Category Archives: Church Renewal

The Cross Is God’s Victory Over Violence

Articles, Atonement, Catechesis, Christology, Evangelisation, Father, Jesus, Kingdom of God, Redemption, Scripture

Since Vatican II the Catholic Church has been hesitating to speak clearly of the insight at its core: that the refusal of God the Father to overpower the enemies of Christ was an emphatic rejection of the use of force to build the Kingdom announced by Jesus – the Kingdom of God.

It is time to end that hesitation. The Youth Catechism published by the Church in 2011 proves that no other explanation of the Crucifixion makes sense.

YouCat’s Confusing Question and Answer

The following question and answer occur on page 65 of YouCat, The Youth Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Q 98. Did God will the death of his only Son?”

A. The violent death of Jesus did not come about through tragic external circumstances. Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23). So that we children of sin and death might have life, the Father in heaven “made him to be sin who knew no sin” (2 Cor 5:21). The magnitude of the sacrifice that God the Father asked of his Son, corresponded to the magnitude of Christ’s obedience: “And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, for this purpose I have come to this hour” (Jn 12:27). On both sides, God’s love for men proved itself to the very end on the Cross.

Is it truly obvious to anyone that God’s love for men (and, presumably, women) is proven by the statement that Jesus’s death on the cross resulted solely from God’s will.

That this inference does not come naturally – that it is counter-intuitive – is strongly suggested by all available research on Irish young people and their generally poor understanding of what happens at Easter, the church’s central sacramental event. Even so YouCat  is in use in some Irish dioceses as a reference source for faith formation – including the faith formation of adults. Question 98 (above) is not the only issue.

The Problem of Atonement.  If it was solely the will of God the Father – and not any  ‘tragic external circumstances’ – that caused the death of Jesus, then God the Father must also have predetermined the opposition to Jesus and the violence of the crucifixion. Why is it supposed that this theological perspective can close the distance between ourselves and God, when it is both scandalous and rendered obsolete by the most persuasive orthodox Catholic theology of the Cross? As Catholic teaching insists that God cannot will anyone to sin it can only be a mistake to allow any room for the inference that God the Father arranged or even condoned the violence of the persecution and crucifixion of Jesus.

The Kingdom of God is marginalized in YouCat, even though it was central to Jesus’ teaching. In Raymund Schwager’s dramatic theology of the Cross it was – and always is – the Father’s will – first of all – to build this Kingdom. Only peace reigns there – because all freely obey the two Great Commandments.  The crucifixion followed from the rejection of that kingdom by Jesus’ enemies – so this sinful rejection was a necessary cause of the predicament that obliged Jesus to choose between overpowering his enemies and death on the cross. His choice to undergo crucifixion rather than use force was not the repayment of a debt called in by God the Father for our sins but proof that the Kingdom of God cannot emerge out of violence. In Dignitatis Humanae (1965) the church rejected the use of force to spread the faith – and this was also the belief of the early church – so why is this not a sufficient explanation for Jesus’ own refusal to use force to build his Kingdom?

The Sins of Covetousness, Envy and Pride are not identified in YouCat as the sins of Jesus’s enemies that led to his arrest, false accusation and unjust execution. Nothing could be clearer than that these sins prevented them from following Jesus themselves. Yet Neither covetousness nor pride are indexed or defined or instanced in YouCat.  Envy is indexed but the explanation on page 254 confuses envy – which is directed toward a person or persons – and covetousness – a yearning for whatever the envied person possesses that the yearner cannot have without violence.

The Problem of Violence is not given central importance in YouCat even though it is central to scripture and to the dangers facing young people today. In revealing the role of covetousness, envy and pride in the opposition to Jesus the Gospel is also clearly pointing to the crucial role of those motives in all aggression.  That this revelation was intended by God is indicated by the warning to Mary given by the prophet Simeon in St Luke’s Gospel: “…and a sword will pierce your soul too — so that the secret thoughts of many may be laid bare” (Luke 2:34-35). This is not seen in YouCat.  It does see Jesus’ opposition to violence but does not link that opposition – or the will of God the Father – to Jesus’ choice of crucifixion before violence.

The name ‘Satan’ is completely missing from YouCat. In Schwager’s theology, as well as in scripture and in the Easter liturgy, Satan is identified as the generator of all aggression, via temptation, deceit and hatred.  Young people need to know the meaning of this name – ‘the Accuser’ – the dark spirit behind all breaches of the 8th commandment against ‘bearing false witness’.  They also need to know what it means to renounce Satan in the Easter liturgy – to reject all blaming of others for our own mistakes, and all unjust violence to save ourselves.

An imbalance in moral theology is inevitable if there is a dominant focus on the rules relating to sexual behaviour but no identification of the role played by covetousness, envy and pride in the genesis of injustice, crime, civil violence and war.  How can e.g. the so-called manosphere and the new Christian imperialism be countered if this is not corrected? Many young People will sense this imbalance in YouCat and tune out.

The Resurrection is not seen by YouCat as God the Father’s peaceful response to the killing of his Son – another exercise of non-violence to overpower those who use violence against the truth, through the courageous witness of believers.  That too is part of the gift of the Gospel to all faced with speaking the truth on behalf of justice. The Christian Creed is a sure passport through all hostility to the faith, all false accusation and all injustice. Believers in Jesus’ Resurrection cannot be defeated by force or the threat of death. Might, for us, will never also be Right.

Conclusion

YouCat is useful as an explainer of the church’s past mistakes – but not the answer to major questions that many young people will raise today – especially about violence and the cross and God’s part in the crucifixion of Jesus.

Dignitatis Humanae (1965) – the church’s own teaching on the principle of religious freedom – allows for an entirely different perspective – that God the Father does not and never could condone any use of violence to advance or secure the Christian truth and the Kingdom of God.

That all-important event of the death of Jesus had obviously two essential causes – the conspiracy against Jesus on the one hand, and Jesus’ obedience to God’s non-violent will on the other. God the Father did not, and could not, have willfully predetermined the first of those causes – and Christian teachers (especially) need to feel free to say that. To say that God permitted the abuse of their own freedom by Jesus’ enemies is to say something entirely different – that Christian faith can never by conveyed to anyone by the use of force.

To engage the interest of young people in the Easter story Catechists will need to see that story – and the many others in scripture on the same theme of victimisation –  as a revelation of the roots of all violence in human concern for social status. Time and again, those who choose violence in scripture do so to ‘save their faces’ – i.e. to avoid losing status. That God willed Jesus to surrender to crucifixion to reveal this connection is missing from YouCat. This textbook does not even index the greatest of all sins – pride – or name the one who personifies that sin – Satan, the Accuser.

It is time to say clearly why Jesus accepted death on the Cross: to prove by his Resurrection that violence has no future – and that God’s peaceful Kingdom will come, despite all of its enemies.

(The final two paragraphs of this article were edited for clarity on Thursday 19th February 2026.)

[To read a summary of the dramatic theology of Raymund Schwager SJ, click here.]

Views: 53

Why No Feast of Christ the Prophet?

Abuse of Power, Articles, Christology, Church Renewal, Jesus, Laity, Prophecy, Sexual Abuse

 Jesus had no tolerance for adult destruction of childhood faith – so why did the Catholic Church’s leaders hide clerical sex abuse from parents?

At the highest level, and globally, the clerical Catholic church of the 20th century not only failed to protect children from widespread clerical sexual abuse but conspired to conceal this failure from Catholic parents – until it was revealed by the victims themselves.

Not even yet, in 2025 – under an American pope – does the hierarchical church show any determination or sense of obligation to trace this failure to its historical source, or to measure the depth of disillusionment it has caused.  A call from Ireland in 2022 for a reckoning on this issue has been ignored – and so has the looming disappearance of Catholic clergy here, as vocations to that priesthood collapse.

Meanwhile state inquiries into church abuse in Ireland have indicted both clerical Catholic silence and the lay passivity that facilitated abuse in Catholic-run institutions – but even yet – despite synodality – the Irish church has had no discussion of those evils. In spite of a strong call in September 2024 by  Archbishop Dermot Farrell of Dublin for an end to a ‘culture of denial’, a hopeless policy still prevails of waiting for scandals to run their course, for everyone to forget and for some amnesiac remnant to move on.

This is a policy for extinction – the complete opposite of the New Creation promised by the Christian Gospel.  It is the opposite also of the transparency called for by the Synodal process initiated by Pope Francis in 2021. It would surely have been rejected by the church’s founder – whose condemnation of the adult scandalisation of children was more severe than any other.

Jesus the Ultimate Prophet

That Jesus of Nazareth was crucified for calling out mere religious performance, that he never joined the Jewish religious elite of his time, and that he condemned elitism per se, is plain from the Gospel texts that all Catholics hear at Mass.  He was squarely therefore in the prophetic tradition of Judaism, and his sacrifice and death were squarely in that pattern also. He is repeatedly identified by others as a prophet (Luke 7:16, John 4:19) and his actions mirror those of Elijah, Jeremiah and Amos, in calling for justice, not empty ritual.

Moreover, Jesus explicitly identified himself with this prophetic tradition, predicting that he would suffer the same fate:

“Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build the sepulchres of the prophets and decorate the tombs of the upright, saying, ‘We would never have joined in shedding the blood of the prophets, had we lived in our ancestors’ day.’ So! Your own evidence tells against you! You are the children of those who murdered the prophets! Very well then, finish off the work that your ancestors began.” (Matt 23:29-32)

For the Franciscan Richard Rohr Jesus is therefore the ultimate prophet who challenges all  religious systems from the standpoint of their victims1The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage, Richard Rohr, 2025.. Jesus’ most dire warning against any adult action that would shatter the faith of a child (Matt 18:6) must surely be interpreted as part of that prophetic critique. Does anyone doubt that this Jesus would have had zero tolerance for clerical abuse of children – as called for by St Peter Damian in 1049 in his letter to Pope Leo IX?

Why did no bishop of the Catholic church – and no pope – ever take a similar stand?

How now, in the wake of what has happened, can Irish Catholics – or Catholics anywhere – be expected to recognise Jesus in a purely ritual and symbolic priesthood, a priesthood that remained mute – that was trained to be mute – when children were being violated? How can they be content with a church calendar, and with services, that never celebrate the prophetic character of Jesus’ sacrifice – that explain his crucifixion solely in terms of propitiation of the Father?

Jesus the Propitiator: A Failed Christology

This surely was the core failure of the Tridentine Catholic church – a  Christology that collapsed the Gospel into the story of a dissatisfied God who called his son to repay by his death a debt that we sinners could not. Even the Divine Mercy devotion promoted by Pope John Paul II calls for the same despairing emphasis – as though only fifty repetitive references to Jesus’ ‘sorrowful passion’ – to be repeated forever – will somehow persuade this Father God – at last – to be merciful.

That from the beginning the Father was merciful, that Jesus was instead calling all to follow his own prophetic stance in opposing religious hypocrisy, that he was raised from death, by the Father, for this courage – and that his prophetic witness in challenging injustice – wherever it occurs – is the distinctive call to all – could not be countenanced by the Catholic Church of Christendom – the church that rewarded only compliance and passivity and called all dissent disloyal.

And this, ultimately, was the root cause of the failure of article 37 of Lumen Gentium (1964) – the Vatican II constitution on the church. This clearly pointed to the emergence of church structures in which concerns could have been raised about any matter that threatened the spiritual health and witness of the people of God. Yet only passive compliance with hierarchical decree could be tolerated, even after Vatican II – so that church of compliance was doomed to disgrace, despite the council.

Synodality too will be doomed if it does not re-centre itself on Jesus the Prophet, and reconfigure the church accordingly – with structures that allow for prophetic challenge to any abuse of ecclesial power. An annual feast day for Christ the Prophet, with a papal encyclical that does justice to this need, could signal such a reckoning – but when will we get a pope – and a hierarchy – that sees this?

[To read Brian McLaren of the Centre for Action and Contemplation on the importance of Jesus the Prophet click here.]

Notes

  1. The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage, Richard Rohr, 2025.

Views: 440

The Pyramid Will Stay Inverted

Abuse of Power, Articles, Benedict XVI, Christendom, Corruption, Division, Evangelisation, Francis, Hypocrisy, Laity, Magisterium, Papacy, Pope Francis, Safeguarding, Sexual Abuse, Vatican II
Pope Francis receives flowers from children at the presidential palace in Baghdad March 5, 2021. (CNS photo/Vatican Media)

Pope Francis’ enemies in the church were ‘talked up’ by some media as capable of reversing the direction he set over the twelve years of his pontificate.

However, the historical circumstances in which Francis came to the chair of Peter in 2013 had not changed by 2025. Those same circumstances made the 21st century Franciscan ‘startup’ – synodality – irreversible. 

The Inverted Pyramid

“Jesus founded the Church by setting at her head the Apostolic College, in which the Apostle Peter is the ‘rock’ (cf. Mt 16:18), the one who must confirm his brethren in the faith (cf. Lk 22:32). But in this Church, as in an inverted pyramid, the top is located beneath the base.”

It was in this celebrated passage in his address to bishops in 2014 that Pope Francis first introduced the idea of the church as an upside-down pyramid, with bishops in the role of servants rather than overlords. He went on:

“Let us never forget this! For the disciples of Jesus, yesterday, today and always, the only authority is the authority of service, the only power is the power of the cross. As the Master tells us: ‘You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave’ (Mt 20:25-27). It shall not be so among you: in this expression we touch the heart of the mystery of the Church, and we receive the enlightenment necessary to understand our hierarchical service.”

The Synodal Pathway

The Synodal Pathway then launched in Ireland and globally from 2021 followed logically – by insisting that Baptism – not Ordination – is the foundational sacrament of the church – and by calling all of the baptised people of God to communion, participation and mission

Was this vision of the church’s future truly in danger now that Francis had passed? Media would hype this as a cliff-edge moment, with the return of ‘Command Catholicism’ – a bid for tight control from above on sexual practice – a real possibility. Might that truly be the direction taken by the Conclave of 2025?

Teachers Must Also be Witnesses

To understand why this was highly unlikely we needed only to remind ourselves of a key insight of Pope Paul VI, expressed in the 1975 document Evangelii Nuntiandi. Writing on the vital topic of evangelisation – the communication of the ‘Good News’ of the Gospel to the modern world – that pope declared:

“Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.” (Evangelii Nuntiandi 41)

An unavoidable question arose from this declaration:

If teachers are not witnesses will anyone listen?

And what of the church’s supreme teachers, its official magisterium, its bishops –  who did not, as a body, witness to the paramount importance of the safeguarding of the innocence of children until – beginning in the last two decades of the 20th century – Catholics – globally – discovered that the safety of their children had been considered much less important than the reputation of ordained men?  And that this was true even of the era of Pope Paul VI?

Lay Victims of Abuse Were its Witnesses

Had even one Catholic bishop been the source of this revelation the shock would have been that much less – but in fact it had been some of the affected Catholic families – lay people – in Louisiana, USA in the mid 1980s – who first informed the wider church of this ghastly anomaly, not any Catholic bishop anywhere.

So all bishops – and all cardinals attending the 2025 Conclave – knew well that the truth of clerical sexual abuse of children was imposed upon the church not by its leaders but by the innocent victims of that abuse.

For many observant Catholics it became impossible from then on to think of bishops – the church’s official magisterium – as necessarily witnesses to the Gospel and even necessarily as exemplary moral leaders of the church. This inevitably applied also to the bishop of Rome, the pope. In the era of Pope Benedict XVI – the era in which Archbishop Bergoglio of Buenos Aires emerged as a likely successor – this was the climate that inevitably gave shape and direction to the Conclave of 2013.

Moreover, as if to underline the fact that bishops were not holy ex officio, the internal wranglings of the Vatican bureaucracy were by then also on public display – in the so-called ‘Vatileaks’ affair. Had not this same scandal helped to bring about that conclave by influencing Benedict XVI’s astonishing decision to retire?  If he was truly disabled finally by insomnia, as recently reported, who can fail, now, to see the causes?

Cardinal Bergoglio Reads the Times

Francis then became the name of Benedict XVI’s successor because, more clearly than anyone else, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio saw that the centuries-old strategy of governing and leading the church by moral edict from above had backfired disastrously. Focused on imposing tight discipline on sexual morality on the non-ordained people of God it had exposed the hierarchical clerical church to the charge of rank hypocrisy, in the concealment of the sexual sins of clergy.

Who now could not see also that, on a global scale, children had been sacrificed to preserve this secret? So obviously sinful was this mistake that only penitence on the part of leadership could now be persuasive.

“I Am a Sinner!”

And so, when asked directly ‘Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?‘ the new Pope Francis declared:

“I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.“

Stunning the Catholic world as it did this declaration told us not just about Jorge Bergoglio but about the times – the circumstances – in which he had been elected.  Everything else about his pontificate followed logically from this declaration.  We Catholics – people, priests, bishops and even popes – are all sinners – and are taught – if we pay attention – to understand our greatest sins.

Of these perhaps the greatest is a tendency to believe that we are qualified to tell others what to do – but had not Jesus himself warned even the apostles – the very first bishops – against doing that?

The Culmination of Centuries of Scandal

Schooled well in the history of the church Francis could see also that the clerical abuse cover-up scandal was but the latest in a centuries-long series of church scandals.

Already, just before the Jubilee year 2000 Pope John Paul II had issued the document Memory and Reconciliation lamenting:

  • the medieval Inquisitions,
  • the church’s own role in causing conflicts between Christians
  • the persecution of Jews in Catholic countries even into modern times,
  • the abuse of women,
  • the violation of the rights of indigenous peoples in supporting European imperialism and colonialism across the globe.

Had not the church also supported imperial European regimes that had gone to total war in 1914 – a major cause of the rise of secularism and atheism in the 20th century West?

The abuse scandal – by no means over yet in 2013 (or even in 2025) – was merely the final blow – a blow delivered by a church system of ‘moralising from above‘ that had backfired – justly – on the moralisers.

The Meaning of Synodality

So, if moralising from above could not lead the church any longer, what could?

Pope Francis’ answer – an answer derived obviously from deep prayer and the guidance of the Holy Spirit –  was synodality – communion, participation and mission – a new era in which Catholic ministers would accompany those to whom they minister – instead of talking down to them .

Those who cannot get on board with this must be prayed for very seriously –  to receive the insight to understand their own times. No effective leadership can ever emerge from historical blindness, the prime disability of the church faction that opposed and sometimes disgracefully vilified Pope Francis.

Constantinian Nostalgia Not the Answer

Almost certainly the historical worldview of the opponents of synodality is one that idealises Christendom – that long era in which the church was patronised by nominally Christian kings.  Even today the perceived danger of tyrannical anti-Christian government leads some to yearn for a new union of Catholic church and state – the union that began with the first Roman emperor to patronise the church – Constantine.

But who cannot see now that it was that long privileging of the church – and especially of clergy – that corrupted and divided it originally?

Had it not been the mission of the first St Francis – in the 1200s – to restore Christ’s Church in an era of nominally Christian kings?

Were not the divisions of the church – into East and West and then into the Protestant fragmentations in the West –  caused and widened by that same corruption?

And what of Christian and Catholic minorities today in e.g. China, India, Pakistan, Israel and elsewhere?  How could any new movement to unite church and state in the West not be seen by people of other faiths as proof of the danger of tolerating Christians anywhere?

Constantinianism – or Christian nationalism – is yet another historical cul de sac.  Too close a relationship with political power will always corrupt the church and endanger the sincere belief of those without it – and reconnect the church scandalously with privilege, mendacity and violence.

No Other Future

What, truly, is the alternative to the direction that Pope Francis has set? What, truly, are the signs of these times?

What would any victim of clerical abuse – or any kind of abuse in, or by, the church –  make of a turning back by bishops – to moralising from above?

Where in this media-saturated world could any bishop hope to succeed with such a strategy? Could the 2025 Conclave truly think seriously of abandoning synodality and reverting to that same stilted mode of leadership – when all who attend it will know that Pope Francis is revered globally for his humility?

Did not the Covid pandemic reveal the shortcomings of governments everywhere – and reveal also the potential of ordinary yet extraordinary people to save one another and to show us the truth of the Beatitudes? It is the compassionate and the powerless who will liberate and inherit the Earth.

All Catholic bishops and cardinals now are surely done with Lording. The only possible future for the church is to suffer – i.e. to put up with – the vulnerability of its founder – Jesus of Nazareth – rather than ever again to seek – or to accept – a position of privilege and power.

What, seriously, were the chances that the conclave of 2025 would not be led, by prayer, to see the future of the church as Pope Francis so clearly saw it?

Sean O’Conaill
April and May 2025

 

Views: 1319

No Historical Transparency in the Church?

Abuse of Power, Articles, Bishops, Scripture, Secrecy, Sexual Abuse, Synodality

While declaring transparency a requirement for a synodal church, the working document for the final session of the 2023-24 Vatican Synod on Synodality gives no promise of transparency around the historical origins of the standard procedure of concealing from Catholic parents the reality of clerical sexual abuse of children in the 20th century – a policy which spiritually traumatised countless Catholic children. How can the church become ‘missionary’ with such a background?

In Genesis we are told that for many years Jacob, son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham, did not know that his own most favoured son, Joseph, had not been killed by a wild animal but sold into slavery in Egypt by his other sons, out of jealousy. (Genesis 37-50) 

In the Book of Kings we learn that Naboth of Jezreel did not know that when he refused the offer of an exchange of land with King Ahab of Israel, Ahab’s wife, Jezebel, would scheme to dispossess and kill him.  (1 Kings 21)

Elsewhere we read that Esther, adoptive daughter of Mordecai and wife of Persian King Ahasuerus, was unaware initially that the powerful courtier Haman was plotting the extermination of her people, the Jews – because of Mordecai’s refusal to show due servility to Haman. (Esther)

Secure in her own garden, Susanna in Babylon was unaware that her beauty had enticed two elders among the Jews there to make a pact to threaten her with stoning to death for adultery if she did not give way to their lust. (Susanna and the Elders: Book of Daniel)

Uriah the Hittite did not know why the men beside him suddenly abandoned him in the thick of his final battle. He was oblivious to betrayal by his commander-in-chief, King David of Israel – who had seduced and impregnated his wife Bathsheba and then given orders that would doom him, despite his own loyalty to the cause of David’s kingdom. (2 Samuel)

Those women who gave birth to sons in Bethlehem around the time of Jesus’s birth had no reason to suspect that King Herod would plot their murder soon after hearing of the latter event. (Matt 2:16-18)

A Biblical Focus on Conspiratorial Injustice

Scripture scholars may doubt that all of these tales are historical, but the pattern of literary focus is clear. The authors had a common interest in narratives of high-level scheming, injustice, concealment and victimisation.  The reason for the concealment may often be implicit but always these plotters can be understood as having a common interest in preserving their reputations in the gaze of others.

That is, they all had a deducible interest in ‘saving face’, to use a phrase more often associated with Oriental culture.  

And this heuristic may also be applied to the Gospel accounts of the parts played by Caiaphas, Judas, another Herod and Pilate in the arrest, trials, crucifixion and death of Jesus of Nazareth.

The Innocence of the Victims

As the anthropologist René Girard has observed there is another common aspect of these narratives.  Their victims, or intended victims, were essentially innocent. Taken as sacred texts they all reveal the God of Israel, the claimed source of all scriptural inspiration, to be on the side of the intended victim or victims.  

Preservation of reputation on the part of plotters is far from being a dated and antiquated fixation – as proven by the outrageous murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018, by agents of the Saudi government.  That this is a western fixation also was most clearly revealed by the attempt of the Nixon administration to conceal the origins of the burglary of the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Office Building in Washington DC in 1972.  High level financial ‘scams’ such as the Enron affair of 2001 and the Madoff ‘ponzi’ scandal of 2008 are apparently inevitable in Western capitalism. Jealousies, plots and betrayals are at the core of western fictional drama, up to and including the current TV series Succession. The tension of these dramas hangs always upon what is known and intended by ambitious or lustful characters and yet concealed, agonisingly, from others who will suffer the consequences.

Unwitting Victims of Reputational Fear

Until 1994 in Ireland Catholic parents generally did not know that the ordained status of men to whom they often entrusted their children did not always make those men incapable of severely harming those children, sexually, psychologically and spiritually.  By now those families who suffered this fate probably know that this phenomenon had been known to church authorities from the end of the first century CE (as recorded in The Didache). 

On December 9th 2009, following the publication of the Murphy report, the Irish Bishops Conference felt compelled to declare that:      

“We are deeply shocked by the scale and depravity of abuse as described in the Report.  We are shamed by the extent to which child sexual abuse was covered up in the Archdiocese of Dublin and recognise that this indicates a culture that was widespread in the Church.  The avoidance of scandal, the preservation of the reputations of individuals and of the Church, took precedence over the safety and welfare of children.  This should never have happened and must never be allowed to happen again.  We humbly ask for forgiveness.”1Statement following the winter meeting of the Irish Bishops Conference, 9th December 2009

Since then the international scope of this ‘cover up’ has become more apparent, as has that motivation to ‘preserve the reputation of individuals and of the church’ – made even more poignant by the claim of Fr Gerhard Gruber in 2010 that as vicar general in the archdiocese of Munich he had been pressurised to take the blame for mistakes made decades earlier in the handling of a case of abuse – when Pope Benedict, then Joseph Ratzinger, had been archbishop of that diocese.2‘Law firm to publish report on handling of abuse in Munich Archdiocese’, CRUX, Catholic News Service, Jan 4, 2022

An Unreasonable Comparison?

Is it unreasonable to compare this ‘cover up’ by churchmen with the plots and plottings of scriptural archetypes such as David, Ahab, Jezebel, Haman, Caiaphas and the Herods? Were those who practised concealment of clerical sex abuse of children ever truly aware of the scale of suffering they were visiting upon the innocent? Did they ever intend that suffering? May they not even have had worthy motives and been oblivious of serious injustice or harm?

All of these questions are plausible – and yet some may be asked also of some of the scriptural plotters, if mitigation is our intent.  For example, given King David’s symbolic importance to Israel, might he not have been justified in sacrificing one man, Uriah, to avoid demoralisation of the nation in time of war? And mightn’t Caiaphas, Herod and Pilate truly have had similar thoughts in the case of Jesus the Galilean troublemaker?

Why So Little Learned in Two Millennia?

Was a span of almost two millennia not truly sufficient to educate churchmen in the consequences to victims of childhood or adolescent sexual abuse? When it came to ending the cover up, did the church truly need to depend upon secular lawyers, police, courts, media? When it came to their ‘learning curve’ on the impact of sexual abuse on children should churchmen truly have needed the advice of secular psychology and psychiatry, when they had Jesus’s own stern warning to guide them? If so, why on earth condemn secularism and the Enlightenment?    

However plausible may be the attempts at mitigation of the cover up of clerical child abuse, it will always remain true that many children globally suffered totally unexpected and unimaginable horrors from these abuses. That much of this could have been prevented if the episcopal magisterium had shown corporate wisdom, courage and transparency ab initio, rather than corporate dedication to the protection of its own reputation, will also always be true – and the people of God truly deserve an historical accounting for this failure.

The Cover Up of the Past  

So far, instead, even after almost four decades of revelation, the cover up still extends backwards into the distant past. For example, no one knows why or when it was decided, with apparent unanimity by the magisterium, that Jesus’s own emphatic condemnation of the betrayal of childhood innocence (Matt 18:6) was irrelevant when considering whether ordained abusers of children could be retained in ministry after a first provable offence. Why was this most emphatic teaching of Jesus ignored, when the context of his only recommendation of celibacy (Matt 19:12) suggests that it was probably intended merely for those who could not contemplate life-long marital fidelity?  This obvious reluctance on the part of the current magisterium to consult and reveal the full Vatican and wider church record is a barrier to the ‘reckoning’ on clerical abuse called for by the Irish national synodal synthesis of August 2022.

Administrators’ Dilemmas 

Inevitably we must guess that it is still the situational dilemmas of administrators that delay a final reckoning. They need to reflect on that scriptural record, recalling where the Trinity’s sympathies always lie – as well as the prophecy of Simeon that the life of the child Jesus would reveal the hidden thoughts of many.  When Christian historians of the future tell this story, will they not also be stressing the innocence of the victims and the reputational fears of the powerful ordained?

Apart from this need to ‘clear the air’ on the handling of clerical abuse there is another reason for urgent closure. The teaching authority of Catholic bishops everywhere – especially in regard to sexuality – has been rendered null for many by this disaster. Irish bishops have still not revealed the reason for their failure to sponsor and publish reliable research on the widespread failure of Irish Catholic schools to develop a practised liturgical faith among their alumni in recent decades3See Faith Formation and Fear of Shame, The Furrow, 2017. This too is an unnecessary mystery suggestive of fear of self-embarrassment via the likely results of any such research.

Lack of Clarity on Sin

The clarity of the church’s teaching on sin is another serious issue. No one who pays any attention can be unaware that serious differences exist between the understanding of sin as prioritised by Pope Francis or, for example, Cardinal Robert McElroy – and sin as seen by the pope’s highest-level opponents, for whom the ‘no parvity’ principle in regard to all sexual rule-breaking is apparently as true and unshakeable as the Creed.

“… the sins of the flesh are not the most serious. The gravest sins are those that are more angelic: pride, hatred. These are graver.”4‘Full text: Pope Francis’ in-flight press conference from Greece’, Catholic News Agency, Dec 6th 2021 So insisted Pope Francis in December 2021, when asked about the admission by a French archbishop of an affair with an adult woman. If the ‘angelic’ sin of pride is indeed graver than lust, what about ‘the preservation of the reputations of individuals and of the Church’ identified by Irish bishops as a cause of the cover-up of sexual abuse? Wasn’t it David’s pride that prevented him from owning up to his own affair with Bathsheba – and then led to the far greater sin of murder-by-proxy?

The Catechism is seriously lacking an extended and culturally relevant treatment of both pride and covetousness – even while the problem of clericalism has been identified by Pope Francis as that desire for superiority, attention and honour5‘5 Of the many times Pope Francis has warned against clericalism’, Kathleen N. Hattrup, Aleteia, 23rd August 2018 that the Catechism does identify as a feature of pride6Catechism of the Catholic Church, Glossary, ‘Pride’. Defining covetousness as ‘modelling your desires on what your neighbour has’ would also allow the magisterium to see and reject the desire for social superiority that fuels all social ambition, including the rampant desire for celebrity. Secularism sorely needs an explanation of inequality – and pride and covetousness are ready to hand.

Sin of Pride Embedded in Clericalism

Or at least they will be when the magisterium has clearly seen these sins as fundamental to the cover up of clerical sexual abuse, and confessed them frankly as embedded in clericalism and ecclesiastical ambition. Pope Francis’s courage in opening up this debate needs the support of all bishops in the pursuit of a ‘reckoning’ – a telling of the complete truth of the hierarchical church’s own sins.  

When it happens this telling will involve a full exposure of the historical record, and the sooner the better. Scripture lauds the anointed King David while telling us the worst that he did. Jesus’s own mitigation of the offences of his persecutors – ‘they know not what they do’ – can be applied also to the cover up of clerical abuse but we need, urgently, the full story – whatever may still impend – if the church is to overcome this disaster in the time of any of the generations now living.

It took decades for Jacob to learn that his most favoured son was still alive, but at least he lived to see Joseph again, now greatly honoured, in Egypt. In knowing that Catholic churchmen at the highest level can visit the most appalling suffering upon innocent children, out of concern for the reputation of ‘the church’ – and can collaborate to hide this problem until exposed – don’t we Catholic people already know the worst?

As stated by the July 2024 Instrumentum Laboris for the final session of the Vatican Synod of Bishops on Synodality in October 2024:

“A synodal Church requires both a culture and practice of transparency and accountability, which are essential to fostering the mutual trust necessary for walking together and exercising co-responsibility for the sake of the common mission.”7How to Be a Missionary Church, Instrumentum Laboris for Second Session of Universal Synod of Synodality, Oct 2024, P.32, Article 73

Despite this statement of principle there is no sign whatever in the document of a realisation that continuing secrecy about the recent past is an insuperable barrier to trust – and so also to communion, participation and mission. How are we to take the call to transparency seriously if secrecy is still to be maintained around the greatest scandal the church has ever suffered?

Never in the long history of human shepherding have so many sheep been lost by so many shepherds – but apparently we are never to know why.

Notes

  1. Statement following the winter meeting of the Irish Bishops Conference, 9th December 2009
  2. ‘Law firm to publish report on handling of abuse in Munich Archdiocese’, CRUX, Catholic News Service, Jan 4, 2022
  3. See ‘Faith Formation and Fear of Shame’, O’Conaill, The Furrow, 2017
  4. ‘Full text: Pope Francis’ in-flight press conference from Greece’, Catholic News Agency, Dec 6th 2021
  5. ‘5 Of the many times Pope Francis has warned against clericalism’, Kathleen N. Hattrup, Aleteia, 23rd August 2018
  6. CCC, Glossary, ‘Pride’
  7. How to Be a Missionary Church, Instrumentum Laboris for Second Session of Universal Synod of Synodality, Oct 2024, P.32, Article 73

(Author’s note: An earlier version of this article appeared in the Oct 2023 edition of The Furrow, under the title A ‘Reckoning’ on Clerical Abuse? Challenge and Opportunity.)

Views: 3298

Why did Jesus of Nazareth accept Crucifixion?

Articles, Atonement, Christology, Church Formation / Education, Evangelisation, Jesus, Kingdom of God, Redemption, Satan
  1. To rescue us from fear of the judgement of others – what Jesus calls ‘the world’ (John 16:33) – by overthrowing, without violence, the judgement of the world of his time, and all time. This fear of judgement, which comes not from God but from the Adversary, is the root of all status anxiety (fear of ‘what people think’), status seeking, inequality and violence.
  2. So that we might follow him out of love rather than fear.
  3. To teach us to forgive as He did.
  4. To reveal to us the origin of all violence in status anxiety – and the Satanic historical pattern of the accusation and scapegoating of the innocent that arises from the status anxiety of those seeking or wielding punitive power.
  5. To give us a limitless horizon – beyond mere consumption, sexual fixation and death.
  6. To offer freedom from fear to those challenged to speak the truth to abusive power, the whistle-blowers who are needed even in the church.
  7. To allow us always to review the history of the church and to lament the status anxiety that misled it too often into too close an alliance with state power (c.313 CE to c.1918 CE) under Christendom, and the many victimisations, enslavements and compromises with violence that followed – including the abuse of children by ordained clergy.
  8. To take away even those sins when we have seen them, and properly atoned.
  9. To clarify our understanding of sin as stemming from doubt of our own value, leading to the coveting of status in the positive regard of others – and all other unloving and unjust actions.
  10. To make way for the Holy Spirit, close counsellor of everyone.
  11. To bring us back to the Father our maker – and sender of Jesus our Rescuer and the Holy Spirit our counsellor.
  12. To save the world in an always New Creation – through our conversion and our witness to the Blessed Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit – who accompany us always and forever.

If the earliest Christians were given new life by Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, and a vision of a new creation in a violent world now passing away, why should Christians of our time not always see this world of now as equally limited in judgement, and the Trinity as calling them always to a new and peaceful Kingdom of God, beyond all ambition and conflict? The medieval God seen by St Anselm of Canterbury as bent only on balancing the scales of an eternal justice is not the God of the apostles or of Irenaeus or the other early fathers, for whom it was God the Father who had burst their chains by sending them His Son.

Using the psychological and anthropological insights of Alain de Botton and René Girard it is time to return to the early church’s vision of Jesus of Nazareth as Christus Victor, who with the father’s help has overturned the verdict of the world, by exposing the real author of the lies that had condemned him. In the words of Gustav Aulén, interpreting Irenaeus:

“First, then, it must be emphasised that the work of atone­ment is regarded as carried through by God Himself; and this, not merely in the sense that God authorises, sanctions, and initiates the plan of salvation, but that He Himself is the effective agent in the redemptive work, from beginning to end. It is the Word of God incarnate who overcomes the tyrants which hold man in bondage; God Himself enters into the world of sin and death, that He may reconcile the world to Himself. Therefore Incarnation and Atonement stand in no sort of antithesis; rather, they belong inseparably together. It is God’s Love, the Divine agape, that removes the sentence that rested upon mankind, and creates a new relation between the human race and Himself, a relation which is altogether different from any sort of justification by legal righteousness. The whole dispensation is the work of grace.”
[Gustav Aulén, Christus Victor, 1931. S.P.C.K. edition 1965, p 34.]

Views: 3065

2024: Irish Catholic Vocations Office Mired in Clericalism

Articles, Baptism, Church Dysfunctions, Clericalism, Evangelisation, Leadership, Ordination, Recent, Synodality
 Front page of the Irish National Vocations Office website in January 2024

“Is God Calling You to be a Diocesan Priest? Come and See. Take the Risk for Christ.” This is what faces you when you click https://vocations.ie/ the website of Ireland’s Catholic “National Vocations Office”.

Asked by Ardal O’Hanlon on his RTE documentary what risk was involved in opting for the celibate priestly vocation today, the National Vocations Coordinator, Fr Willie Purcell, responded:

“Anyone who is presenting himself for priesthood nowadays is really being counter-cultural. It really is a radical decision. The risk really is giving yourself completely to Christ that others might come to know him through you.  There really is a lot of humility involved in it, of self-sacrifice involved in it, but most important of all a vocation is a selfless decision, to give yourself to Christ and then to give yourself to others.”

Yet again we are being asked here to ignore what the Gospel clearly tells us about Jesus, viz.:

  • That he was never a member of the priestly religious institution of his own time and place;
  • That his definitive role in ‘salvation’ was not sacramental or liturgical (i.e. symbolic) but the direct prophetic challenging of a religious system he saw as both exploitative and hypocritical, to the danger of his own life;
  • That it was therefore his integrity, not his celibacy, that constitutes the central sacrifice that he did indeed ask us to repeat in memory of him;
  • That the definitive Christian calling to ‘follow’ him was therefore NOT to males only to join an exclusively male religious institution but to the same self-giving and integrity in whatever social role we baptised Catholic Christians find ourselves – whatever our gender, age or occupation.

Why does the National Vocations Office see only the risk to clergy?

Why is it not obvious to the Irish National Vocations Office that any social role, in any society, can and does involve these challenges to integrity – and that risk can attach to any of these?

It isn’t only the lives and trials of outstanding Irish individuals such as Veronica Guerin, Maurice McCabe and Martin Ridge that demonstrate this. Public service, especially for women, has become notably more risky and challenging for anyone who approaches it with integrity in the age of the Internet. With Pope Francis now calling all of us, even teenagers, to ‘mission’ today – and with Irish Garda, nurses, firefighters and paramedics at risk on every callout in certain locales in Ireland  – why was this not obvious to whoever dreamt up the slogan ‘Take the risk for Christ’ – implying that the risk of Christian witness attaches solely to the male celibate sacramental calling?

Lessons of the Pandemic

Did not the Pandemic teach us that in an interdependent society the lives of all of us can depend upon those who risk turning up even to man the check-out in the local supermarket or the counter in a dispensary?

Isn’t even any Irish teenager who stands in school against sexual harassment or homophobic bullying – or online trolling of a friend – at risk, and is not this the risk that attaches to the common priesthood of the people of God, the risk that comes to all who affirm their Baptism?

Why does Fr Purcell imply that only the diocesan priest has the responsibility to bring the message of Christ to others, when the key message of synodality is that this responsibility comes to all of us with Baptism?

The Priests who spoke out

As for the specific risks that do indeed attach to the sacramental priesthood, how would Fr Purcell account for what happened to those Irish priests who did prophetically challenge the injustices of church policies in relation to women, the LGBT community and the mishandling by bishops of the issue of clerical sexual abuse of children in Ireland, back in 2012?

What a shame that Ardal O’Hanlon did not think to ask if that was indeed the ‘risk’ that the National Vocations Office has in mind!

Child Safeguarding and Risk

And if he had asked that question, would Fr Purcell have recalled  that we have never yet had an open conversation on the role and obligation of private conscience when faced with an abuse of authority in the church, as could happen, for example, to any of the child safeguarding personnel we now depend upon?

With synodality far from firmly embedded in our Catholic culture, and canon law still a mess, the risks for every servant of the church that are still posed by the church itself are far from merely notional or historic. Does Ireland’s National Vocations Office truly serve the church by apparently forgetting all of that?

Why in 2024 can we not instead have a properly balanced understanding  of ‘vocation’ that does not associate counter-cultural Christian self-sacrifice and ‘humility’ solely with the male celibate sacramental priestly role or imply that for all lay people the risk of Christian witness must be secondary?

Is it not to this clericalist talking-up of the sacramental role alone – and the consequent forgetting of the priestly and prophetic calling of all of us – that we must ascribe the incomprehension of so many young people about the Christian call to themselves?

Baptism the Primary Sacrament of the Priestly People of God

Finally, given the paramount importance of communicating the meaning of our common priesthood, why is the restoration of the primacy of Baptism still lagging totally in Ireland? Is that no concern of the National Vocations Office, or of the Irish Bishops Conference?

In its singular concern for the survival of the sacramental Catholic priesthood in Ireland the Irish National Vocations Office has presented us yet again with an understanding of the Christian vocation that is stridently and essentially clericalist.  This can only undermine the central message of synodality and delay the emergence of the co-responsible church we so badly need.

17th Jan 2024

Views: 2049

Church Is Mission?

Articles, Atonement, Evangelisation, Recent, Theology

Without official rejection of a mistaken medieval understanding of ‘redemption’ the call to mission is futile.

~

‘Rather than saying that the Church has a mission, we affirm that Church ‘is’ mission.‘

Those are just two of 110 occurrences of the word mission in the Synthesis Report of the October 2023 16th Synod of Bishops in Rome.

Nowhere is there a convincing manifesto for this mission.  With the Irish national synodal synthesis of 2022 saying that ‘we are unsure about how to evangelise in the modern world‘ there is no help with that problem in the forty-one pages of the report.  

So far also the two Irish bishop representatives at the synod – Brendan Leahy of Limerick and Alan McGuckian of Raphoe – are also unhelpful.  All Catholic bishops are still imprisoned by a medieval theology of atonement and redemption that no missionary in Ireland today could offer as ‘Good News’? 

Blaming the Father

Originating with St Anselm of Canterbury in the late 11th century this theology proposes that the crucifixion of Jesus was demanded by the Father who sent him – to give ‘satisfaction’ for the ‘dishonour’ caused to the Father by all of our sins – by dying an excruciating death in ‘substitution’ for ourselves.  (CCC 615)

God the Father was Liberator for the early church.
This was not the theology of the early church. The very idea of ‘redemption’ derives from the ‘buying back’ of the freedom of a slave.  It was to God the Father that the first Christians attributed their own liberation from fear of the condemnation of their own Roman world.  The greatest power of that time had been proven powerless to overwhelm an ever-living  truth – by Jesus’ Resurrection.


What exactly do Irish bishops believe: that the Father of the mission we are now to embark upon is bent upon our liberation from the source of all oppression and fear in our present world – or that he is still, as he was for St Anselm in 1098 CE – in the business of calling in debts? 

This theology never even liberated any bishop. No Catholic bishop anywhere in the world is known to have warned his flock about the possibility of clerical sex abuse of children – before victims of that abuse or their families took secular legal action themselves.  In December 2009 the Irish Conference of Catholic bishops named the fear that had paralysed them: of a loss of ‘reputation’ if the truth was known.

The Root of All Evil?

An overbearing concern for ‘reputation’ now has a name – status anxiety – given in 2004 by the philosopher Alain de Botton. If our bishops cannot see this same affliction in every aspect of the evils that surround us – from manic consumerism, absurd inequality and climate change to compulsive cosmetic plastic surgery, stalking and mass shootings – and even invasive imperialism in Ukraine and violence in the Holy Land – how are we to convince anyone that Jesus has anything to do with overthrowing the power of evil?  If they cannot see it also in the problem of clericalism, how are we to overcome that? 

Status anxiety is essentially fear of scorn – of being ‘cast out’ – the fear that stalks our dreams. It also drives the pursuit of ‘likes’, admiration, influence, celebrity – and power.  This explains the absorption of younger generations with digital media.  A globalized personal ‘brand’ can now be created, via a handheld device, even by children. 

Meanwhile our prisons and psychiatric hospitals and addiction centres struggle to cope with the depression, self-harm,  trolling, addiction and criminality that results from the lack of status – even the shame – that the victims of the digital age must feel. 

Jesus the Whistle-Blower
Is not status anxiety also the source of the fear that attacks would-be whistle-blowers everywhere?  Is that not what Jesus was – a whistle-blower against all injustice, who stood firm – without violence – against the merciless judgement of that ancient world? Did he not name his own mission, when he said, just before his own judgement, that he had ‘overcome the world’ – the fear of that judgement? Did he not by his crucifixion and resurrection dissolve the same fear in his earliest followers, who then took up their own crosses – and changed an empire? 


We Catholic Christians urgently need official recognition that the first person of the Trinity, far from being himself trapped in medieval status anxiety, is still bent – with the Son and the Holy Spirit – on rescuing us from that affliction. Until that happens the mission ahead will be ‘mission on pause’.

First published on the website of the Association of Catholic Priests of Ireland – Nov 21st 2023.

Views: 2898

Comeuppance or Confession – A ‘Reckoning’ on Clerical Abuse?

Articles, Recent, Sexual Abuse, Synodality

Faced with apparently unending scandal – and dwindling credibility and authority in the societies it has scandalised – should Catholic church leadership look to scripture, especially the story of King David of Israel, for insight into a scenario for resolution?

In 2023, with the global tide of clerical sex abuse scandals still surging in places as far apart as Poland, Ireland and the US state of Illinois, Catholic church leadership seems as bereft as ever of a strategy for ‘getting ahead’ of such revelations.

In December 2022 Irish bishops agreed with the conclusion of Ireland’s national synodal synthesis of August 2022 – that a ‘reckoning’ on the disaster has still to be achieved 1Statement following the winter meeting of the Irish Bishops Conference, 7th December 2022 – but it is far from clear that the Universal Synod on Synodality, to culminate in Rome in the autumn of 2024, will rise to this challenge.

What ‘shape’ could such a reckoning take in any case? How, in particular, would the victims of clerical sexual abuse and their closest kin, picture that?

Comeuppances

Popular secular culture provides one obvious model for closure on high-level concealment of malfeasance. In the classic movie ‘All the President’s Men’ the final sequence is a montage of press headlines, culminating in President Nixon’s resignation announcement – on foot of the Washington Post’s remorseless investigation of the origins of the Watergate burglary of 1972. This was Nixon’s ‘comeuppance’ – the deserved consequence of his paranoid detestation of a critical media.

Similarly a fictional streaming TV epic, the HBO series ‘Succession’, ends with the rivalrous adult children of another ‘mogul’ visiting a variety of betrayals and indignities upon one another – including the takeover by an interloper of the media empire they had all plotted to inherit.

This ‘comeuppance’ scenario satisfies the natural human desire to see what TV readily provides in the form of ‘perp walks’ – the bitter experience of downfall by the highest conspirators, with merited suffering etched clearly on faces. Who can forget Richard Nixon’s grotesque attempts at facial denial of the defeat he had fought tooth-and-nail to prevent, or the fictional Kendall Roy’s final frozen stare into his own endless horizon of failure?

No such comeuppance is possible for the long-dead originators of the Catholic policy of secrecy on clerical sexual abuse.  There is as yet no official history of this cover-up but the best short unofficial account2A Very Short History of Clergy Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church, Thomas Doyle tells us that the decisive steps that affected living victims had already been taken by 1962. Already in 2023 the first decisive media revelations of the phenomenon – those relating to the abuser Gilbert Gauthe in Louisiana ­– are almost four decades old, and very few if any bishops have ever been criminally sanctioned by secular courts anywhere for a cover-up since then.  The secularising principles of distance between church and state, and freedom of the press, have exposed the dysfunctions of power as exercised by the Catholic hierarchy but new state laws cannot now be made against concealment of clerical child abuse in the past.

Would it ever be sufficient in any case to see only some individuals suffer for what is in essence a colossal global institutional failure, with ramifications that must utterly change the nature of our church relationships if they do not shatter the church altogether? Would it not be more satisfying – and redemptive – for the leaders of the affected institution to uncover and confess an utterly mistaken and sinful sequence of decisions that sacrificed the innocence and future of children to preserve the celibate reputation of the clerical institution itself – a sequence that can nowhere find justification in the texts that the church claims as foundational?

Cover Up and Betrayal in the Bible

Are not those texts – the books of the Old and New Testament, the Bible – replete instead with stories of betrayal, victimisation of the innocent and then concealment by those exercising power – including spiritual power? Why has it not yet happened that these scriptural patterns of misuse of power and of divine intolerance of injustice have been officially recognised in the Catholic clerical church’s mishandling of clerical sexual abuse of children and the scandalous revelations that still remorselessly follow?

Take, for example, the two Jewish elders in Babylon who tried to intimidate Susanna into yielding to their lust, well aware that just two elder testimonies to any woman’s adultery would usually be sufficient for a sentence of death by stoning. Those two were thwarted only by the inspired young Daniel’s stratagem for discerning their conspiracy. (Susanna and the Elders: Book of Daniel).

Similarly Jezebel’s scheme for dispossessing Naboth of his vineyard, and then murdering him, was empowered by the divinely anointed status of Jezebel’s husband, the Israelite King Ahab -condemned later by the prophet Elijah for his connivance. (1 Kings 21)

The exposure of the crime of the brothers of Joseph, the most favoured son of Jacob, grandson of the founding patriarch Abraham, took much longer but was also implicitly a result of divine providence – the raising of Joseph to supreme favour in Egypt, where he had been taken when sold into slavery by those siblings. (Genesis 37-50)

Leaving aside the question of the historicity of these and other such narratives, the central focus of their authors follows always the same pattern: power is misused to satisfy the desires of power-wielders at the expense of victims who are innocent – and the God of Israel is revealed as wholly intolerant of this injustice.

Even if it can be argued that there was ignorance on the part of offending bishops of the likely effects of clerical abuse upon children, this raises its own questions as to the safety and wisdom of the church’s governing system – given especially Jesus’s most vehement warning against any adult misleading of a child (Matt 18: 6). Do we not need to know why the clerical church, with an experience of pederasty dating from the earliest centuries3See The Didache, had to look in the end to secular psychiatry for the truth of the impact of such abuse on the young?

Status Anxiety the Root of Secrecy

Another connection implicit in all of these biblical stories is that between the status anxiety of the conspirators and the secrecy they try to maintain over their own motivations and actions. By ‘status anxiety’ I mean fear of shame, of social condemnation and rejection, in consequence of revelation of the selfish exercise of power. These biblical stories surely reveal a pattern that should have warned against clerical secrecy over clerical abuse – especially because of the repeating pattern of divine intervention on the side of victims.

That this identical pattern has been replicated in the case of secrecy in Ireland must now be obvious. Not until the first criminal prosecutions for clerical sex abuse in 1994 did Irish bishops begin to act decisively in the cause of child safeguarding. Then it took the Murphy report of 2009 to precipitate the Irish bishops’ declaration that there had indeed been a widespread culture of cover-up, motivated by a desire to protect the reputations of individuals as well as that of the church4Statement following the winter meeting of the Irish Bishops Conference, 9th December 2009.

However, this same declaration, seemingly regretted by some Irish bishops at the time, now points to a future church document that builds upon scriptural examples of ‘reckoning’ – to admit that the great conspiratorial sins of Old Testament archetypes have had a near equivalent, with countless child victims, in our own time. That document will surely reference the greatest of all failures by an anointed leader of Israel – King David – and draw inspiration from his example of contrition.

King David’s Confession

Who cannot see that the most obvious reason for David’s betrayal of the Hittite elite soldier Uriah was also David’s status anxiety, his desire to conceal his self-indulgent seduction and impregnation of Uriah’s wife Bathsheba – while Uriah was himself away from home, fighting Israel’s enemies? At length the book of Samuel has previously extolled David’s youthful climb to celebrity, with the women of Israel chanting of his military exploits and his superiority to Israel’s first anointed king, Saul. The fall from grace that David faced in the matter of Bathsheba’s pregnancy was in direct proportion to this unparalleled status – and far too much for him to bear. His despicable betrayal and murder-by-proxy of Uriah then followed. (2 Samuel)

And yet, according to the same narrative, Israel itself was preserved in the Old Testament telling, by the courage of the prophet Nathan and by David’s reciprocal compunction and contrition. This too – the eventual victory of the truth, and not the celebration of any individual or caste – is the true glory of ancient Israel, and of our church’s foundational texts.

It is surely inevitable that the Catholic clerical leadership will someday admit that their institution sinned against children, their families and the Trinity by attempting to keep secret the hard and vitally important fact that a small but significant proportion of ordained Catholic priests could mislead and violate children.  They could also recognise that in making use of the inspired secular principle of a division of power to reveal this mistake the Trinity are not only vindicating all child victims but revealing the future of Catholic church governance.

In the meantime are we not all living in the Limbo of our church leadership’s inability to grasp decisively the nettle of compunction and contrition? We are surely in these days as ancient Israel was in the time between King David’s crimes and his heartfelt and full confession. This time of high-level hesitation and bitter revelation cannot end soon enough for a myriad of living victims, and for all of us.

Notes

  1. Statement following the winter meeting of the Irish Bishops Conference, 7th December 2022
  2. A Very Short History of Clergy Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church, Thomas Doyle
  3. See The Didache
  4. Statement following the winter meeting of the Irish Bishops Conference, 9th December 2009

Sean O’Conaill
June 2023


This article appeared first in La Croix International on June 7th, 2023.

Views: 1690

Did God want Jesus Dead?

Articles, Atonement, Evangelisation, Recent, Theology

Now committed to a synodal programme, Irish Catholics will struggle to make missionary sense of a medieval theology that implies a divine need for a divine victim – the crucifixion of Jesus on Calvary to repay a human debt of honour to the Father God of Creation.

~

Satisfaction and substitution, keywords of the medieval and early modern theology of the cross, are both used in the Catholic Catechism of 19941CCC615 ‘”For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous.” (Romans 5: 19) By his obedience unto death, Jesus accomplished the substitution of the suffering Servant, who “makes himself an offering for sin”, when “he bore the sin of many”, and who “shall make many to be accounted righteous”, for “he shall bear their iniquities”.  (Isaiah 53 10-12) Jesus atoned for our faults and made satisfaction for our sins to the Father.‘ – to explain why Jesus submitted to crucifixion on Calvary. Human sinfulness is so great, according to this theology, that the voluntary suffering and death of God’s only son was needed to atone, reconciling the Father to ourselves.

In this understanding Jesus ‘satisfied’ a cosmic debt, substituting himself as sufferer of the divine punishment that must otherwise fall upon ourselves. This is the essence of the redemption theology of the Catechism.

Paradoxically, however, this leaves the same Father God obviously open to a suspicion of unforgiveness, making Jesus’s own forgiveness of his accusers a startling contradiction. Any ‘new evangelisation’ in Ireland must contend with this theological Gordian knot. Has any of us have ever heard, in church, a convincing attempt to untie it?

How many are aware that this medieval emphasis on divine debt recovery was not the understanding of the early Christian church? For over a thousand years, until the time of St Anselm of Canterbury in the late 11th century, it was taught that Jesus’s self-sacrifice had ransomed humankind from the powers of darkness – from ‘Satan’.

In this understanding, God the Father – in raising Jesus from the dead – was co-liberator of humankind. To ‘redeem’ was to buy the freedom of a slave, and, in the early church’s understanding, humans had been in captivity to evil until the time of Jesus. For those earliest Christian believers, the God of Abraham had done for themselves – through Jesus – what he had earlier done for the Israelites enslaved by Pharaonic Egypt.

In Cur Deus Homo (‘Why God Became a Man’ – 1098 CE) Anselm argued that the life of the Son of God was worth far more than any debt that could have been owed to Satan. To undo this mistake he essentially attributed the captivity from which Jesus liberated humankind to God himself.

To understand this shift we need to remember that for Anselm and his contemporaries the monarchical political order of the time was God-ordained. From the fourth century adoption of Christianity by the failing Roman empire, Christian clergy had supported the authority of the political order that protected them, an authority that rested on military power. It did not make sense to Anselm that God the Father would not rescue Jesus by the same forceful means, unless the crucifixion had been necessary to restore the perfect creation described in Genesis.

Anselm’s explanation of the Crucifixion became the bedrock of the fundamentalist evangelical Christianity of our own time – a Christian extremism that can favour the Old Testament principle of ‘an eye for an eye’ and scorn any reference to the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew.

There Jesus insists that enemies be loved instead. Never does Christian fundamentalism attend to Jesus’s repetition of the warning of the prophet Hosea – that what pleases God is ‘mercy not sacrifice‘ (Matt 9:13).

With the church no longer beholden to any political elite in the West, St Anselm’s perspective is a missionary millstone. Who cannot see that a state power that rests upon force – rather than consent – is unjust and sinful? Who cannot see in political ambition the covetousness of the 9th and 10th commandments of Moses?

And who cannot now see that it was in his rejection of ambition – political or religious – that Jesus overcame the temptation of ‘the world’? Oblivious of this danger even Christian religious elites can be corrupted, the problem described as ’spiritual worldliness’ by Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium (2013).

The crucifixion is explained simply by the refusal of the Trinity to force us to follow them. How could the Father be freely loved if he was less loving than the Son?

Violence – and victimisation – arise easily from human ambition. Jesus stands unique in the ancient world, as an historical figure who refused power on those terms, at staggering personal cost. That sacrifice bears witness to a source of moral strength that lies beyond any of us. It was in this non-violent self-giving that Jesus reached the summit of human achievement – bearing witness to a heavenly father who thinks the same way. His forgiving self-sacrifice finally abolished the contradiction between mercy and sacrifice. He died as he had lived, in solidarity with the most vulnerable – those many millions who have died to save the faces of the Caesars of history.

The sacred purpose of the Trinity is to free humankind from selfish ambition (the root of all imperialism), from elitism and from violence. We need to reconsider a theological perspective that falls scandalously short – by imputing self-absorption and a need for violent sacrifice to the Father.

Notes

  1. CCC615 ‘”For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous.” (Romans 5: 19) By his obedience unto death, Jesus accomplished the substitution of the suffering Servant, who “makes himself an offering for sin”, when “he bore the sin of many”, and who “shall make many to be accounted righteous”, for “he shall bear their iniquities”.  (Isaiah 53 10-12) Jesus atoned for our faults and made satisfaction for our sins to the Father.‘

See also: Why did Jesus of Nazareth accept crucifixion?

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What is it to be Holy?

Articles, Evangelisation, Formation, History, Holiness, Hypocrisy, Integrity, Spirituality
The Judean desert, where Jesus may have fasted and resisted temptation

What exactly is holiness? Will we know it when we see it? Is it attainable by anyone, or only by those who have made a lifelong commitment to the ‘religious’ or ‘consecrated’ life and to celibacy? How does holiness relate – if at all – to the secular virtue of integrity? 

In The Charismatic Structure of the Church: Priesthood and Religious Life at Vatican II and Beyond, Michael McGuckian SJ 1The Charismatic Structure of the Church: Priesthood and Religious Life at Vatican II and Beyond, Michael McGuckian SJ, Xlibris US, 2021provides essential historical background to the long debate on holiness in the Catholic Church and explains why complete agreement by Catholic bishops at Vatican II proved impossible to achieve. Arrested by this unexpected discovery, the author is currently busy on a sequel – not only to reinforce the call to all to ‘be perfect’ but to explain why no one should suppose that this calling is ever impossible for themselves, whatever their situation or time of life.

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That all Catholics are called to holiness by Lumen Gentium (‘Light of Nations’ – a key document of Vatican II 1962-65) – is known at least vaguely to many of that generation and later.  However, if asked to explain clearly what holiness is and how that call can best be answered, how many could confidently respond?  If asked, perhaps scathingly, what the purpose or point of holiness could be now – by someone of a secular mindset – how many would be ‘up’ for that as well?

Necessarily the standard for holiness for all Christians was set by their founder, Jesus of Nazareth – and from the beginning those called by him to ‘follow’ and to ‘be perfect’ needed to discern how exactly to do that. Given that Jesus’s own ‘way’ was not simply one of poverty and celibacy but of exceptional risk, suffering and – in the end – catastrophe, was it even sensible to think of following all of that perfectly?  If not, what ‘way’ would be best?

The greatest virtue of The Charismatic Structure of the Church is the copious evidence it provides for the conclusion that there has never been a time in the long history of the church when Christian ‘holiness’ was a settled question, with its meaning and practice harmoniously agreed by all who sought to follow and to teach.

To marry in uncertain times, or not?

St Paul, Apostle

The difficulty of the choice between the married and celibate states was an obvious one from the start, a choice made more problematic in the first century by uncertainty over how soon Jesus would return in glory, for the Final Judgement.  St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians clearly reveals that this was an issue in his time (e.g. 1 Cor 7).

St Monica, Mother of St Augustine of Hippo

Those who opted for perpetual virginity in those early years set an example that proved durable down the centuries, but so did those who did not.  From the latter came subsequently many Saints who then themselves became enthusiasts for virginity.  A notable example is St Augustine of Hippo in the fourth century, who strongly advocated celibacy following his conversion.  If his sainted mother Monica had been able to opt for virginity when of marriageable age, and had been so inclined, the medieval church would have been deprived unknowingly of one of its greatest luminaries.

The Monastic Model – and ‘Secular’ Clergy

Soon also there were those who decided that ‘following’ required a way of life that was separated entirely from the distracting and profligate ‘world’, and was lived within a separated community of like-minded ‘ascetics’.  This ‘coenobitic’ option was the origin of monasticism.

And yet – especially after the early fourth century legalisation of Christianity by the Emperor Constantine – the diocesan successors of the apostles needed local parish ‘presbyters’ or clerics who would not live in a separated and dedicated community but in ‘the world’ among ordinary citizens. This was the origin of the ‘secular’ or ‘diocesan’ clergy – and for the first Christian millennium many of the latter lived married rather than virginal lives.

St John Chrysostom

It followed, then, that from an early stage there could and would be strong differences of opinion on how best to follow Jesus faithfully.  Where St John Chrysostom (347-407) would insist that none of the baptised should feel unable to follow the Lord faithfully, others took Jesus’s solitary and debatable reference to ‘eunuchs’ (Matt 19: 11-12) as an injunction to lifelong celibacy.  That inevitably consigned the married state to the relative disapproval of many of those who chose that option.

We are the Holiest

The question of who was the holiest became even more unsettled with the arrival of the mendicant orders – e.g. the Franciscans and Dominicans –  in the 1200s.  Given a universal missionary mandate by the pope, they inevitably came into conflict with the hierarchical claim of diocesan bishops – that even the monks and friars should consider themselves subordinate to themselves in the scale of holiness – since ‘perfection’ was a distinctive ‘sign’ or attribute of the bishop’s apostolic office.

St Thomas Aquinas

When the Dominican friar St Thomas Aquinas disagreed and prioritised three ‘evangelical counsels’  – of poverty, chastity (i.e. celibacy) and obedience, as a ‘holocaust’ or total consecration of the person to God (1256), he was therefore setting this ascetic option up in opposition to any association of a superior holiness with the hierarchical principle – and a centuries-long disagreement between ‘secular clergy’ and ‘religious’ ensued.

That such tensions could exist between ‘regular’ clergy (those who belong to religious orders whose members are bound to a founder’s ‘rule of life’) and ‘secular’ clergy (those directly under the authority of a diocesan bishop) will astonish those lay Catholics who may fondly have supposed that no historic disharmony could ever have intruded into the equally edifying holiness of all of their ordained ministers.

Vatican II – Same Old Same Old

However, many will be even more mind-boggled to learn that this same dispute was to surface – 800 years later – at Vatican II (1962-65).

Whereas there was strong support among many bishops at the council for an emphatic statement in Lumen Gentium that regular clergy, secular clergy and laity (married or unmarried) were equally called to and capable of manifesting the same holiness (by God’s grace), a powerful lobby for the manifest superior claim of the evangelical counsels was eventually successful in frustrating that aim.

Two consequences followed: not only does Chapter 5 of Lumen Gentium (‘The Universal Call to Holiness in the Church’) lack the insistence that all of the baptised are called to the same holiness, but immediately following, in a separate chapter entitled ‘Religious‘, there is an assertion of the superior claim to holiness for the following of the evangelical counsels, including celibacy.

As a result, while Chapter 5 of Lumen Gentium stresses that all in the church are called to holiness, Chapter 6 of the same document insists that the evangelical counsels of poverty, celibacy and obedience ‘are based upon the words and examples of the Lord’.  Furthermore, this ‘religious state whose purpose is to free its members from earthly cares, more fully manifests to all believers the presence of heavenly goods already possessed here below’. (44)

That marriage and the nurturing and the safeguarding of children are thereby declared ‘earthly cares’ that are inherently less capable of ‘manifesting the presence of heavenly goods’ (i.e. of holiness) will baffle lay Catholics today,  especially in light of the revelations of the last three decades. Global church events since the 1980s have raised the most serious questions over any claim to a moral or spiritual superiority for any chosen ‘state of life’ or hierarchical office – up to and including the office of pope.  Jesus’s most solemn adjurations re the protection of the innocence of children have had a new and shocking impact. Pope Francis’s frank and welcome admission that he too is a sinner – and has also made mistakes in handling clerical child abuse – provides a postscript to Lumen Gentium Chapter 6 that underlines its shortcomings.

An Unsatisfactory Confusion

Michael McGuckian therefore concludes that at present the church’s formal teaching position on holiness is ambivalent and unsatisfactory. Whereas all are called to holiness by Lumen Gentium, this is not clearly – in this important document – the same call to the same holiness. By implication the holiness to which lay people can aspire can only be, at best, the avoidance of serious sin. Those bishops who insisted on the insertion of Chapter 6 into Lumen Gentium could not agree to the use of the phrase ‘same holiness’ in any part of the document other than article 39 – where it clearly refers only to those who observe the evangelical counsels. Subsequent magisterial treatments of holiness – e.g.  Vita Consecrata by St John Paul II (1996) – have not resolved this problem either, in his view.

Can we avoid the conclusion that the recruitment crisis for the celibate priesthood is still preventing a full and unequivocal acknowledgement of the equal call to, and potential for, holiness of the unordained and non-celibate majority of the baptised people of God?

In light of this situation, and the hovering threat of the Vatican watchdog, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, what Catholic evangelist today would take on to preach on the meaning of holiness for lay people – especially in the wake of the revelation that, apparently, integrity – so emphatically modelled for us by Jesus – was never a consideration or an issue at Vatican II when holiness was under discussion?

Are Christian holiness and Christian love the same?

In a subsequent recorded interview Michael McGuckian promotes a persuasive solution to the problem of defining holiness:  we should look to the Great Commandments of love of God above all, and of neighbour as oneself – the Shema Israel still recited and sung  by observant Jews today and reiterated by Jesus (eg. In Matt 22: 37-40). We should look also to Jesus’s own new commandment in John 13:34 – to love one another as he has loved us. These, Michael insists, are a non-postponeable and binding call to be perfect in love – a call that can be heard and obeyed at any stage of life – or in any state of life – by any of the baptised without distinction.

On discovering that St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas had agreed that these Great Commandments of Jesus and the Torah were not real commandments  – because they demand an unattainable perfection – Michael McGuckian was unimpressed and unconvinced, and is now bent on explaining why.

If anyone else has ever wondered why, in the wake of Vatican II, no Irish bishop ever convened his people of God to consider together how they could ‘consecrate the world to God’ (Lumen Gentium 34), this book will greatly help to explain all that. It has not only addressed most of my own questions on holiness, but given me an invaluable historical overview of the issue. My only slight complaint relates to its title. While ‘The Charismatic Structure of the Church’ may signal the book’s content clearly to experts on church structure, something like ‘Holiness? A History of Disagreement’ would have made it a ‘must read’ for me as soon as it was launched in April 2021.

It must surely be seen also now that the citation out of context of Matthew 19:12  in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (Article 1579) – the sole reference by Jesus to celibacy in the Gospels – is a scandalous leaning on the scales in the cause of making celibacy a necessary condition of ordination.  That Gospel context was a discussion of Jesus’s teaching against easy divorce, a teaching that was obviously also ‘for the sake of the kingdom of God’. In light of the known contemporary Jewish expectation that religious men would marry, by far the most sensible inference to be drawn from Jesus’s subsequent reference to eunuchs is that celibacy could also serve the kingdom, not that it would better or would best serve the kingdom.

Holiness and Integrity

This needs especially to be said at this time, in light of the global revelation that priestly celibacy can as readily be a matter of mere appearances as of fact. Here Jesus’s denunciations of hypocrisy – of seeking to be regarded as holy – have not yet received the attention they deserve (e.g. Matt 6:1-6). That unknown multitudes of innocent children and vulnerable adults have suffered lifelong agonies as a consequence is now indisputable, and the cost of centuries of concealment of this reality has not yet been fully acknowledged and redressed.

Fr Michael McGuckian SJ

We can therefore anticipate that in his next book – on that same subject – Michael McGuckian will be citing Jesus’s story of the equal reward given to the latecomers in the vineyard to question any claim that any office or chosen state of life can entitle anyone to a superior expectation of ‘the treasure hidden in the field’.  We can also hope that the critical importance of integrity – the conformity of behaviour with what is vowed and professed, or is implied by any church role or office – will be emphasised.

The ancient belief that personal holiness must come automatically with the conferring of any particular office, even that of bishop, must surely also be finally rejected. Here Lord Acton’s comment on the danger of attributing holiness to a person solely on account of that person’s role or official status has too long been ignored: ‘There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.’2Lord Acton, letter to Mandell Creighton, 1887

Can disobedience be holy?

Also – in regard to the virtue of obedience – that a good conscience can oblige anyone to disobey a religious superior needs now also to be emphasised – since everyone understands now that unholy obedience was also a major factor in the global tide of recent scandal. Why, for so long, was Jesus’s courage in challenging the Jewish religious hierarchies of his own time never seen as a distinctive mark of his sanctity? That a fetish for lace-laden clerical attire could be preferred as a sign of holiness in the long era of clericalist illusion will forever be remembered.

St Mary McKillop
1842-1909
The Holiness of the Family

The canonisation of the Australian Saint Mary McKillop in 2010 is conclusive proof of the need to qualify the elevation of obedience as a requirement for holiness. Personally pilloried for her calling out of a clerical abuser in Australia, the cross of excommunication she was obliged to carry in 1871 is a dire warning against a pernicious religious authoritarianism – the expectation of deference in all circumstances by a religious superior.

Finally, the ongoing promotion of the ‘domestic church’ to an indispensable role in the faith formation of adults as well as children has its own logic.  If parents and grandparents are truly to have the primary responsibility for encouraging and guiding the faith development of their children, must this not be recognised as a call to a sacred role and a holy task, modelled on the example of the Holy Family?  That we should still be so distant from a full and unequivocal recognition of the same call to every baptised person – to respond sincerely to the greatest commandments of integrity and love in whatever space we currently occupy – speaks loudly for the timeliness of this book.

Notes

  1. The Charismatic Structure of the Church: Priesthood and Religious Life at Vatican II and Beyond, Michael McGuckian SJ, Xlibris US, 2021
  2. Lord Acton, letter to Mandell Creighton, 1887

Sean O’Conaill, 19th August 2021 
(This article first appeared on the website of the Association of Catholics in Ireland)

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