels embattled and defensive, trying to maintain its authority with its members and its prosperity and influence in the general culture; this has led to a deformed attachment to appearances, which rewards dishonesty and evasion and punishes complaint regardless of its legitimacy; and this in turn results in a clerical culture that fosters unhealthy approaches to sex and gives substantial cover to predators.

The focus of most traditional Catholics in accounting for this scandal has been upon sex (and especially homosexuality), but I think that’s mostly a red herring. It is the diseased dynamics concerning image and power that brought the scandal into being—if the hierarchy had not been trying to protect both, it would probably have dealt with the problem openly and as it was discovered, and there would have been far fewer victims. These are problems with pride and avarice, not lust.

Conversely, progressivist Catholics have long been talking about the all-male, celibate priesthood and the Church’s doctrinal stances on issues like divorce and homosexuality as contributing factors to abuse. Personally I’m a little skeptical of this, partly because there are other institutions consisting largely or entirely of celibate men—for instance, there are monastic orders among Buddhists and Hindus, as well as Eastern Orthodox Christians—which, so far as I know, don’t display the same problems that the Catholic hierarchy does. However, to the extent that factors like an all-male environment intersect with image and power issues (and I strongly suspect they do), they’d be relevant, though not necessarily in the way progressivists claim.

The thing to do, I believe, is to hack at the roots of pride and avarice, rather than plucking the flowers of lust. There are several ways this could be done, none of them mutually exclusive.

1. Impose poverty on clergy. There’s nothing wrong with having a beautiful church building, indeed there’s everything right with it: we should give God our best, materially as well as otherwise, and it’s a more creditable (and more public) use of gilding and marble than a billionaire’s private gym or a shopping mall. But chanceries, rectories, and episcopal residences could be cut down to size. A chancery office does not need chestnut panelling and Tiffany chandeliers to serve its purpose, and outside of the liturgy, bishops do not really need to appear in state. Even if they are receiving dignitaries, what could be more appropriate than requiring an official who wants to deal with the Church to deal with her in her poverty? the poverty in which her Lord entered, lived, and died in the world? An inverse relationship between ecclesiastical stature and secular prosperity would not only help rein in pride and greed, it would be deeply apostolic.

2. Introduce laity, male and female, into the official operations of the Church. Of course there is some of this already. But it can be ramped up. Sacramentally speaking, qualified laymen and laywomen could be made eligible to fulfill almost any function in the Church except for celebrating the sacraments: teaching seminarians, running hospitals and schools, serving as diocesan officials. Even the office of cardinal could be reöpened to laymen—it was not restricted to clergy until 1917, though most cardinals were in fact priests or bishops; and indeed, the ancient electoral form included the right of the laity of the diocese of Rome to confirm or reject the papal candidate whom the clergy had picked, a system which was not changed for the first seven hundred years of the Church’s existence. [1] It’s particularly important that seminarians should be formed with constant (not periodic) contact with laymen: these are the people they’re devoting their lives to serving and they should understand them.

Introducing women into these official functions seems to me like a good idea, too, up to and including appointing female cardinals. (This is a different matter from conferring Holy Orders on women, which has been pronounced theologically impossible by the Church. Celebrating the sacraments and making authoritative doctrinal definitions are the powers attached to Order, but most business the Church conducts is not directly either of these things.) This is not because women are any less fallen than men, but because, in a number of ways, they aren’t likely to make the same kinds of mistakes that men typically do. The obvious example in our current situation is that women are far less likely to be sex offenders, and, to judge from the last two or three years, less likely to ignore or minimize reports and evidence of sexual abuse. But the peculiarly feminine genius, which I don’t claim to understand very well, is one half of the human experience, and I think it’s accordingly foolish to exclude it from the human governance of the Church. She is far more than her human governors; but she is not less, nor is she immune to their faults and limitations.

3. Encourage all Catholics, and require clergy and other officials in Catholic institutions, to be thoroughly educated on sexuality. I’ve said several times that this is a power problem more than a chastity problem, but chastity is obviously involved—partly because, in both healthy and unhealthy ways, sex is easily experienced as power. [2] Now, we have the doctrines of chaste conduct, marital and celibate, pretty well outlined. We have some acquaintance with psychology and sexual development. We have the beginnings of a mystical theology of sexuality, e.g. in the work of St John Paul II. But, to be perfectly blunt, what we need is sex ed.

Dishonesty about contraceptives, ‘discreet’ silence on sexual matters, defamatory portraits of the queer and kink communities, and an alarming lack of clarity about consent, are all familiar in Catholic circles. But none of them should be, nor do they need to be. Many of them are fostered by a desire to protect the Church’s teaching; but, as Kallistos Ware pointed out in The Orthodox Church, ‘Christianity, if true, has nothing to fear from honest inquiry.’ 

Catholic teachers and apologists should be prepared to acknowledge that, yes, condoms work to prevent pregnancy and STDs most of the time, and our reasons for objecting to them lie elsewhere; Catholic parents and pastors should be prepared to speak frankly about things like masturbation and porn, without hiding behind euphemism or manipulating people through shame and guilt; Catholic theologians and journalists should be willing to learn about gay, trans, and kink people from their own lips, rather than repeating quack science and stereotypes and excusing their prejudicial ignorance as fidelity (as if understanding a community entailed approving of everything about it); Catholic teenagers and confessors should be able to identify the difference between genuine consent, abuse of authority, coërcion, intoxication, and predatory acts. Addressing these issues intelligently is not an obstacle to chastity. It is the subject matter of chastity. Knowledge is the natural ally of integration, and that, not abstinence just as such, is what chastity is.

4. Establish total financial transparency, at both the parochial and the diocesan levels. This is going to get some significant pushback from the hierarchy, but I think it is one hundred percent necessary to any substantial reform. Money is what allows abusers and those who cover for them to get away with what they do—rarely, I think, through direct bribery or embezzlement, though that doubtless happens, but rather because money can purchase two things that those who wish to keep shaming secrets want: privacy and lawyers. ‘Uncle Ted’s’ notorious beach house was a splendid little thing for keeping his indiscretions away from the public eye, and Cardinal Wuerl’s legal team enabled him to be transferred from Pittsburgh to the second see of the nation despite his ghastly record; privacy and lawyers may be seen operating together in the squalid behavior of the Archdiocese of Baltimore over the half-revelations of The Keepers. None of that can be dealt with unless there’s total openness about how much money is coming in and what it’s being spent on.

And when I say total, I mean total. Gross income [3] for every parish, school, hospital, diocese, and so forth; the wages of every person paid by the Church, whether salaried or hourly and irrespective of their work; every expense footed by parochial or diocesan accounts or by institutions they govern and fund, including both the amount paid and what the payment was for; every yearly surplus or deficit; and legally binding statements that the information provided is both true and complete. Websites would be the easiest way of making this information publicly available, though letters might be preferable for that very reason—I’m not certain.

5. Restore the liturgical ritual of degradation for serious offenders among the clergy. This may be the least important of the proposals I’m putting forth; but I think it would be worthwhile. Considering the sometimes liturgical character of many of the offenses the scandal is about (e.g., abuse happening in the confessional), and the publicity it has entailed, a public and liturgical response is called for. Degradation, the ritual removal of the privileges of ecclesiastical office, fulfills these requirements exactly, and helps symbolize how seriously the Church needs to take these things. I think it might help reassure the faithful, too, insofar as the liturgy is the principal business of the Church and also the context in which Catholics are most likely to deal with fellow Catholics and with the hierarchy, and placing these issues in that liturgical context is therefore an act which directly, officially addresses the majority of Catholic Christians.

Doubtless other measures would also be reasonable, and many of these things would help to heal the gravely wounded trust of the laity in the hierarchy. Still, these five points seem to me like a very good place to begin. But, remember, any effort to implement them must begin in prayer. Partly because it is going to take a lot of prayer to get the clergy to accept such a reform—I mean, if I were in their shoes, I wouldn’t much want to give up my possessions and stature. But also because it would (perhaps will) be very easy for these acts to become merely malicious. Few of us can quite truthfully say that we don’t enjoy seeing someone who hurt us being taken down a peg. And there is little, if anything, of heaven in that pleasure. Only God can purify our hearts and the pleasures they harbor, and guide all our deeds to a wholesome end.

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[1] It was changed in 769, through a synod convened to deal with electoral abuses and a number of disputed elections that resulted in antipopes. For the time, this was probably a wise decision, but what is wise changes according to circumstances.

[2] This is a huge topic that I am only hinting at here. A guy I dated for a little while a few years back used to say, ‘Everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power.’ I don’t think he was right exactly, but the maxim is, I think, more oversimplified than wrong. In particular, the pleasure of male strength (in both heterosexual and gay male sex) is an obvious way in which sex is experienced as power, as too in a different way is the compelling beauty of the female (in heterosexual and lesbian sex). Most forms of kink, like BDSM, involve much more explicit or ritualized power games. I don’t think these things are intrinsically unhealthy, although their development and expression certainly can be.

[3] Gross income, not net income. Net income is, approximately, synonymous with profits. Gross income is the total amount of money received into an account, before any deductions or payments are made from it.