If you've been keeping up with Pope Benedict's visit to the United Kingdom by reading internet articles, you will have encountered several themes that make up paper ideas that I have for this semester at school, including the heart of my MA thesis. To begin with the obvious, there's the reputed negative reaction that a large portion of Britain's population has been giving to Pope Benedict--mainly due to the mishandling of the sex abuse scandal--Ireland, for example, has suffered much like the United States with an incredibly large number of abuses cases and examples of failed leadership from Church officials. [Of course, there are other reasons for the negative reaction: Church teachings on homosexuality and contraception, which the secular society of Britian eschews, and England's/Britain's history of anti-Catholicism, which I'll get to in just a minute.]
The sex abuse scandal and the related scandal of perceived failed leadership are two of the greatest present problems for the Church--for everyone from Benedict to the other bishops to our parish priests and religious to the people in the pews. There's not one Catholic that can reasonably claim that his or her identity as a Catholic has not been impacted by these two scandals. Thus, when in my class on the prophets, I was asked (along with my peers) to play the part of the prophet and to examine a contemporary problem in light of the prophetic tradition, I decided to take as my topic Religious Leadership Failure, looking at examples of such failures in the biblical tradition and seeing if how those cases were handle in the past can shed any light on how the Church ought to handle the current situation.
[Two examples of Religious Leadership Failure scandals in the Bible are Aaron's role in the worship of the Golden Calf (Exodus 32) and the abuse of priestly privileges by Hophni and Phinehas the sons of Eli (1 Samuel 2-4). [Note, Aaron goes unpunished for his grave sin, but both Hophni and Phinehas are killed in battle as punishment for their sins.] There are plenty of other examples--but there are also examples of holiness from the priestly leadership. So I suspect the biblical tradition will be very instructive, as it presents us with a story line that is honestly a mixture of holiness and human frailty--punishment and repentance. While secular people and believers alike might want to see the punishment enacted against the criminal priests and the leaders who protected them/facilitated their crimes, there's a question demanded of us, rooted in the tradition--What about conversion, penance, and redemption (here I'm referring to religious leaders)? For those who believe that Benedict, himself, is guilty of poor leadership, a question might be: isn't he then exactly the person to guide the Church through this period of humiliation and penance, bearing the weight of the Church's (including the laity's) collective failures? It is my humble opinion--or, at least my hope--that Catholics of coming generations will admire Benedict for his sufferings and penances. For although penance may be "deserved", the result, that is, of one's own actions, and so are signs/indicators that one has been sinful--they still, none the less, are signs, also, of the grace and mercy of God that triumph over sins, and so are non-verbal preachings of the Gospel.]
This subject of Religious Leadership Failure is likewise at the heart of my paper idea for my ecclesiology course. For that class, I would like to explore the topic of Credibility and the impact that the two scandals have had on the Church's ability to credibly preach the Gospel (I believe I have blogged about this before). How, some might argue, are they to take the Church's preaching on issues like abortion, homosexuality, contraception, war, just economics, etc. seriously when the Church leadership seems so permeated by corruption? These are strong words, so let me give a lighter example. In the television sitcom The Vicar of Dibley, the parishioners of the little Anglican parish church faced a problem when it came out that the vicar (a female priest) was having a sexual relationship with a man with whom she was not married. The opprobrium that followed, naturally, began to impact the vicar's ability to credibly pastor her congregation. The same was true, you may recall, for the innocent Frank Wentworth in Oliphant's novel The Perpetual Curate. For the Vicar of Dibley's parishoners, they were able to go to the next level and examine the relationship between their judgement of the vicar and the question of their own personal sinfulness. In The Perpetual Curate, by contrast, one gets the impression that Frank is only redeemed in the people's eyes because he happened to be innocent, and that had he been guilty of anything, he would have been rejected and cast off completely, without a chance for repentance.
The present situation seems to prompt the question: Is there going to come a time when the opprobrium is too much? Will God finally say "enough is enough" and show his favor to another people? Two simplistic responses would be: 1) Perfection is a sign of heavenly favor, righteousness, and, therefore, Truth--thus, if there is sinfulness, God is not present, and Falsehood reigns. Anti-Catholics use this argument as justification for their prejudice. 2)But the second argument runs: The Church is both human and divine, and there has never been a time when the humanity of the Church hasn't manifested itself with examples of sin (the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of Paul illustrate this with tales of wayward Christians in the early communities), but the Christ and the Spirit continue to be present in the Church as its guides and protectors (examples of this would be the holy saints that come in every age to reform and renew the Church).
--So, Credibility--do we still have it? Again, I think that Catholics of generations to come should look back with admiration at the Catholics of our present days, at how we have persevered with the preaching of the Gospel even in the face of public ridicule and in the shadow of egregious sins committed against the most vulnerable of our Christian family. It would be easy to abandon the Gospel and run away from this sin, but we who stay know that there is much, much more to the Faith than these two scandals, and that there's something much more demanding, and honest, and real about facing these scandals than running away from them, or hiding behind the mask of "you're sinful and I'm not", which some of our critics (secular, Christian, and otherwise) are doing.
Lastly, I will be examining the question of English/British anti-Catholicism for my thesis. It may surprise some to know that Britain has such a long history of being anti-Catholic. We of this age might think of the U.K. as a tolerant country with high ideals, but it is, in fact, true that since the time of Henry VIII that English/British society developed a unique kind of suspicion and hatred for the Catholic Church, even though it had been predominately Catholic for centuries. This manifested itself in discriminatory laws (the Penal Laws), and in public expressions of anti-Catholic sentiment (as in literature of all types, including novels). It simply became easier to see Catholicism as "foreign" as a way to justify being a member of the Church of England and not the Apostolic Catholic Church. Thus, nationalism came to usurp Christian unity, and thus, to rationalize prejudice and hatred. Of course, the English Reformation is complicated, involving, also, historical questions regarding Church Leadership Failures/clerical sin and Church credibility, not to mention genuine theological questions. Could it have been only an event of thought and debate, that would have been one thing; but it was also a long battle involving the shedding of blood--creating martyrs on both sides, and leaving scars that, for some, may have healed, but still smart. So--English anti-Catholicism, what's that really all about? That's what I'll be investigating this semester for my thesis.
Fortunately, Benedict's visit has not been all bad news and gloom. He did preside over the beatification of John Henry Cardinal Newman, a famous apologist for the Church. If ever we needed the intercession of a man who was convicted of the truth of the Catholic Church it is now. Indeed, the beatification or canonization of a holy man or woman is a challenge to both the critics of the Church and to its members. To the critics, it is the strongest example of how they ultimately will fail to destroy the Church--because as right as they may be about our faults, they cannot seem to get that the Spirit works even with an imperfect people, and raises up saints in every generation to show to the world the activity of God that remains in the Church. To those with eyes to see and ears to hear, the Gospel is alive and well in the Catholic Christian Church, and that's not something to treat lightly or to dismiss. To Catholic Christians, from the pope to the people in the pews, the beatification or canonization of a holy man or woman calls us to follow their example, to strive harder to live up to our Creed, to our Sacraments, to our Scriptures, to our Tradition, to our God.
Indeed, would that we were all saints; but let us sinners continue to strive toward perfection, not letting our many falls and bruises keep us from running the race back to our Father who loves us and watches and waits for us at the gate of our eternal home.
Br. Paul, OP
*Note: I don't have an inside scope on any of these issues. Like most, I can only base my opinions on what I have been hearing and seeing in the public forum--so take this reflection with a grain of salt.
