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.

The Sex Abuse Scandal: Excruciating for us all

The sex scandal makes it really hard to be Catholic. I feel like just by being Catholic I could be perceived as in some way endorsing the actions of these priests. It’s as if there’s this silently screaming question:  Why wouldn’t any decent person immediately get as far away as possible?

And yet, here I am, IN it.

I would like to offer this: During my entire life as a Catholic child, sexual abuse was not part of my experience. If it had been, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be back at the church now. Knowing what I know about the far-reaching damage caused by child molestation, I don’t know if I could be evolved enough to forgive something that big.

But because my experience was mostly good and did not include that kind of evil, the church to me is not wearing the face of a child molester. I don’t want to leave the church to this tiny minority of the priests.

Mass-Market Epiphany

Here’s an excerpt from an op-ed by that title in the NY Times last Monday, contributed by an insightful person named Ross Douthat.  

“…..it’s possible that our horizons have become too broad, and that real spiritual breakthroughs require a kind of narrowing — the decision to pick a path and stick with it, rather than hopscotching around in search of a synthesis that ‘works for me.’”

My sentiments exactly. That explains a lot of the reason for my return to the Catholic church. I found myself unattracted to the Greatest Hits approach to spirituality, and tired of the voyeuristic dilettantism of seekers cruising along some kind of spiritual smorgasbord and helping themselves to a little of this and a dab of that, then issuing invitations to sample their fare (“Have you tried this?”) and following up with testimonials (“It really works!”).

What does that even mean??

I tear at my hair and run screaming down the street. I flee from the McSpiritual and claw my way back to something that makes sense in light of the life I was born into.

Surprise-- it’s not an ashram in India. Or some obscure medicine man in Bali. Hello. If we have something already, shouldn’t we check that out before we go leaping across the Big Water to imitate those other people?

I mean have I ever truly looked at Catholicism? No. Not since my years with the nunnie-bunnies. It’s time. Time for the grownup version. Surely it's not really about a talking snake in a tree.

Hence my interest.

Monk sightings in town

Saw two monks today. Walking down Broadway. A while later I was browsing in a Broadway shoe store and guess who strolled in. The monks. As an excuse to talk to them I asked if they were from Lafayette, though I knew they weren’t. Different outfit. Long and brown, but otherwise completely different. No, they said. Mount Angel. They asked if I went to Lafayette much. Occasionally, I said. Did I go for the one-day, or the three-day, they wondered. I’ve done both, I said. Depends how much time I have. We chatted about other monkly things. A few years ago I wouldn’t have known what to say to a couple of monks.

After a while I commented on the shoes they’d been looking at. Keene’s. Made in Portland. I pointed down at my own. Extremely comfortable, I told them. They had on Birkenstocks – what I wear around my house. It appears that I share monastic tastes in shoes.

They were both squeaky young, in their twenties. I suppose that means that at least someone is still signing up for monastic life. I wonder what the numbers and ages at Mount Angel are. At Lafayette it seems like about thirty of the thirty five are over 55.

I haven’t seen monastics on the streets since I left Italy. I miss it. I don’t know why, but I’ve always liked seeing them, even during my most heathen years. Maybe they’ll start showing up again.

The Call of the Mild

I think I’m due at the monastery again. How can I tell? I get so overloaded with all the voices of the world vying for my attention that I stop doing the important things that sustain life itself. A few days of seclusion orders my priorities without my even having to think them through or figure them out. No mental gymnastics required – au contraire. The less thinking, the better.

I found this place by hearing it mentioned by Catholic friends who were already doing this very thing. I pressed for details. The Trappist Abbey in Lafayette Oregon is the closest monastery to where I live. You don’t have to be a boy to go stay there – unless you want to really stay there, like forever, as a monk.

First I went for one full day. Twenty bucks for a tiny room with a little couch and a desk and a lamp. You could hole up there for the entire day, or walk around the ample grounds, or sit in the library, or sit in the chapel and listen to the monks chanting their hours.

The night before, I was so excited to escape the world that I woke up at 4:30 and couldn’t sleep -- so I just got in my car and went. I arrived in time for their 6:30 chants – though the monks had already been up since 3:30 or so. Instead of whizzing by at the speed of pandemonium, that day stretched out like a cat in the sun. The slightest happening, like a red dragon-fly landing on my bright orange shirt as I sat by the pond, matched the importance of any front page story. For about ten week-long minutes, I had a relationship with that dragonfly that surpassed anything I’ve achieved with a lot of the humans in my life.

I could go on. And I will. For now, I’m happy to submit this short introduction as a way of launching a new commitment to post here three times a week. Shall I go so far as to name the days? Let me think about it…