UNITED STATES
Huffington Post
January 1, 2018
By Sally Vance-Trembath
Many found Bernard Law’s Roman funeral deeply upsetting. There have been various responses to that Catholic funeral protocol: condemnation, explanation, justification. I suspect that actual victims of molestation and rape are not satisfied by details that describe who gets what kind of funeral. I worked with “The Voice of the Faithful” early on so I know something of victims and their families. The last thing they need or want to hear about is Catholic protocol. In many ways, such protocols acted as accelerants for their destruction. It must be harrowing to see any display of honor given to the person who destroyed your life. Clerical collars and vestments that should mark sacramental authority instead provided camouflage. And the camouflage was brilliant. The trappings of office and authority as instruments for the disturbing larceny of this Catholic Crisis. That is what I saw as I listened to victims during those years. Their capacity for intimacy had been stolen. That is how I think about the predators. They were thieves. In treating their victims’ bodies as things, those villains robbed those young people of experiencing those same bodies as locations of tenderness and delight in physical love. So if we are going to talk about Catholic protocol, let’s talk. Let us honestly bring the best of our protocol, in this case, our liturgical system to this persistent sorrow. Signs and symbols were used to spread this contagion; it is long past time that we used our symbolic, ritual tradition to promote healing on a massive scale. The damage is widespread; the repair must be so.
As a theologian I must champion the deep truth that animated the funeral for Bernard Law: Catholic sacraments display an essential truth-claim that the Judeo-Christian tradition makes about reality: God’s presence saturates all of our experience. We mark that truth in many ways; for Catholics the Sacraments are among our richest expressions. We need Sacraments; we are constitutively communitarian creatures.
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