I don’t need to believe that my church is perfect. But I have learned that my personal response to stories of child abuse is so strong that it prevents me from seeing any other truth. As a Catholic, I kept telling myself that the evil of some priests and bishops does not obviate the church’s teaching. But the deeper I immersed myself in details of the crimes and the stories of the victims, my grief and fury distorted and overwhelmed logic.
The fault was mine. But any institution ”” sacred or secular ”” that has to depend on deception, and the willingness of its people to be deceived, to maintain its legitimacy will not get away with it for long. These days, the attempt to withhold or suppress information doesn’t work to protect authority, but rather to undermine it….
I did not agree with the way Father Neuhaus answered that question when faced with the American Catholic Church’s worst-ever crisis. But he was not wrong to ask it.
A very thought-provoking piece. I think both Fr. Neuhaus and Mr. Dreher bring up excellent points.
“Article XIX
Of the Church
The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure word of God is preached and the sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same. As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch have erred: so also the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of ceremonies, but also in matters of faith.”
The question that came to me in reading this was, should there be a connection between the failings of the Church one belongs to , and one’s faith. And the second is, how to deal with concerns about the strength of one’s faith.
First, the Protestant view is that there needs to be a distinction drawn between the visible, and invisible church, as indicated in the 19th article.
Second, there needs to be a distinction drawn between the strength of one’s faith and the object of one’s faith. Quoting from an article by Rod Rosenbladt; “Luther faced this in the case of Melanchthon, his brilliant coworker. Genius that he was, Melanchthon was more “inward oriented” than was Luther. In a letter to Luther, Melanchthon fretted, “I wonder if I trust Christ enough? Perhaps I do not? What then?” Luther fired back his famous letter, “Melanchthon, go and sin bravely! Then go to the cross and bravely confess it! The whole Gospel is outside of us!”
That which saves us is not Christ’s work within us. What saves us is Christ’s objective dying, his objective blood shed on an objective cross. This sounds so simple, but it is the battle between the true Gospel (which is totally objective) and a false gospel of inwardness. When our introspections result in despair (and well they might, because we continue to sin), Christ’s objective and sufficient work must be re-presented to us by our pastors.â€
#2 Jimmy D.
That comment is some outstanding thinking and deserving of a couple more reads. I would simply add this.
Rod D’s article doesn’t do enough to distinguish the authentic argument that we don’t need to know everything. “Did Jesus not say, ‘You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free’?” Jesus was referring to himself, the kingdom of God in person.
Eve didn’t need to know what was good AND what was evil. To “know” something in the (correct) Biblical sense means to become one with it. James Dobson was on the president’s panel on pornography and says he was permanently damaged by this experience. You don’t need to see a dead body in your newspaper to learn that someone was murdered.
#2 and #3
Excellent and illuminating comments. They are really helpful. Thanks.
I totally agree with Jimmy D. Another home run by him.
Part of the problem Rod D had was that, like so many, he identified the Christian life as one of saintliness and holiness and viewed priests as its special exemplars — and therefore was destroyed when he discovered that his particular institution contained terrible sinners. In short, his anthropology was too high, and his view of the cross too low. It’s interesting that he concludes still that it is best to not know too much, when a Reformation understanding would say he needs to change his expectations: both of sinful man and of the saving power of the Cross for us bad men.
I am curious as to whether Catholics have a harder time weathering the sinful storms of their priests than Protestants do. It seems that we Evangelicals are constantly bombarded by the failings of our pastors which seem continually splayed across media headlines. To me, these failings only reinforce my worldview: they do not undermine it. As human beings, we are woefully dysfunctional and in constant rebellion against God. As an evangelical Christian, I do not feel like I am doing anyone any favors by pretending to be perfect. I find people are much more willing to listen to my testimony when I admit I am broken and flawed rather than when I try to pretend to be perfect.
Thank you, Jimmy D., for your thoughtful response to the article. Your words reminded me of an exchange I witnessed between two Christians:
Christian 1: “I know that God has forgiven me, but how can I forgive myself?”
Christian 2: “The Bible says nothing about ‘forgiving oneself.’ If God has forgiven you, then you are forgiven. Period. Your feelings have nothing to do with it.”
selah –
[blockquote]I am curious as to whether Catholics have a harder time weathering the sinful storms of their priests than Protestants do.[/blockquote]
I don’t think so, despite the obsession of the media with the Catholic priesthood. Despite some myths to the contrary, we don’t expect our priests to be flawless in their persons. We do have high standards, but we have, at various times, been criticized for being too forgiving. And I understand that. You might read Phillip Jenkins’ Pedophiles and Priests for a good examination of what lies behind social perceptions about sexual abuse.
Catholics really do have a relationship with their clergy that’s different from protestants and I don’t know how to explain it. For one thing, as a convert, I was late coming to see there is a difference. In the wake of the Rudy Kos scandal in Dallas, my Baptist mother asked “what were those parents thinking, letting their sons spend the night with adult men?” The chancellor of the Dallas diocese lost his job for asking that same question. At any rate, I got to reading and listening to cradle Catholics, and realized we link boys to men as sons to fathers, with the expectation that the young men will consider the priesthood. That may be naive, but you know, a very small percentage of Catholic priests are involved in the scandal – probably between 3% and 4%. Men in general, and certainly men in positions with access to children, act out at that rate, or even higher. In a sex obsessed society, however, you have to set up different rules for these sorts of things, I guess.
Let me tell a story: before the Boston scandal, a senior priest of our diocese, a father to me personally, was accused of molesting a 12 year old boy 38 years prior. He admitted it, went away for awhile, then came back to serve quietly in one of his old parishes (that can’t happen anymore: every offender is a predator you know, incurable, unforgivable, and a constant danger). When he died, the Cathedral was filled for the Vigil and the Funeral Mass. Grown men, who had been in his youth groups over the years wept and offered eulogies at the Vigil. Passing his coffin, people touched his hands and chests with genuine love and grief. I’d never seen such an outpouring of love. One event 38 years prior did not invalidate the good life this man had led since, nor did it devastate our local Church. It was hard, but these sorts of things always are.
Personally, I think the attention to this problem in the Church will strength her, by purifying our clergy and waking the laity to our own responsibilities. It may shake up bishops (who were the real scandal, after all) who have been more CEO than shepherd. That’s still iffy, you know: they have obfuscated and sidestepped the issues pretty effectively up till now. It has forced the Church to address the problem of homosexualist ideology among us. All of which is to say that God has been merciful to His Church; what the media and other parts of the culture meant for ill, He will certainly use to His purpose.
There is a difference between learning of a secret that a scandalous crime happened and was properly dealt with quietly, and a secret that such a crime happened and was NOT dealt with, but quietly perpetuated by cover-ups. The second demands the kind of harsh scrutiny that teaches a lasting accountability. In a community whose relationships rely on the lifeblood of trust, transparency is a messy but necessary tourniquet and transfusion to such a tragedy.
I should add that in the case of child sexual abuse, transparency can be a matter of safety–transparency may be a large part of “properly dealing with” the issue.
After reading the comments here, I agree with much of what has been said, but I do think that there is something missing. It is especially apparent to me in regards to sex scandles in the Church because they are so often the ones that are most shocking and handled, arguably, the worst. One person (#5) noted that Dreher “identified the Christian life as one of saintliness and holiness and viewed priests as its special exemplars—and therefore was destroyed when he discovered that his particular institution contained terrible sinners.” The problem I find is that although the Christian life is certainly not sinless, priests are set to a higher standard: James 3:1 “Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.” While priests and pastors should not be glamorized as “uber-Christians,” they should be held accountable for their actions as elders in the Church.
I think this is one of the major things, if not the thing, that hurt Dreher so greatly. Those who were put in charge of guarding the flock did more dammage than any shepherd should and then, instead of repentance, the sin was hidden. He even says “I don’t need to believe that my church is perfect.” He does want, I think, the Church to do its job in confronting sin, not ignoring it. So I can completely understand the pain that he found and the difficulty for him to seperate the sinfulness of the Church with the Truth of Christ. (That whole, the Church is Christ’s body thing might be responsible for this.)
This is where I think the Church needs to grow further in Christ. God is in the buisiness of redeeming the broken, not hiding them, patting them on the back or persecuting them endlessly as is often the response of the Church these days.
A local example for me is a youth minister from a church I attended in high school. It was at a fairly large mega-church that had a deep devotion to the Lord. This summer, I learned that he had been convicted of 2 counts of child molestation. The church’s reaction to it? They brushed it off and insisted that it was simply the work of Satan trying to provide distractions. Was Satan at work? I’m sure he was. Was he guilty? I do not know, but I think the church’s response was unhealthy. First they seperated themselves from him (ignoring pastoral care to him) and then they hushed the issue so that it is now taboo to talk about it.
Another more nation example is Ted Haggard. A very telling illustration of some of the problems in the wider Church can be found at http://exodus.to/content/view/942/37/ where an article asks “What if Ted had told the truth?”
So, what if the Church sought to facilitate the redeeming of the broken which only God can do but which the Church needs to proclaim AND model?