Ex-ex-Catholic

Vatican spokespeople fear shortage of offensive ideas

The Vatican is deeply concerned about the possibility of running out of ways to offend people, according to a statement issued by the Vatican's Public Non-relations office.

"So far," said Vatican spokesman Rev. Fred Bombardi, "we've re-alienated the jews, the sex abuse victims, and most recently, the gays." But that's not enough, says Bombardi. "We’re going for the whole world. We're doing our best to make almost everyone despise us so that we can feel more like Jesus must have felt at the end of his life.”

The concern has been deemed great enough to consider a call to the faithful for new offensive material. Each offensive idea submitted would earn the submitter 33 days off purgatory. Submissions chosen for actual use in speeches, homilies, or press releases will allow the winners to bypass purgatory altogether.

“This way, we are not selling indulgences, and at the same time we’ll save money on public relations and marketing,” says Bombardi.Selling indulgences came to a contentious end in the 16th century, omitting a reliable source of income for the church. In addition, church coffers have been somewhat depleted of late by the pesky lawsuits of deposed altar boys harboring various grudges.

“We’re frequently approached by public relations experts trying to sell us their costly services,” explains a senior Vatican official, Cardinal Tacitus Burponi, “but they always want to make us look good. The silly gooses just don’t understand. We want to be persecuted. And we can achieve that on our own if we just keep doing what we’re doing.”

“Getting people to hate us has been a specialty of ours since we started this whole thing two thousand years ago,” agreed the Pope, who declined to provide his real name.

This would explain why, despite the blossoming of professional services such as imaging and branding, the Vatican appears to be afflicted with an astonishing case of acute hoof-in-mouth disease.

The Vatican may well be concerned about running out of ideas; meanwhile, back in reality, many of the faithful worry that there seems to be no end to them.

Women in the Catholic priesthood

I may fill out or add to this post later, but for now, some quick notes.

I went to see a talk by Fr. Roy Bourgeois the other night. Called "Women are finding a way in the church." Held in a Lutheran church because he's been banned from Catholic churches for supporting the ordination of women. He spoke briefly, and left the rest of the time for the three other panelists to speak. Two of these are ordained Catholic women. Really. It's true. This is a small movement that is growing.

The energy in the room was electric, and  I mean that in a good way. The third panelist was a Lutheran minister who also supports the cause.

Her findings so far, and preceded by an apology for perhaps sounding a little raw: "Too many in the Roman Catholic church believe that ministry is not about "being" like Jesus, but about peeing like Jesus."

I'm afraid I cannot improve on that.

No, celibacy does not cause child abuse

The media continues to focus on celibacy as the source of all the trouble. This is so wrong. It implies, 1, that celibacy causes pedophilia, and 2, that marriage is the antidote. That makes celibacy pathological and marriage creepy. 

I have my own opinions about celibacy, which I’ll discuss next post. Meanwhile, here’s what George Weigel has to say about it, in another article in this week’s Newsweek, following the Lisa Miller one I discussed last post. Weigel is a theologian on the conservative end of Catholicism. For example he’s against women in the priesthood and against the acceptance of gays. But he’s right about other things. Here’s an excerpt:

“Sexual abuse is indeed horrible, but there is no empirical evidence that it is a uniquely, predominantly, or even strikingly Catholic problem. The sexual abuse of the young is a global plague. In the United States, some 40 to 60 percent of such abuse takes place within families – often at the hands of live-in boyfriends or the second (or third, or fourth) husband of a child’s mother [and here I feel he’s blaming the mother for changing men. How does being her third boyfriend make a man more likely to be an abuser than the first?]; those cases have nothing to do with celibacy. The case of a married Wilmington, Dela., pediatrician charged with 471 counts of sexual abuse in February has nothing to do with celibacy. Neither did the 290,000 cases of sexual abuse in American public schools between 1991 and 2000, […..]. And given the significant level of abuse problems in Christian denominations with married clergy, it’s hard to accept the notion that marriage is somehow a barrier against sexually abusive clergy. (Indeed the idea of reducing marriage to an abuse-prevention program ought to be repulsive.) Sexual abusers throughout the world are overwhelmingly noncelibates.”

There. When he says it’s not uniquely a Catholic problem, he’s leaving out one of the most important aspects of the scandal, namely the cover-up. But to be fair, that isn’t uniquely Catholic either. Cover- up exists in those other arenas too, such as in families. How many victims of child abuse are expected to endure Thanksgiving dinners with the abuser for the rest of their lives? Not to mention daily living for the duration of their childhoods; living under the same roof while being required to pretend nothing’s happening; because we can’t turn Uncle Bob or Dad over to the police, now can we? And when those victims grow up, there’s no organization to sue, and no reporters interested in an exposée of  Dad or Uncle Bob.

Newsweek's Lisa Miller explains a few things

Good article in Newsweek this week by Lisa Miller. The title inside, "A Woman's Place is in the Church" is of couse a big duh for most of us, except if you live in the Vatican.

“The cause of the Catholic clergy’s sex-abuse scandal is no mystery: insular groups of men often do bad things.”

That’s the crux of it right there. You put a bunch of men together and leave them unsupervised, some form of destruction is bound to happen.

I could come up with some equally bad things to say about undiluted women, to be fair. But this is no time to worry about being fair to men. Let’s be fair to women for, say, a couple thousand years, and after that maybe I’ll be ready to take on being fair to everyone at the same time.

We all know that this stuff never would’ve happened with the Sisters in charge.

UnHoly Week 2010

The deacon was right. The more you focus on the institution, the less spiritual you feel. I re-learn this over and over again. Last week, which was supposed to be Holy Week, I was glued to the news about the sex scandal developments. It sure brings out one’s cynicism about religion in general. Cynicism which I was mired in for thirty years and have been trying to coax myself out of for the last three.

That kind of news will throw me back there faster than a banana peel thrown from a train window.

I suppose it didn't help that I hardly went to any Holy Week things. At the beginning I went to Palm Sunday  -- which I never miss for the shallow reason that I really like palms. (Shoot, I live in Oregon, when do I get to see palms?)

Then at the end of it I went to Easter Vigil last night. Nothing like a good dose of fire, darkness, and incense to reel me back in. At least for the moment. At the party afterwards I heard several grumblings among my friends about bad behavior at the Vatican.

The Compounding Effects of Child Abuse

It seems pretty clear that the boys at the top don’t fully understand the ramifications the sexual abuse of children. If they did, we’d be seeing a different reaction from them. Their reaction is too tame, lacking the impetus of someone who really gets it.

The people who really understand are those who have ever courted or been in relationship with an adult victim of child abuse. The problems are profound and crazy-making to the intimate partner. Often abuse victims are more comfortable making love to a stranger than to a sincerely interested suitor. In such cases, the more intimate a relationship becomes, the more the abuse victim starts to back off. Their behavior is a swirl of mixed messages, a jumble of maddening inconsistencies. A common example is the dance of “Come here, go away.” The constant “translating” required by the non-abused partner in the ongoing struggle to understand is exhausting. Mired in the confusion of their history, victims will sometimes lash out at the well meaning, sincerely loving partner who is making intimate advances of the type totally appropriate in a healthy love relationship. Such reactions often leave the healthy partner feeling sleazy, or in some way predatory.

Hence, the partners of the abuse victims are just as much victims as they are – which doubles the number of victims. With that at its base, the relationship is likely to be dysfunctional on other levels as well, which means that anyone in relationship with that relationship is affected too – such as their kids or other family members and close friends. So the ripple effect of one child molested seems to be almost infinite.

Today these consequences are much more widely recognized among the general public. It’s easy to see why a population of celibates would probably be the last to get it and therefore very slow to take it seriously and respond. That said, I see that it’s being taken very seriously at the lower levels these days. The parish I go to has an arsenal of strategies in place to make sure this never happens again.