A Sound of Sheer Silence

About nine months ago, I wrote a paean to Nativity Parish in Fair Haven, New Jersey , the first Catholic parish where I really had a experience of God and of faith.  The pastor of Nativity when we were there was Richard C. Brietzke.  His name is on the list released today of priests in the Diocese of Trenton who have had "credible accusations" of abuse .   According to this list, he was "removed from ministry." What is interesting is that this seems to have come as a surprise to everyone.  This article from the local paper suggests that this was not a known fact about him .  This is backed up by a glowing piece in the Diocesan paper upon his retirement , providing no indication that anything was amiss.  One wonders, though.  Brietzke was the chancellor of the Diocese of Trenton in the 00s, during the period when, or so we are told repeatedly , the Roman Catholic Church "fixed" its problems with the Dallas Charter.  And the man responsible f...

But the Church’s theological factions are sufficiently far apart that each would rather do nothing than let the other side lead reform — because the liberals think the conservatives want an inquisition, the conservatives think the liberals want Episcopalianism, and there is some truth in both caricatures. --Ross Douthat, "Sheep Without Shepherds," November 17, 2018 . We are coming to the end, I think, of things to say about the sex abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church that are not restatements of previous ideas.  But, to go out, I'd like to unpack this is a very smart and insightful observation by Ross Douthat. Let's take the second part first.  On Twitter,  Francis biographer Austen Ivereigh expressed confusion as what Douthat meant by "Episcopalianism" in the above quote .  Maybe things are different in the UK, but I don't think Douthat was being obtuse at all.  "Episcopalianism," in the US Catholic context, is simply a push by fol...

A term that has recently entered The Discourse, or at least I have recently become aware of it, is "emotional labor."  Emotional labor is the work of regulating one's own feelings and emotional state in such a way as to maintain some sort of social environment.  More specifically, it is controlling or restraining one's own natural or reflexive emotional state in order to prevent someone else's emotional state from spiraling out of control.  So, if you are in a situation where you are scared of something, but you have to suppress or hide that because you know that if you show fear you will cause the person you are with to completely freak out, you are undertaking emotional labor. Emotional labor is usually brought up in the context of male/female relations, tied to the claim that women are expected to perform an undue amount of emotional labor insofar as they are presumed to have responsibility for the emotional state of their male partner.  Here we might think o...

In the last few days, a bombshell story has dropped that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, retired Roman Catholic Archbishop of Washington, D.C., has been suspended from ministry as a result of a "credible allegation" of unwanted sexual contact with a minor when he was a priest of the Archdiocese of New York.  Here are some unorganized reactions. 1.  Don't Take Your Eye Off the Ball.   I have a prediction--not based on any secret evidence, just a hunch--that the victim who made a "credible accusation of abuse" is male, and was a teenager at the time the event occurred.  Fifteen, sixteen, maybe even seventeen, something like that.  [Edit:  turns out I was right ]   When that comes to light, and it will, there will be a segment of people who will say "see, this is what gay men do," and others who will say "well, jeeze, I mean, it's not really a kid, right?" Both of those takes are wrong and beside the point.  The relevant mental category fo...

Just as you don't have to be the actual autocrat to believe in autocracy, or have any capital to believe in capitalism, you don't have to be a cleric in order to fully absorb the norms and values of clericalism.  And no one demonstrates this better than Michael Sean Winters, columnist for the National Catholic Reporter .   His article today in defense of Pope Francis's handling of clerical sex abuses cases shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that the folks on the "inside" of the Roman Catholic Church and those that circle around their orbit (i.e. Winters) fundamentally do not understand the origins of the problem or what needs to be done to fix the problem. Let's begin, first, with the one thing Winters gets right--the accusation that Pope Francis is "soft" on sex abuse cases is being used by the anti-Francis faction as a club to smack around the Pope.  Surely true.  But the fact that these stories are being exploited for political purposes doesn...

Summing up what was included in the last three posts ( Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 ), I would say that the Roman Catholic clerical sex abuse crisis was caused by: a completely closed and insular clerical culture which prioritized its own autonomy from judgment by non-clerical institutions, and which developed a culture of "don't ask, don't tell" with regard to sexual indiscretions formed in light of its own internal struggles around the fact that a majority of its members were closeted gay men, and which was also struggling with shrinking numbers, thus was incentivized toward doing whatever possible to keep priests in the fold and on duty, while lacking robust tools to recognize the true harm and danger of the sexual abuse of children. In light of this diagnosis, what can be done to rectify it?  One thing that will certainly not rectify it is creating a culture of paranoia around homosexuality inside the priesthood.  And yet, that seems to be what has happene...

Any honest discussion of sexuality and the Roman Catholic priesthood must start with the elephant in the room--something approaching a majority of priests are closeted gay men of one form or another.  That seems impossible to believe for many people, but no one speaking honestly has ever seriously challenged this premise, at least not to me.  And my own experience confirms this assessment. If you think it through, though, it's not really surprising.  In a pervasively homophobic culture, a priesthood in which you were not allowed, and thus not expected, to enter into a (opposite sex) marriage would be logically attractive to men who understood that such a marriage was not an option for them.  It doesn't even have to work on a conscious level.  I remember asking an elderly priest how he knew he had a vocation to the priesthood, and his response was, "I remember being 14 and seeing all my friends starting to get really into girls, and I was never particularly int...

In the previous post , I framed question #2 of "how did this sex abuse crisis happen?" as "how did it come to pass that the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church covered up the fact that some number of Roman Catholic priests had and were sexually abusing children, either actively or passively, thus facilitating the abuse?"  The answer to that question, in my view, can be answered in a one sentence response--"because the culture of the Roman Catholic priesthood is sick and broken, and the sex abuse crisis is the most visible manifestation of that pathology." It is extremely important here to emphasize the word "culture."  While people contribute to cultures in which they are a part, a culture is a conceptually distinct entity from any particular member of that culture.  There are deeply decent and honorable men who are Roman Catholic priests.  But the culture in which they swim is not decent and not honorable in the main.  And, in what is perh...

Less than a month ago, I said I would stop talking about Roman Catholicism , and I had every intention of sticking to that.  But I am going to break that promise to talk about the release of the report of the Royal Commission in Australia about clerical sexual abuse.  The results are shocking--if the reports are correct, the scope of the problem in Australia was even worse than in the United States or in the UK/Ireland.  To give an example, there was a reference to a Benedictine monastery in Western Australia in which 17.6% of the monks had an abuse allegation lodged against them at some point in the 1950s.  Think about being in a room with a group of monks in which one out of every six of them had someone in the 1950s  accuse them of committing a sexual violation on a minor.  Think of how many complaints were not made  in the culture of the 1950s.  One in six.  My God. I had a twitter exchange last night with Maureen Clarke about the rep...