UNITED STATES
Hamilton and Griffin on Rights
Sep 21, 2015
The Burden of the Gospel – Papal Homily in Philadelphia on September 27, 2015
It is an odd coincidence – I would call it a grace – that the gospel reading for this Saturday and Sunday, as the World Meeting of Families concludes in Philadelphia, is the passage we have just heard from the Gospel of Mark. Jesus says, “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were put around his neck and he were thrown into the sea.”
I have written about the joy of the gospel, but today I will talk about the burden of this gospel, which is not to be explained away.
Christ and his disciples have been walking in Galilee and have come to the lake town of Capernaum, where Jesus had called the first apostles to join him. On this occasion, the apostles had been squabbling among themselves about “who was the greatest.” But “taking a child he placed it in their midst, and putting his arms around it he said to them, ‘Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me.’”
Let me be painfully specific about this Gospel reading and its importance.
Remembering and Healing
The millstone passage has often been quoted by survivors of sexual abuse committed by Catholic clergy and religious. The passage shows Christ’s condemnation of child abuse, and the episcopal arrogance and self-regard that have enabled abuse from that day to this. So powerful is this Gospel message that it is invoked at what I think of as a pilgrimage site, St. Joseph’s Church in Mendham, New Jersey, not one hundred miles from this spot.
The Mendham monument – a 400-pound basalt millstone – honors the survivors of abuse by priests and religious, especially survivors of Fr. James Hanley, who abused children at St. Joseph’s and other parishes in the Paterson diocese. The monument was proposed by Hanley survivor William Crane and supported by the pastor of St. Joseph’s, Msgr. Kenneth Lasch. They were motivated in part by the suicide of another Hanley victim, James Kelly.
I am a city boy, a porteño, as we say in Argentina, a native of the great port city of Buenos Aires. I have been very moved by my first visits to your great cities of Washington, New York, and Philadelphia – my Northeast Corridor tour. But I know the United States is a huge and various place, full of many other big cities and many other small towns like Mendham. And I am very sadly aware that in every city and town, here and in other countries, there are Catholic parishes and schools where priests and religious have sexually abused children, damaging and destroying their families.
As Catholics, we are obliged to love our neighbor and help the poor, including the poor in spirit. Our first responsibility in this regard is to love and help those who have been harmed by us, by the church itself. The World Meeting of Families should have taken as its first priority the tens of thousands of families that have been harmed and destroyed by abusive priests and vowed religious. They are our particular responsibility.
Instead, clergy abuse has been almost entirely neglected in planning the World Meeting of Families. Abuse is invisible in the keynote speeches and sessions, and in the breakout sessions.
I apologize for this grave mistake, which I could have corrected, and should have. A survivor of clergy abuse will give the keynote address at the next World Meeting of Families. Those sessions will focus on remedying the harm that we have done to families worldwide, and to working with civil authorities to make the church a safe place in the present and future.
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