UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
More on the SNAP conference this past weekend: for me personally, the conference made a big impact in a way that’s not really easy to explain. I suppose the best way to aim at explanation is to say that listening to people who have had no option except to give up on the churches – meeting many such folks in such a concentrated group – has set my heart at ease about the similar movement of my own religious and spiritual life.
What makes this a difficult matter for me to explain is that, along with many of the people I met at the SNAP conference and to whom I listened carefully, I didn’t really choose this option. Like them, when I experienced my own tiny Waterloo of abuse and betrayal at the hands of the Catholic religious leaders who cruelly destroyed my career as a theologian in the early 1990s, I very naively believed that I was dealing with a few bad apples.
I confidently turned to the abbot of the very Benedictine monastery that was destroying my theological vocation, and asked for a hearing. I sought his pastoral advice. Only to find that he slammed the door in my face and informed me in no uncertain terms that he would not talk to me . . . .
I turned to the bishop of the diocese of Charlotte, North Carolina, and had the very same thing happen to me. I made a retreat at the Trappist monastery in South Carolina and asked the abbot of that monastery, who had been highly recommended to me as a pastorally sensitive person, for spiritual counsel.
He agreed to provide it. I then came home from the retreat, wrote him a thank-you letter expanding on what I had told him face to face about my anguish at what was happening to me, to a vocation-career for which I had worked long and hard and sacrificed much. I never heard a single word from this abbot again.
I did not choose to have doors slammed in my face. I did not choose to have my career as a Catholic theologian callously destroyed by monks and bishops who natter on about social justice and human rights, while leading lives of complete comfort and security as they blithely take bread from the mouths of lay employees of their Catholic institutions, removing healthcare coverage from them, refusing to disclose any reason for doing this, and thereby making it impossible for those hapless human beings to find subsequent employment in Catholic institutions.
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