MORE THOUGHTS ON POPE BENEDICT


Coincident with his official visit to the UK, an article has appeared in ‘The [London] Times On-line’, reprinted from the [London] ‘Times Literary Supplement’.

The piece is by the religion editor of the TLS, Rupert Shortt, who reviews a rather upbeat book entitled “Benedict XVI: A Guide for the Perplexed” by one Tracey Rowland.

Rowland’s rather upbeat approach to the subject provides an opportunity for Shortt to take the downbeat approach in his review, which he does. He’s nice enough about it, and comprehensive – and it is that very comprehensiveness that offers me an opportunity to make some comments about Shortt’s review and the general trend of Things Catholic since the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, now 45 years ago.

First, Shortt notes that in Benedict’s own volume of memoirs, published in 2000 and covering the years from his birth (1927) to his elevation to the Archbishopric of Munich (1977) then-Ratzinger did not mention the Holocaust or “the Jews” (Shortt’s term) even once. While a person’s memoirs are his own, and perhaps reflects an un-Correct set of personal priorities, it is a bit much to say that Ratzinger “leaves a sour taste in the mouth” because “given an ideal chance to deplore a catastrophe in which he had been a blameless bystander, [Ratzinger] instead chose to emphasize Hitler’s persecution of Catholics”.

But by 1977 the Israeli Realm had mastered the use of the Holocaust for its own purposes, and the American media had amplified that whole subject exponentially. But Shortt may be giving away a trade-secret of Correctness by taking Ratzinger to task for not Correctly putting himself on the record and – basically – ticking off that box on the Correct checklist.

And given his own religious background, Ratzinger is surely on solid ground by sharing his concern for Catholics. In fact, given that members of the Jewish faith had been historically given difficulties in pre-1933 Europe (although, especially in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany and in the Polish and Russian territory they had developed a robust and comprehensive culture and in Germany had become rather deeply enculturated) it was probably more of a historical anomaly that the Catholics were persecuted.

(And, just to add a poignant note, recall that in the mid-1930s, as the Nazis tried to establish their hegemony over stubbornly recalcitrant Catholic Bavaria and the German South, Goebbels had tried to engineer a public-relations coup by having the State Prosecutor there bring charges against an entire monastery full of Catholic religious on charges of – wait for it – child sexual abuse.* The sturdy Bavarians refused to take that seriously and Goebbels had to back down, no doubt on the orders of a Hitler who realized that he wasn’t going to be changing a millennium-old religious culture of belief overnight. The man was not a complete fool.)

But as I indicated in the immediately previous Post, any totalizing State’s pretensions put it on a collision course with the ancient teaching of the Catholic Church, the essence of which is that there is a God and His Higher Law to which all States and monarchs and governments must conform and by Whom they all stand under judgement. And while in the course of human events national Catholic hierarchies tend to take the side of their national flocks and – alas – their nations, right or wrong, YET the core of the genuine foundational teaching of the Universal Church remains solid as a rock.

And that is gall and wormwood to State-friendly interests, especially when they are especially State-dependent. And this, nowadays, would include both the National Nanny-Regulatory State of the current Left as well as the National Security-Invasion State of the Rightists. (See the immediately previous Post.) So you can see where the Catholic Church is pretty much bound to dissatisfy a whole lotta powerful interests in the modern West, no matter which way it turns, unless it simply takes the ‘mainline Protestant’ approach of diluting itself into some form of a goo-goo religious Chowder-and-Marching-Band Society, spreading ‘liberation’ either in the form of self-indulgent ‘luv’ or in the form of democracy-by-bayonet-and-God's-Will.

And for those wondering where ‘liberation theology’ fit into all of this, it is that by the 1960s the Church became verrry leery of ‘revolution’ given its experience of the Soviet and Nazi revolutions (although Hitler had indeed taken dictatorial power legally, the Nazi and Stalinist Modus Operandi were similar in many vital, insidious, and bloody respects). And when the revolutionary Content and Method arose again, ‘baptized’ – its proponents imagined – by the Good Purpose and Good Intentions of ‘the poor’, the Church hierarchy, functioning as much as a keel and rudder as a sail**, worked to rein that horse in before it took the wagon (and the poor) over yet another revolutionary cliff, as had befallen the hapless Russian people in October of 1917 and subsequently.

Shortt won’t have any of this. Benedict, he says, made two big mistakes. First, “his discussion ignored the largely supine response to the Nazis of both clergy and laity”. Rather true, but grossly incomplete. Western clergy, laity, and commentators never had to face directly a brutal and bloody dictatorship on its own ground. There existed every possibility that if you stood up you – AND your family – would have suffered immediate and awful consequences.

Worse, for any prelate charged with responsibility for his flock, there existed the very real danger that the Nazis would simply start taking ANY members of an offending religious faith-group and use them as hostages or – as the Nazis (and the Kaiser’s forces before them) did in Occupied countries – shoot a bunch to shut-up the rest. Gandhi did not have to face this in the far more respectful – if not indulgent – British rule of India; there were no Gandhis or Martin Luther Kings in Nazi Germany because they would have been taken and executed long before they could work up to speed (as happened to the greatest of the resistant German churchmen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer).

So it’s not an impressive gambit for a later commentator to tar the Nazi-era German religious leadership and congregants as “supine” (although there were, as ever among humans, a few who went along to get along). A bishop or prelate or leader who declared opposition to the Nazis was risking not only his own life but the lives of his flock – men, women, and children – to State reprisals … and in the Nazi State, ‘reprisal’ tended to be on the extreme and bloody end of that term’s definitional range.

Secondly, says Shortt, Ratzinger “drew the highly contentious lesson that the Church can only resist dictatorships effectively when run as a very tight ship”.

Yeah, well, phooey.

First, the lesson is “contentious” only because there are a number of persons who – for any number of reasons, not to exclude political agendas and a reliance on sentimentality rather than rational deliberation – don’t like ‘tight ships’. And many of them are in the U.S., which in the years 1963-1968 experienced the Second Vatican Council, the success of the first-phase of the Civil Rights Revolution, the increasing failure (in so many respects) of the Vietnam War, the Summer of Love, the urban riots, three hugely significant assassinations (JFK, MLK,RFK), and – with an eye to the happy-face ‘success’ of Mao’s youthy and creatively-destructive ‘Cultural Revolution’ – a general sense of gaga over the positive possibilities of wide-ranging and free-range ‘revolution’ (radical feminism being the most organized fruit of Mao’s poisonous tree).

And it’s hugely significant that Shortt makes this classic objection to the Roman Catholic Vatican-heavy mode of governance: the ‘liberal’ Catholics of the Sixties were quite certain that ‘liberal democracy’ could work as well for the Church as it had for America itself. Which assumption seemed back in those days to be reasonable; America was a creative profusion of ‘democratic’ impulses and fever-dreams.

But now, given the inevitable (though never fully predictable) mutations and permutations imposed by almost half a century of vigorous History, there stands the awful Question: has American democracy been done in by too much Boomery, radical, fevered ‘democracy’? Is there any ‘there there’ any longer when you speak of ‘American society’ or ‘the American people’ as anything more than a geographically-defined term? Even Obama is trying to solve a problem he doesn’t dare admit exists: identity politics has shattered the American polity and any sense of common weal or common purpose, and enabled all sorts of ancient demons (Wealth (capital-W) being the most hoary of all) to return.

And – really – can you ever have a ‘radical democracy’?

If the Consequences of the Sixties are expressing themselves only now, half a century later, then perhaps the Church – and Benedict – will be proven right: that without some amount of serious guidance, very large bodies of folks are not going to be able to hold themselves together and sustain any effective sense of national identity. (Look at the mainstream Protestant churches in this country, for example, and ask yourself if they really remain vibrant and vital and distinctive religious communities of Christian belief.)

But of course, this comment of Shortt’s (did Benedict actually use the ‘tight ship’ image himself?) also emphasizes a verrry substantial difference in world view. A ‘ship’ is a constructed machine carrying a burthen of ‘souls’, a human community; moreover it requires a certain knowledge and skill to operate the ship safely, especially since its very reason for being is to traverse a very unpredictable and potentially lethal medium: the ocean, which is itself a potent brew of wind and weather and water – lots and lots of each.

THIS image captures many – but not all – of the major elements of the Church’s vision of humanity’s passage through History. You need a skilled and competent captain and crew to see this thing through, even as the passengers themselves conduct – within the parameters of the ship – their own lives and business.

But can you have a genuinely ‘democratic’ vision of humanity’s presence in this life and in human History and still subscribe to the ‘ship’ image? Surely not since 1968 or so, in the West, and certainly not in the U.S. ‘Total autonomy’ and the post-modern axiom that NOBODY can claim to really know what they’re doing to the extent that they can impose it on anybody else … you can’t very well run a ship and still remain congruent to current trends.***

But perhaps Human life together is neither a Ship nor a Garden, but just a ‘democracy’ of everybody doing what they can get away with and getting what they can get by ‘organizing’ and ‘pressuring’ for themselves and their preferred ‘group’ or ‘identity’ and figuring that there is no larger identity, no larger life, no Larger Life and no Larger Presence or Authority or Being. That’s a Flattening and ultimately enslaving and most surely dis-empowering approach, but in the short-run it sure LOOKS like a liberation … and if the Boomers loved anything more than not ever again being said No-to, they loved surfaces and appearances – since in their youthy salad days they hadn’t been around long enough to have to deal with the ‘bummer’ and ‘downer’ of Consequences and Limits and Reality (which last, by the by, post-modernism helpfully denies exists). Wheeee!

The question remains open at this point. But – if Benedict has bet on the right horse – humanity is still very much at sea on a storm-tossed ocean of existence, and in dire need of competence in order to stay afloat (in the metaphysical and moral, even more than the financial, sense).

Shortt’s conclusion is that the Pope’s memoir gives “the unintended impression … that its author, though urbane and intelligent, lacks common sense”. Which, come to think of it, could be the epitaph of an awful lot of elite commentators nowadays.

In the alternative, I would submit the very real possibility that the Pope’s wisdom – as the songster saith – “sank beneath them like a stone”. To use an image from the Cargo-Cult era of World War 2 in the South Pacific, when you know there are radio-waves, and are talking to South Seas Islanders who don’t even suspect the existence of such a dimension of reality and who are busily devising the best ritual for bringing the big silver birds filled with lotsa nice stuff, then your vision of how the world works is going to be lost on even the most elite of the native leaders.

I suppose there are innumerable modern elites who would take umbrage at being compared to Cargo-Cult natives, but there it is.

Ditto when Shortt then goes on to judge Benedict personally un-ambitious but still a “very ambitious promoter of his own model of church government”.

First, the whole idea underlying Identity Politics – especially in the Postmodern era – is that you promote your own visions and versions of how the world is supposed to work with gimlet-eyed, almost fanatical, resolve.

Second, Shortt seems to think that Benedict’s vision is just his own, personal, Benedict’s-eye-view of how the Church should operate. Perhaps Shortt confuses the Protestant polities with the Roman Catholic Church. But Benedict is standing-tall for the historic Roman Catholic vision, and also for the prudence that says If you’re going to change the foundations of a standing and occupied skyscraper, you really have to do so verrrrrry carefully and with a lot of serious thought; because even if in theory your changes will work, the consequences of your being wrong will wreck an awful lot of irreplaceable and vital human structure. (A thought that proved – alas – a Bridge Too Far for the eager churchy-embodiments of the post-Vatican 2 Boomers.)

Shortt goes on to accuse – gently – the Pope of “legerdemain” in his memoirs: from being a scholar who looked for more rational and reformed changes in the era before Vatican 2, Benedict went to being a rather careful (may I suggest ‘prudent’?) man in the era following Vatican 2’s termination in 1965. Shortt sees this as some form of conceptual inconsistency, and intentional at that. Although you could spend a whole lotta time with a Cray supercomputer trying to find the conceptual consistency in the agendas of today’s assorted Identities or even within each Identity; so, for example, trying to rationally harmonize the many sets, sub-sets, alter-sets, and oppositional-sets of overall Feminism at this point would be like trying to find conceptual consistency in the assorted Mensehivik, Plekhanovite, right-deviationist, left-deviationist, Old Bolshevik and New Bolshevik factions of Communism in the 1910s.

I can imagine Benedict’s thought as quite rational and reasonable: he saw opportunities for substantive reform but then realized that – given the tenor of the 1960s (not at all evident when the Council was conceived by John XXIII in 1959 nor even when it was convened in 1962) – the whole ‘change thing’ was going to go into frenzied overdrive and threaten to vibrate so violently as to wreck the whole structure. Like a car stuck in overdrive and rocking its own motor off the mounts.

So too Shortt thus accuses the author of the book here as subscribing to a “fantasy” – i.e. that Benedict has been fully consistent. To the extent that any serious thinker is ‘fully consistent’ over the course of decades, and to the extent that any serious thinker tries to adapt his presentations of his basic ideas to an idiom of expression suitable to the times in which he finds himself, and to the extent that his basic vision of things has remained steady and stable – to that extent I’d say that Benedict has been very respectably consistent, and far more so than an awful lot of ‘cutting-edge’ and ‘transgressive’ and even ‘progressive’ thinkers on the world scene today. (Which statement is not my commercial for pre-Vatican 2 Catholicism in every single aspect of practice.)

Perhaps Shortt here is simply trying to offer a counter-toned review of Rowland’s upbeat book.

Shortt notes that in the late 19th century, “Enlightenment rationalism was now to be answered with a Catholic counter-rationalism”. He refers to the deep embrace by the Church of Thomas Aquinas’s comprehensive – and I mean that in the fullest, pre-Modern and pre-Postmodern sense – attempt to rationally comprehend the vision of Humanity and its World as created by a loving God yet accessible to humans’ splendid Gift of a capacity for Thought and Self-Reflection that would guide the more universally mammalian Instinct and the unique, vital, but hard-to-master human Emotions.

The Catholic approach has always been an effort to deploy Mind in the service of a Soul that constitutes the most genuine reality of being a Human (Emotions indispensably a part of it as well), all the while understanding that the Human consisted not only of Mind and Emotion but also of a very real Soul, which was created in the image and likeness of a God Who actively seeks nothing less than a relationship-to-genuine-fulfillment with each Human and all Humans.

That’s quite a vision – and I challenge anybody to come up with as comprehensive a Model as Aquinas came up with (himself building upon both ancient Greek and early Christian thinkers). Indeed, while they have individually come up with interesting insights, the whole corpus of Western philosophers and thinkers since the beginning of the Modern Era (1600 or so) can be looked at as a whole bunch of players with their individual instruments trying to play, or even conceive of, a symphonic piece without reference to a Composer or Conductor. Would you pay good money (so to speak) to listen to an evening full of THAT at your local philharmonic hall?

And you always have to factor in – especially these days – a certain selective straw-man approach to commentary on the Church: you pick out what you don’t like, claim that the Church has been doing nothing but that all along, and then triumphantly claim that therefore the Church has to go (or at least ‘change’) in precisely the way you’d like to see. This is evident not only in the matter of deep philosophical and theological discussion but also in such more politically-driven and socio-cultural matters as the ordination of women, the morality of abortion, and the current fixation with a sex-abuse that – however much it may have been an active issue decades ago – appears to have been addressed with some real success (few newly-committed cases are to be found, certainly compared to the lurid intimations you find in the press).

Ratizinger, as Shortt notes, has always been concerned with “structural reform”. Good for him. That isn’t to say ‘foundational change’, but as a professional churchman Ratzinger has always been concerned with preserving the foundations, updating the structural elements that transmit the vitalities of the foundational elements to successive long-ages of human history, and effectively communicating, proclaiming, and sharing the vitality of the Church’s vision with all Humanity. Oh, and that presumes, of course, that you have to maintain a certain consistency of institutional identity. Oh, and that presumes that in the Church’s reality, God is always breathing Genuine and Ultimate Life into her so that she can continue to perform her God-given Mission.

It was for that complex of reasons that Ratzinger – and he was hardly alone – “decided that the liberal genie had to be returned to the bottle” after Vatican 2 began to gyrate wildly off the rails.

Genies – as anybody familiar with fairy-tales knows (at least if the tales haven’t been gutted by the mavens of Correctness) – are notoriously unreliable beings: you think you have formulated a reely reely great Wish, but then the Genie gets going on it and the next thing you know you’ve got what you asked for … but it’s somehow creating a whole mess of trouble that you never imagined but that the Genie helpfully instructs you were consequences contained logically within your dream-wish in the first place. (And can you say Iraq War?)

Or, to look at it another way, Benedict – like a shrewdly experienced emergency services director – realized early on that no matter how great the ‘emergency’ to which you must respond, you can’t drive an ambulance (or a dozen ambulances) at 120mph on crowded city streets.

At this point I’d like to propose something.

For all the decades since 1965 the appearance, if not so often the substance, of Great and Good Change has been maintained in the example – set forth to the world – of the United States: immensely rich and powerful, able to Change every old which way and still be Number One. In that context the Church’s rather prudent caution (she’s seen a lot of Change breed frakkulent unimagined consequences over the course of 2000 years) could easily be spun as stodgy, fuddy-duddy and worse – oppressive, hateful, insensitive, and you-name-it.

But it’s 2010, and 1965 was 45 years ago. And the United States – especially to eyes not soused by rah-rah American media ‘reporting’ – has come a substantial cropper. Its economy is a shambles and may never recover, its economic primacy is gone for good, and domestically its polity is riven and wracked by Identity Politics and the cumulative wrack of many decades of many revolutions; while in foreign affairs its ability to shape events is hugely reduced.

So too with American ‘liberals’ of the post-Vatican 2 era of the 1960s: whatever they demand now, the background context of ‘ever-changing and always-growing Success’ has dissolved into wrack and ruin.

This is NOT simply to say that some sort of neutral Hegelian thesis-antithesis dynamic is doing its inevitable thing. It is, rather, to say that so very much of what was embraced after 1968 or so has proven itself to have borne some awfully lethal poisonous fruit and that damage has now been done that may never be fully repaired. And that – in the eyes of future (read: unbiased) historians, the 21st century may now appear to them as similar to the West’s experience after the 6th century A.D., after the fall of Rome’s hugely advanced level of civilization and culture. (I read somewhere once that after Rome’s fall in the 500s,the average European ‘peasant’ did not achieve an equivalent level of living until the 1800s.)

We are not merely witnessing, perhaps, the end of a ‘change cycle’ and the counter-reaction. We are, I am saying, facing the cumulative Consequences of what can only be seen as the West’s self-destruction. Not through one huge series of world wars, such as World War 1 destroyed the achievements of late-19th century European civilization and culture. Rather, it has been a self-destruction through whackulently embraced Deconstruction.

Khrushchev did not bury the West. Rather, the West buried itself – and, in a hell-hot irony – it was precisely the collapse of the Soviet State that lured the U.S. into its most virulent frenzy of self-deconstruction (those years burbled by feministicals to be the flowering of their success under the benevolent aegis of Billary).

The Church has watched this as she once watched Rome herself slide down into the 500s.

You can imagine, then, why frenzied American criticism, liberal and progressive or fundamentalist, doesn’t make as much impression upon her as the American organizers would like. As National Nanny State – worshipping the fatuous frakkulence of ‘total individual autonomy’ – or as National Security State – worshipping the national government as a god (if only Bush had a horse to make a Senator!) … the Church has seen this sort of thing before. Been there, seen that.

Atheism – the presumption either that there is no God or that there are many gods (which is really a form of the old paganism) – is just a flicker of distracting energy on the surface of a dying thing.

This, I think, is a profound reality with which most Americans have not yet come to grips. But it is truly the key operative dynamic of history in Our time and for the forseeable future.

What resources – philosophical, theological, maturational – America and Americans possess to deal with this reality … now THAT is an interesting question.

But the Church, I would say, will draw on 2000 years of experience and on a Resource that is not dependent on the material world … and, if I were a betting person, will help shape whatever comes after Us.

NOTES

*One article reports as an outrage the following: there are in the UK priests who have been convicted of some form of child sexual-abuse and served at least one year in prison and who are still carried on their diocesan rolls and listed in the comprehensive directory of priests. And this despite “recommendations” made by the sentencing judges that the convict be “laicized”.

A couple of thoughts. First of all, in this day and age it doesn’t take a lot to get charged or even convicted of sexually abusing a child (which, let me say, is NOT to imply that some of those convicted did not commit outrageous, genitally or otherwise seriously invasive acts with children). And if you were to draw a one-year sentence on such a conviction, that would seem extremely low, opening up the very real possibility that the conviction was for a relatively low-grade act.

Second, you can be an ordained priest and yet not practicing ministry and still be carried on the official rolls. You can even be barred by your bishop from any public ministry and still be carried on the rolls, although to all appearances you would be living as a ‘lay person’.

Third, it is then quite possible that a bishop took pity on a priest – perhaps of advanced years – who is released from prison and at this late stage in life, especially given the specific nature of priestly training and the job market in all the Western countries nowadays. And thus the bishop might decide that the Church still owed him some modest support, and carries him on the rolls to ensure health insurance or a stipend to see him through his remaining years.

This, to the professional advocacies, is gall and wormwood and – perhaps taking a page from Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” – provides yet another opportunity to keep the flames fanned: they want the priest – who has now not only lost his life’s occupation but also any possibility of livelihood AND has completed (and physically survived) a prison sentence – to be cast into the outer darkness.

This is rather a bit too much of a muchness. And it is not a judge’s place to be ‘recommending’ religious disciplinary action to the Church. The State’s legal process has been carried through, a sentence imposed and completed, and that’s as far as the State’s writ runs.

I imagine that if the offender-priest had been ‘defrocked’ the established advocacies would then declare their ‘outrage’ that he is still allowed to receive the sacraments and hasn’t been excommunicated (the Church punishment of being completely thrown out of the Church, which can be imposed upon any Catholic if the bishop sees fit). That gambit would fit rather well with Alinsky’s pointers on technique: always keep the issue on the front burner no matter how much you have to change your agenda to do so.

I would also point out that the technicalities of the statutes as most are written do not conform to the formal and official psychiatric manuals’ diagnoses: a ‘pedophile’ is compulsively attracted to prepubescents, whereas it is quite possibly that a number of these convicted priests were actually found guilty of an offense in regard to an adolescent or at least someone under the age of majority (usually 16 or 18).

**On a sailing ship, the keel serves to reach down deep into the water and stabilize the hull as it responds to the pressure exerted by the sails’ catching the wind and tends to heel over to one side or another; the rudder steers the moving ship. The sails high up on their masts and yards are designed for the opposite – or, better, complementary - purpose of catching the wind and harnessing its power to create movement. Both forces are necessary and complementary: the keel and rudder control motion while the sails provide it.

***And as I so often say, how then can you run an actual Navy of ships in the current Correct post-modern era?

CATHOLIC PRIEST


A Catholic priest is in the news again – and the Cardinal that protected him from police investigation.

It hasn’t received a lot of play here though.

The man is long dead (1980) but that has rarely made a difference in current American media and legal praxis.

He was a member of a shadowy and indeed secret organization that rather fancied it a good thing to screw up lives, perhaps since in the Big Picture they were actually doing the work of the Lord.

The man’s alleged crimes certainly ruined the lives of nine victims. ‘Totally screwed them up’ as no doubt might be said anywhere in the US these days.

His Cardinal got together with the police and they all quietly decided that the best thing would be to transfer him out of the country – and so they did. He died uninvestigated and un-charged. There will be, thus, no ‘closure’, as they like to say in these parts.

His alleged victims will never go to church again.

They are dead. He allegedly masterminded the IRA bombing that killed them in 1972.

It was in Ireland during ‘The Troubles’ that started in 1969 and went on for quite a few years.

The story hasn’t received much play here.

I think I can see why.

It’s been an elephant in the middle of the room around these parts that priests could easily be tarred with a metaphorical ‘killing’ through this, that, or another form of ‘abuse’ since – reliably – priests rarely really actually killed anybody and so there was no reality-principle to act as a brake on the incessantly trumpeted ‘soul-murder’ or ‘life-destruction’ said to result from this, that, or another form of ‘abuse’.

So it has been easy-peezy to play the ‘death’ card against ‘abusive’ priests, since there was never any real death on the field that would put the ‘abuse is death’ mantras in proportion: as being rather substantially exaggerated. Not to put too fine a point on it, if one is well enough to be taking nourishment and breathing with some regularity, one is not really dead. And claims to be so must be taken as the (perhaps well-intentioned) exaggerations that they are.

This embarrassing reality is clearly not ‘friendly’ to the cause of certain interests in the country these days, nor to their media enablers. Indeed it threatens to inject an irrefutable reality into a forum that has been somewhat prone to something other than reality: the exaggerated mantra itself, of course, and then the somewhat phantasmagorical reliance on ‘spectral evidence’ – I am ‘dead’ because I believe I am dead and you can’t tell me otherwise.

Which in any normal world would elicit, at best, counseling, and at worst, a bit of tough-love explication of just what ‘reality’ means.

Although then again, We no longer live in a culture whose elites value ‘reality’. ‘Facts don’t matter’; symbols are more useful than actualities; if enough folks can be gotten to believe something then it is ‘true’.

All of the foregoing are signs not of cutting-edge progress (no matter how ‘sensitive’) but of regression to more primitive forms of public discourse.

George Bernard Shaw once said that “all progress depends on the unreasonable man” – say “unreasonable people” if you like. There’s a bit of truth to it, real truth.

Although it’s exaggerated for effect, as all aphorisms are. The ‘unreasonable’ – like the nonconformist lemmings of the later Boomer generation – are helpful, indeed indispensable.

But they cannot be the policy-makers or the policy-drivers in a civilization. Especially in a remarkable civilization – the Western civilization – that was built on Reason and reasonableness. And especially in the American version of Western civilization, that was founded upon a politics of reasonableness NOT for the purpose of creating an idolatry of Reason – that was the French Revolution’s vision, that poisonous tree that also bore the fruit of the Leninist and Maoist revolutions – BUT for the purpose of ensuring a reasonableness in politics and a reasonable politics.

It was in that way that the Framers sought to avoid the dark and primal excesses that abide in the human self and were enshrined, one way or another, in so many of the world’s prior civilizations and systems of government.

It has not been ‘progress’ that unreasonableness has been enshrined here and drives far too much of the American government’s policy and the country’s politics, and has now for decades. It has been, rather, a monstrous regression to a more primitive politics and has resulted in a much more primitive and greatly weakened polity.

And that must change.

JAMES CARROL ON CELIBACY

More on this Catholic priest thing. Why? It’s amazing to watch this thing keep going, with so many commentators tossing whatever they happen to have handy in the hopes that something will stick. And yet it is presented by ‘The New York Times’ and its corporate subsidiaries with all the breathless solemnity of ‘serious’ stuff.

Carroll has a full-page piece. He’s basically running the plan of claiming that all the priestly abuse and all the ‘cover up’ is due to priestly celibacy (and an old-boy network that also comes back to ‘men’, not to put too fine a point on it).

In this approach he dovetails nicely with Garry Wills, about whom I recently Posted. Although, Wills goes after the Papacy and the entire concept of a hierarchy and a clergy (at least a male clergy) as being late add-ons to a fancied original layperson’s church nicely called “the people of God”.

But they both join the ‘liberal’ siege that is seeking to neutralize the Church’s credibility and stature as a moral force, either through sex-abuse (cases now either very old or diminishing in number), hierarchical cover-up reaching up to the Papacy itself (opening the path to a ‘democratic’ – and thus more ‘liberal’? – Church), maleness (opening the way for women to be ordained and become bishops and even Pope), or – not quite coherently – abolishing the Papacy and the hierarchical priesthood itself (what will that do to all the ordainment opportunities for women?).

I sort of get a sense of déjà-vu: the old Tailhook game-plan now run against the Church, presumably with as much success as – alas – it had with the Navy and the Pentagon. The Church, though, appears to have a bit more backbone than the Admirals and assorted pols, and perhaps enough intellectual chops to see that the proposed utopia of Postmodern Ascendancy has more than a coupla downsides.

Which resistance is not having a good effect on the ‘liberals’’ blood-pressure at all.

Carroll is going for the idea that if the Church got rid of clerical celibacy then there wouldn’t have been all the sex-abuse.

Of course, you first have to remind yourself that the ‘abuse’ has been defined to include anything from a touch to outright rape, with an awful lot of the claims at the lower end of that spectrum, and with almost all of the allegations never subjected to the inquiry of a trial (even as the trial process has been skewed in favor of allegators in the Age of Sex Mania).

But beyond that, I’d need to know if the existence of sexual abuse is less among married clergy.

That’s an utterly necessary bit of information to have before you can start assessing the dump-celibacy (or dump-men) plan. But it’s a tough one, since – by amazing coincidence – the marquis media investigative resources have never done any sustained and effective looking into the question.

Anglican clergy? Protestant clergy? Fundamentalist clergy? Mormon clergy? Jewish clergy? Where either the male or the female is the ordained member?

Surely the sex-offense movement’s rather shrewdly underplayed information is that when you actually look at the numbers, more than 90 percent of the sexual abuse of children takes place in the family setting. And that the stranger-man so favored in media reports constitutes less than 5 percent of the instances. Marriage doesn’t seem to have the effect that Carroll presumes it to have.

Nor do I say here that the clergyman is a ‘stranger’; but then I would want to know if Catholic priests are relatively more frequent or less frequent offenders (when they actually do offend) than clergy of other faith-groups. And that too is a rather vital piece of the puzzle that the marquis reporting media haven’t really discussed.

This is not an attempt to ‘minimize’ by trying the ‘everybody does it’ gambit; but if Carroll is going to pin everything on ‘celibacy’ (and ‘men’ to a lesser extent) then answers to these questions are essential.

He stakes a lot on his own experiences as a seminarian and priest for some years.

He himself left, he says, because he wanted to be a writer and he felt he couldn’t exercise the freedom to do that while a priest. He’s probably onto something there: large organizations don’t usually allow their official representatives or employees an unlimited latitude for freedom of expression. It’s sort of built into the organizational – even the ‘team’ – dynamic, and is clear in corporate and military settings as well as in political and even academic settings.

But he also reports on the substantial amount of immaturity – emotional, psychological, as well as sexual – among the Catholic clergy as he experienced them.

And I think he’s on to something there.

The Church made a choice for an unmarried clergy in the 12th century. There were organizational and strategic reasons for that. Organizationally, married priests died, for example, leaving wives or concubines and even children to be supported and there arose questions of what belonged to the priest’s ‘estate’ and what belonged to the Church (did the widow or relicts have a legal claim upon the parish property?).

Strategically, the Church in the various nascent monarchies of a Europe recovering from the Dark Ages, was looking to protect not only its spiritual integrity and authority (fearing what ultimately took place in Henry VIII’s England) but also the physical infrastructure of parishes and bishoprics and so forth.

And in suppressing the pre-Reformation agitations of dissenting sects (the Cathari and Albigensians, most notably) as well as in looking at the diplomatic and military professionalization going on in the developing monarchies, the Church leadership saw the possibility of having a corps of professional dedicated agents in the form of a celibate priesthood.

It was that or allow a slide toward priests becoming employees of the nascent monarchies (as happened in Henry VIII’s England, most notably) or simply popular local tribunes, chained to local popular whims theological, social, political and otherwise.

And, of course, if you were married – and marriage being such a significant and profound sacrament – then your first responsibility in life had to be to your family and not to God and the folks assigned to your care. (Which is why the military for so long preferred unmarried folks and was not ‘family-oriented’. I clearly recall an episode in the first season of the ‘Star Trek’ TV show (the one with Kirk and Spock and the gang) where two officers on the ship (a male and a female; the show wasn’t TOO far ahead of the times) are going to get married; suddenly the Battle-Stations alarm goes off as an enemy vessel is sighted; the betrothed immediately rush … to find each other for re-assuring hugs. Thank God this is science fiction, I said to myself.)

But there was a spiritual dimension to it as well. Carroll rightly looks to the original deformation – to remain in the spirit of his analysis – that took place in the early centuries of Christianity when certain North African Christians took to the deserts to live a life of almost complete withdrawal from the life of this world, the better to conduct a vital relationship with the Divine, unhindered and undistracted in their pursuit of the soul’s excellence by the needs of societal living and even of the body itself.

Their idea was something akin to naval life: you stripped down the vessel so that it carried only those things essential to the mission of the warship. You lived your life as focused on the Mission of conforming yourself to a relationship with the Divine as a naval officer at sea lived his life conformed utterly to the needs of the Mission (you see a robust echo of this in “Master and Commander” Jack Aubrey’s overriding dedication to ‘the needs of the Service’, which so exasperated his friend, the scientist (and, in the books, government intelligence agent), Dr. Stephen Maturin).

This strand resembles the insight underlying Noh plays: you strip down the inessentials, thus acutely refining and intensifying the spirit to fit into the most core essentials in the script-action and in the performance. (Alhough there then developed Kabuki for those who weren't up to the challenges of performing or watching Noh - but I'm not going to draw the analogy out that far: because in the Church, and certianly as reaffirmed in the Second Vatican Council, 'lay life' wasn't seen as merely a 'watered-down' version of genuine Christianity suitable for 'lesser' minds, souls and lives - rather, the lay life was in itself a mode of the Divine life expressing Itself in life and history and human affairs.)

There was a significant weakness in this desert hermit approach: not everyone baptized into the Church community was going to be living as a desert hermit. And the Church saw her mission as not only to provide a matrix for desert hermitry, but also for all of those human beings who still wished to carry on a life of more conventional (not to say less-spiritual or less morally valuable) societal participation, marrying, raising families, and earning a living through which sustenance could be provided for same.

The hermits, let’s face it, took a dim view of ‘the body’ and of Matter (as opposed to Spirit) generally. To them, all of that was ‘the world’ and it was the playground of the Devil. And especially sex, which the hermits rather vividly – and perhaps acutely – perceived as capable of raising one hell of a mess with one’s concentration and one’s life. Few adolescent boys of any era (girls too, in their way) could disagree with that concern.

The trouble with sex was that it is not only a human capability, but is one of the most primal evolutionary* fundaments of the human being, and in each individual self, it was a remarkably powerful element of ‘motivation’. This, we now know, wasn’t surprising: the first thing Nature seeks to ensure in a species it that it will be able to reproduce itself and raise its young to continue the cycle of birth, life, and death.

But in the Church’s (and hence the West’s) view, the human being also possessed a ‘soul’, something that kept going after death, something that (as we now know) maintained personal identity even as all the cells in the body replaced themselves in the space of multi-year cycles throughout life.**

And the problem arose of how to integrate the human’s primal evolutionary sexual urge into the advanced life of being possessed not only of Material (physical, bodily) existence but some form of non-Material, spiritual (metaphysical) existence as well.

Scripture was not definitive. There are two Creation accounts, one which emphasizes procreation and one which seems to indicate that God created Eve so that Adam wouldn’t be all alone and lonely. Nor does Scripture apologize for the bald duality in its text.

Is sex for ‘having kids’ or for ‘relationship’? Or for both? (Or, as in today’s hook-up culture, the gift of the past 40 years, is it for ‘personal fulfillment’ or for ‘stress relief’ or for ‘health’ or for laffs?)

And in any case, then, how integrate it into a general balance among one’s human powers and potentials? Or do you just call Sex your personal equivalent of the Prime Directive and let it run your life?

You may already sense that these issues are hardly ‘quaint’ or of merely historical interest. For much of the past 40 Biblical years this country has been wrestling with the question. And taken it to new heights or depths of conceptual creativity. And political activity - or political theater, anyway.

Especially in a consumerist culture that emphasizes the immediate gratification or ‘fulfillment’ of the individual and every desire, not to be postponed or ‘repressed’ for any reason – including, some would say, responsibility to ‘children’ and succeeding generations (once quaintly known as ‘posterity’).

The Church has evolved a concept of human ‘fulfillment’ that involves a responsible use of sex (by males and females) that is tied into a complex and dynamic human reality that involves other human beings in the Present building on the experiences of humans in the Past and holding itself responsible for those humans in the Future, that posterity yet to be born. And the whole three-ring circus to be overseen by a Beyond that cared enough to guide, nurture, support and – in the widest and most constructive sense of the word – ‘judge’.

And it is a concept that requires more than a little ‘postponement of gratification’, a hallmark of maturity in psychological circles that yet affronted (and affrighted) the cocky adolescent Boomers (who, if you ask me, were given far too much too soon, not only by their doting parents but also by their government when the Democrats gave them the vote in 1972 and told them they were the cutting edge of Everything).

If materialist and consumerist America has always existed a little uneasily with the Church’s teachings, the Boomers – and especially some of the utopian paradise excitements that have riled Us during their tenure – have really got their issues with the Church. But nobody ever really said No to them; and after the domestic political experience of Vietnam they got the idea that nobody really had the authority or integrity to say No to them.

Nor have they learned to say No to themselves. To the contrary, they have erected Yes into a general philosophy of life. But one that has somehow morphed in the following generations into an instinctual (no philosophy about it) knee-jerk of Whateverrrrr.

But Carroll’s own experiences do hold some valid observations.

The downside of the Church’s 12th century plan was that if you were going to have a complex set of sacraments that would mark all of the important watershed moments in every believer’s life, dispensable only by your ordained agents, and yet you were a very large and widely dispersed organization, you were going to need a whole lot of agents.

And that would have quality-control ramifications. Where find consistently so many spiritually as well as personally mature adults, trained to ecclesiastical and sacramental competence?

In American history, especially as the pioneering immigrant Catholic flocks of the 19th century got themselves adjusted to America’s culture, the pool of candidates – raised in a misch of Catholic and ethnic tradition that then combined with American attitudes – to administer the extensive Catholic ‘establishment’ of parishes, schools, and dioceses faced a life not so far different from what is known in the military as ‘garrison life’.

It was not the life of the legions, enduring great physical hardship and danger yet experiencing the thrill of deploying self and commitment to duty squarely in the teeth of the remarkably concentrating and enlivening threat of death. Rather, life in garrison was prone to become a round of duties and formalities.

Garrison life attracts a certain type of recruit who might not have signed up for the legions. It’s just the way things are and for what it’s worth I don’t think that the simple addition of ‘women’ to the mix is going to make that much difference.

Unless, deducing from the work of the many ‘nuns’ who vitally sustained the work of the Church over decades, the female is naturally better equipped to ‘nurture’ and ‘nurse’ – which, in a way, is what the parish ministry is all about. But that – who can be surprised? – is not something that Correct thought will entertain in the present matter. Nor can I resolve it in a simple Post here.

And the garrison mentality – as opposed to the life of the legions – also brings its own insidious spiritual drawback: you get the idea that if you just get all the daily, weekly, monthly checklists checked-off, and keep the flag flying and fire the sunrise and sunset guns, then you’ve pretty much done your job and the rest of your energy is … ‘free’ (as in free-time or – in Latin – ad libitum).

So you either have to train the troops to define ‘free’ and ‘freedom’ in a way commensurate with their overall professional responsibilities, or else you’ll wind up with a 9-to-5 soldiery that, once the uniform is off, acts like just any other civilian.***

The postwar years – when the Boomers were just getting started - saw not just a loosening of cultural restraints (that had started at least as early as the 1920s, though tempered by the Depression and then World War Two) and a culture-wide settling down to a long-deserved (it was presumed) binge of peace and quiet and personal satisfaction.

It is the strength as well as the risk of the Church’s deep engagement with culture that anytime the culture ‘catches a cold’ the Church’s own human agents are going to start sneezing a little too.

And the confusing trumpet of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965)didn’t help matters, sounding in this country in the midst of the confusing mid-Sixties civil rights experience (the Voting Rights Act followed in days by the Watts riots), the Vietnam experience, Liberation Theology’s concern for ‘oppression’ and ‘social justice’, an increasingly anti-male early feminism, on top of the general confusion of both elements of the Boomers’ excitements: the groovy, druggy Summer of Love ethos and the in-your-face ‘revolution’ ethos (so vividly-modeled by Mao’s Red Guard youth cadres).

The upshot was a general loosening of the traditional strictures, evident not only in the increasing number of priests who more frequently appeared in public without their traditional black-suit garb, but also weren’t so clearly held to the old strictures that governed deportment.

But then, the idea was to get ‘beyond the garrison’, so to speak, and get out among the people. (The French had tried that with the ‘worker priest’ movement of the immediate postwar era.)

And not to be underplayed (but also not to be overplayed) were the number of priests who were either clearly unbalanced (but accepted because they seemed able to keep up appearances and go through the daily round) or were accepted into seminary far too early in their lives. And there was also a residual dynamic among some ethnic groups where you either wanted your ‘best son’ to be a priest or you gratefully sent along your ‘different’ one.

A genuine kaleidoscope of pressures, influences, dynamics, and – as ever – complex human realities.

All things considered, I’m not about to say that the Church did a worse job navigating that era in America than did the national political establishment.

But to conclude on the basis of his own experience of organizational inertia and emotional confusion that there has been a) a huge and extraordinary amount of genuine and profound sexual abuse and b) an old-boy network cover-up that clearly indicts the Church’s entire concept of i) ordaining only males and ii) requiring them to be celibate … I don’t see it.

And, frankly, I can’t see how Carroll sees it.

Nor can I imagine from certain tensions I noticed as a kid among the tremendously impressive and dedicated ‘nuns’ who taught grammar school, that there wasn’t and would not be an awful lot of old-girl dynamics in a Popess or Goddess Church.

Carroll blames Paul VI, the Pope who followed John XXIII (he who decided in 1959 to call a Council in the first place). John was a marvelous peasant (I mean that in the very best sense) who had been an Army chaplain with the Italian forces during their profoundly horrific experiences, under truly awful senior leadership, against the Austro-Hungarians in the mountains of northern Italy; he had been in the Vatican diplomatic service during the interwar years, ranging Europe as it was wracked by all the tumults of aspiring social democracy, departing monarchy, vigorous Red agitation, and nascent Fascist reaction.

And Catholics were involved on all sides of everything, or were endangered by same.

John, a large man in all senses of the world, maintained his heart and mind, possessing his soul and ministering to the soul of Europe and of humanity.

Paul was a bird-like man, physically, but no dope. He gasped, as probably any more conventional person – or responsible official – would gasp, when his boss decided to shake things up with a world-wide corporate re-evaluation. Imagine the head of GM or IBM in 1959 ordering a general world-wide re-assessment of Everything.

John died before he could guide the complex forces that he had convened. Paul found himself elected to the hot-seat; the previous Ringmaster – a true master of the life forces – had put them all in the center ring and had no doubt expected to manage what he had set in motion. Paul was a far less confident and secure Ringmaster – and the whole zoo figured that out pretty quickly.

In a way, the Church experienced what this country experienced when Lincoln, who had formulated a vision for the future and had achieved the political and personal maturity to shepherd it through, was taken away just as the War ended, but long before its objectives and achievements were solidly anchored in a national consensus.****

Paul VI's solution – decently enough – was to slow down; since navigation and even command philosophy were now uncertain for the moment, the prudent thing to do was to slow down from Warp 6, make a respectable Warp 3, and get things a little clearer.

The American idea – sharing more than a little utopian impatience with the French Jacobin and 19th-century ‘revolutionary’ mind and heart – is to kick it up to Warp 9, see what happens, and que sera sera. Wheeeee! It worked so well in the movies, and up to that point (1965) had made and kept the country an actual (if not comprehensive) Number One in the world and in history.

Carroll speaks for the Warp-9 club that considered any prudent handling of the helm to be rank incompetence, cowardice, back-lashing, foot-dragging, and probably some things a whole lot darker.

It’s not sufficient to suggest that the Warp-9 bunch have been emboldened by the past quarter-century of American Sex Offense Mania to take a swipe at the Vatican, the Papacy, the hierarchy, the celibate priesthood, and men generally.

Their own ‘liberal’ credentials and their friendliness to all things Boomer and Correct enabled them to render encouragement and credibility to all the forces within American culture and civilization, on the Left and on the Right, that would rather not live in the presence of a Beyond that might Judge.

It also occurs that there is an extra benny MIRV-ed into this whole priest sex-abuse thing: you will wind up scaring off whatever decent potential priesthood candidates there are. In either of two ways: a) they simply lose hope in the possibility of a fulfilling and worthwhile life answering the call to ministry or b) they realize that no matter how blameless a life one might lead, the sex-offense laws and the mainstream media are so skewed now that just about anybody can lodge an allegation secure in the knowledge that you can't defend yourself and they will never be held to account in law for any mischief they deliberately wreak with a false claim.

This of course will yield the tactical and strategic result of weakening the Church's ministry as numbers of available priests shrink, and perhaps even render the Church more amenable to ordaining women or simply turning over more and more 'ministry' and 'governance' to laypersons. Neat.

And here We are today.

On top of which, the forces for ‘liberalization’ have convinced themselves that ‘religion’ as in the forces that pulled off 9-11 and ‘religion’ as in the people who shoot abortion doctors are pretty much the essence of ‘religion’, and that therefore the ‘liberal’ attack upon the Church is justified and Good because it will rid the country and the world of fanaticism. Thus the ‘New Atheist’ movement, which has been inspired to ‘get active’ and join the Cause against religion-terrorism.

Although if anything is true of the garrison-mentality it’s that it isn’t dedicated (not to say ‘fanatic’) enough.*****

It's a mug's game - taking the mis-application of something and claiming that the mis-application is its essence. The Church has spent long centuries trying to tame the wildness in the most profound needs and potentials of the human reality, seeking to Shape and channel the deepest human energies rather than choking them out.

But as I've said here, that requires a certain amount of saying No, and to both the Boomer and the revolutionary cadre, being-said-No-to is the most outrageous of oppressions.

And as I’ve said in a previous Post, it’s long past the time that the Church faced up to itself and yet also to its – I’ll indulge myself here – tormentors.

There’s more than enough work and space cargoed in that comment to keep ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’, hierarchs and laypersons, quite usefully, constructively, and (one hopes and prays) fruitfully engaged for quite some time.

As has always been the case with the Church and with humanity and with History.

NOTES

*’Evolution’ was not formulated widely as a concept until the 19th century, but while they didn’t have the word for it, or a large conceptual understanding of its dynamics, earlier generations and eras intuitively grasped the power and complexity of the sexual urge.

**This is a problem not unknown to the ancients. The 'Ship of Theseus’ problem dealt with it: if you have a ship, and you replace its original planks one by one, at what point have you replaced so many of the original planks that you no longer have the original vessel at all? Nicely, the oldest commissioned warship in the US Navy – the frigate Constitution, now berthed in Boston – has at this point in Time had just about every single piece of her replaced several times over with the possible exception of the deep keel wood; so to say that you are taking a tour of the ship that did all that great stuff in the space of a few months in the War of 1812 is to deploy a bit of imagination. (It’s still a tour well worth taking if you’re up that way.)

So too with humans then: if you replace all the cells in your body every 7 or 10 years, say, then how is there still a ‘you’? (Assuming that 6 year-olds aren’t reading this Post.) What is it that keeps you You even though all the physical infrastructure present at birth has been replaced several times over at the cellular level?

Current science suggests, among other things, that a) there is a ‘mind’ or b) there isn’t anything and you’re not.

But (a) simply kicks the can down the road since you now have either a ‘something’ at your core that is not actually materially dependent on your cells or you do have something immaterial at your core – and why not call it a ‘soul’ and how can you be so sure that said ‘soul’ isn’t configured as the Church has always taught?

And (b) simply erases you as an individual extended in Time. And, by the by, raises all hell with the Constitutional vision of the individual person as Citizen. That is to say: if You today aren’t the same entity carrying your name and wearing your clothes that existed yesterday, and that You today aren’t the same entity that will be carrying your name and wearing your clothes tomorrow, then ‘You’ as a Constitutionally protected (and responsible) entity are merely a momentary flicker and could hardly have any ‘rights’; You are not sustained and are not sustainable as an individual being. Whatcha think about that?

I sit back sometimes and wonder if this is the type of stuff that they assure each other is ‘knowledge’ at elite Beltway and academic dinner parties, as the Chardonnay and Kool-Aid rain down like a tasteful and tasty flood.

***Let’s not even get into the fact that this, indeed, is precisely what the national approach to military life is sliding into.

****Contrary to current Advocacy thinking, I don’t think it’s first and foremost a matter of getting your ‘vision’ enacted into law, so as to force everybody to go along with you. Rather, the hard path of consensus-building, at which Lincoln was a patient and sober master, is the only way to profoundly change a democracy without ripping it off its foundations. Alas, in 1965 and subsequently, the vote-addled pols chose the low-road, the easier way, and We are hugely the worse for it as a national Community with a national Idea … meaning that We The People at this point have neither.

*****I don’t want to limit my vision of things to the somewhat military garrison-legion image, helpful as it is. If you imagine the parish priest as a ‘farmer’ in the best sense of that vocation, then surely that is a powerful image through which to imagine a disciplined dedication to assisting Life (including Spirit) that requires focus, concentration, competence, and unremitting effort in order to remain an efficacious servant of the Great Process of God’s life-giving work in the world and in history.

ABUSING RELIGION

James Carroll, in a not-always displayed acuteness that cuts against the grain of ‘liberal’ conventional wisdom, piques the imagination today with a column that touches – but doesn’t dig into – the following thought: the intensifying ‘liberal-secular’ assault on all things religious (especially the tremendously handy and assorted-interests-pleasing Catholic sex abuse crisis) is directly proportional to the secular-liberal fear that its own ‘paradise’ now so clearly reveals itself as cracked (and perhaps crackpot) that it must ‘go negative’ in order to distract everybody from its own failures.

“A focus on religious failures”, he observes, “can let the broader culture off the hook”.

Of course, things are helped along – in a neatly self-licking ice-cream cone sorta way – by the Pope recently speaking about “sin within the Church itself”. The Pope is on to something here. But it’s hardly evidence of his originality: the Church has been saying that about itself since the beginning (and it is, at this point, ten times older than the American republic and rather more experienced in matters of this world and of the Next).

The Church embodies (though not fully) God’s presence in human history, but while the pinnacle of its Ideals reach into that Beyond which infuses it with Spirit and Grace, the roots of its historical edifice – like the Vatican buildings themselves – drive into the mushy flatlands of that humanity and its history of which it is composed.

Nor does it help that while trying to move humans toward living life in God (which, like B-29s trying to fly in the jetstream, requires some advanced development of the individual pilot’s skills), the Church can’t get too far ahead of the stubbornly less-advanced elements of human-ness. For every first-rate saint who has matched the mastery of sailing his or her human vessel to the utter mystery of the Divine Wind, there have been so many thousands whose religious capability remained anchored in the darker and more primal human gropings toward the Unseen.

But when it comes to humans and their histories, God seems persistently willing to work with what’s available, and the Church can’t get too far ahead of God either.

But, Carroll notes, “we are living through the simultaneous breakdowns of the two great secular myths that have defined Western civilization for 200 years – the socialist idea of equality and the organizing ethos of nationalism”. If We imagine – and not wrongly – that the Left for so long has tried to bring about a paradise of Equality, and the Right a paradise of Order, then We might also imagine that both have gotten somewhat ahead of human history.

Well, what the hey? How can you get anything done if you don’t get ahead and lead?

But if you get too far ahead, or too excited, you might stop trying to lead and simply try to pull.

And you won’t only try to pull History along, although you’re perhaps too far ahead for any good that you might accomplish; you’ll start trying to pull human-ness along.

And that doesn’t often end well.

The Church learned that the hard way long ago.

The much much younger Enlightenment West hasn’t yet learned that. Indeed, it holds itself being far too knowledgeable and adventurous to be held back by ‘old’ knowledge (don’t trust anything over 200 years old, the Enlightenment and Romantic West might say – at least until the Boomers knocked it down to 30).

Funny, but in the vampire movies – especially the best of them – it was the older vampire that the younger vampire must learn – the hard way, if necessary – to respect. There was knowledge and power that emanated from a lonnnnng ability to survive. A two-thousand year-old vampire would be much more capable than a two-hundred year-old one, and the youngster would do well to bear that in mind.

Of course, neither the revolutions of the Left nor the nation-states of the Right are really willing to see themselves as vampires. Though in a way there is a vampiric strain in both, as there is in all things human, and in humans themselves. But it’s a useful metaphor, I think.

And it makes for a certain patience and humility that youth never really grasps until later, if not – alas – until sometimes it is too late.

And then Consequences kick in and Life takes one of its nasty, but helpfully corrective, turns.

Although, Consequences having a life of their own and not being simply the cuddly resolved-in-the-third-act plot problems of Hollywood, things can never be quite the same again. Think of how ‘un-American’ the end of “Casablanca” really was: the hero (no great shakes in the looks department) didn’t wind up getting the girl, and ‘the other guy’ (no great shakes in the personality department) turns out to be successfully dedicated to a demanding life of self-sacrifice in the awesomely threatening face of awesomely organized evil.

(And, face it, in this day of self-assured, bleating, butter-greasy Beltway slickies, who can’t cast a wistful eye at Inspector Reynaud’s refreshing candor: “Make it ten thousand - I’m only a poor, corrupt official ” … ?)

So the Church, drawing upon a wisdom drawn from the Greeks and the Romans, developed canon law. The word ‘canon’ does not derive from the artillery piece, but rather from the Greek ‘kanon’ – target or ideal. You make a law to embody the Ideal, giving people something to aim at and to grow toward, while knowing that they are certain to fall short from time to time or even a lot of the time.

This is an approach to Law different from the approach that presumes everybody will and must fulfill it all the time. The ‘kanon-ical’ approach requires both stern-ness and patience, and the humility to realize that in this world even the guards and judges have probably (perhaps most probably) committed their share of law-breaking. Thus the balky and unruly human circus column makes its pilgrim way through Time. If it is a ‘line of march’, it is so only in that marvelously and stubbornly human way once ascribed to Italian military operations generally.

Carroll warms to his thought as he goes along: “The hollowing out of US institutions, from a Congress in the grip of political paralysis to an extravagantly funded Pentagon that cannot defeat enemies whose bombs are made with fertilizer, to an economic regulatory system that has no influence, much less control, over financial predators – all of this suggests a breakdown not just of government, but of the national idea”. [italics mine]*

To which antiphon one can only respond: Bingo!

He names, accurately but without getting into the much more painful specifics as to how they came about, so fundamental a catastrophe as “the collapsed structures of meaning”, which has cut humanity (in the West, at least) “loose from all moorings”. Like my favorite image of the Ferris wheel, broken loose from its struts and careening drunkenly along the midway (one of Spielberg’s most telling images, in my book).

In this country, this is all the result of Congress ‘bipartisanly’ choosing to pander both to Big Pain and to Big Money.

The Big Pain is the organized advocacy against ‘oppression’, impossibly broadly defined if you are going to engorge and deploy the powers of a theoretically limited Constitutional government to assuage its every manifestation.

The Big Money is – as always – the big money. But now with a twist, and a monstrous one. Whereas in the pre-1970 era of US history, the money itself was made by huge corporately organized productive enterprises, since 1980 or so the money is simply ‘there’, and the ‘big money men’ (not intended in a genderist way) are financial managers, who produce nothing but paper and reeking ‘instruments’ … and large bonuses, which they share with the pols who in grateful exchange have deployed their public authority to cage the dogs of regulation.

In fact, you might say that at this point the only thing the country produces is money (printing the stuff at will) and ‘instruments’.

Oh, and military stuff – which it both sells to other countries and uses against them (increasingly), in the service of ‘humanitarian imperialism’ or ‘resource imperialism’ or – the wave of the future – both, with the former fronting for the latter.

After all you can’t eat all those paper ‘instruments’ – or even all those benjamins, and you can’t run your car on them. For the necessities of life, you need other folks’ stuff. That’s what the ‘national interest’ is becoming, and that’s what the military will have to go out and grab – for as long as the game lasts. Which probably won’t be another two thousand years. Or maybe even another two hundred. Or even a tenth of that.

But this started out about the Church, so let’s not digress.

The Church, Carroll’s own paper now uneasily reports, is getting ready to stand up against the decades-long sustained effort to paint it as an ongoing Nixonian cover-up of what is essentially an ongoing sex-abuse enterprise.

I can’t help but think of Audi, in the 1980s, after several years of an American soap-opera stampede claiming that its Teutonic-engineered, high-performance automobiles lumpishly accelerated when the brake pedal was depressed (so the embarrassed drivers claimed in their civil court filings). After a spell of the then-unfamiliar horror-stories from this and that telegenically posed driver, Audi decided that the customer cannot always be presumed to be right, especially when there’s a bundle to be made by said customer(s) through a successfully staged lawsuit.

(Whereas the type of European who would buy an Audi might not perhaps wish to embarrass him/herself by such a gambit, a new generation of Americans – Audi discovered - felt that Pain and its pecuniary assuagement was a perfectly respectable business undertaking.)

So now the Church is going to break the ‘script’; rather than stand conveniently still as all manner of opprobrium is heaped upon it, or mumble or fumble in an effort to assuage its tormentors and hope that they will be appeased, the Church has decided to stand up – both to face its tormentors and itself.

Good. Should have been done long ago on both counts.

As to whether the larger strategic purposes of this long torment have been achieved – that the Church’s moral stature among its adherents and in the public eye has been sufficiently weakened so that it can no longer offer credible resistance to this, that, and the other programme of the Left’s and the Right’s pandered constituencies – remains to be seen, but I’m thinking not.

And at this point, as might be inferred from Carroll’s piece, this country and its people – and The People – are in dire need of the Beyond: for meaning and for mooring, as individuals, as communities, and as the Citizens of a Constitutional Republic that has lost both its bearings and its very grounding.

The Church isn’t perfect, but then has never claimed that it/she was. Which is a bit more than the US government can say at this point (whether in its Leftish reforms or its Rightist wars or its bipartisan ‘humanitarian imperialism’ deployed both domestically and abroad). The Church has never claimed to make History, nor to be its Shaper.

But in a way far deeper and wider and higher than any contemporary faddist can assert, the Church does indeed ‘get it’, and has, and will continue to.

The best this country can hope is to continue to share Time and History with her.

But if that is to be, then it will take more virtue than a flat and shallow ‘optimism’.

The courage of patience and humility would be a good place to start.

Especially if We can impose it upon Ourselves before Time and History do it for Us.

NOTES

*And you are welcome to give some thought to what is/was America's “National Idea”.

It seems to me that the Framers wanted to provide a reliable limited government that would create the stable ‘space’ wherein human energy, ingenuity and enterprise could flourish and the world would be able to see what a free people could accomplish when unhampered by despotism.

Beyond that they could not go without the government starting to take on the tasks and require the powers of God. Which would inevitably result in a ‘benevolent despotism’, which benevolence they mistrusted over the long run; it would morph into a mere ‘despotism’.

And that is precisely what has happened over time. Especially when, beyond the classic concerns for decent economic rights in the Depression that resulted in the New Deal of the 1930s, the hugely more intangible and questionable programmes of the late 1960s and early 1970s demanded a far more fundamental re-casting of the National Idea.

And then, of course, the revolutionizing advocates of that re-jiggering realized that their visions were sooo tenuous (if desirable, in a best-case outcome scenario at least) and questionable that any process of genuine public deliberation would quite possibly result in that re-jiggering being largely watered down. Thus their revolutionary play-book required that in the service of their visions the entire process of public-deliberation be side-stepped. Which was effected with the whole-hearted assistance of vote-desperate Dems, who enshrined their highly questionable ideas with the full authority of the Federal government.

Thus the paralysis of government which Carroll now sees. The Beltway is now so deeply indentured to the ‘revolutions of the identities’ for votes (and to the corporations for PAC cash) that hardly any pol is sufficiently ‘free’ to take any genuinely corrective and reformative action at this point.

Which is why I see the Beltway now as being in much the same mess as the Soviet ‘elites’ of the mid-1970s: they know they’ve made a hash of it and that things can’t go on like this, but they hope to just have their fun and then retire and get out of town; the new term for that – popular in elite circles – is IBGYBG: I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.

In other words: let’s make our money now, and by the time anybody figures out what we did, IBGYBG.

But of course, one of the consequences of that approach was that by 1990, 15 or so years later, the whole government and its ‘National Idea’ collapsed.

I worry that this, now, is what is in store for Us.

CONSPIRACY AGAINST CATHOLIC CHURCH?

I came across yet another article on this and decided – it being Easter and all – to make one more stab at this thing.

Two pre-notes first.

One, I hold no brief for anybody who in a position of trust and authority indulges him/herself at the expense of another human being. Or for that matter, anybody who indulges him/herself at the expense of another human being – whether sexually, emotionally, economically, or otherwise.

And that definition, I think, covers just about all of us humans – since Sin (as they used to call it around here, and the Catholic Church still does) seems reliably built-into the entire human thing: despite our best intentions, we humans have a tendency to violate our own best interests or others’ rights in the indulgence of this or that urge or desire. Worse, we can make it seem (to ourselves, at least) like a good idea, like the right thing to do, or – at least – the ‘necessary’ thing to do.

We are – let’s face it – a flawed species. And it seems rather clearly to be a built-in characteristic.

Which is not a particularly new or original insight. The Catholic Church has been operating on that assumption for a little over two thousand years and still going strong and actually growing (although not in the now-declining West, where the Emptiness and Flatness of assorted Materialisms of the Right and the Left have pretty much left folks standing in quicksand and expected to be ‘optimistic’ about it).

We are faced now with this amazing tornado of Catholic Priest Pedophilia (or Sex Abuse or Molestation or what-have-you). Having blown through town in the mid-1980s, it then circled around and came back in the early 1990s, then circled around and came back in 2002, and now has circled around and come back again in 2010.

If you were a Pentagon heavy, and saw weather behaving like this, and continually hitting your positions, you wouldn’t be doing your job if you didn’t wonder if somebody with ill intentions toward your operations, organizational health, and perhaps your very existence hadn’t figured out a way to manipulate large violent weather phenomena. And no doubt the Pentagoons would call them LaVWePs or some such; perhaps even Hostile Guided LaVWePs, or HoGi-LaVWePs.

As best I can make out, either a ranking spokesman for the Church has suggested that there is – at least to some extent – a “conspiracy” against the Church or else the Western mainstream media (MSM) have adopted the conspiracy trope as their quick and easy shorthand for the latest ‘Church statement’.

Either way, you wind up with the idea that there is some smoke-filled (well, they used to be) back room where representatives of all the Church’s enemies (and their name, it has to be admitted, is Legion) are running some sort of command center for planning and executing such a conspiracy.

I don’t think so. I don’t think a ‘conspiracy’ like that could exist – there are so many ‘enemies’ with divergent agendas, and of such varied levels of competence, that I can’t see getting them all together in one room and staying on the same sheet of music and for an extended period of time.
On the other hand, this sex-abuse scandal story just keeps coming back – and we’re back to the odd behavior of the tornado again.

My thought is that this thing is a SYNERGY, not a conspiracy.

There are just a lot of forces and organizations and movements in play in the Western world nowadays who consider the Catholic Church – or perhaps the Catholic approach to life, death, sin and other things – to be a rival or – soooo much easier – an ‘enemy’.

And if an ‘enemy’, then – again, soooo easy to claim nowadays – ‘evil’. Odd how an avowedly secular West – or its elites, anyway – keep tossing the E-word around; you get the sense you’re back in the early Medieval era or worse … a condition the actual Catholic Church grew out of, after much wrack and suffering, quite a while ago; indeed, while the Church no longer tortures (even for heretical comments about the Deity) the self-proclaimed secular paradises, deputized either by God or by the Correctness of their agendas, have taken up torture with a repugnant gusto … funny how the night moves, as the songster doth say.

So back to this mysterious tornado that keeps circling around and coming back.

I make no claims about the truth (or not) of various assertions and claims, either by the Church or the cases of individual priests or by persons claiming whatever they claim however long ago it has been.

But there are factors and forces and elements surrounding the core script (you almost have to use the word nowadays) that certainly stimulate my Kick-Tire instincts.

A recent Post on the Politics Daily site tries to take a middle-of-the-road, sorta ‘balanced’ view – which is nice, but doesn’t really permit the wide-lens assessment that gives a larger picture of everything involved.

So let me share the list that seems to me necessary here.

First, the Church has always been characterizable as both ‘She’ and ‘It’. The ‘She’ is the sum of her ideals and the Good News and – she has always claimed – the divine support that constitutes her Mission in the world. This is the realm, also, where you have to acknowledge beforehand that this dimension of human striving and suffering is not the only dimension.

The ‘It’ is the organizational Church extended in Time and Space, the one that is mired in all of the same failures of faith and reason as everything else in this dimension where the human tendency to fail its own ideals taints whatever is undertaken.

In this aspect, by the way, the Church shares the same divided reality of Ideal and Actual as anything else: what nation can say that it never fails its ideals? Can it not – must it not – be said, for example, that the US holds great value for the world and for humanity because of its Ideals, enshrined in the Constitutional vision (although it has recently been declared “quaint” by assorted American elites – as they like to style themselves) and yet is so often failing in adhering to its own ideals in its actual operations?

It is always necessary to measure your own performance against your ‘ideals’ – and this is true for individuals, organizations, and nations. (It’s also essential that you have committed to some objectively good ideals, of course; there were many SS personnel and many communists who remained loyal and committed to their ideals – but that clearly isn’t enough.)

It’s also necessary that any such committed entities are liable to be judged on the quality of their ideals and on the quality of their performed faithfulness to those ideals – which nobody likes (surely not countries, as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo indicate).

But as any old high-school debater will tell you, it’s also a pretty good rhetorical strategy: if you want to make something look bad in this incomplete and imperfect human dimension, there’s no easier and more effective way than to dig into the guaranteed gaps between the ideal and the real.

Second, there are many elements and forces and factions in the modern world that can reasonably be characterized as ‘aspiring rivals’ looking to supplant the Church’s role and status.

Simply in the domestic arena there are such rivals – earnest ones – on both the Left and the Right.

On the Left, the entire ‘secularist’ thrust seeks to remove ‘religion’ from any role in American affairs. The common term for this is ‘secularism’. And nowadays and for the past 40 years or so this was also cast as being ‘liberal’. Or at least up until very recently – when for various reasons the former ‘liberals’ suddenly felt the urgent need to separate themselves from their past decades’ worth of activity and have started calling calling themselves ‘progressive’.

But ‘secularism’ nowadays is also allied with ‘postmodernism’, and one of the most essential elements of the postmodern programme is to ‘deconstruct’ any established authority. And not simply the ‘authority’ in this dimension, but the authority that in the West has traditionally been thought to reside in another, a higher, an ideal dimension which constitutes the Ideal, and which therefore sits in judgment on the things of this world.

That higher dimension, the vision of which was developed extensively in Christianity and especially in Catholic Christianity, has for the past 40 years been a prime target of deconstruction’s adherents and cadres. It had to be: the cadres sought to clear away not only ‘traditions’ in this world but also any authority Beyond this world which would ‘judge’ and interfere with their objectives and programmes.

And the Church has always spoken against such a Flattening of all authority and Goodness, a collapsing of existence into the horizontal, 2-dimensional confines of the Actual world by the erasure of any sense of the Ideal world.

In its staunch refusal to acknowledge the Flattening ultimate authority of this-dimension, and in its constant proclamation of a Beyond that restores a Vertical 3rd-dimension – and a God Who cares and seeks the genuine fulfillment of humankind – the Church is guaranteed by political dynamics to be a target of those elements that would – on whatever pretexts of doing ‘good’ in history – Flatten humanity’s vision of the fullness of existence and thus Flatten humanity’s possibility for fulfillment as a species-community and as individuals.

So the Church was pretty much fated to be the Left’s target for the past 40 years: not only because of the Church’s influence in society and culture but also because the Church’s Ideal stood squarely in the path of the Flattening but vigorous Materialism and ‘deconstruction’ essential to the Left’s elites these past 40 Biblical years.

And of course, by refusing to admit ‘women’ into its ordained clergy, the Church was asking for the Mao-Mao (not a misspelling) treatment so widely deployed by the feministical cadres here in the past 40 years.

But the Church was also in the position of being the Right’s target, again almost ‘automatically’ so, as American politics intensified their vertiginous descent into partisan caricature in the 1980s.

The neocon Right demanded an idolatry of the nation in order to firmly establish support for its highly dubious and assaultive program of international domination – and this became exponentially worse after the fall of the USSR in 1991. Beneath the old ‘patriotic’ pieties there was a jingoist imperial agenda. And after 9-11 that intensified even more.

And the neocons could not forget the Church’s strong opposition to the spread of nuclear weapons in the early 1980s. Indeed, not even the Polish Pope, John Paul II – survivor of World War 2 and the Nazis as well as of the era of Central Europe’s Communist domination – supported the Reagan build-up or valorization of a re-ignited nuclear arms race, although that Pope’s ultimate purpose of bringing down Communism coincided clearly with Reagan’s.

But the Right in the 1980s also welded into its ‘base’ the Fundamentalist fringes of American Protestantism. And that former-fringe and now ‘base’ took the old State-as-Church fallacy latent in Henry VIII’s assumption of supreme ecclesiastical authority in his Realm and raised it to frakkulously idolatrous levels: Americans were pretty much God’s Deputies, and the US government was God’s Sheriff, and thus whatever they did was the direct will of God and – so neatly and morally crapulent – could not be judged Good or Evil by mere mortals. Indeed, once you had declared yourself to be “on a mission from God” then everything you did was by definition Good, so anyone who disagreed must – of course – be ‘Evil’.

None of these major forces in American politics were friendly to the Church. Indeed, their hostility was guaranteed: for them to ‘succeed’, the Church’s moral authority and her status in American society would have to be reduced, if not destroyed.

It was in the early 1980s, when the ‘liberal’ Congress and the neocon-fundamentalistic Executive sought ways to make common cause (‘bipartisan’ became Tip O’Neill’s mantra) that the country saw its first ominous and bizarre ‘sex mania’*: those day-care ritual satanic sex abuse trials fueled by a national hysteria whipped up by mainstream media now addicted to the soap-opera ‘clarities’ of good-vs-evil and the perennial ‘innocent victim in danger’ that Hollywood had discovered when the first silent films had evil and moustachioed older males tie nubile young women to railroad tracks with a huffing locomotive approaching from the middle-distance.

The sex-offense mania that began in 1990 – see the Note below – resulted in a second ‘priest sex abuse’ wave in the early 1990s.

Then came the 2002 re-ignition, led by the ‘Boston Globe’, which didn’t wind down for several years.

Neatly, that ‘reporting’ coincided with the post-9/11 Executive drive toward starting a bunch of wars in the Middle East and Southwest Asia (which the ‘Globe’ supported).

Now the ‘New York Times’ – owner of the ‘Globe’, by amazing coincidence – has started up another round, this time going for the Pope and the other Western European countries. And just this morning the ‘Globe’ trumpeted that – by another amazing coincidence – it has just been awarded a place among some journalism school’s list of the 10-Best Stories of the past ten years for its 2002 ‘priest sex abuse’ ‘reporting’. Perhaps all this will help the ominous decline in both papers’ subscribership.

And perhaps, as the past 40 years’ worth of Beltway** frakkery now demonstrate through their stunning bad consequences just how much damage has been done by so many baaaad ideas embraced merely for their electoral utility, it would help to distract folks from the colossal and wide-ranging failures of government by setting the old Catholic bonfires going again.

And surely, as even in their failure the most established Identities of Identity Politics are now looking to share their bounty with as much of the rest of the known world as the government’s power can reach, then the Catholic Church’s steady growth in the non-Western parts of the world (which is most of it) – especially in areas like Africa and South America where there are – wait for it! – large untapped reserves of natural resources … well, you can see where the US government wouldn’t be averse to a two-fer: pandering to its Identities while also eliminating any potential obstructions to a new and far more desperate phase of colonialism whereby ‘mature’ economies, still in possession of military power, are going to need to go ‘over there’ and take stuff from the natives all over again.***

None of which means that I am trying to pooh-pooh or ‘minimize’ such sexual abuse as has happened within the Catholic fold.

But I watched too many of the Five O’Clock follies in Saigon back in the day not to come away with a verrrry clear and distinct conviction that government Tire must always be Kicked by every intelligent Citizen.

So in the more specific matter of allegations of priestly sexual abuse I would approach any such with a few thoughts in mind.

First, the Catholic approach has always been first and foremost from the aspect of Sin: Sin is always there, built into the heart of the human endeavor, and if you adopt the rather purist and impatient Protestant approach of ripping out every vestige of ‘sin’ forthwith you are going to wind up in the position of ripping the wood planks out of your lifeboat in order to get at the wood-worms … and that type of approach is, before too long, going to put you in a rather difficult situation indeed.

And the Church is into sustaining and nurturing a multi-dimensional human societal and civilizational enterprise over the long haul (2,000 years and counting at this point).

Yes, the danger of the ‘patient’ approach is that organizational dynamics might also seep in and keep you from wanting bad things aired about your failures to perform as well as you should (sort of like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and ‘torture’, come to think of it).

And so if a sinner – even a priest – refuses to truly repent (which requires reforming one’s sinful behaviors) then there must be a way to deal with such persons more forcefully. (Sort of like the current US government refusing to stop ‘torture’ and all sorts of other things that many on the Left had insisted was merely the malfeasance of a few bad Republican apples that would stop as soon as the Party of Goodness once again gained the White House, come to think of it.)

But you want to give a sinner some chance to repent.

This entire approach is hell-and-gone from the Protestant and more specifically the Fundamentalist approach.

It is also hell-and-gone from the ‘revolutionary justice’ approach adopted (along with a lot of other Maoist praxis) by the revolutionaries of the Left in this country since the late Sixties.**** To both the cadres and the ‘true believers’, impatience is a virtue, since their Good intentions justify whatever they think should be done.

Thus, in many of these cases, the Church’s approach to priestly failure has been ‘patient’ – and perhaps in some cases (see the following paragraphs) too patient. But to ignore the reality of how the Church approaches sin is to leave only the more sensational and ominous (and, it has to be noted, politically useful) inference that it’s all been a ‘cover up’.

Such an imperfect and incomplete analysis is bound to fail to get at the reality.

Second, I try to keep in mind the following points:*****

- There is precious little evidence in most of these cases, except for the allegations themselves’;
- There is a disturbing problem of overbroad and vague definition: ‘rape’ (which is not the allegation in the majority of the cases) is not the same as ‘abuse’ or ‘molesting’ (which could be anything including a touch);
- The actual percentage of priests who have been accused is not so large compared to the number of priests;
- Following from that, the actual number of incidences ‘reported’ is miniscule when you figure in each priest over the past 50 years, the number of probable interactions he had with parishioners over the course of his ministry, and then divide by the number of allegations (even if you multiply the allegations by ten to compensate for non-reporting and even if you accept the overbroad definitions of ‘abuse’ and ‘molesting’);
- There have been few criminal trials where evidence can be examined; the vast majority of ‘settlements’ through civil litigation (legally advisable, perhaps, in light of the costs of defending against every allegation under the current skewed rules of evidence and statutes of limitations) do not constitute proof that any act was committed;
- Billions of dollars have been paid out – which surely gives rise to doubt as to factors beyond guilt or innocence that might drive allegations;
- The lifting of statutes of limitation, on top of the already vague and overbroad definitions, make it almost impossible to defend oneself or for any observer to establish what might really have happened;
- The mantra of what might be called ‘victimist’ jurisprudence – that no ‘pain’ should go juridically unaddressed simply because there is no evidence – is utterly and profoundly antithetical to the Constitutional and Western traditions of law as they have evolved over the course of a long hard slog from the legal swamps of Medieval heresy ‘trials’ and post-Reformation witchcraft ‘trials’.

Third, I recall just how many internal factions rend the Church in the United States. Two of the most vocal ‘Identities’ – the feminists and the gays – are eager to change things substantially.

The feminists wish to see female priests and are miffed about the Church’s position on abortion; additionally, as it would be in any case, the Church’s insistence on actual Realities that are Beyond this world places it inalterably in opposition to the radical elements at the core of the feminists' postmodern approach. And both gays and lesbians (the terms in use according to the last memo I got on the subject) are miffed at the Church’s stance in regard to same-sex sex and same-sex marriage. And the lesbians, as well, must be included among the feminists who are looking for ‘women’s ordination’.

On top of that, there are Catholic theological faculty members who want to see the Church’s lines-of-governing-authority ‘democratized’; and also are often in sympathy with the assorted discontents enumerated in the paragraph above.

And from another point of view, it has to be said that the late Pope John Paul’s insistence on appointing bishops who were doctrinally sound sacrificed, with some frequency, spiritual distinction for doctrinal ‘soundness’.

I would add that an overemphasis on doctrine, to the exclusion of a genuine spiritual vitality, would also contribute to the development of far too many clergy who would be – to use a military image – ‘garrison troops’, the parade-ready City Cohorts of the late Republic and early-Empire whose armor was always shiny and whose uniforms were always correct, but who were clearly not the Legions and didn’t really know how to use the stuff in the field.

And from another angle, there’s no doubt that a Church that has evolved an increasingly personalist pastoral approach in its priestly personnel, while simultaneously requiring that only males can be priests, sort of set itself up for some substantial reliance on gay males (even if they cannot come ‘out’).

Add to this the trip-wire atmosphere induced by feminist-victimist legal theory and the changes wrought in American jurisprudence (especially in regard to rules of evidence, presumption of innocence, and statutes of limitations) and the 20 years of what I call the Mania of sex-offense dynamics, and it’s not hard to see where things can get verrrry frakky verrrrry quickly nowadays.

These elements, any one of which should raise serious concerns, act cumulatively to substantially undermine any possibility of determining what actually did or did not happen.

While simultaneously opening the floodgates of a cash cornucopia to allegators.

I am not at all saying or trying to imply that no Catholic priests ever gravely violated their responsibilities, or that – if it can be genuinely established – they should not be criminally prosecuted and sanctioned.

But I am saying that with so many forces and elements active in this type of thing, with so many variables – some of them quite dark themselves – active in the ‘equation’, the most diligent and prudent deliberation, on the part of the public as well as on the parts of legislators, judges, agents of the government and member so of the Fourth Estate – the media – is utterly essential.

Because this type of thing will spread. A cavalier or sinister disregard of the most basic safeguards, if successful here, will then migrate to infect other areas of national life and governmental activity. Which I think can already be seen.

And as Martin Niemoller said, I let them come for this group and that group and did not speak up, and then when they came for me there was nobody left to speak up.

But I think that even Niemoller’s statement is insufficient to the present American reality. The current cohorts or generations of Americans have a responsibility to preserve the American ethos for the world, for history, and for humanity. And for the generations, surely, of Americans yet to be born.

If the Constitutional ethos, bequeathed to Americans by the Founding, is allowed to be dissolved, then a great light is going to go out of the world.

Is that what Americans of today want to have happen on our watch? That this light, as Lincoln said, shall “perish from the earth”?

NOTES

*As I’ve always said, the still-expanding sex-offense mania itself, which began in 1990 – in all of its phases and sub-manifestations (of which the ‘priest sex abuse’ gambit is but a variant) – is the result of a similar blending and melding of Rightist and Leftist political agendas and objectives. Both Right and Left could unite to get rid of a powerful potential cultural and even political counter-influence to the agendas of their own ‘bases’: the neocons get rid of an antiwar influence; the Fundamentalists get rid of the Kathlik approach to understanding and proceeding-through life and history; the feminists get rid of a major obstruction to the postmodern deconstruction of ‘Capital Letter Realities’ and to their utterly essential abortion initiatives and at the same time strike a blow against ‘men’ (whom their more radical thinkers have always characterized as incorrigibly sexually violent and more or less a bane to humanity). Something for everyone! A marvel of ‘bipartisanship’.

And from the point of view of abnormal social psychology, a classic instance of the displacement of one’s own failures toward ‘children’ (abortion, latch-key parenting, frequent divorce, family dissolution, the dissolution of parental and adult authority) onto some comparatively small and ‘marginalized’ group upon whom shall be loaded all the opprobrium that is really a societal self-hate and guilt.

And of course, politically the whole thing serves to get American society used to being driven (like stampeded cattle) by ‘fear’ – the fearsomeness garishly limned in heavily-manipulated and highly-selective ‘reporting’ and ‘advocacy’ warnings and – alas – truckling legislative ‘findings’ that bear no correspondence to reality and suffer from fundamental conceptual incoherence.

**I don’t think you can talk of a two-Party system any longer. Both Parties have adopted the game-plan of pandering to Big Pain in order to maintain some form of electoral viability and, through the Dems’ inspired creation of PACs back in the early 1970s, to Big Money to collect their swag (formerly delivered at night in surreptitious bags and briefcases).

I also don’t think you can usefully talk of ‘Congress’ any longer. There is the Beltway – a now un-diselectable nomenklatura of pols, staffers, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and assorted ‘experts’ – and they are all too deep into it to back out or really change things now.

*** But of course, it will be a ‘partnership’ this time, as the Pentagoons have been burbling. Which isn’t such a new scam. The Imperial Japanese were quick to point out that their expansion throughout the Far East and Far Pacific was indeed merely a “Co-Prosperity Sphere”, just like the US’s own Greater Southwest Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and the new ‘partnerships’ that have been unilaterally declared with Africa (the good resource-rich parts) and South America (ditto).

It’s a neat trick: any nation not wishing to be ‘partnered’ (to use the nice new verb for this sort of thing) can now be declared ‘oppressive’ of its own people and therefore ripe for the Left’s ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the Right’s ‘regime change’ at the same time. And if any members of that country’s citizens or that country’s government itself choose to resist such ‘gifts’ as having their culture ‘deconstructed’ and their resources ‘partnered’ – well, there’s always whatever’s left of the military to send in for an occupation. You see how this whole thing could get out of hand. And might develop not necessarily to the Beltways’ (or America’s) advantage. As has already been demonstrated in places where Americans have not at all “been greeted as liberators”.

****That ‘revolutionary justice’ approach is essentially premised upon the presumption that the ‘revolution’ is the only Good, and therefore nothing can be allowed to interfere, obstruct, or slow down the rush to ‘revolutionary justice’. Which, you might notice, is not so far from the Fundamentalist approach to ‘justice’ and ‘sin’: nothing can be allowed to interfere with the immediate and thorough uprooting of ‘sin/injustice’ wherever it is found. The various ‘revolutions’ of the American Left and the Fundamentalist approach are really ‘sisters under the skin’, sharing a common ruthless impatience to whatever they feel is ‘sin’ or ‘oppression’ or what-have-you.

This is not a particularly original insight here. Since the time of Marx, ‘revolutionary’ approach has been seen as some sort of eerie doppelganger of the ‘impatient’ and ‘radical’ ruthlessness latent in Christianity from its earliest times. Christ himself, as portrayed in the Gospels, advised both that if your hand committed a sin you should cut it off if you couldn’t control it while also allowing that there are times when the wise farmer must allow the tares to grow alongside the wheat until the Harvest (although Jesus expected God to be the Lord of the Harvest, whereas some Christians – most recently the Fundamentalists – declared that they themselves had been deputized by God to do the separating of the tares from the wheat, right here and now).

I’d add here that the Good Book said that if your own hand became an occasion of sin, then you should cut it off. It did NOT authorize you to go out cutting off other peoples’ hands if – in your humble opinion – they were sinners. But of course, it’s always easier to go looking around than to go looking in, as it were.

The consequences for the Constitutional ethos of ‘limited government’ and a justice based on careful analysis of valid evidence over the course of the past decades of assault from the Left (the ‘pain’ is too great to permit any obstruction – evidence be damned!) and from the Right (the government grants rights and can take them away because the government is God’s) … well, you can see that none of the ‘elites’, Left or Right, have really been interested in government and jurisprudence being ‘limited’ by such “quaint” stuff as ‘evidence’.

*****See my Post on the statistics here.