Paying Attention To The Sky

I have quoted from this book in numerous posts but never provided my reading selections. The book is an extended essay giving Weigel’s take on the sexual abuse crisis circa 2002. As one Amazon reader noted: “[George Weigel's] criticisms of past handling of sexual abuse are fearless but fair. Pope John Paul II’s own excellent teachings on the formation of priests were given good exposure. The link between good priestly formation and adherence to the general teaching on sexual ethics was beautifully drawn. Best of all was his passionate call to holiness through love of Christ and fidelity to His teaching- not just for the laity but priests and bishops alike. I finished the book with great hope and certainty that this crisis will eventually bring renewal.” As you sense from the latter comments, Weigel’s comments have a timeless nature to them, which makes the book a precious read.

Overwhelming Majority Of Abuse Cases Was Homosexual Molestation
According to press reports, confirmed by the studies of reputable scholars, the most prominent form of clergy sexual abuse in recent decades has involved homosexual priests abusing teenage boys and young men. It took editors, television personalities, and radio talk-show hosts approximately two and a half months to recognize what print reporters had, in fact, been uncovering for months: namely, that the overwhelming majority of cases of abuse did not involve prepubescent children, but rather teenage boys and young men, often in school or seminary settings. While clinical distinctions (“Fixated ephebophilia,” “regressed” or “stunted” homosexuality) may be helpful for purposes of professional study and therapy, normal English describes such abuse as homosexual molestation.

The Living Instruments Of Christ, The Eternal Priest
Vatican II taught … that ordained priests “are living instruments of Christ the eternal priest.” At his ordination, every priest “assumes the person of Christ.” The Catholic priest, in order words, is not simply a religious functionary, a man licensed to do certain kinds of ecclesiastical business. A Catholic priest is an icon, a living re-presentation, of the eternal priesthood of Jesus Christ. He makes Christ present in the Church in a singular way, by acting in persona Christi, “in the person of Christ,” at the altar and in administering the sacraments. 
The Catholic priesthood, in other words, is not just another form of “ministry.” Ordination to the priesthood in the Catholic church radically transforms who a man is, not just what he does.  In fact, in the classic Catholic view, the thins a priest does – the things lay Catholic cannot do, such as celebrate Mass or forgive sins sacramentally in confession as entirely dependent on who he is by the grace of his ordination. The old Baltimore Catechism tried to describe the difference ordination makes by saying that the sacrament of Holy Orders imprinted an “indelible mark” on a man’s soul: Once ordained, a man is a priest forever, because he has been configured to Christ the eternal priest in an irreversible way. A still older philosophy would say that a priest is “ontologically changed” – changed in his deepest personal identity – by his ordination.

Everything Is A Ministry: A Sociological View Of The Church
By the mid-1970’, virtually everything in the Catholic Church was being described as a form of “ministry,” to the point where ushers in churches were habitually described as “ministers of hospitality.” Ideas have consequences and so do words. If everything is a ministry and everyone in the Church is a minister of one sort or another, what if anything is distinctive about the ordained ministry of the priest? Doesn’t it demean the “ministry” of baptized lay Catholics if the Church continues to insist on the unique “ministry of the ordained priest?
These confusions had many ramifications. Not least among them was the claim…that if the Catholic Church insisted that it must be governed by a “hierarchy” composed of ordained bishops and priests (all of whom were men), it ws branding itself an authoritarian, misogynist hang over form the Middle Ages. Many Catholics in the United States wondered why, if the Church was what sociologists aptly described a s a “volunteer organization,” it shouldn’t govern itself like most other voluntary organizations – by majority rule, with “offices” open to all members?

Saints and Disciples
Every Christian is called to be a saint. Indeed “saints” are what every Christian must become if we are to enjoy eternal life with God. It takes a special kind of person to be able to live with God forever—it takes saints. When the Chruch recognizes someone publicly as a “saint”, the Church is bearing witness to the truth that, in this world, a man or woman was so completely configured to Christ that this life of “heroic virtue” is now continued in heaven, in joyful communion within the light and love of God.
Every Christian fails on the road to sanctity. Some of us fail often, and many of us fail grievously. In each case, the failure is one of discipleship. Men and women who have truly encountered the Risen Christ in the transforming experience of conversion – an experience that can take a lifetime – live different kinds of lives: They lead the life of a disciple (lives of deeper fidelity).

Blaming The Crisis Of Sexual Abuse On Celibacy
To blame the crisis of sexual abuse on celibacy is about as plausible as blaming adultery of the marriage vow, or blaming treason on the Pledge of Allegiance. It just doesn’t parse.

The Relationship Of A Spouse To A Beloved Bride: Chaste Celibate Love For The Church
In the Letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul describes the relationship of Christ, the eternal high priest, to his Church as the relationship of a spouse to a beloved bride: Christ the redeemer gives himself to his spouse freely, unreservedly, faithfully, and unto death. If a Catholic priest is not a religious bureaucrat who conducts certain kinds of Churchly business, but rather an icon – a living re-presentation—of the eternal priesthood of Jesus Christ, then the priest’s relationship to his bride, the Church, should be like Christ’s – the priest is to give himself to the Church freely, unreservedly, faithfully, and unto death. And he must be seen to be doing so. His commitment to his bride must be visible in his way of life, as well as in his heart and soul.
That is why the Catholic places such a high value on celibacy. Chaste celibate love for the church is another “icon” of Christ’s presence to his people. The Christ whom the priest makes present through his sacramental ministry at the altar and in the confessional is acting not simply in the name of Christ but in the person of Christ. According to ancient Catholic usage, he is another Christ, alter Christus, whose complete gift of self to the Church is an integral part of his priestly persona. Celibacy is thus not “extrinsic” to the Catholic priesthood, a mere matter of ecclesiastical discipline. There is an intimate, personal, iconic relationship between celibacy and priesthood.

The Form Of The Catholic Church
The Catholic Church believes that it has a “form” or structure given to it by Christ. The structure is composed in part of truths: truths about God, truths about human beings, truths about our relationship to God and God’s relationship to us…Doctrine is not a matter of papal or episcopal whim or willfulness. Popes and bishops are the servants, not the masters of the tradition – the truths – that make the church what it is today. … Moreover the Catholic Church believes that the truths it has been given by Christ free us as well as bind us. They are liberating truths. To accept the Church’s teaching as authoritative and binding is only a “restriction” on my freedom if I imagine freedom to be the unbridled exercise of my imagination and will.

The Shorthand Of “Pedophilia Crisis”
Pedophile priests – in the classic sense of men who habitually abuse prepubescent children – are not the majority of cleric sexual abusers; they are, in fact, a small minority of malfeasant clergy, although they are arguably the most loathsome form of the clerical sexual predator. That the shorthand of “pedophilia crisis” was being used …months after even gay activists were conceding that the overwhelming majority of the abuses reported involved homosexual men molesting teenage boys or young males suggested that the moniker “pedophilia crisis” served agendas other than factual accuracy. Were the crisis of clerical sexual abuse to be described accurately – as a crisis whose principle manifestation was homosexual molestation – other questions about gay culture might well be raised.

Betrayal
Betrayal has been part of the Church’s reality – and part of the reality of the priesthood and episcopate – from the beginning. Betrayal is not the last world in the Church’s story, however. The men who fled Gethsemane in a panic of fear were transformed by the Risen Christ and the Holy Spirit into men on fire, men who could not do anything else but witness to the truth of God’s salvation in Christ, even when it cost them their lives. God can, does, and always will always bring good out of evil, even an evil so great as the treacherous betrayal of God’s Son.

Vatican II: The Church “Opens Its Windows To The Modern World.”
One of the most important things that many U.S. Catholic priests, bishops, nuns, theologians and lay activists took away form Vatican II was that the Church had “opened its windows to the modern world.” What these Catholic leaders failed to notice at the time – and what some Catholic leaders refuse to acknowledge today — is that the Catholic church opened its windows just as the modern western world was barreling into a dark tunnel full of poisonous fumes…there were all sorts of toxins in the air. In high culture, and especially in intellectual life, the bright hopes of “modernity” were being dashed on the rocks of irrationality, self-indulgence, fashionable despair, and contempt for traditional authority. The mid century’s two premier philosophers – Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre – had it turned out, been supporters of the two great butchers in a century of slaughter: Hitler for Heidegger and Stalin for Sartre….the late 1960’s were a very difficult time for a two-way conversation between an ancient religious tradition build on the foundation of what it understood to be truths –with consequences for all humanity, and an intellectual world deeply skeptical that there was, in fact, any such thing as “truth”

Encounter With Modernity
In the 1960’s the Church met an old enemy tarted up in modern guise: Gnosticism, the ancient heresy which denied that the material world really counts for anything. For almost two millennia, the Catholic Church has insisted that stuff counts – that bread and waster, oil and salt, and sexual love within the bond of marital fidelity could be transformed into sacramental encounters with God himself. Why? Because the ordinary stuff of this world is never as ordinary as it seems; it always points itself to the extraordinary love of God for his creation. How could this kind of Church teach its message in a world that, or all its luxuriant materiality, seemed not to take the material world seriously, treating material things (including the human body) as mere toys for manipulation in an endless quest for self-expression and pleasure. Then there was the modern quest for freedom. How could a Church committed to the idea that freedom has everything to do with truth and goodness make its case in a culture in which freedom was broadly understood as license – “I did it my way.”

A Subtle, Interior, Invisible Schism
There was no overt schism in the Catholic Church in the United States of the sort Pope Paul VI evidently feared. But there was a subtle, interior, invisible schism. It is one thing for a Catholic – layman or laywoman, seminarian, priest, nun or bishop – to say of authoritative teaching, “I don not understand. Perhaps the teaching authority can make the matter clearer; perhaps we need to think about this truth in a more refined way.” It is quite another thing for a Catholic—and especially a Catholic who teaches, administers the sacraments, and governs the Catholic people in the name of the Church – to say, “The highest teaching authority of the Catholic Church is teaching falsehoods and leading the Church into error.”
The Catholic who says “I do not understand,” concedes that, in the Catholic scheme of things, the Church’s’ teaching authority is just that, an instrument of authoritative teaching. The Catholic who says, “The teaching authority is leading the Church into error,” is declaring himself or herself out of full communion with the Church. …too many seminarians and priests…fell out of full communion with the Church, whether the issue at hand was contraception, abortion, homosexuality, or the possible ordination of women to the priesthood.
If a priest is sincerely convinced that the Church is teaching falsely on these or other matters, or if he is simply lazy and absorbs the culture of dissent by osmosis, his conscience is deadened. And having allowed his conscience to become moribund on these questions, he is more likely to quiet, and perhaps finally kill his conscience on matters relating to his own behavior, including his sexual behavior. When the incident of such deadened consciences reaches critical mass in a diocese, a seminary, or a religious order, corruption – intellectual, spiritual and administrative –sets in, as the culture of dissent seeks to bend that institution to its ends.

Pedophile John Geoghan
Perhaps the most mind boggling document to be released publicly…was the last clinical evaluation of pedophile John Geoghan from the St. Luke’s Institute, a prominent therapeutic center in Silver Spring, Maryland, founded to deal with troubled clergy …The conclusion of the evaluation’s “spiritual assessment” by a priest who once headed St. Luke’s, was at first dumbfounding, and then chilling: Father Canice Connors notes that “there are no particular recommendations concerning (Father Geoghan’s) spiritual life since he is involved in spiritual direction and seems to have a good prayer life. The critical question for Father Geoghan seems to be whether he has ever integrated his psychological experience with his spiritual values.”