Benedict and the Scandal (Mark Shea comments on Rod Dreher remarks)

Inside Catholic ^ | April 23, 2008 | Mark Shea

[NYer]

Now that Benedict has come and gone we are in the thick of media analysis of the meaning of it all. Many folk (Rod Dreher is a notable example) were (as I expected) disappointed because the pope didn't "do something" about bishops who have, to say the least, not particularly distinguished themselves in the Scandal. Dreher wanted a "read them the riot act" moment. Others scattered around the secular and mainstream media talked about Benedict "firing" them and so forth.

The pope, as you might expect, addressed the bishops and (as you also might expect given his high degree of commitment to dialog with any person of good will or even not-so-good will) his talk wound up being a mixture of his thoughts and attempts to engage the often dim-witted drivel of the USCCB functionaries upon whom he depends for information about what's going on in the USCCB. But though he made clear that sometimes sexual abuse cases had been very badly handled by our bishops, there was no Riot Act Reading. Compounding this, for Dreher, was the reaction of our dim-witted functionaries, which was predictably less-than-stellar (not to say vaguely nauseating). Dreher mentioned Bishop Tod Brown, who offered the usual disingenuous smarm that he learned from his master, the even more egregious and untrustworthy Cardinal Mahony. Both Brown and Mahony are textbook examples of just about everything that is wrong with the USCCB's response to the crisis of sexual abuse in the Church.  All this bugs Dreher and he expresses his disappointment with Benedict (though, to be fair, he was also very delighted to see Benedict meet with abuse victims and gave him his due).

The thing is, I'm not sure what Dreher and many others think should have happened between Benedict and the bishops. But then I haven't thought Dreher has had a realistic grasp of the options the pope has in this matter since the beginning. Dreher began his quarrel with the papacy on this matter when, as he famously said, the pope "let us down" by not dismissing a bunch of bishops "with the stroke of a pen." Life for Dreher since then has constituted the never-ending encounter with the fact that this entire perception of what the pope could or would do was wholly unrealistic.

As I've argued repeatedly, anybody who has read and internalized Ut Unum Sint could not be surprised when the pope with the most Eastern conception of the papacy in a thousand years did not regard it as his role to micromanage the American Church. Likewise, John Paul II's successor, Benedict, for all his fury at the Scandal (and it is real fury, not feigned for the cameras) is also constrained by the fact that, at the end of the day, he is bound to his commitment to regard himself as first among equals, not as The Guy Ordained by God to Tell All the Other Bishops to Obey Him or Hit The Road. His mission is to strengthen the brethren, not lay about him with mace and cudgel. Both his office and his personality are wholly arrayed against this highly American desire to "fix" everything with a cathartic gust of rage.

Moreover, the crowning paradox of Dreher's position is that, having left the Catholic Church for Eastern Orthodoxy in large part because of the Scandal, he is now in communion with bishops who would take it very ill if the pope were to do what Dreher so much wants him to do. It's one of the most puzzling aspects of Dreher's position and I hope that one of these days he will articulate how he can simultaneously hold an Orthodox ecclesiology and still want Benedict (or any pope) to act like Innocent III. I honestly don't get it.

Meanwhile, from where I sit it seems we are left with this:

 

Failing to summarily fire bishops whom even we laypeople (who own all the guns, run all the police forces, staff all the courts, and manage all the jails) have not opted to charge with any crimes, what is it we laypeople are asking the pope to do?

 

As far as I can tell, we are demanding that the one person in the world whose job, more than any other, is to proclaim the mercy of God do our job for us by administering some sort of vague but severe punishment for something we will not, ourselves, punish (and which we in many cases celebrate: namely a laissez-faire attitude toward our sex lives, including the sex lives of our kids).

Now I'm all for jailing bishops who have committed crimes. But, see, that's our job as laypeople and we have basically decided we can't or won't do that. I'm not a lawyer and I have no idea of the legal guilt of this or that bishop. But I do know something about the Gospel and it seems to me that if we laypeople don't think we have a case against the bishops beyond their being dumb, shady, slick, and/or disingenuous in the handling of serial perverts, then I don't see how it is the pope's task to be more merciless than we are.

The American Church has made great strides in making parishes places of almost paranoid safety for kids since 2002. This is but one of the prices we pay for the wretchedness of the episcopal response to the Scandal. Some of the Zero Tolerance idiocy is a heavy cross to bear for all the normal people who have to go through endless training and scrutiny because bishops did not have the sense God gave a goose when some serial pervert was reassigned to a fresh field of victims multiple times by these numbskulls. Now the bishops overcompensate by treating everybody as a serial pervert. That's exasperating, but it does give the lie to the notion that "nothing has been done." Plenty has been done and I, as a layman, have not a worry in the world about the safety of my children in the Church.

But that's not what people now mean by the phrase "nothing has been done." What they mean is that they do not have the sense that sufficient vengeance has been wreaked on bishops. Well, if there is legal vengeance to be wreaked, that's up to us laypeople, innit? But we have not done so, apparently because we don't have a case. So we hope that Benedict will do something or other to wreak that vengeance for us and we take it out on him for not doing our job. I think that's kinda crazy. I don't want a Church that is all about vengeance. I much prefer a Church that is about mercy.

[Tax-chick]

LOL! I just can’t see Pope Benedict saying, “Compost-eating hypocrites”; he’s too refined.

[neb52]

I believe it was this year. Would more hats be handed out later this year?

[sitetest]

Dear neb52,

“Would more hats be handed out later this year?”

I believe that the Vatican tries to keep the number of voting cardinals to 120. There are currently 118 voting cardinals. Thus, until that number falls to perhaps 110 or even much less, it's unlikely that the pope will have another consistory.

There are three cardinals who are 79 years old or older, thus, without a significant number of deaths, it's unlikely that there will be a consistory in the next 12 months. There are, however, another seven cardinals who are at least 78 years old, so a consistory in the next 24 or so months is certainly possible.

sitetest

[neb52]

Will I know what to add to my prayers then! :P

[RobbyS]

Moreover, the crowning paradox of Dreher's position is that, having left the Catholic Church for Eastern Orthodoxy in large part because of the Scandal, he is now in communion with bishops who would take it very ill if the pope were to do what Dreher so much wants him to do. It's one of the most puzzling aspects of Dreher's position and I hope that one of these days he will articulate how he can simultaneously hold an Orthodox ecclesiology and still want Benedict (or any pope) to act like Innocent III. I honestly don't get it.

Rod is like the husband who has got a divorce from a women with certain faults decides to marrry a second woman with the same faults. When one falls out of love, it usually has less to do with the other person than oneself. There is nothing more bitter than a person who expects others to grant him all he desires.

[ELS]

I think it was in one of the DC addresses, but I’m not sure which one. He said something about the pedophile crimes, and then he mentioned homosexuality and said “but this is a separate matter that we will get to later.”

I'm pretty sure it was during the press conference on the airplane coming to America.

[Tax-chick]

There is nothing more bitter than a person who expects others to grant him all he desires.

Some people, when they notice that a lot of terrible things happen in the world, take it very personally. Maybe it's a genetic trait. Continually searching for the place where no bad people do bad things must be very stressful.

[livius]

You could be right; it was early in the visit and could well have been on the plane. Did you draw the same inference, which is that he was going to cut this issue (clerical homosexuality) out as a separate one and address it specifically? Or was that just my wishful thinking...

[RobbyS]

Unfortunately, resistance to this message is pervasive in the Church as well as in general society. Goes back to 1968. PV was a progressive pope, and he was shocked to discover how liberals interpreted the Council documents. A revolution was taking place and the pope was somewhat in the same position as Louis XVI was in 1789. He had lost control of events: hence the famous remark about the smoke of Satan in the Church. Jacques Maritain, until that time a darling of the liberals, wrote a bitter statements against the trend of things in his "Old Man of the Garonne," and was dismissed as a bitter old man.

I have read that John Paul was warned to stay clear of the committee that was discussing the issue of contrception. because that was a runaway train. The encyclical only managed to brake its momentum. Benedict was also surprised, and the vilolence of the your rebelliion in 1968 made him turn away from the progressives, so much so that they think of him as a traitor.

The pope has lived through the 43 years since the Council and he knows how deeply the Church is divided. As deeply divided, I think, as the Church was during the Christological contoversies of the 4th and 5th Centuries. In a sense we are engaged in a similar controversy. The pope stands with Athanasius but many of the bishops stand with Arius.

[ELS]

I think he just wanted to sidestep the entire homosexuality issue at that time. I think he agrees with the document written by John XXIII saying that homosexuals should not be admitted to the priesthood, but knows that many in the mainstream media are pro-homosexual or homosexual themselves and has observed the violent rage of the radical homosexuals in Italy, so he simply diffused that aspect of the discussion. IMHO.

[livius]

That’s what I think, too. But it sounded like he was definitely preparing something on this subject and was getting ready to deal with it.

You’re right, he has been heavily under attack from the Italian gay lobby. And of course St. Pat’s is picketed by them on a regular basis, and has even been desecrated by radical homosexuals at the masses. So I think he probably wanted to avoid such an event on this trip.

[NYer]

Continually searching for the place where no bad people do bad things must be very stressful.

How coincidental that you should mention this. Earlier this morning, I watched an EWTN program "Eucharistic Principles". Father Emmerich Vogt O.P who does this series, specifically addressed this topic of perfectionism and the damage it brings to our spiritual life. He was quite amusing as he described two other members of the society - one is messy - the other is a neat nick. The messy one admonishes the perfectionist and vv. He runs missions called 12 Step Review

[NYer]

Would more hats be handed out later this year?

That is up to the pope. Given the number of aging cardinals, it's possible he may call another consistory this year.

Like you, I also believe Archbishop Burke is a sterling example. FWIW - my grandmother was upset when Archbishop Sheen did not receive the red hat. Look at him now ;-)

[maryz]

going to cut this issue (clerical homosexuality) out as a separate one and address it specifically? Or was that just my wishful thinking...

That was definitely my understanding too, though I sort of inferred that he would have quite a bit to say when he did and that it's a complex issue. One possible complicating aspect, I would assume, is that there are practicing (and good) priests of homosexual inclination who manage to control themselves, and they would have to be taken into consideration too, though this is speculation on my part.

[livius]

I don’t think the inclination has ever been a problem, legally speaking. Actually, I’d say the “inclination” may even be a modern phenomenon in our sexualized culture, because I think a lot of people who simply are not really interested in sexual relationships (with anybody) would now be considered homosexual. A lot of men who develop intense intellectual relationships with other men are not even remotely thinking of any sexual involvement with them, but Freud has transformed everything into sex. The worst thing that followed VatII, IMHO, (well, after the destruction of the liturgy) was the acceptance of Freudianism.

Freud was a renegade Jew who hated Judaism and spent most of his life trying to destroy it. He succeeded, to some extent: all my Jewish friends in NY had a therapist, and none of them had a rabbi.

By extension, Freud also hated Christianity, and his effect has been equally corrosive. And after VII, we all ran out and embraced his vision of life as entirely sexual, in a genital sense, and entirely at odds with what the Church was and has always taught. This was actually one of the things that contributed to the clerical sexual abuse of the last few decades - they all thought it was groovy and cool, and their bishops were telling them it was all okay.

[maryz]

You make excellent points, especially about the pre-Freudian/post-Freudian mindsets! And the whole therapy mystique has been implicated in the abuse scandal in a number of articles. (I do recall Cardinal Law: “We are all ‘wounded healers’” — which I guess is almost a term of art in the therapeutic world.)

[Kolokotronis]

” Moreover, the crowning paradox of Dreher’s position is that, having left the Catholic Church for Eastern Orthodoxy in large part because of the Scandal, he is now in communion with bishops who would take it very ill if the pope were to do what Dreher so much wants him to do. It's one of the most puzzling aspects of Dreher’s position and I hope that one of these days he will articulate how he can simultaneously hold an Orthodox ecclesiology and still want Benedict (or any pope) to act like Innocent III. I honestly don't get it.”

My thoughts?

Dreher is a jerk. Like so many Western converts, he is far, far too “holier than thou”, a legalistic martinet with no more understanding of the Orthodox phronema than my dog. The disgrace is that any Orthodox priest chrismated him. He is, as one of my favorite priests from down in the old country once told a puffed up “holy guy” convert, “nothing more than a Protestant swinging the theemeeatoe (thurifer)!”

The comment about the Pope being constrained by his primus inter pares position is an interesting, and probably delusional, observation. In Latin ecclesiology he has immediate local jurisdiction of the various bishops. Eastern ecclesiology is different. Oh, btw, I sincerely disagree that there was anything even remotely Eastern about +JPII. In fact he was not well thought of in the East though of course his office and person were respected. Its quite a different matter with +BXVI

[Tax-chick]

It’s always very interesting to hear the foreign perspective.

[Kolokotronis]

“It’s always very interesting to hear the foreign perspective.”

It is, eh?!

[Tax-chick]

What letter makes the “ee” sound?