THE SEXUAL ABUSE CRISIS: THE CHURCH DYING AND RISING

Good Friday 2010
St.Patrick’s Parish
Halifax NS

Our own experience of the Passion of Jesus continues to evolve as we go through the stages of our life. Different aspects of it will touch our hearts each year. To begin with there are our own passion processes: we often die as we let go of something we thought essential to our lives, and eventually we find a peace and a liberation we never dared hope for. Sometimes we share in the passion of loved ones who are struck by a disease over which they have no control, and end up leaving this world. We mourn their passing, but our mourning is often tinged with gratitude, because they are finally released into resurrection out of lengthy and painful sufferings. Sometimes we reflect on the plight of far too many people in our world who live in refugee camps, uprooted from their homes, victims of a violence they do not deserve, not knowing when help is going to come. Sometimes we are caught up with the plight of the homeless, often put out on the street with various drugs to numb their pain and confusion, dependent on the care and compassion of all of us, unable in many cases to pull together the fabric of their lives in a meaningful way. And so on.

Contemplative silence as we behold Christ journeying through his passion will help us understand the Cross as we stand under its dark radiance. Our silence today will unite us with one of the aspects of the passion we cannot but relive at this time in our collective life. Jesus opened his mouth and spoke during his journey to the Cross. He was not mute. He answered many of the questions of his judges, but he knew that his response would be fruitless, his words not heeded. As far as effectively defending himself, his identity, the mandate His Father gave him, he might as well have been mute. Any words he said to vindicate himself were words in the void. His judges had their mind made up and Pilate yielded to political expediency. It was the time for darkness to take over and to envelop him. This was the price of our salvation.

Words that fall into the void or words that have power to defend and vindicate: for us, and in these days, this is an issue of mighty struggle. Jesus was persecuted, and his words were powerless against his accusers. At this time too the Church which he founded is being persecuted, as it has been down through the centuries, but persecuted in a different way, which brings it closer to Jesus victim of injustice and slander. The media in these last weeks, in their quest of news to shock us, and to garner larger audiences and increase their revenues, are bringing to the fore stories of sexual and physical abuse committed by Roman Catholic priests against children and teenagers, and the long-standing failure of Church authorities to deal with these issues in a forthright way. One story after another. The same ones repeated time and time again. “When will it stop?”, we ask. And now we note an effort to include the highest authority in the Church, the Pope, in this wave of accusation by innuendo. This effort has to do with his alleged negligence, even his cover-up, when he was Archbishop of Munich. So the passion of Christ continues. The suffering of many victims of abuse whose lives have been twisted out of shape is intertwined with that of persons who feel – often rightly so – unjustly accused of failure to act in a forthright and effective manner when confronted with incidents of abuse, and also with our own suffering, because these incidents provoke in us feelings of shame, of powerlessness before the onslaught, feelings that the Church has let us down.

How do we respond to this extremely complex situation? Volumes could be written about it and no doubt they will be, once the dust has settled and we have enough distance to see things more clearly in their broader context. We will limit ourselves to two preliminary points:

Firstly many of these accusations of cover-up simply ignore the factual responses and explanations that have been forthcoming from the Vatican and other sources. Willful misrepresentation is going on, and a failure to acknowledge recent changes in the Church’s understandings and procedures. For example, one can agree, with the hindsight we have today, that Benedict XVI as an archbishop ought to have been more personally concerned with the abuse issues that came across his desk, or to have asked his subordinates to bring these issues to his personal attention. He doubtlessly now wishes he had then acted differently. But it is unwarranted to lay on him an accusation of deliberate cover-up carried out at a time when less was known about sexual abuse and its effects. In the last 5 years, even more than John Paul II, he has been instrumental in having the Church do a thorough cleansing of itself, with no area covered-up or hidden, and instrumental in stirring up some of the muck and debris that we might deal with it. He has got the point and is responding courageously. Thank God for that.

My second point is the more important one. The faithful and those who lead them in the Church today cannot simply wring their hands in the face of the current media frenzy, and pretend that as a Church we are maligned and victims just as Jesus was: “ Poor us, we are now suffering without cause.” No, the Church has reason to suffer because its members have sinned. By contrast, Jesus didn’t sin. And we need to suffer as members of the Church because without being purged the Church will not be renewed and reformed as it needs to be. By contrast, Christ did not need to suffer, because he was without sin. He chose to suffer for our sakes, to show us that the road towards perfection for us and for our Church passes through suffering.

I am not calling into question the pope’s sure guidance in the matter of faith and morals. But infallibility is far from meaning that the Church as a whole, including ourselves, and the popes and bishops who lead us, are without sin. We have seen this sinfulness at work in the course of history: it began with the very apostles that Jesus chose. During his earthly life they stubbornly held on to a wrong interpretation of Jesus’ mandate; during his passion they abandoned and betrayed him. Later in the history of the Church there have been some very difficult periods marked by corruption at the top, for example in the 10th century, and among some of the renaissance popes of the 15th and 16th centuries. Much damage was done to the unity of the Church. Thank God that these periods have been followed by periods of repentance and reform. Thank God that the path of repentance and reform is open before us today.

One of the most notable sins of the Church down through the ages is its tendency to cultivate its image as the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, to look good in the eyes of others, to belittle and even hide its warts and flaws. This tendency has been ingrained in its institutional culture. Recognizing its own flaws and need for cleansing does not come easy for the Church. Its earlier practice of keeping quiet such things as priests abusing young people sexually and physically was mostly, we are told, to avoid scandalizing the faithful. It would say: “Let us not disturb their simple faith in the holiness of the Church.” Of course our young ones need to be gradually initiated into Christian life and we need to protect them. But such protection, when people have grown up, can degenerate into paternalism. The faith that animates us should be an adult faith. We can and must confront sin wherever it is to be found in ourselves and in the Church and call it by its name. If we pretend that the Church, its leaders and members, are holier than they actually are, that they are without the disorders that are endemic to the human condition, we are caught in an intolerable untruth. Adult faith means facing reality whatever it is, in this case knowing and accepting in love the Church with both its gifts and its flaws, recognizing that it is not the pinnacle of the perfection that it preaches.

The crisis which has shaken all of us profoundly has energized many of us towards this adult faith. Most importantly, our faith in Jesus as our Saviour and beacon of hope is intact; we continue to come together as a Christian community to celebrate Christ our redeemer, as we are doing today; but we demand more honesty and effective action on the part of our leaders, and our voices will not be silenced. Fortunately, we have heard so many of our Church leaders tell us they are ready to launch into the deep with a new way of dealing with these issues in the Church. What is emerging is no less than a re-foundation, in the words of our Archbishop. A deep cultural change has begun to take place, but we are far from having completed this process of reform and repentance based on a solid foundation of adult faith. This is painful and discouraging for us, because while we are trying to rebuild, past failings of the Church and its officials are constantly being thrown back in our face. This is part of the purgation which we all need to undergo. Let us undergo it courageously. It is one dimension of Christ’s passion which continues today. We suffer, we struggle, we hope.

We know that the passion and death leads to the resurrection. As we undergo a passion which, unlike Jesus, we deserve, let us trust that the fruits of resurrection will be given to us, in a Church rebuilt on the rock of faith and hope and love, nourished by Jesus and his grace so abundant in our midst over the centuries. Our failings and consequent sufferings are God’s way of constantly reminding all of us that God is God, and we need to simply let ourselves be ourselves, forgiven sinners who assemble around the Cross which saves us.