The John Jay Report indicated that 4.0% of all priests in the US between 1950 and 2002 had been accused of sexual abuse of a minor. This datum, and the numerous commentaries surrounding the horrific news of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, have been cited as evidence against the discipline of celibacy in the Roman Catholic clergy. Prominent psychotherapists, such as Richard Sipe, have argued that celibacy has been a factor contributing to criminal sexual conduct by clerics over the last half-century. Even Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna recently suggested that the issue of priestly celibacy should not be ignored in discussions of the sex-abuse scandals in Europe.

The argument against priestly celibacy– the argument that celibacy is a contributing factor in sexual abuse– has never been examined in the context of statistics showing abuse rates in other clerical populations that do not require celibacy. Such a comparison between clergy populations is critical, because if celibacy were a major factor in the abuse over the last half-century, then one would expect to see much lower abuse rates in the clergy of other communions. If on the contrary celibacy were unrelated (or even a safeguard against abuse) then the other clergy groups would likely show comparable or even higher levels of abuse.

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When Tim Ryan was called to an urgent meeting last year to discuss his duties as children’s minister at West Shore Evangelical Free Church, he knew something was amiss.

“This is really hard. I don’t know how I can do this,” said executive pastor John Nesbitt, who helps lead the 2,500 attendee megachurch in Mechanicsburg, Pa.

The church, part of the Evangelical Free Church of America, had been growing rapidly but giving was down and well below projections as the recession weighed on members. So Mr. Ryan was losing his job, as was another pastor.

While the economy appears to be recovering from the worst downturn in generations, more clergy are facing unemployment as churches continue to struggle with drops in donations. In 2009, the government counted about 5,000 clergy looking for jobs, up from 3,000 in 2007 and 2,000 in 2005.

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One of West Virginia’s best-known ministers — an activist against the Iraq war and longtime leader of other public causes — has been stripped of his license by the state’s Episcopal bishop.

The Rev. Jim Lewis says his Episcopal credentials were revoked on grounds that he performed too many rites for his former parishioners at St. John’s Church in Charleston.

However, he says, nearly nine years have elapsed since he returned to Charleston in retirement, and his involvement with long-ago church members never caused a problem until now.

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After a decade-long clergy shortage in America’s pulpits, Christian denominations are now experiencing a clergy glut — with some denominations reporting two ministers for every vacant pulpit.

“We have a serious surplus of ministers and candidates seeking calls,” said Marcia Myers, director of the vocation office for the Presbyterian Church (USA), which has four ministers for every opening.

The cause of the sudden turnaround: blame the bad economy.

According to PC(USA) data, there are 532 vacancies for 2,271 ministers seeking positions. The Assemblies of God, United Methodist Church, Church of the Nazarene and other Protestant denominations also report significant surpluses.

Cash-strapped parishioners — who were already aging and shrinking in number — have given less to their churches, resulting in staff cuts. Meanwhile, older clergy who saw their retirement funds evaporate are delaying retirement, leaving fewer positions available to younger ministers.

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REV. PATRICK LEE: It’s like being a parent to be a pastor. You never give up on your children, but you keep holding the ideal and explaining the ideal and hoping people will strive for it, but not condemning them when they fall short.

[JUDY] VALENTE: With so many Catholics going their own way these days, the role of pastor is perhaps more complicated than ever.
post02-priestandpeople
Rev. Patrick Lee

REV. LEE: When I was growing up, the church was the ideal we tried to change ourselves to match. Now people want to change the church.

VALENTE: Father Lee is the pastor of two parishes in Chicago. Most of his parishioners are highly educated, and they represent a diversity of views about church teaching.

REV. LEE: All authority is being questioned in our times. Some of it selfishly, some of it enlightened. I think Americans are more comfortable in an educated democracy now, and so they want to spread that democracy to the church, which has never really been a democratic organization. I think we have to be open to a dialogue of understanding what the church teaches and really hearing it and not dismissing it instantly. On the other hand, I think the church has to open itself to the wisdom of its laity.

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A gay Atlanta pastor and his partner who have been at the center of a battle over the treatment of gay clergy by the nation’s largest Lutheran denomination are being reinstated to the denomination’s clergy roster, church officials announced Tuesday.

The Rev. Bradley Schmeling and his partner, the Rev. Darin Easler, have been approved for reinstatement, the Chicago-based Evangelical Lutheran Church in America said in a news release. The approval came roughly eight months after the denomination voted to allow gays and lesbians in committed relationships to serve as clergy, and just weeks after the ELCA’s church council officially revised the church’s policy on gay ministers.

Schmeling, who serves as pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Atlanta, was removed from the church’s clergy roster in 2007 for being in a same-sex relationship with Easler. A disciplinary committee ruled that Schmeling was violating an ELCA policy regarding the sexual conduct of pastors.

“I’m grateful that this journey has come full circle and that the church has changed its policy,” Schmeling said Tuesday.

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….he testified that he’d been so busy traveling across the state and nation preaching the Gospel that he’d neglected his personal finances and those of his church.

—From a WCNC article on Greater Salem City of God minister Anthony Jinwright, who, along with his wife, was in court on tax evasion and fraud charges

As he sat in Church last Sunday afternoon, Guillaume Humblot found himself troubled by the declining number of Catholic priests in France, and asked himself if he was ready to join the cloth.

“There are almost none left,” the 31-year-old Humblot said.

On Facebook, Humblot discovered a forum dedicated to people who, like him, are considering the priesthood. The page was part of a campaign, launched by the Catholic Church this month, to attract young people to the priesthood following decades of dwindling ordainments ”” and amid waves of sexual abuse allegations that have darkened the reputation of the Catholic priest.

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The 300-odd hymns that James Quinn composed in New Hymns for All Seasons (1969, Chapman) and Praise for all Seasons (1994, Chapman) appear in most modern hymn books whether used for Roman Catholic or Anglican congregations.

His aim, while composing, was to produce a “catechism in song”. “Hymns fundamentally declare the Christian faith,” said Quinn, a Jesuit. “They are our source book for teaching and for sermons.”

His inspiration came from the writings of the saints, the psalms and ancient texts that reflected on church teaching, Scripture or the Eucharist.

“Hymns form a rich scriptural quarry,” he said. “They are to convey the words of Christ memorably.” The language used should be “clear but not banal and above all simple”. He did not write “modern” hymns that relied only on current vocabulary, and encouraged people who did not understand the terminology to make the effort to learn.

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With just a dozen regular Sunday worshippers, the people of Holy Apostles Episcopal Church in Perry were in no position to afford a full-time priest.

But they didn’t intend to shut down their 170-year-old rural parish, either.

So the congregation looked within its own pews and found a willing candidate for the priesthood.

And he comes cheap, too.

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(Please note that this is in Sunday’s paper but it appeared on the website today–KSH).

We want many pairs of eyes watching for signs of abuse. We want everyone to know how to report suspected abuse of children and abuse of the pastoral relationship between clergy members and parishioners. We want to keep the issue before our church — clergy and laity alike — and to keep the conversation going.

But the thing victims most want to hear from the church, especially its leadership, is: “I am so sorry. This should never have happened to you, especially here. We are going to do everything in our power to see that nothing like this happens again.” Victims live with their horrific experiences and know that their abuse can never be undone. And so they seek assurance that the church will change the system that allows abuse to go undetected and take action to hold perpetrators accountable. Child abusers do not deserve protection; they must be reported immediately to civil authorities and prosecuted.

The Christian church — like any institution — is as capable of sin as any individual. We have been wrong before, from the Inquisition and the Crusades down to our defense of slavery (using scripture) and our denigration of women. Over time, the church has repented for these sins and sought to change its ways. The discovery of sexual abuse by clergy is another situation that calls for the church’s repentance and reform.

I would not presume to instruct you. That would be arrogant. Nor would I impose upon you advice you’ve not sought. But I do offer you the benefit of my experience as you seek to deal responsibly with these challenges to the integrity of your church. Your letter to the faithful in Ireland and your meeting in Malta with victims were a good start. I hope the future will bring more truth-telling, which will make your church a better, safer place.

However, I believe it is misguided and wrong for gay men to be scapegoated in this scandal….

Read it all.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

In the beginning, there was partisanship.

When Daniel Coughlin was chosen to be the first-ever Catholic House chaplain in March 2000, Democrats made clear that he wasn’t their pick. A top Democratic spokeswoman called the decision to appoint him — made unilaterally by then-Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) — “a graceless, tactless, partisan maneuver.”

Ten years later, Coughlin is still in the job, and there is ample evidence that the rancor that accompanied his selection has disappeared: Last week, lawmakers from both parties streamed onto the House floor to honor his decade of service.

“He has seen us through the dark and through the bright,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said of the chaplain. Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) confessed to being “a better person for having known Father Coughlin and having been counseled by him.” Rep. Daniel Lipinski (D-Ill.) called him “an inspiration.”

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As Pope Benedict XVI has come under scrutiny for his handling of sexual abuse cases, both his supporters and his critics have paid fresh attention to the way he responded to a sexual abuse scandal in Austria in the 1990s, one of the most damaging to confront the church in Europe.

Defenders of Benedict cite his role in dealing with Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër of Vienna as evidence that he moved assertively, if quietly, against abusers. They point to the fact that Cardinal Groër left office six months after accusations against him of molesting boys first appeared in the Austrian news media in 1995. The future pope, they say, favored a full canonical investigation, only to be blocked by other ranking officials in the Vatican.

A detailed look at the rise and fall of the clergyman, who died in 2003, and the involvement of Benedict, a Bavarian theologian with many connections to German-speaking Austria, paints a more complex picture.

Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, had the ear of Pope John Paul II and was able to block a favored candidate for archbishop of Vienna, clearing the way for Father Groër to assume the post in 1986, say senior church officials and priests with knowledge of the process. His critics question how this influence failed him nine years later in seeking a fuller investigation into the case.

Read it all.

I thought this was a nice photo.

The rector of Christ Church Grosse Pointe has been temporarily removed from his position because of a “serious allegation” that wasn’t specified, congregants learned this morning.

Rev. Brad Whitaker has run the prominent Episcopal church since 2002.

A representative of the Episcopal Bishop of Michigan addressed worshippers at the 9 a.m. service, followed by remarks by vestry senior warden Libby Candler.

Two calls placed to the home phone number listed for Whitaker the rector were hung up.

Read it all.

Finally, a footnote about the impact of the Castrillón episode: Ironically, resurrecting that 2001 letter may have doomed Castrillón, but it could actually help Pope Benedict XVI.

Throughout the most recent round of media coverage, there’s been a serious mismatch between Pope Benedict’s actual record on sex abuse — as the senior Vatican official who took the crisis most seriously since 2001, and who led the charge for reform — and outsider images of the pope as part of the problem.

While there are many reasons for that, a core factor is that the Vatican had the last ten years to tell the story of “Ratzinger the Reformer” to the world, and they essentially dropped the ball. That failure left a PR vacuum in which a handful of cases from the pope’s past, where his own role was actually marginal, have come to define his profile.

One has to ask, why didn’t the Vatican tell Ratzinger’s story?

At least part of the answer, I suspect, is because to make Ratzinger look good, they’d have to make others look bad — including, of course, Castrillón, as well as other top Vatican officials. Lurking behind that concern is a deeper one, which is that to salvage the reputation of Benedict XVI it might be necessary to tarnish that of Pope John Paul II.

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The Rev. Fernando Karadima is one of Chile’s most respected and influential priests. Some go so far as to call him a “living saint,” who for half a century trained dozens of priests and helped mold thousands of young Catholics from Santiago’s elite.

Now four men who were once devoted followers have filed a criminal complaint alleging that Father Karadima, now 80, sexually abused them in secret for years.

One man said he had reported the abuse to Father Karadima’s superiors in the archdiocese of Santiago as many as seven years ago, but they took no action. All four men filed formal complaints last year with the archdiocesan tribunal and, receiving no response, spoke publicly for the first time this week.

But the allegations have been largely met not with anger at Father Karadima but with outrage at the accusers by many of his parishioners, a prominent conservative politician and church officials. They say a man so respected over so much time could not possibly have abused his followers, though as the news broke this week, a cardinal here confirmed that the church has been secretly investigating claims of sexual abuse leveled against the priest.

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Luis Malagon felt blessed when he, his wife and their daughter were offered $11,000 a month to work at a new religious social service agency being planned in Brooklyn. He quit his job as a building inspector in South Carolina in February, put his house up for sale and borrowed money to move to Sunset Park.

Settling into a cramped apartment, they waited for the project to begin on March 1. When it did not, they said, they were summoned to daylong religious services presided over by its leader, the Rev. Isidro Bolaños, who offered harangues and excuses.

Today, the Malagons are out of work, money and time. The paychecks they had been assured were in the mail never arrived, putting them on the verge of eviction. Their New York sojourn has gone from blessing to curse, and they are moving to a relative’s apartment in Florida.

“I have nothing,” said Mr. Malagon, 61. “I feel like an ant. Look at everything we gave up to come here.”

Read the whole article.

The Very Rev. J. Brad Benson, rector of St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church, plans to get married this summer in a state where same-sex marriage is legal.

“After twenty years of loving relationship, my partner Carl Johengen and I have decided that it is time that we were legally married,” he wrote in the church’s most recent newsletter.

The St. Thomas rector explained that he has begun to see the word “marriage” in purely legal terms and has come to realize that he and his partner “need” the legal rights and responsibilities afforded in a marriage.

“No one questions the rights and responsibilities of a married couple; simply saying, ‘I’m his wife’ or ‘I’m her husband’ opens many legal doors,” he stated.

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The pews are packed at many Catholic churches, but a scarcity of priests is leaving even some of the biggest parishes short-staffed and scrambling for help from retired and visiting clergy.

Recent examples aren’t hard to find:

–Just one full-time priest for months at 13,000-member St. Gabriel in Cotswold, N.C.

–A pastor’s heart-bypass operation, with complications, that left 14,000-member St. Mark in Huntersville, N.C., struggling to find substitutes to celebrate Mass.

–A sanctuary so crowded on Ash Wednesday that a parishioner at St. Matthew in Charlotte, where two priests serve a flock of 28,000, called the fire marshal.

Why not just build more churches? Not enough priests to staff them.

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The Church in Wales is urgently looking for new clergy as figures reveal a continuing drop in their numbers.

The number of full-time clergy has been falling in recent years with a net loss of more than 100 between 2004 and 2009.

The Church in Wales governing body will discuss the issue when it meets in Lampeter, Ceredigion, on Wednesday.

A motion seeks backing for the “urgent need” to “seek out and nurture” new clergy, while welcoming a five-year vocations strategy.

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The future Pope Benedict XVI, dealing with a request to defrock a child-molesting priest in California, was handling it as a dismissal from the priesthood ”” not an abuse case ”” and acted “expeditiously” by the standards of the time, a Vatican lawyer said in a statement released Saturday.

The Vatican issued the remarks a day after reports emerged that Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, signed a letter to the priest’s bishop saying the matter needed more time and that the “good of the Universal Church” had to be taken into account. It took two years for the man, the Rev. Stephen Kiesle, to be removed from the priesthood.

The bishop, John S. Cummins, wrote to Pope John Paul II in 1981, saying that the priest had been criminally charged with molesting six boys ages 11 to 13 several years earlier and that he was asking to be dismissed. He wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger at least three more times, to provide information and check on the case’s status.

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When he was in charge of the office of church discipline, the future Pope Benedict XVI was slow to respond to a request to be defrocked by an East Bay priest who had pleaded no contest to lewd conduct charges.

In 1985, four years after the Vatican learned of Stephen Kiesle’s request to leave the priesthood, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote to Oakland Bishop John Cummins asking for more time to consider the matter.

Kiesle, who had served in several East Bay parishes, pleaded no contest in 1978 to lewd conduct for tying up and molesting two boys at Our Lady of the Rosary parish in Union City, where he was a teacher and priest.

Read the whole article.

The priest, convicted of tying up and abusing two young boys in a California church rectory, wanted to leave the ministry.

But in 1985, four years after the priest and his bishop first asked that he be defrocked, the future Pope Benedict XVI, then a top Vatican official, signed a letter saying that the case needed more time and that “the good of the Universal Church” had to be considered in the final decision, according to church documents released through lawsuits.

That decision did not come for two more years, the sort of delay that is fueling a renewed sexual abuse scandal in the church that has focused on whether the future pope moved quickly enough to remove known pedophiles from the priesthood, despite pleas from American bishops.

As the scandal has deepened, the pope’s defenders have said that, well before he was elected pope in 2005, he grew ever more concerned about sexual abuse and weeding out pedophile priests. But the case of the California priest, the Rev. Stephen Kiesle, and the trail of documents first reported on Friday by The Associated Press, shows, in this period at least, little urgency.

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The future Pope Benedict XVI resisted pleas to defrock a California priest with a record of sexually molesting children, citing concerns including “the good of the universal church,” according to a 1985 letter bearing his signature.

The correspondence, obtained by The Associated Press, is the strongest challenge yet to the Vatican’s insistence that Benedict played no role in blocking the removal of pedophile priests during his years as head of the Catholic Church’s doctrinal watchdog office. The letter, signed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was typed in Latin and is part of years of correspondence between the diocese of Oakland and the Vatican about the proposed defrocking of the Rev. Stephen Kiesle, who pleaded no contest to misdemeanors involving child molestation in 1978.

Read it all. This one ran on the front page of the local paper here this morning; I would be interested if that also happened with your local paper if you know–KSH..

With her careers as veterinarian, astronaut and U.S. president behind her, Barbie has at last found her true calling: as a second-career Episcopal priest.

The 11.5-inch-tall fictional graduate of Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, Calif., has donned a cassock and surplice and is rector at St. Barbara’s-by-the-Sea in (where else?) Malibu, Calif.

She arrived at the church fully accessorized, as is Barbie’s custom. Her impeccably tailored ecclesiastical vestments include various colored chasubles (the sleeveless vestments worn at Mass) for every liturgical season, black clergy shirt with white collar, neat skirt and heels, a laptop with prepared sermon and a miniature, genuine Bible.

Apparently a devotee of the “smells and bells” of High Church tradition, the Rev. Barbie even has a tiny thurible, a metal vessel used for sending clouds of incense wafting toward heaven.

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Now, in both of those cases (of abuse by priests, one in Wisconsin, one in Germany), what both the Vatican and local church officials have said is that the future Pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was not intimately aware of the details of the case. He was not involved in the nitty-gritty of decision making.

That may well be true. I’ve written two biographies of this man. I can tell you from my own experience that that this is a guy who lives the life of the mind. He’s not a micromanager and has always sort of tended to leave it to others to make the trains run on times.

So if you mean, do I accept the version of events that the future Pope didn’t know the details, I’m willing to accept that. However, I’m not sure that really solves the problem, because both of these cases ultimately did happen on his watch. The buck stopped at his desk, and so I think ultimately he has to take responsibility for them.

Read (or watch) it all.

Following weeks of media coverage of sex abuse by priests in the United States, Ireland and Germany, three deaf men from Italy appeared on national TV last week.

Gianni Bisoli, 61, entered a Catholic institute for the deaf in Verona at age 9. He described how he was subjected to three years of sexual abuse. And he listed the abusers’ first names ”” many of whom are still serving as priests.

Bisoli described how he was often taken to the home of the local bishop, who used him as a sexual toy. The network bleeped out the bishop’s last name. A total of 67 former students of the same institute for the deaf had signed similar affidavits last year.

Their story was briefly in the news but was quickly swept under the rug.

Robert Mickens, Vatican correspondent for the British Catholic weekly The Tablet, says that was possible thanks to a long entrenched code of silence.

Read it all.

As I have found that the reporting on this issue has been inaccurate and poor in terms of the facts, I am also writing out of a sense of duty to the truth.

The fact that I presided over this trial and have never once been contacted by any news organization for comment speaks for itself.

My intent in the following paragraphs is to accomplish the following:

To tell the back-story of what actually happened in the Father Murphy case on the local level;

To outline the sloppy and inaccurate reporting on the Father Murphy case by the New York Times and other media outlets;

To assert that Pope Benedict XVI has done more than any other pope or bishop in history to rid the Catholic Church of the scourge of child sexual abuse and provide for those who have been injured;

To set the record straight with regards to the efforts made by the church to heal the wounds caused by clergy sexual misconduct. The Catholic Church is probably the safest place for children at this point in history.

Read it all (Hat tip: WJT).

The church needs to show it understands the flaws of its own internal culture by examining its own conscience, its own practices, its own reflexes when faced with challenge. As the church rightly teaches, acknowledging the true nature of our sin is the one and only path to redemption and forgiveness.

Of course, this will not be easy. Enemies of the church will use this scandal to discredit the institution no matter what the Vatican does. Many in the hierarchy thought they were doing the right thing, however wrong their decisions were. And the church is not alone in facing problems of this sort.

But defensiveness and institutional self-protection are not Gospel values. “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.”

The church needs to cast aside the lawyers, the PR specialists, and its own worst instincts, which are human instincts. Benedict could go down as one of the greatest popes in history if he were willing to risk all in the name of institutional self-examination, painful but liberating public honesty, and true contrition.

Read it all.