driven to distraction by the hijinx in his own Episcopal communion, reflects on why the Catholic Church has a future and the Thing that Used to be Anglicanism does not.
The thing is, that’s no great credit to us Catholics. I owe Anglicans like C.S. Lewis, John Donne, Charles Williams and Dorothy L. Sayers a debt I can never repay. The tragedy of the Anglican communion is that there are so many people there of whom the Episcopalian Thing is now utterly unworthy.
In contrast, when I think of the Catholic Church, I’m reminded of a trip I once took to my brother’s house with a carload of teenagers. He lives on a lake, and one fine summer day we went down there to swim. He owns a canoe, one of those fiberglass kind that no mortal power can sink, lade her how you will with water and teenagers. I swam for a full afternoon as half a dozen teenagers strove with might and main to force her beneath the waves. It was not in her nature to sink.
The Catholic communion is like that. It’s not to the credit of the passengers and crew of the Barque of Peter that the ship is unsinkable. Try as we might with our unbelievable sins and folly (Problem: child raping priest. Solution: send him to a parish with more children and don’t tell anybody. Lather, rinse, repeat for decades), we just can’t sink the Boat. But that’s only due to the fact that the Hold is full of the styrofoam of the Holy Spirit and was built that way by the Divine Engineer. If it were up to us, we’d have filled her with rocks and bashed a hole below the waterline centuries ago. Jesus deserves the credit—entirely and without reservation—for any future the Catholic communion possesses. He’s the Savior. We’re the Savees.
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Amen brother AMEN!
Mark…you can try to explain away this most strange behavior on the part of a Cardinal but it still seems like wily and Machiavellian behavoir to most of us. For the Cardinal to call for an “off the record” meeting at his residence might seem like an open and honest attempt to put the record straight…or it might just seem wily and Machiavellian given all the other strange statements and behaviors of late by this theologian Cardinal. Things are not as they seem with these guys ...and the subterfuge and mystery they create does not help the “cause” one bit. The words transparent and open do not come to mind when matters of the Curia come to the forefront and Shoenborn is adding to the “mystery” every time he choses to speak. Either he has ulterior motives or a really serious case of “hoof and mouth ” disease.
Adele:
I’m afraid I don’t know what you are talking about. I think you much have me confused with Jimmy Akin. He’s the one who has written a couple of piece on Cdl. Schonborn. I haven’t followed that story.
Mark, I agree with what you say but let’s not forget that the majority of the sex abuse incidents involved post-pubescent males not children, making it homosexual rape.
And that makes a difference to this discussion how?
Everyone has an opinion. To me, nothing happens that God does not have a hand in it. He either allows it or disallows it. I have come to the conclusion that since there is so much pedophilia in the world, (school systems, childrens’ organizations, everywhere) that God is using His Church to put an end to it. The news is rampant with the Catholic pedophilia, yet not any other church or organization. I think the Church is an instrument used by God and I think the Catholic church, especially the Bishops, should pray and pray and pray until they find how to end this atrocity in the world, not just the Catholic Church.
Mark, I think your reading of the child abuse scandal is right on and so is your analogy of the unsinkable canoe.
Good point, Sue. Judgment begins with the house of God. And while there is a way to go yet in ridding the Church of this evil, much progress has been made. Hence the need of the media to devote so much space to decades-old incidents. At this point only an unreconstructed bigot or an ignoramus thinks of child sex abuse as a Catholic priestly phenomenon.
Point of technicality, Mark: a ship with a hold full of styrofoam would be guaranteed to float… upside down. The canoe analogy was great.
I’m reminded of the supposed conversation between Napoleon and the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris when Napoleon came to power and promised to destroy the Church. The Cardinal responded that, if all the popes and bishops through the centuries hadn’t managed to destroy the Church, he doubted that Napoleon would accomplish the deed.
Shades of those who read Newspapers. Over, and over, and over, ad naseum !
Gather instead the truth from the source. 1.7% of Catholic Clergy involved, terrible enough in itself, but compared to what? They’ve been dealt with, severely, and new systems are in place to screen future priests. My feelings now = Get over it!!!
In the interest of fairness and a more equitable allocation of blame, the to what extent, if any, can a concession be made in defence of senior clerics, including Cardinal Law, that they relied in good faith upon the “medical” advice of Psychiatry and Psychotherapists that sexually abusive adults (including priests) can have their behaviour modified, i.e, cured, and therefore able and recommended to make a fresh start in a new environment far away from previous temptation. I am under the impression that many priests (proportion/numbers unknown) who were initially discovered to have committed abuse were sent for treatment to psychiatrists who gave them a clean bill of health i.e. cured, before they were relocated to new parishes to make a fresh start. Are these “leaders” also to be be held responsible for moving their personnel around in the normal course of events if they were not aware of their abusive behaviour?.
NOTE: before people jump on me, I am NOT trying to excuse the behaviour of the abusers. I interested in the issue as to what extent were the “leaders”, later accused and declared guilty of moving these abusers, mislead by pseudo science and have now been left “holding the baby” while the psuedo scientists have got away scot free. No preconceived ideas please: but comments drawn on the basis of the facts would be interesting.
PS. The case of the priest in Munich which is being used in an attempt to draw the Pope directly into the issue, also involved a case of a priest “sent for treatment” and what happened after the treatment.
Right on - except for the “styrofoam of the Holy Spirit”. That’s one analogy I will most certainly keep out of my repertoire, together with “the velcro of the Hypostatic Union”.
Greetings from Sweden!
LaVallette you have made some good points. It’s not about justifying past actions but understanding how we got here to begin with. It does no good to ‘fix’ areas that don’t need fixing (ie. it’s a Catholic problem due to a celibate priesthood). We must be able to look squarely at the real problem and correct it.
What a wonderful analogy! Thanks, Mark.
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