An Open Letter to Cardinal Wuerl

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To Donald Cardinal Wuerl, the Archbishop of Washington.

Your Eminence: peace be with you.

I’m Gabriel Blanchard, and I entered the Catholic faith under the ægis of your archdiocese, though I've since transferred into the Ordinariate under Bishop Lopes. I have a lot to say and none of it is likely to be very pleasant reading. I hope and ask that you read it anyway, prayerfully, because it is deeply important. I am not an ideal person to write this; I have some seriously ugly skeletons in my closet. I am not meaningfully different from a prostitute, speaking to a prince of the Church. But given the role of the blessed Magdalene on Easter morning, I am bold to write anyway.

Here is a (partial) transcript of an interview you gave just a few days ago for the convention of the Knights of Columbus.

Fr. Rosica: You’re playing a very important role right now … It’s a moment of crisis, but it’s also a moment of new beginning. Tell me how you’re coping with the situation—your predecessor, we’re well aware of it in Canada, and the message of hope that you’re giving to your people, to your priests, your seminarians, but also to the American Church.
Card. Wuerl: Well, it is a moment of new beginning. Remember, when we had the first crisis of the realization that clergy were being abused by priests, back in 2002, we took a very strong stand. We created a charter, the Holy See provided for us the essential norms. Let me just say, it’s working. Right now, when you hear of abuse, when you hear of a case of abuse, when you hear of—they’re talking about things that happened decades ago, for the most part. So, the charter worked. Now what we’re realizing is, we need to have something that would also be a mechanism for when a bishop isn’t as faithful as he needs to be, even if the charge goes back forty, fifty years. So, what I’m suggesting, what I have proposed to our conference of bishops, is, we already have that statement of commitment we all did back in 2002. Let’s put some practical measures to it, to make it work. What I’m suggesting is, we already have a National Review Board made up of laypeople. Why don’t we take from our conference a number of bishops from different committees, to work with it, invite the National Review Board to join them, so now we have a permanent body; and if someone has an accusation they want to bring, they can bring it there. We now have two things at work.
Fr. Rosica: Well, what you’re dealing—you’re talking about the nature of the Church. That the Church is not only clerical, only laypeople, it’s this unity. Your diocese is a perfect example of that. Some of the most competent laypeople I’ve met in my life are in the leadership positions in your diocese. You’ve done that.
Card. Wuerl: But isn’t this what Pope Francis is saying. Pope Francis has been saying, we’re all missionary disciples … It doesn’t make sense: a shepherd without a flock, and a flock without a shepherd. They’re co-relative terms, they go together. This is what we’re saying needs to be done today, when we have—I don’t think this is some massive, massive crisis. It was a terrible disappointment.
Fr. Rosica: For all of us. For you, for me. He was a friend to us.
Card. Wuerl: So, we’re saying now, well, what do we do in the future to see there’s a mechanism so if somebody wants to say something about a bishop, they have a place to go.

Here is a selection of a story from the Boston Globe that ran in April of 2002:

Over the last several days and weeks, prominent church opinionmakers, including two cardinals, have suggested that the clergy sexual abuse crisis is a relatively minor phenomenon that is being turned into a major scandal by the media and others with an ax to grind.
Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington, for example, told The Washington Post this week that some newspapers are having a ‘heyday’ with the issue.
‘Elements in our society who are very opposed to the Church’s stand on life, the Church’s stand on family, the Church’s stand on education … see in this an opportunity to destroy the credibility of the Church,’ he said. ‘And they’re really working on it—and somewhat successfully.’
Cardinal William H. Keeler of Baltimore made a similar point … saying, ‘It’s really the news media of the United States that has made this an American problem. We’re in this feeding-frenzy situation right now, where the coverage of cases of 20, 30 years ago is being plastered in the headlines.’

This is not a good look for you.

It does not look bad because of a merely accidental resemblance between sentiments you’ve expressed, and the blame-shifting lies of a then popular and respected pedophile. I dare say that the resemblance really is accidental; but the echo of your predecessor is the thing least wrong with what you said.

Beginning with the optimistic sales pitch ‘This is a moment of new beginning’ is beyond crass and tasteless. It is the first smack in the face to the abuse victims whom you almost entirely ignore here. I say the first, because there are more, such as the assertion that this is not a massive crisis. Speaking as a survivor of molestation, any number of victims greater than zero should not be spoken of in a tone of dismissal. And for an abuse victim, I was fortunate. I was never whipped or made the subject of child pornography, and I could not be impregnated or forced to get an abortion. You can read about more than a thousand less fortunate victims of over three hundred priests in this sickening report just released by a Pennsylvanian grand jury; and that is only about Pennsylvania. This is absolutely a massive, massive crisis.

Your description of ex-Cardinal McCarrick’s behavior as ‘disappointing’ is an appalling understatement. He was not a disappointment; he was not just not as faithful as he should have been. He was a liar, a vow-breaker, a hypocrite, and a rapist, who manipulated men and boys for sexual release and destroyed the faith, hearts, and lives of an untold number of them. As a shepherd, it is your job to say that, in those words. Acknowledging the truth straightforwardly is your duty to them and to God. Euphemism, minimizing, and indirectness are harmful to the flock. Those who are recovering from the trauma of sexual and spiritual abuse need that trauma to be honestly acknowledged by Catholic authorities. Polite dining room language does not make the Church look better, and even if it did that would not make her be better: at best such language scandalously appears to, and at worst it really does, exacerbate the atmosphere of denial that was so largely responsible for these abuses going unpunished in the first place.

But then, where, in this interview, are the victims? You mention ‘clergy being abused by priests’ early on—I take it this is a reference to the fact that many or most of the victims revealed in the scandals of 2002 and later had served as altar boys and were thus, in the older and broader sense of the word, clergy. This is the only direct allusion you make to the boys and girls who were manipulated, coërced, lied to, molested, threatened, gaslit. All by people whom they’d been taught to hold in the highest esteem as the instruments of God. But you and Fr Rosica do find a moment to pity yourselves about how sad this was for you, having a friend engulfed in scandal.

This suggests a myopia that may explain why you see no problem with putting a group of bishops effectively in charge of an investigation into a habit of concealment among bishops. For of course, if you combine a group of bishops with a group of laymen on any ecclesiastical task, the latter will be expected (by everybody concerned) to defer to the former; and we know from the horrible history of your predecessor’s two careers, the public and the private, that bishops show a pattern of covering for their priests and for each other. We know it, too, from the Church’s disgraceful treatment of Frank Keating, the first head of the National Review Board, whose severe words about the American bishops led to his being pressured into resigning—which he did, but without once apologizing for or modifying his remarks for the last fifteen years. A bureaucratic, episcopally overseen approach to this problem is obviously useless.

But even from a purely practical viewpoint—is there any reason the National Review Board could not be made a permanent institution with competence to examine cases about bishops? The original draft of the Dallas Charter applied to ‘clerics,’ but was altered to say ‘priests and deacons’ in order to exclude bishops; why? Your Eminence speaks, rightly enough, of the need for fraternal care for one another among bishops. But that is not enough. Absolution without confession and indulgence without penance are acts of corruption, not mercy, and they rob the victims of evil shepherds of any scrap of justice. 

Additionally, I do not share your confidence that you ‘took a very strong stand’ and ‘it’s working.’ For one thing, the prominent role played by Theodore McCarrick in drafting the policies for dealing with abuse casts quite a shadow over this ‘strong stand.’ What confidence can the laity possibly have in a document designed to deal with predatory priests, which was drafted by a predatory bishop?

Moreover, yes, the cases of abuse that are coming out of the woodwork are decades old; that’s normal. Victims of abuse frequently take a long time to report the abuse, for a wide variety of reasons. Abuse nearly always involves a power dynamic, in which the abuser has some kind of control over the victim, so that reporting it is a very dangerous thing to do. The abuser may also have power over other people the victim cares about, and can thus emotionally blackmail them. Many victims are groomed and manipulated into believing that the experience is consensual, or that it is primarily their own fault, or both, so that talking about it seems like exposing oneself rather than the abuser: they may be so conditioned that they simply don’t recognize what’s happening as abusive. Victims are frequently disbelieved or ignored, especially when the abuser has any kind of public stature, like a successful coach, a popular comedian, a respected politician, or a prestigious Christian minister. A given victim might be subject to any number of these inhibitions; that so many victims do manage to speak up forty or fifty years later is itself a mercy and an act of courage. We will not really be able to know how well the Dallas Charter is working for decades yet.

As a shepherd yourself, this is information about abuse you ought to know already. It is Your Eminence's duty as a spiritual father, and to ignore or neglect it is sin.

But above all: words, words, words. Beloved, let us not love with words or tongue, but with deeds and in truth. It’s fine to talk about charters and propose committees and so forth, fine and easy and worthless. The words that matter most right now are not ‘We’re implementing a mechanism for anyone who wants to bring a formal accusation against a bishop,’ spoken to the public in general. The words that matter most right now, properly addressed first to the victims and then to the Church and the world as a whole, are these. ‘We as a body, and I as a member of it, have committed terrible sins. I am sorry. I hope you can forgive me for the part I have played in this; and that you can forgive all of us for our neglect and betrayal of the trust that you, and God, placed in us. As a Christian and especially as a prelate, I will do whatever I can to make amends to you for the horrible agony you’ve suffered.’ Public penance from the whole college of bishops is called for, and public apology, and whatever reparations can be made (whether the apologies are accepted or not). Literal sackcloth and ashes would not be an excessive beginning.

This is not a time to rehearse how much better we’re doing, if there ever is such a time. It is a time to confess and do penance. For the kingdom of heaven is, as ever, at hand. Innocence, compassion, and the truth will prevail, in this life or the next, and if you do not surrender yourself to them then you will experience them as judgment.

The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant, whom ye delight in: behold, he shall come, saith the Lord of hosts. But who may abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand when he appeareth? For he is like a refiner’s fire: and he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver: and he shall purify the sons of Levi, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness. And I will come near to you to judgment; and I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, and against the adulterers, and against false swearers, and against those that oppress the widow and the fatherless, and fear not me, saith the Lord of hosts. For I am the Lord, I change not: therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed. —Malachi 3.1-6

I shall pray for you. I ask that you also pray for me.

The peace of the Lord Jesus, the Good Shepherd who laid down his life for the sheep, be with you.

Gabriel Ian Matthew Blanchard

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The Technique of Pardon, Part III

Night descended until there was nothing but a thin streak of red between it and the black line of earth but still he stood there. He felt his hunger no longer as a pain but as a tide. … There, rising and spreading in the night, a red-gold tree of fire ascended as if it would consume the darkness in one tremendous burst of flame. The boy’s breath went out to meet it. He knew that this was the fire that had encircled Daniel, that had raised Elijah from the earth, that had spoken to Moses and would in the instant speak to him. He threw himself against the ground and with his face against the dirt of the grave, he heard the command. Go warn the children of God of the terrible speed of mercy. The words were as silent as seeds opening one at a time in his blood. … His singed eyes, black in their deep sockets, seemed already to envision the fate that awaited him but he moved steadily on, his face set toward the dark city, where the children of God lay sleeping. 

—Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

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III. Reconciliation

Though truthfully, ‘reconciliation and its complications’ would be at least as good a header here. Anyhow.

The ‘classical’ form that reconciliation takes is for the offender to apologize and the victim to forgive, thus healing the wounded relationship. For the victim, the movements of grieving and compassion precede and prepare, as we’ve seen, while for the offender, the steps of repentance are confession (recognition of the wrongdoing) and contrition (apologizing). It’s rare that any act of forgiveness is so simple, but it does happen, and this simplicity is the center from which the deviations are understood.

There are several principal deviations. The first is that, because the victim is fallen too, it may be necessary to make an interior act of forgiveness many times for a single offense. Long-term consequences that an offense caused, the habit of rumination, a defensive ego—all can renew the wound, picking at the sutures of grief. And this is properly the victim’s burden, not the forgiven offender’s; for forgiveness, being a gift, can’t be snatched back any more than a Christmas present. It is part of our training in pardon. To be perfected, we have to forgive with our whole soul, and it is the parts of the soul that haven’t gone through grieving, compassion, and reconciliation that are rearing up at these moments. The call to renew our forgiveness is the call to extend our being more fully into it.

Another is the question of prudence. God can read hearts, but we, except by a miracle that he is rarely pleased to bestow, cannot. Which means that we are necessarily at risk of pardoning, and thus enabling, the unrepentant. To a mind properly formed by compassion, this is an upsetting prospect, because encouraging a person in sin is by definition harmful to them—yet, on the other hand, to refuse forgiveness to a sincere penitent is hurtful, too.

The general rule, I think, is to reconcile unless we have complete moral confidence that the offender’s request for forgiveness is insincere. This strong inclination to one pole rather than the other obviously doesn’t accord with the notion of the Golden Mean; and that’s fine. As noted before, gold is only pavement in the heavenly Jerusalem. Genuine repentance can come in some very mixed, very halting, very unattractive forms; it is not our role as Christians (that is, as those who have consented to live in an economy of gift) to reject it. The only basis for doing so is the authentic concern that doing so would almost certainly encourage a person in wrongdoing, and that will rarely occur, because near certainty is a rare thing.

The third, and in some ways the saddest, difficulty lies in wanting to forgive someone who won’t apologize. A person might not apologize because they’re not sorry, whether through ignorance and thoughtlessness or through hardness of heart. Or they might not apologize due to a despairing recognition of the evil they’ve done: when an injury is so horrible that it may seem unforgivable to the victim or to onlookers, it’s likely to seem unforgivable to the perpetrator too—so much so that even to ask for forgiveness feels like a fresh outrage.

The former problem, that of the offender not realizing that they’ve done something wrong, requires great delicacy to handle. It is possible to rebuke someone compassionately, but the times when we are most ready to rebuke aren’t typically our most compassionate times. I speak hesitatingly on this subject, because I am the sort of person who holds a grudge, prods and pokes at wounds. The art of rebuking someone without rancor does not come easily to most people, and certainly not to me.

I think—again I emphasize that I am not at all sure—that the rule to keep in mind here is that, to the extent that the idea of rebuking someone is attractive, to that extent we are probably approaching it in the wrong spirit. Not because we need to be terrified or disgusted by rebuke as such (we don’t), but because delighting in rebuke nearly always has a self-righteous and vindictive element. If what brings us joy is the prospect of the person repenting, rather than of their being ashamed or humiliated, then we may have a moderated confidence in our motives. If we don’t have that—well, we rarely, perhaps never, have totally unmixed motives. We can only pray for our motives to be made purer, and that the pure elements in them would be the uppermost.

Of course, we might, if we are honest with ourselves, be concerned that any rebuke we issue would be an exercise in self-righteousness. If that seems like a reasonable concern, it isn’t wrong to wait for our hearts to heal or mature further. The whole burden of pardon does not rest on ourselves.

Turning to the lattermost problem, that of an offender being too ashamed of what he has done to even ask for forgiveness, there is only so much we can do. If we suspect that someone is under this curse, we can tell them that we’re willing to forgive, as God Incarnate told us that he was willing to forgive and made the sacraments of the Church available accordingly. But, until and unless the offender approaches the means of pardon, we can only wait and pray. Pardon, being a gift, can’t be forced on anybody.

And of the middle problem, the person who has done wrong and will not submit to either confession or contrition? The offender who, on whatever basis, perseveres in injury?

Both must wish, and will, to be a part of an act. But if one of us does not wish to be? if we refuse coïnherence? ‘Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone.’ If a man will be separate from the love which is man’s substance, he can; the ancient promise holds: ‘I will choose their delusions.’ Whoever refuses … it is difficult to see what else can be done except to leave him alone. If he shuts himself out of the mortal coïnherence, or we; if he shuts himself out of the act in which, more than any other, the mortal coïnheres with the divine or we; then that solitude is the answer. If it is he who refuses, and we have been sincere in our goodwill, then at least we are innocent there—if we have not supposed ourselves to be innocent in anything else. … It is a lame conclusion? a very lame conclusion. Mortal ones are apt to be; only divine conclusions conclude. Christian publicists indeed are apt to sound as if they thought they performed their moral duty merely by teaching it; it is easier to write a book repeating that God is love than to think it; it is easier, that is, to say it publicly than to think it privately. Unfortunately, to be of any use, it has to be thought very privately, and thought very hard. [1]

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[1] From Charles Williams’ magnificent little book The Forgiveness of Sins, which I recommend to anybody who will stand still long enough.

The Technique of Pardon, Part II

Forgiveness can be considered as applicable in three ways: (i) to things which need not be forgiven; (ii) to things which can be forgiven; (iii) to things which cannot be forgiven. The first and third, put so, are contradictory; nevertheless, the phrases may for the present stand. … It may be objected that such operations, in many and many a relationship of love, are purely ‘natural’; they neither invoke, nor think of invoking, the supernatural world of which St Paul was thinking. So; but then the great goods do operate naturally. Where there is love, there is Christ; where there is human reconciliation, there is the Church. To say so is not in any way to weaken the supernatural: where the consciousness of that exists, the power of the operation ought in every way to pierce deeper, to last longer, to live stronger, than in the natural. … He who professes a supernatural validity for his acts must follow them out into that whole validity. 

—Charles Williams, The Forgiveness of Sins

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II. Compassion

When we approach the sacrament of penance, or indeed when we make any sincere act of repentance and seek reconciliation with someone we’ve wronged, we go through the three steps of confession, [1] contrition, and absolution. Confession means admitting that we’ve done wrong; contrition means being sorry for it and apologizing; and absolution means being forgiven by the person we wronged (done by God in the confessional, and by whomever we apologized to in the rest of life).

The technique of pardon (grieving, compassion, reconciliation) is similar in some ways. The first step, grieving, parallels confession: both involve recognizing and admitting a truth about the act that needs forgiving, and both are prerequisites to the rest of the process. The emotional process of healing that’s involved in grieving doesn’t have an obvious parallel in the steps of repentance, since God doesn’t need to process emotions—although it could be argued that the Passion itself is the parallel.

The second step, which is the counterpart to contrition, is compassion. Once we are healed and balanced (or even before that, depending on the wound), the next step toward forgiveness is to see the person who wronged us with the eyes of love and mercy. And this is the step which often meets with indignant refusal.

It’s hard to look with kindness, patience, or pity on somebody who’s taken advantage of us. More than that, it’s an act of generosity. Compassion cannot be extracted; it is a gift.

And that, that movement from an economy of debt and payment to an economy of free giving and receiving, is what makes the difference between forgiveness and the refusal to forgive. To accept God’s forgiveness is to enter the economy of gift. That is why gold is used to pave the streets of the New Jerusalem: purchase and wages have become as irrelevant to its coinherent, relational life as concrete is to our relationships.

‘I’m not asking for anybody’s bleeding charity.’
‘Then do. At once. Ask for the Bleeding Charity. Everything here is for the asking and nothing can be bought.’
—C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

The catch (so to call it) is the same catch that’s present in all being. Everything is double-edged: what makes it work, when we try to oppose it, will make it work against us. If we enter the economy of gift, we must enter it entirely. I believe that is why we are given the terrible warning that if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses: not because the Lord will withhold it, but because we cannot pick and choose how our relationships will work; we must work on one basis or the other, law or grace, debt or gift. And if we insist on the former, we shall have it—though we probably won’t like it when we get it.

How, then, are we to practice compassion when we don’t want to? Well, like every good action, it is rooted in two things: the grace of God and the assent of man. Even if we, I, find it difficult to believe, God loves to give, and he will not withhold the grace of the desire to forgive if we ask him for it. For that, we can only pray and, if need be, wait.

And the assent? that is, if not easy, at least not complicated. We choose to act toward what is best for the person that hurt us. We can’t control our passions, though we can pray for them to become better, and, if we find ourselves having a twinge of pity for the misery of the person that sinned against us, we can encourage that feeling. We can’t always want to forgive, but we can intend to forgive despite what we want, and pray for the ability to do it, if and when the time comes. The gift of righteousness that we receive in Christ is, among other things, the power to really do—however haltingly—at least a little of what he asks of us. And as dizzyingly high and steep as Mount Purgatory is, in both this life and (I imagine) the next, it does in fact get easier the higher you go.

The third step, reconciliation, carries certain complications with it. To begin with, the offender may never apologize (and that for a number of different reasons), thus leaving compassion itself yearning for a consummation it has not received. Again, reconciliation itself can require multiple efforts of will on our part, as the memory and the pain recur to our minds and hearts. And the question of penance or indulgence has to be treated intelligently, too. So I will leave those considerations for my next.

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[1] Unfortunately this has a rather confusing name—it is informally used for the sacrament as a whole, for non-sacramental and even non-liturgical admissions of guilt, and even for statements of belief; and yet its use as a theological term is so entrenched that intruding a synonym (could one be found) would risk even more confusion.

The Technique of Pardon, Part I

Then his lord, after that he had called him, said unto him, “O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me: shouldest thou not also have had compassion on thy fellow servant, even as I had pity on thee?” And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him. So likewise shall my heavenly Father do unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses. 

—The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, 18.32-35

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Yesterday I got back from Revoice’s first conference in St Louis. It was phenomenal. The mere sensation of being in a room full of four hundred people who all either understood from within what it’s like to be queer and a Christian, or had come because they wanted to understand, was so overwhelming that I had to step out and do some deep breathing, several times.

One thing that caught my attention was how often a measured and (I believe) godly anger was expressed towards the homophobic words, actions, and policies that have damaged so many of us, coming from fellow believers. I’ve encountered anger with Christianity before, but it’s generally been the clear result of an injury or string of injuries—which, sadly, is no mystery—and has had the haphazard, defensive, and unscrupulous quality of an immediate response to pain. I can’t blame that sort of anger, but I can’t trust it, either. The anger at Revoice, what there was of it, was different. Not primarily by being gentler or quieter; Matthew 23 is one of the angriest passages in Scripture, and came from a sinless mouth. It was different because it was reasoned, temperate, even calm—equity is passion acting in lucidity, as Charles Williams might repeat. And, startling though it may be to say so, I believe that an anger of this kind is very often an important element in forgiveness.

This is because forgiveness is so generally mixed up with indulgence in our culture, both secular and Christian. Forgiveness means reconciling with somebody who’s done wrong; indulgence means letting them off the consequences. And it is perfectly possible to forgive without indulging, in the knowledge that what’s best for the other person is, exactly, that they should be effectually and memorably corrected. A sex offender might experience remorse over his horrible actions and resolve to reform, but it might or might not follow from that that he should be paroled; indeed, if his remorse and his resolve are sincere, he might want to serve his full sentence.

How, then, are we to approach forgiveness, if it isn’t just letting things slide? The sacrament of Penance shows us the process from the penitent’s side—confession (recognition of our wrongdoing), contrition (being sorry for it and saying so), and absolution (being forgiven). But of course, when we are on the other side of the equation, these steps are not necessary [1]; and God, unlike ourselves, never has difficulty or hesitates to forgive. The technique of penitence, however little we practice it, is tolerably clear in outline. But what is the technique of pardoning?

I believe that this technique does exist, and that it has these three parts: (i) grieving, or recovery; (ii) compassion; and (iii) reconciliation. The first is concerned with ourselves, and the second and third with the person who wronged us.

These three things need not occur in distinguishable, conscious sequence in every act of forgiveness. There are offenses light enough that hardly any recovery is necessary; and conversely, there are offenses heavy enough that we may be able to forgive them long before we’ve finished repairing the damage they’ve done to us. But I take these three steps to be the basic framework on which quite different acts of pardon may be built, the center of the derivations.

I. Grieving

I’ve chosen this name for all of the psychological processing we have to do to recover from a wound. I prefer grieving over healing or some similar adjective for two reasons: first, because grieving a wrong that’s been done to us is very like grieving a death or some other tragic loss; and second, because Americans at least are extremely bad at this—we have a strange aversion to, even an embarrassment about, sadness—so that the idea could use some emphasis.

To be injured changes our universe, at least a little. Any change can require a kind of grieving, and injuries nearly always do. The essential parts of grieving, as I understand the process, are: acknowledging what happened; recognizing that it was wrong; experiencing the pain (along with the anger, sadness, etc. that that may involve); and returning to a place of psychological stability in the new, changed universe.

The trope of the ‘Five Stages of Grief,’ or the Kübler-Ross model, is not universally accepted, but it does touch on some of the experiences that many people go through in grief: shock, denial, anger, bargaining, numbness, exhaustion. These emotions have to be allowed their say. Wallowing isn’t a good thing, but repression does (if possible) even more damage, because when you simply tell an emotion No and force it down, it doesn’t go away—it’s like compressing a bag of water, the excess will just bulge out in another place; and when the bag of water is a person, it’s virtually bound to bulge out somewhere unhealthy. So that then you have to deal with the unhealthy consequences, and still go back and do the original emotional work you had refused: patiently and simply letting your feelings be felt. Not obeying every impulse you have, but acknowledging every emotion that this loss or wound has aroused in you. Emotions are messengers, and until their message is delivered they will not let you be.

It is very hard work to just sit with your feelings and let them speak. When you’ve been injured, it hurts to let your heart have its say. But one of two things will happen first: you letting your heart speak, or you dying. Not letting your heart speak isn’t on the table. It’s a part of you.

How do you get past this stage wisely? How do you tell the difference between listening and wallowing? Well, a tell-tale sign of wallowing is when you find yourself going, even slightly, out of your way to provoke the feelings of anger or sadness. That is emotional masturbation, and it’s just as sterile as the regular kind. (I suspect that part of the reason Americans are so skittish about grief is an authentic recognition that sadness and anger have their pleasures, and that these pleasures are extraordinarily dangerous, if not necessarily illicit.) I think a lot of it is just going to be waiting, though; waiting for your emotions to finish talking. All else being equal, they’ll quiet down when they’re done.

All else may not be equal, and the support of good friends, good pastors, and (depending on the nature of the wound) a qualified therapist, should not be dismissed. Even minor wounds often heal better when they heal in a communal context. But everybody has to find the solutions that work best for their own person, their own wound, their own context. A framework of pardon can be made of wood, but it shouldn’t be made of diamond: every person’s needs and graces are different; it’s why God made lots of people instead of, like, six.

Grieving is necessary not as part of forgiving per se, but because without grieving, we aren’t in a position to forgive. [2] There are exceedingly few people whose command over their passions is so complete that they can sincerely forgive while they’re in the throes of anguish; and of the ones that do exist, most of them got that way by hard, excruciating practice. God, being infinite, is always ready to forgive—yet Scripture implies that even our grief is an analogue to something in God, a wrathful or anguished love for his creatures when they sin and would (if it were possible) wound the boundless fullness and goodness of their Creator. Contrariwise, we are finite beings who have to call upon emotional resources in order to act, and are moreover trained from childhood in the half-unconscious techniques of ego-defensiveness against sins and virtues alike. It isn’t shocking that we have difficulty forgiving.

But this difficulty comes in two forms. One, the (for lack of a better word) obvious form, is the proud refusal of forgiveness, Milton’s Sense of injur’d Merit, the festering resentment, the unappeasable egocentrism, that will not pardon one who has blasphemed our great god Self.

The other form is less straightforward, more subversive, and, I believe, more responsible for the evil reputation of forgiveness has in our society today. It is to indulge—that is, to release from consequences—without the offender’s repentance. This is the parody rather than the rejection of forgiveness: indulging everything, allowing everything, pretending that sins don’t matter. In small social gaffes, it can be appropriate merely to indulge, but when you try the same technique with real injuries and injustices, the result is disastrous. It destroys the human dignity from which forgiveness has to operate, by implying that the offense wasn’t really an offense at all; in the name of being civil or kind or respectful, it voluntarily reduces itself to a subhuman status. Authentic forgiveness is a weapon against evil, overcoming it with love; indulgence without forgiveness enables evil, encourages it to consider itself normal or even positively good.

It is because this parody is so often represented as ‘forgiveness’ that I specially accent grieving as a necessary preliminary to the other steps of the technique of pardon. Naked indulgence reckons without the human dignity of the victim-pardoner, and to grieve is (among other things) to assert one’s dignity and humanity. Christians, who ought in theory to understand forgiveness better than other people, are as subject to these misconceptions as anybody else; the only culturally prominent exponent of genuine forgiveness I can think of is an apostate, Joss Whedon, whose depictions of the complexities of forgiveness in Buffy the Vampire Slayer [3] and Firefly are remarkable for their truth to the process and their intuitive comprehensibility.

I’ll leave compassion and reconciliation for a later post.

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[1] Not necessary, that is, in the exercise of forgiving the specific offense. We are virtually always sinners as well as sinned against, absolvers of our victims and suppliants of those who have wronged us.

[2] Ordinarily, anyway. I don’t rule out the possibility of graces that exceed normal human capacities; I mean, that’s kind of the point of Catholic Christianity. But our normal duty is to follow the normal way of things, because it’s what we encounter the most, and the miraculous is by definition exceptional.

[3] I’m pedantic enough that I feel the need to point out the Buffy clip here entirely misconstrues the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory: it is not a realm of directionless punishment (that would be Hell), but of cleansing and completion—a little bit like the Buddhist idea of bardo, where the dead sort out their issues that remain unresolved from life, though even bardo is less decidedly positive than Purgatory. But obviously that isn’t the main idea of the Buffy scene.

The Ethics of Compromise; Or, Wittering

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,

The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,

Endeavors to engage her in caresses

Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;

Exploring hands encounter no defense;

His vanity requires no response,

And makes a welcome of indifference.

—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

‘I believe God prefers drunkards to a lot of respectable people.’

‘For God’s sake,’ I said, for I was near to tears that morning, ‘why bring God into everything?’

‘I’m sorry. I forgot. But you know that’s an extremely funny question.’

‘Is it?’

‘To me. Not to you.’

‘No, not to me. It seems to me that without your religion Sebastian would have the chance to be a happy and healthy man.’

‘It’s arguable,’ said Brideshead. ‘Do you think he will need this elephant’s foot again?’

—Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

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Melinda Selmys has hit it out of the park once again with her latest, which I propose to shamelessly misappropriate.

The priest that I actually confessed to did what most priests (in my experience) do if you come to them with an NFP hard-case: he said ‘I don’t know.’ But then he added that if I was willing to stay afterwards, one of the other priests might be able to advise. I waited, and eventually a very kind, older priest came over and listened while I explained my situation. His advice was, ‘Every day, you should try not to sin. But if you do anyway, know that you have done everything humanly possible. Put it in God’s hands.’ It was in many ways very helpful—being told by someone in authority that I really actually had tried as hard as I could made a huge difference in terms of shutting down the shame and self-accusation machine. It was also meant charitably: this was a priest trying to somehow steer a path between the demands of the teaching and the needs of the person in front of him.

This isn’t unlike the experiences I’ve had in the confessional. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of priests who’ve been severe with me about my sins, however grave; the Church is famously uncompromising in the content of her teaching about sex, especially sex between men, but the application of that teaching to actual penitents is eager to absolve and console, in my (perhaps extremely fortunate) experience. Some confessors have been much too lax, and many have given useless advice. But they’ve overwhelmingly been gentle and kind, and often they have been wise too.

Unfortunately that is not the whole story.

It was, however, problematic advice in practice. What it meant was that I was in a position where I couldn’t have a realistic discussion about what I actually wanted in my sex life1 … but provided I was responding to seduction, swept away by my passions, or just doing it because I felt pressure, it wasn’t really my fault.

It’s a problem, not just in NFP culture but in purity culture more generally. If your situation is in any way irregular—that is, if you are not having married sex primarily for the purpose of procreation, there is a more or less strong psychological incentive towards sexual expression that is not quite consensual. There’s a lot of understanding, a lot of leeway, for people who are just carried away by a desire that overwhelms them. But if you’ve arrived at a sober, rational, well-considered and empirically tested conviction that a sexless marriage would be a disaster, that pregnancy would be worse, and that NFP does not work for you … well, you’re out of luck. [...] Suddenly not only are you sinning, you’re veering into the territory of willful rejection of the truth. And into the near orbit of presumption. Until you repudiate the error of your ways, confession isn’t even an option.2 Of course most confessors have more sense than people in NFP forums and comboxes. They’ll point out that emotional factors are only one of the factors that can reduce culpability,3 that in an objectively hard case you probably don’t meet the criteria for full knowledge, that if you want to do the right thing but are finding it functionally impossible due to external circumstances this also impedes full consent, and so on.

And for a long time, for eight or nine years, this really was satisfying to me. It’s rigorously logical, yet leaves space for moral generosity and humility; it allows for the difficult combination of idealism and compassion, not only within the same philosophy, but within the same person. That’s nothing to shake a stick at. Plenty of moral traditions that have successfully retained the loyalty of millions for generations aim lower than this, while yet being less flexible. (Even contemporary secular morality, while it operates on different principles from Catholic morality, is far harsher with those who transgress its principles, demanding mass shamings, public and groveling apologies, even personal ruin as its penances.)

And then, one day, it wasn’t satisfying. It was still good. But it ceased to be adequate to the dilemma I was facing, because its proponents didn’t seem ready to grapple honestly with its consequences. I wanted to, but I didn’t know how to move forward.

But this is not the attitude that I generally find in Catholic chastity culture. Here, external circumstances are always the Cross that God is calling you to bear. Internal weakness, on the other hand, is natural. Everybody stumbles. It’s a dirty little secret that almost nobody actually practices the teaching. It’s understood that [...] if you’re actually rigid enough to follow the teaching as you profess it, well, probably that would be harmful. But nobody actually does that. What people do instead is engage in a kind of psychodrama where you are tempted, you resist, you try to get away, but temptation slowly reels you in. It’s not quite your fault. It’s the feeling. The music. Your drink. The weather. Before you know it, almost against your will, there you are having sex like all the normal, badly catechized people. But at least you know enough to feel bad about it in the morning. Then you go to confession in the morning. Rinse. Wash. Repeat.

This means that you can have a sex life … provided you’re not too hung up on giving clear consent. Because if you insist too much on explicit consent, sober consent, or worse, premeditated consent, this interrupts the entire drama. It shines too much light on its fundamental assumption that it is acceptable, indeed better, to lose control of yourself sexually than it is to rationally think about what will be good for you and discuss it clearly with your partner.

The moral revisionist (Christian or otherwise) will protest against Catholic principles on these grounds, while the traditionalist will protest instead against Mrs Selmys. I’m not prepared to do either, because I don’t understand.

On the one hand, I certainly see the revisionist’s point. It would be idle to deny that beliefs like those of Matthew Vines, Rev Nadia Bolz-Weber, or Justin Lee are appealing; but this does not make them either false or insincere (as I have insisted for years and shall continue to), and one of the strongest criticisms of Catholic teaching from that perspective is the anguish that our doctrine of chastity normally imposes on LGBT people. Is that anguish universal, or inevitable, or proof that the Catholic faith is wrong? No. But that’s cold comfort at best, and rank hypocrisy at worst, when offered by those who are exempt from such suffering to those who are subject to it continually. What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he have faith, and hath not works? can faith save him? If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit?

But for me, that horror isn’t enough to alter my beliefs, for the simple reason that the central symbol of my faith is my God being tortured to death. That, you see, is what a crucifix is. The God who makes these demands of us did not spare himself their costliness.

Which leads me to the orthodox Catholic perspective and its problems.4 The premises are straightforward enough: the thing that matters most, in life and after it, is being united with God, who literally is goodness, beauty, and meaning; anything that impedes union with God is accordingly something to renounce and avoid, whatever else it costs us; therefore, the visible and tangible costs of doing the right thing are rightly to be regarded as trivial.

Where it gets problematic is, one of the things the Church insists upon is that the visible and tangible cost of an action is actually important. Morally relevant, even: whatever we think of Just War Theory, one of the standard criteria for the justice of a war is that there should be a reasonable prospect of success—meaning that if there isn’t, even a war fought in defense of one’s country is not just (since it would be sacrificing lives to national pride rather than national well-being). And the thing about being somebody who needs to ask forgiveness seventy times seven times is, it’s not good for you, and it’s not good for the people around you. Sometimes a compromise really would be healthier; just as, in a logically parallel case, it is much healthier to insincerely renounce one’s faith rather than be killed for it. The Church admires and celebrates her martyrs. But she also admires and celebrates the Kakure Kirishitan, the underground Catholics of Japan, who were forced to practice insincere apostasy or else be exterminated; and who survived in secret, without a single priest, for two centuries of longing and faithfulness, until they were reunited with the whole Church under the Emperor Meiji.

And anyway, the objection to the life of reasoned compromise is that it can harden your heart against God. I don’t deny that. But does a life of incessant failure to live up to perfection always keep your heart soft to God? I’m seriously asking.

If we’re virtue ethicists, it seems as though the life of reluctant but considered, frank compromise seems to draw nearer to full integration—it at least encourages our sexual behavior to be ruled by the brain rather than the, uh, little head. If we’re baptized Kantians, the life of the second, intending chastity even while anticipating failure, appears preferable; never mind the question of whether it’s psychological possible to intend something that you have no reason to believe you can actually accomplish. (Can an underweight guy who doesn’t work out sincerely intend to lift three hundred pounds?) But then again, if we are meant to have faith that God can do the impossible in us, what does that look like, if it doesn’t look like attempting what seems impossible? How many times ought we to attempt what looks impossible before we accept that, for whatever reason, God does not seem to be granting this particular grace?5

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I wittered there to passersby, and that has made small difference.

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1To dispose in advance of one tasteless response to this remark, to the effect that what a person wants out of sex isn’t morally relevant: I see nothing wrong in a woman wanting certain things from her sex life, certainly not any more than a man wanting certain things from his sex life. There are other moral factors to consider than what we want out of sex; I even assent that what we simply want may be the least weighty factor; it doesn’t follow that it can be ignored, either in moral theology or in daily life. Moreover, it bears saying that I have a vague impression that such dismissiveness of desire is directed at married women more often than at men (in any state of life), which doesn’t square with St Paul’s teaching that a wife rightly has authority over the body of her husband—and seems a little sexist in differing ways towards both sexes, if that has anything to do with it.

2This is due to the, oh, mechanics of Confession (side note: I’ve found Catholic sacramental theology easiest to understand as being like the rules to an RPG; plenty of nerds will happily read six hundred pages of role-playing mechanics to make sure they aren’t confusing a warlock with a sorcerer). The formula of absolution is not magical; it is the concrete manifestation of God’s forgiveness of the penitent—which means that repentance, in the Greek μετάνοια (metanoia) or change of heart, which by its nature includes an intention to leave one’s sin behind, is required. This is not an arbitrary requirement, imposed by God as a way of making things more difficult for us: rather, the purpose of divine forgiveness is a restored union of life between the sinner and God, and the defining characteristic of sin is that it mangles that life; that life and that mangling cannot coëxist, not permanently anyway. Incidentally, this is also (probably) why our Lord commanded us to forgive up to seventy times seven times: because forgiveness, in a sense, operates of itself, and since we cannot read hearts we must always be ready to forgive, or else, when a sincerely penitent person asks us for forgiveness and we refuse it, it will be we rather than they who have broken the relationship.

3This again refers to mechanics. For a sin to be what theology calls mortal sin in technical terms, it must meet three requirements: grave matter (i.e., doing something serious in itself), full knowledge (i.e., understanding not only what the moral law says but why it says it, and being aware of other relevant facts), and full consent (i.e., deciding to do it anyway without being controlled by passions, addiction, forgetfulness, threats, or whatever else). If one or more of these conditions isn’t met, then the sin in question is what is called a venial sin: not that it doesn’t matter, but that it doesn’t kill the divine life placed within us through the sacraments.

4Problem here is not a synonym for inconsistency or falsehood or anything of that kind. A problem is to be solved; the proper response to inconsistencies and falsehoods is, rather, unmasking.

5We know, if only from the uniqueness of the Immaculate Conception, that God does not grant every grace to every person.

Dona Eis Requiem, Part IV

Pride is the besetting sin of Pardon, almost the infernal twin of Pardon; it is its consciousness; rather, say, its self-consciousness become its only consciousness. ‘Cast thyself down,’ the devil murmurs, ‘the angels will support you; be noble and forgive. You will have done the Right thing; you will have behaved better than the enemy.’ So, perhaps; but it will not be the angels of heaven who support that kind of consciousness. Can Forgiveness worship the devil? all the virtues can worship the devil.

… The double responsibility of guilt enters; sinner to sinner. Heroic sanctity is required perhaps to forgive, but not to forgive is ordinary sin. There is no alternative; the greatness of the injury cannot supply that.  It becomes—an excuse? no, a temptation; the greater the injury, the greater the temptation; the more excusable the sin, the no less sin. Can any writer lay down such rules for himself and for others—especially for others? No; and yet without those rules, without that appalling diagram of integrity, there can be no understanding, however small, of the nature of the interchange of love.

—Charles Williams, The Forgiveness of Sins

It is always agreeable to hold someone responsible.

—Charles Williams, Witchcraft

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Now the next step, and you’re not going to like this one. We, the LGBT community, need you, the Christian community, to apologize.

It’s hard to apologize when you’re wrong, and harder to apologize when you’re right. Hardest of all to apologize when you are both. The technique of repentance is simple enough to understand, but it’s terribly challenging to do, because it’s brutal on the ego like nothing else is: every impulse to defend and explain, every manifestation of the desire to be the one in the right, even the senses in which we are in the right, must be simply renounced; our own responsibility for what we have done wrong has to be stated in plain English and owned. You have to put the rights and sufferings of the other person ahead of yours, and ask forgiveness. And to ask forgiveness is, necessarily, to ask for what the other could reasonably refuse. A Christian has the duty not to refuse; but even if all the victims of our sins were fellow Christians, not all of them always do their duty; and when it comes to forgiveness the undutiful response is always comprehensible.

‘Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until he has something to forgive.’1 Correspondingly, most people love the idea of being forgiven in a general, irresponsible way—that is partly why it is so pleasant to recite the confession of the penitential rite, with its from time to time and its manifold sins and wickedness that don’t linger over anything particular, which could be awkward-making. But to be forgiven for something concrete, implying an explicit acknowledgment and asking for what could never be claimed as a right, asking this person you’ve wounded to be generous to you—that’s scary. There aren’t many situations as vulnerable as that, and perhaps none that are more. It’s much more comfortable to find a way of not needing to be forgiven, or not as forgiven as all that: appealing to misunderstanding, or coërcion, or habit, or (best of all) to the injuries the other person has done to you, and perhaps avenging their pardon by pardoning in your turn.

The centrality of forgiveness to being a Christian, especially a Catholic Christian, ought to mean we all have some training in the technique of pardon. Unfortunately we often show that we have nothing of the kind: neither the gentle, honest, unshowy willingness to pardon nor the swift, cheerful, humble willingness to be pardoned.

The point is—you’ve hurt us, and we need you to apologize and then stop talking. No, not renounce your beliefs; not never talk again; but we need an apology that’s an apology, not a ‘We truly are sorry, but’. An apology’s not an opportunity to restate your position, or explain why it was really somebody else’s fault, or a sop thrown to the opponent in the hope of making one’s later arguments more convincing. It is saying, I hurt you. I’m sorry. Will you forgive me?, and meaning it. Don't couch it. There's nothing more orthodox than repentance.

And what have you done?

You personally may have done nothing to us; I don’t know. But professing Catholics can’t reckon accounts that way: the communion of the saints is real, Christians interanimate one another, we live each other’s graces and each other’s sins. At the simplest level, it just isn’t very consistent to rejoice over the virtues of St John Paul II if you will not also blush for the vices of Julius II. It’s more than that, though. Henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more. Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. The root of our being is Jesus, our brother and our God, and through him we exist in one another and they in us. You can’t separate yourself from your fellow Christians except by separating yourself from the very Vine.

So what have you done?

Image via myrainbownetwork

You’ve told us that we’re disgusting. That we’re inferior to heterosexuals. That we’re out of control, shameless, incapable of healthy love. That we’re rapists and pedophiles. That two cities were destroyed by fire for no other reason than that people like us lived there. That we’re mentally ill for even seeing beauty in the same sex. That God loathes us. That we’re excluded from heaven. That HIV is divine punishment against us. That we’re conspiring to hurt you. That our lives are worth less than yours.

You’ve subjected us to attempted cures by chemical castration, electric shock, and conditioning weirder than A Clockwork Orange. Insisted—first in advance of, and then in the face of, the evidence—that our desires come from twisted family dynamics, and forced us to distort our own experiences and memories so they’ll fit the theory. Forced us out of homes, schools, jobs, and churches. Pressured us into sham marriages that destroyed multiple lives.2 Advocated laws that would get us locked up or even executed. Told us what words we can and can’t use, and then stood by while slurs were thrown at us. Demanded that we be silent, compliant coöperators in being abused.

You’ve created an atmosphere, both by what you’ve said and by what you’ve left out, in which violence against gays, lesbians, and the transgendered is normal. Disclaimed the responsibility to show compassion when we’ve been attacked. Refused to bury our dead. Celebrated our killers. Applauded statesmen, here and abroad, who allow us to be imprisoned and assaulted. Made us believe that we are so horrible and unacceptable that we’d be better off killing ourselves. Stood by and said nothing when we’ve been shot, and beaten, and burned.

Can you apologize, please?

Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Maker of all things, judge of all men: We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we from time to time most grievously have committed, by thought, word, and deed, against thy divine Majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us. We do earnestly repent, and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; the remembrance of them is grievous unto us, the burden of them is intolerable. Have mercy upon us, have mercy upon us, most merciful Father; for thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, forgive us all that is past; and grant that we may ever hereafter serve and please thee in newness of life, to the honor and glory of thy Name; Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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1From Mere Christianity. I’ve always loved the combination of exact truth, irony, lightness, and severity this quote is capable of.

2No, not every mixed-orientation marriage is a sham. But some are.