MODERNAGE
A
Q U A R T E R L Y
REVIEW
Scandals in the Church
THE RECENT SCANDALS surrounding sexual
deviancy among Roman Catholic priests
in the United States must horrify all believers. The pedophile crimes committed are especially distressing in the extent and the depth of activity, nationwide and over a period of two or three
decades. The role of the hierarchy in
these scandals is equally distressing,
and inexcusable, in terms of cover-ups,
indifference, neglect, apathy—and arrogance. The Church inevitably is stigmatized by the degree of these perverse
happenings and their consequences.
It is hard to fathom even the least
presence of a depraved orientation in
the ranks of the clergy and in the name of
faith. It is hard to excuse or to forgive the
clergy and the hierarchy involved directly or indirectly in these abysmal
events. And it will be terribly hard to
forget the history of these crimes for
many years to come, as wounds fester
and attitudes harden into a cynicism
beyond detestation. Harder yet is it to
forgive any of the religious their violation of a consecrated Vow to God.
How will these problems be examined
in the context of solutions, if any? Even
more importantly, how will the aftereffects be accurately understood or
measured? These are more troubling
adjunct questions in the current state of
our socio-political situation, in the very
nature of our secular society and culture. Clearly, the deterioration of standards of discipline in the civic order
have a way of affecting the religious
scene, as well as the standards and the
discipline of faith.
Unquestionably, the Church itself has
contributed to the crisis by steadily surrendering to a leveling liberationist theology, to progressivist opinions, to the
spirit of permissiveness, egalitarianism,
innovation, change, in short, to a secular
mentality that is at its roots blasphemous and grasping. Too often gestures
of reconciliation have transfigured into
compromise, a process that helps make
possible deviancy, physical and spiritual. A deconstructionist mood becomes
consuming habit and policy, as moral
and ethical standards degenerate into
license and irresponsibility. When the
Church surrenders in the smallest way
to materialist enticements, when it sanctions socio-political offences and obscenities, when it fails to resist actively
and fearlessly the liberal Zeitgeist in all
of its invasive forms (even when it comes
to the discipline of ritual and the sacred-
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ness of canon law), when, in short, the
Church shows a blind eye to an evolving
enlightenment at all levels, it fails to
assert its authority and to accede to a
multiform secularism.
The Church in America has not been
speaking out, loudly and clearly; it has
instead been largely standing by passively in the face of continuing crimes
both outside and inside its realm. In a
word, the Church seems resigned to the
liabilities of the political correctness,
multiculturalism, abnormity, and legalism of the "secular city." The Church
thus falls into the identical pattern of the
temporal superstructure, one in which
some clergy metamorphose into evangels of terrestrial reform and progress:
they forget their sacred commitments,
and neglect the Creed by contributing to
the forms of sloppiness and crassness
that lead to the perversions some of the
clergy have entertained and practiced.
When a sacred calling is subordinated to
nominalist demands and formulae, that
calling is debased in those strange and
aberrant ways to which the sexual deviancy of some priests testifies.
The Church, by sometimes entering
the secularist arena, has not been steadfast in its true loyalty to the life of the
soul; as such it has moved away from
adherence to the moral virtues by accommodating the chronolatry that
Jacques Maritain several decades ago
indicted, and for which he was at the
time much criticized by clergy and lay
people alike. This chronolatry, even
within the Church, has increasingly devoured the indiscriminate. Chronolatry
has become a continuing obsessive impulse and has been reigning, to the point
of recklessness and irresponsibility, yes,
to perversion, within the Church, among
its hierarchs, its clergy, its seminarians,
its theologians, its institutions of higher
learning. La trahison des clercs, indeed!
There can be absolutely no rapprochement between the spiritual and the secu-
lar worlds, and where this idea is
adopted, it leads to rips in the religious
fabric and the texture of things eternal;
it transforms the spiritual into the temporal, the political, the worldly. It sanctions accommodation in a hungering
secular world in which the demoniac
sway is unyielding; in which moral and
spiritual standards are watered down; in
which profane and impious idols are
worshipped in the new Babeldom; in
which diabolisms enter collectively and
without abandon, as Satan is enthroned
as the great Anarch.
Having confessed these contrite
words regarding the present situation in
the Church, as it has been scurrilously
dramatized over an extended period of
time, it is also imperative to say a few
sharp words regarding the total moral
and cultural climate in American society
as it has been polluted by unscrupulous
merchants of sex at all levels of our
national life. In their earnest efforts to
evaluate the problems giving birth to
the scandals in the Church, and to comprehend the causes of ecclesial deviancy, many Americans seem to be driven
by a desire to look exclusively at immediate issues and to ignore some of the
larger, deep-seated causes of the violations. It is, it seems, far more convenient
to decry and to attack, sometimes indiscriminately, the clergy who have deserted their Vows, without at the same
time inspecting censorially the pansexualism which now characterizes the
total American scene, as it has been
developing without restraint since the
end of World War II.
Clearly, and demonstrably, it can be
said that the merchants of sex are busily
and profitably at work in the print industry, in the electronic media, in the entertainment business (especially films), in
advertisements, in the educational system, to mention here only a few areas of
sexual entrepreneurship. The fact is inescapable that the merchants of sex have
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been unceasingly creating the very conditions that metamorphose into the tyranny of sex in the entire country by
whetting, and commercializing, sexual
appetites and activity ad absurdum. This
sexual climate is one that has and sets no
limits in its wanton forms of salacious
enactment. Criticism of the tyranny and
climate of sex is thus highly selective,
even one-sided, as we pour all the blame
on the misdeeds, for example, of the
religious while at the same time ignoring
the ongoing transgressions, sensationalism, deceptions, vices, and crimes perpetrated by the merchants of sex who
perhaps comprise one of the most lucrative industries in American business history. In a word, we choose to be comfortably myopic in assigning blame for our
sexual afflictions.
What is especially revealing in judging deviant Catholic clergy is the way in
which intellectuals, statisticians, publicists, and pollsters and celebrities (even
Hollywood misfits), with their own motives and biases, join forces with confirmed non-religious and anti-Christians
and proceed, in unison, to diagnose instantly religious ideas, traditions, beliefs, canons, and then develop sham
panaceas. This entire scenario has become fraudulent as psychologists, therapists, sociologists, and self-acclaimed
experts rush to center stage to have
their say on religious and spiritual issues, though they themselves are spiritually bankrupt. In essence, the Kingdom of the Spirit is being pillaged, mercilessly, by a puffed-up social civic order, unabashedly secular and prejudiced
in faith and conviction, setting itself up
as magistrate in religious matters. False
motives should be detectable to all citizens sincerely concerned with the plight
of the Catholic Church in America.
The first thing to detect is that many
of the so-called concerned authorities
act as they do and say so as to fulfill their
purpose of exploiting the Church as just
another saleable commodity. Yet their
quantitative reductionisms speak for
themselves, as they are recited and recommended, too often totally ignorant of
what exactly differentiates the sacred
from the profane. What we are confronting in their testimonies is the degree to
which the unchurched venture to speak
out on sacred things, oblivious as they
are of the Hebrew prophets, Christian
Saints and Martyrs and the Holy Doctors
and Fathers of the Eastern and Western
Church. Their lack of any biblical and
covenantal understanding becomes blatantly apparent when one reads and
hears their smatterings in all areas of the
communications field and information
services. In essence, what we are often
viewing is the spectacle of modern secularists, sui generis, playing with religion.
And in the end they are as reprehensible
as are fallen priests molesting youngsters.
Newspaper columnists and editorial
writers, especially those of a liberal persuasion, have gone all out in "analyzing"
the church scandals. But predictably
their opinions are supra-secular and,
from the perspective of any understanding of or sympathy with "the idea of the
holy," simply paltry journalism, epitomizing an anti-religious outlook. Their
commentaries, in this respect, are predictable in their misunderstanding and
misinterpretation: nothing more than
offshoots of doctrinaire ideology, incipiently anti-Christian in motive and orientation, etched in the language and attitude of brutish hostility towards religion, bringing much to mind some of F.
M. Dostoevsky's "devils" in their vituperations against Christianity in nineteenth-century Russia. A notorious
present example of this vituperative
mindset is regularly on display in The
New York Times, which will hardly ever
qualify for a distinguished prize for honest religious reporting, such is its subtle
and often unsubtle antipathy to the Faith
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of Our Fathers.
What Russell Kirk describes as "Demon Ideology," with its automatic rejection of religion and metaphysics, can be
seen at the virulent center of an op-ed
piece entitled "Is the Pope Catholic?," in
The New York Times (May 4, 2002), written by columnist Bill Keller. No piece of
writing better discloses the ideologue's
wrath and instinctive dislike of the
Church than that of this columnist who
proudly admits to being "a collapsed
Catholic," a self-designation that in itself
brings into question any attempt at credence in his column, which concludes
with this eerie sentence: "Whether the
church will reform, or fracture, or continue this continental [that is, Vatican]
drift, I have no way of knowing, but I
wonder how long faith withstands such
a corrosive rain of hypocrisy." No columnist could more arrogantly reveal the
disease of ideology that afflicts the media elites, cheapens language and meaning, and deceives and enslaves American readers. And then one comes upon,
again, in The New York Times, a little
over a month later, an editorial entitled
"Bishops at the Crossroads," which purports to advise the American Catholic
Church about establishing "a credible
policy on sexually abusive priests." This
editorial smacks of the same hypocrisy
as Bill Keller's in pointing an accusatory
finger at Pope John Paul II and the Curia.
All the noise that is now emerging
from the public square, and the democratizing process, cannot be allowed to
dictate standards that accord with Holy
Tradition. Theological issues are not the
property of the marketplace; and solutions to religious problems must never
bear the taint of an intervening secular
society and the vulgar values it imposes.
Over seventy years ago, Jose Ortega y
Gasset rightly identified this threatening phenomenon of our time when he
declared that "the vulgar proclaims and
imposes the rights of vulgarity, or vul-
garity as a right." It is precisely this
imposition that we need to resist to our
dying breath if the state of the soul is not
to be annexed by anti-religious and, more
specifically, anti-Christian forces with
their own scheming agenda and ambitions. (The frightening designs of these
forces have been more recently and convincingly explicated in Patrick J.
Buchanan's The Death of the West [2002]
in his chapter entitled "De-Christianizing America.")
The current difficulties confronting
the Roman Catholic Church, and the
loud outcry and reactions to these in our
communities, need to be put in a perspective that Buchanan cogently touches
on in this sobering observation: "AntiCatholicism, the anti-Semitism of the
intellectuals, is the bigotry du jour of the
cultural establishment." It is not difficult
to discern in the present-day versions of
anti-Catholicism, fueled as they now are
by sexual scandals, the distinct voice of
radical and leftist ideologues who seek
to tighten their stranglehold on American socio-political thinking, particularly
on the American intelligentsia and the
academy. Their dreams of power over
the American mind and soul are now
renewed by recent events in the Church,
and are now and again on the march,
ready to strike, and to strike down, anything and anyone doubting their Jacobin
designs.
When, therefore, we are faced with
coping with some of the dire problems of
the Church and its clerisy, and with forming our judgments and simultaneously
sustaining our religious principles and
affirmations, we need to be alert to the
neverending prowlings of the Adversary
in all his wiles and disguises, and the
remedies that he proffers, always at a
price. As we continue to listen to and to
read commentaries on the crisis in the
American diocese, we should take notice of Edmund Burke's words, found in
his First Letter on a Regicide Peace, when
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he warns us against those ideologues,
past and present, who live for the sole
purpose of destroying pre-existing laws
and sacred institutions, and "in mockery of all religion, they institute impious, blasphemous, indecent theatric
rites, in honor of their vitiated, perverted reason, and erect altars to the
personification of their own corrupted
and bloody republic,—when schools and
seminaries are founded at public ex-
pense to poison mankind, from generation to generation, with the horrible
maxims of this impiety,—when, wearied out with incessant martyrdom, and
the cries of a people hungering and
thirsting for religion, they permit it only
as a tolerated evil,—I call this Atheism
by Establishment."
— George A. Panichas
14 June 2002
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