BishopAccountability.org

Opinion: We Catholics need a new church culture and a remedial course in the virtues

By Joshua J. Whitfield
Dallas News
August 17, 2018

https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2018/08/17/catholics-need-new-church-culture-remedial-course-virtues

Writing demands courage, otherwise it's advertising.

Sometimes a writer doesn't choose the subject; sometimes it's shoved in one's face. Sometimes, one either writes at one's own risk or makes oneself comfortable with cowardice. Sometimes there's no choice. Sometimes morality is clear.

As a priest, I appreciate the privilege of writing beyond my normal ecclesial ken. It's why I write, because I believe both people like me and people unlike me should each have a voice. It's where my earthly hope originates these days, from the idea that we can still talk to one another and listen.

Which is why I must write about the sex abuse scandals of my church, of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick as well as the damning revelations out of Pennsylvania. It was the eccentric Frenchman, Paul Claudel, who said (echoing Jesus) that, "It is not the mote from one's neighbor's eye that the house of God can be built, but with the beams one takes out of one's own." If I am to write and if you are to read, and if that's ever to be meaningful, then clearly I must speak up here. Otherwise, as I said, I should become a comfortable coward and write nothing else.

Hence I confess my dizzying anger, my morose, almost morbid sadness about the whole damn thing. Not tainted, in that rhetorical self-serving way, with me playing the victim: I'm sad for the genuine victims, the uncountable innocents we've slaughtered. I'm angry for an incompetent church, incompetent leadership, for unvetted evil. It's like the fourth circle of hell in Dante's Inferno: seeing so many tonsured heads, he asks an unsurprised Virgil, "Are all these clerics?" It's an evil and an incompetence hard to exaggerate, which only the siloed and the foolish deny.

Thus penance and humiliation are our proper lot these days as Catholics, but also a reckoning, a brutal accountability beyond mere words and beyond the establishment of yet more bureaucratic processes. What justice requires is something else, something more. It's going to have to be painful, and more than emotionally. 

Of the #MeToo movement, I've written before that what it lacks is an account of the virtues, an understanding of the sort of culture we must create if we're to become people who don't abuse each other. It's good that it seems a little easier now for victims to speak out and find support, good we're shining light in darkness and dismantling shame; however, that by itself isn't enough. We must recreate our culture and rehabituate ourselves. We must become different people making a different world.

My point is that this is true for the church too. From this, hopefully, clergy of every rank, seminarians, laity and whistle-blowers alike, all of them will feel free to speak up without fear of reprisal or marginalization, that the silencing culture of clerical reverence comes to an end. At present we suffer from a clericalism better described as a caste system, too many fearful of speaking up to their superiors about the most trivial of things. It's a culture which lends itself to hiding, which is unhealthy and dangerous in any human organization, and which simply doesn't belong to the essence of the church.

What we need is a new culture in the church and a remedial course in the virtues. As Catholics, we must be daring enough to change, brave enough to demand it, to call into question all but the essentials of our faith and morals. We clergy must get over ourselves, opening ourselves to criticism and questions from faithful, fearless laity and honest journalists. 

And we must open ourselves to genuine lay involvement in the governance of the church, structural and canonical change. What this looks like exactly is for canonical jurists and theologians to debate; however, it must include real subsidiary power that is better shared at all levels of the church. This, because the era in which clergy were respected simply for who they are is blessedly over, because trust is gone. And because it's the right thing to do. 

However painful it will be, it's worth it because of what's at stake: our belief in the truth of the faith, the beauty and eternity of it, belief bigger than any pope or priest or bishop. My experience of the church has been nothing like what these scandals reveal; rather it's been of a church, of layfolk, fellow priests and bishops, of sacrificial strength and charity, of a beauty as I've never found elsewhere, unfabricated, divine. It's what keeps us Catholics Catholic, and it's what we're fighting for.

And it's why we must be honest about our crimes, honest about the changes we need to make. Because the church's beauty is in the shadows; its voice lost, unlikely to be found again soon. Not before a season of silence, at least, in sackcloth and ashes.

Contact: jwhitfield@stritaparish.net




.


Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.