VATICAN CITY
Women Church World
February 1, 2019
By Lucetta Scaraffia
Touch – as we are taught on the one hand by the commentaries on the Gospels and on the other by psychoanalysis – which occupies a crucial place in Gospel evangelical teaching is an essential factor of our way of knowing the truth and of communicating with others. It is a hidden but most powerful sense that involves the deepest aspects of the human psyche. The fact that for priests and religious touch has become an impracticable form of contact with children and women for some years now as a result of the abuses scandal not only constitutes a new form of etiquette and a form of elementary prudence to avoid (even unfounded) suspicion but is also a real mutilation of relational life and of the apostolate in the Christian community. At a time in history when the Church is going through a serious crisis regarding her capacity for transmitting the Gospel message, the heart of the Christian message, the impossibility of giving a caress to a child or of shaking the hand of a woman who is grieving or upset is a serious wound. By denying the possibility of using touch as a form of communication it becomes almost impossible to understand the ability of the person involved to face the reciprocity of the relationship and the intimacy and identity of the other person – essentially the profound reality of a human relationship.
It cannot of course be denied that it is a question of a deserved mutilation, but nevertheless it is still a mutilation.
Returning to the freedom to bestow a caress, to take someone by the hand, to put an arm round a shoulder – charity also consists of this – some way out of the abuses scandal needs to be found.
Every gesture has become suspect because the simple, good and affectionate meaning of so many gestures has been used not to reassure or encourage someone but to violate the intimacy of a child or a woman, that is, of someone weak.
Pope Francis has given the strongest and most radical interpretation of this crisis: it is not, he says, a question of falling into the temptations of the flesh, of sexual sins, but rather of an abuse of power, an abuse that is born from a perverted interpretation of the priestly role, arising from an evil which he has called clericalization.
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