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Joan Chittister 7-01-2002
The question everywhere is the same these days: What, in the long run, will be the effect of the pedophilia scandal on the Catholic Church? Speculation ranges from predictions of total collapse to speculation about total reconfiguration. Given the long lessons of history, neither hypothesis is likely, perhaps, but we may have already been given a mirror into the future of change. Let me tell you what I've seen already.
It was 1996. I was in Dublin at the time writing a book. To do concentrated work I had gone away to live alone in a small townhouse on the canal. For a while, there were no distractions at all. But then the first pedophilia scandal erupted in Ireland. I found myself as immersed in the story as the rest of the country but, as an outside observer, more concerned about the overall effects of the situation than by the cast of characters. I began to understand that the Irish, too, were dealing with this situation differently than they had in the past.
The Irish had already dealt with the case of a bishop who had fathered a son years before, supported him financially all his life, but never acknowledged him. They had read themselves weary about the young pastor who dropped dead leaving a mistress housekeeper and their children who were now suing the diocese for his estate. They had watched the church battle the government over the legalization of contraception. The Irish, it seemed, were well battle-tested on sexual scandals.
Joan Chittister 7-01-2002
A recent editorial cartoon showed a clerical procession in which a mitred man is being preceded down a church aisle by two young altar boys. The cardinal is carrying a placard that reads, "Celibacy has nothing to do with pedophilia. " The scowling little altar boy who is leading the procession, however, is saying to his partner, "Oh, yeah? Well, if he were a father, I bet he wouldn't let anything happen to kids."
The message is clear: There are some things that may be clinically unrelated to the problem at hand but that definitely have a bearing on it. Surely, the role of women in the church is one of those. If the scandal points up anything at all, it begs for a review of the role of women in the decision-making arenas of the church, and the question of the ordination of women as well.
What the scandal highlights in the most glaring of ways is the total absence of women from the inner chambers of ecclesiastical discussion and procedural review. Would women have stood by quietly, said nothing, even agreed to a policy of moving clearly abusive men from parish to parish where they could jeopardize the lives of other children so that the system itself could be saved? The answer is unclear, perhaps, but the question is a necessary one.
Whether or not women as a class would have agreed to such policies is impossible to determine. We may, however, have some clues to the answer, even without benefit of the experience. Women are not more virtuous than men—they have sins of their own—but they do judge systems a great deal more lightly than men do. Women tend to be caretakers and advocates. They are, if we are to believe most of the social-science research in the area, given more to a desire to create and maintain personal relationships than they are to a desire to get and keep power. To have women at the table for discussions could, then, introduce a balance of values, another set of priorities, a broader agenda.
Richard Rohr 7-01-2002
Hearing confessions is a rather dangerous and lethal profession. It creates a kind of patience with sin that is often scandalous to outsiders. But confession is a very good thing about my Catholic tradition that might not be recognized in the midst of our shame about the pedophilia scandal.
Good confessional practice does not encourage you to read a situation in a forensic or argumentative context, and in fact quite the contrary. The whole purpose is healing and reconciliation. Ours is not "innocent until proven guilty" but actually "guilty and declared innocent." We start with the conviction and move therapeutically from there.
This wonderful pastoral practice is now to our severe disadvantage inside of the entirely different set of assumptions of the secular social order. This is a good reality check for us, but we Catholics (and all Christians) deserve to understand our own partly ignorant and partly vulnerable position in the world today. We have a very different agenda than the world. Some priests have surely been wolves among lambs, but we are also lambs in a very wolfish system of law and punishment. That is the world as it must be, exactly what Jesus promised us.
The confessor and the Christian judges evil in terms of its possibility for transformation and openness to grace; the dualistic secular mind knows only crime and punishment, quid pro quo—an "eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." We are grateful for a certain sense of social order that it gives us.
Richard Parker 5-01-2002
Wanna do something about globalization? You might start by learning a little history.
Jim Wallis, Karen Armstrong, Susannah Heschel, Feisal Abdul Rauf 3-01-2002
A return to the Dark Ages? Or a modern rebellion against secularism? Either way—as we've so painfully learned—we ignore this phenomenon at our grave peril.
Kathleen Norris 1-01-2002
Apocalypse grabs us by the shoulders and says, 'Look at what matters in life.'
Walter Wink 1-01-2002
There’s a trap that I’d call the Bonhoeffer assumption. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was studying at Union Seminary in New York.
Stanley M. Hauerwas 1-01-2002
Some people think that if you have a position of Christian nonviolence, you don’t have anything to say because you’re excluded from making discriminating political judgments.
Richard Rohr 1-01-2002
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editor's note: This article was first published in the January-Febuary 2002 issue, only months after the attacks on September 11, 2001.
"They sat there on the ground beside him for seven days and seven nights. To Job they never spoke a word, so sad a sight he made." —Job 2:13
IN RECENT STUDIES of initiation rites, which seem to have been strategic for human survival in most of human history, I have discovered from Victor Turner the concept of "liminal space." He says that it is very hard to come by in the modern and now post-modern world. We are now too strategic, functional, and hurried to easily seek what the ancients sought above all else. Only pain is now strong enough to lead us into this unique place "where all significant transformation happens."
I suspect America is in a unique liminal space [post-Sept. 11]. Our attitudes are numbed, absolute, and strange. The old constituencies are unpredictable and misshapen. There is something new afoot, not only politically but also somehow archetypally and on the level of the psyche and soul. We are tipping on the balance, and usually God is an opportunist in such situations—waiting at the bottom of the slide.
Let me first explain what I mean by liminal or sacred space (I will use the terms almost interchangeably). "Limina" is the Latin word for threshold, the space betwixt and between. Liminal space, therefore, is a unique spiritual position where human beings hate to be but where the biblical God is always leading them. It is when you have left the "tried and true" but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when you are finally out of the way. It is when you are in between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer. It is no fun. Think of Israel in the desert, Joseph in the pit, Jonah in the belly, the three Marys tending the tomb.
John Paul Lederach 1-01-2002
The most significant ways—both short and long term—to deal with the sources of terrorism will emerge more from within the circles that are close to it rather than from sources that depend upon it from outside.
Bill Wylie-Kellermann 11-01-2001
Our broken hearts are indeed the proper place to begin theological reflection. Wounded hearts, the tears of suffering and death, however, can lead divergent ways.