Why the panic? Because there were predators about in those days, just as there are today. And just because Jerusalem was the seat of Judaism doesn’t mean a child wouldn’t be raped, killed or sold into slavery. It happened to Joseph.

And now we know it’s happened to thousands of other children by the hands of men the world over who claim to act in Jesus’s name. While that’s horrible, an added horror is that other men – who lay claim to moral leadership, the men for whom the word “sanctimonious” was coined – covered up and defended the crimes.

The Catholic Church’s pederasty scandal has gone global and now coils its tentacles around Josef Ratzinger, a / k / a Pope Benedict XVI. Did he – when he was a cardinal – ignore warnings about a rabidly pederastic priest in Wisconsin, as the New York Times reports? Did he – when he was a bishop in Munich 30 years ago – approve the transfer, rather than the prosecution of pederast priests under his jurisdiction?

There’s a famous story about American political organizer Saul Alinsky. In the 1960s, two Catholic seminarians came to him for advice. They were drawn to the civil rights movement, but their superiors disapproved of priests’ involvement in what the church (wrongly) considered secular social issues. What should they do, they asked?

Mr. Alinsky had a question of his own: Do you want to be a priest or a bishop? If civil rights is important to you, dive into the work, but know your career in the church hierarchy will never advance. If you want to be a bishop – perhaps telling yourself you can do more good once you’ve achieved a position of authority – then forget about the civil rights movement.

I think it’s clear which choice Mr. Ratzinger made. It’s equally clear he hasn’t done any good. This pope is famous for bringing the full force of canon law down on the heads of priest and nuns who oppose his will, especially those who call for a preferential option for the poor and alienated. Communists, he calls them.

If the priests and bishops are not good at policing their own, they are good at message discipline. Ask your parish priest about the church’s sexual abuse scandal. The Vatican line is that yes, sins were committed, but only by a very few bad apples.

This, of course, begs the question of how many molesters have gone unreported. A common feature of the victims’ stories is that they were warned no one would believe them if they turned in the priest. Certainly they had reason to fear being subjected to shame in the small societies of Catholic parishes of the 1960s and 1970s.

For the sake of this brief argument, let’s make the unlikely statement that we have now caught all the guilty priests. Statistically, they may constitute a small percentage of the priesthood, but one need not sodomize a child to share the guilt. There were the bishops who knew about this behavior and shuffled the priests around, rather than turn them over to the authorities as they should have and so the number grows.

There are the priests who work in diocesan administration, handling the paperwork for the transfers – so the number grows. Let’s not minimize the guilt of this latter group. Stop and think about their actions. They knew children were being raped and they obfuscated, shuffled priests and hid the crimes. They bullied the victims’ parents into silence, using the faith and obedience of their flocks as tools against them.

Here in Vermont, then-bishop of Burlington, John Marshall, in the 1970s told Catholic prosecutors that if his priests’ crimes were brought to light, the prosecutors would be guilty of “the sin of scandal.” A school was named for this man recently.

So there were the pederasts, the bishops and the priest administrators. There were also the pastors and associates who served alongside the pedophiles, some of whom probably turned their fellow priests in to the bishops – but not the police. They too, knew and so the number grows still larger.

I’ve known priests all my life. The priests of a diocese are a fraternity, like members of the same police force or a military unit. They know each other very well; their capacity for gossip is unrivaled. Consider the case of Father Robert Trupia, a molester whose predilections were so well known in the diocese of Tuscon, Arizona that other priests referred to him as the “chicken hawk.” What a wonderful inside joke. Ha, ha, ha.

And what of the rank and file? Surely, many have left the church over these scandals, swelling the tide that was already flowing away from the church’s insistence on making itself irrelevant to the concerns of its people. For those who remain, it’s easier to keep blinders on and pretend nothing happened or that it’s all in the past.

Since we began with a gospel, let’s end with one, Matthew, chapter 25: “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do to me.”

© Mark Floegel, 2010

Two stories in Wednesday’s Washington Post: The first was about Father Tim Jones, an Anglican priest at the parish of St. Lawrence in York, England. From the pulpit last Sunday, Fr. Tim said shoplifting is not a sin, if the act was caused by need instead of greed. He encouraged his parishioners – should they need to shoplift – to do it from big chain stores and not a locally–owned mom-and-pop store and to not take more than they absolutely need to get by.

The sermon generated plenty of attention, much of critical. Archdeacon Richard Seed promptly rejected Fr. Tim’s point of view on the Anglican Church’s website and has called Fr. Tim in on the carpet.

Fr. Tim says the frenzy misses the main point of the sermon. “The point I’m making is that when we shut down every socially acceptable avenue for people in need, then the only avenue left is the socially unacceptable one,” he said

“What I’m against is the way society has become ever more comfortable with the people at the very bottom, and blinded to their needs,” Fr. Tim said. Among the classes of justified shoplifters, he said, are people who are legally entitled to government welfare benefits but have the benefits delayed for bureaucratic reasons.

Twelve years ago, another Anglican priest in the UK, John Papworth, told the BBC that shoplifting from corporations is not immoral, because corporations are not people and therefore cannot be sinned against. Mr. Papworth was expelled from the Church of England for his remarks. We’ll see how Fr. Tim fares.

In the case of each priest, many tongue-tsking critics take pains to note that shoplifting raise prices for all of us, in that corporations pass their losses along to the consumer. As it was 12 years ago, it’s worth noting that corporations pass along the cost of obscene executive salaries and bonuses or the price of corporate misfeasance and malfeasance. We hear more grumbling about these costs today than we did in the go-go 90s, but no change looms on the horizon. The Post also reported Wednesday that employees who promised to give back their bonuses at taxpayer-rescued AIG, in fact did not.

On this side of the pond, a Roman Catholic priest at St. Michael parish in Garden City, South Carolina won $100,000 for his parish building fund in a poker tournament. The priest, Fr. Andrew Trapp, missed the million-dollar first prize in the tournament, but came out ahead for his parish nonetheless. The AP story about Fr. Andrew noted that he also entered the tourney to “strike a public relations blow for priests.”

Fr. Andrew, at 28 the youngest priest in the statewide diocese of Charleston, received permission from both his pastor and his bishop before entering the tournament. He wore his roman collar throughout and was filmed saying mass for the final episode of the televised tournament. Even with Fr. Andrew’s 100 large, the building fund is still $1 million short of it’s $5 million goal.

Fr. Andrew compared the tournament to being on a game show. Instead of answering trivia questions, he played cards. He said his talent for card playing is a gift from God that he uses for good purposes. Fr. Andrew says gambling – in moderation – is not a vice. Apparently, the numbers 100,000 and 1,000,000 fall within Fr. Andrew’s (and his superiors’) definition of moderation.

But it’s Christmas Eve, when we celebrate the birth of a child – in a barn, to an unwed mother. I wonder about that barn. Did Joseph and Mary have permission to be there or were they squatting? The crèches we see this time of year look very staid and pious, but I think the real thing was dirty and drafty and sweaty and bloody. Joseph – according to Hebrew law – should have been nowhere near the place, since Mary, having just given birth, was considered unclean.

Joseph, however, had already stepped outside the law, by refusing to turn his fiancée, pregnant by someone else, over to the authorities for stoning. Within days of the birth, the whole family would be running off to exile in Egypt.

Their child, Jesus, was no great heeder of statutes, unsurprising, given his patrimony. He was called out because his followers were caught working on the Sabbath and he himself got arrested for causing a ruckus in the temple in Jerusalem.

Christmas week and two priests are in the news – one praised for gambling for a new church, one punished for his ah… innovative method for feeding the hungry and clothing the naked.

God bless us, every one.

© Mark Floegel, 2009

P.S. – By the way, Wednesday’s Post also reported that the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, approves of the Simpsons. And if you’re still in the Hanukkah spirit, there’s now a professional dreidel league.

Sunday is also the 66th anniversary of the execution of Franz Jaegerstaetter. Mr. Jaegerstaetter was an Austrian farmer beheaded by German military authorities for refusing to take part in what he considered an unjust war.

Although it’s fun to badmouth Nazis, what was done to Mr. Jaegerstaetter was not unusual for the time. The penalty for desertion was death in armies on both sides of that war and while some avenues of conscientious objection were open, no nation allowed its citizens to disavow the war effort.

Mr. Jaegerstaetter’s actions were based on his religious convictions and while one need not be religious to recognize the evil of the Nazis – or any unjust war – Mr. Jaegerstaetter’s case illustrates the yawning gulf that often opens between preaching and practice.

From accounts of his life, Franz Jaegerstaetter was a typical country youth who sowed his wild oats, got in his share of fistfights, etc. etc. In 1936, he got married, settled down and began a serious investigation of religion and morality.

When the German-Austrian “Anschluss” of 1938 was put to a general vote, Mr. Jaegerstaetter was the only one in his village to oppose it, citing a dream in which he saw a gleaming train that thousands of people ran to board. He heard a voice say, “This train is going to hell.” On waking, he associated the train with Nazism.

So yeah, people probably thought he was a kook. Conscription time came and Franz refused to go. When he cited his faith as the ground of his refusal to fight, he was urged to join up to prevent godless Bolsheviks from destroying European Christianity. (This must have been one of the earliest sightings of “Kill a Commie for Christ.”)

He was offered a place as a non-fighting medic. He refused. He said his objection was not to killing another person in wartime per se, but that any participation on his part would be an admission Hitler’s regime was legitimate and Hitler’s wars were just.

Did Hitler really need Franz Jaegerstaetter’s legitimacy? He already had Goering and Goebbels and von Ribbontrop. Was Jaegerstaetter so grandiose, that he thought the withholding of his consent would matter to anyone? Or is it different? When Jaegerstaetter accepted responsibility for his single grain of sand, did he make it morally impossible for anyone to do less? The Talmud says that someone who saves one life saves the whole world. Perhaps the opposite is also true. Perhaps someone who allows one person to die damns the whole world.

So was Jaegerstaetter Christ-like? In his death, did he accept all the sins of the Germanic people? I don’t think so. The only soul he owned was his own.

His priest and bishop urged him to join the army and fight. They said any citizen who obeyed duly appointed authority was absolved from personal guilt. (Clearly, they had funny ideas about “duly appointed authority.”) Mr. Jaegerstaetter refused. He was asked to think of his family – his wife and four daughters. He wrote: “Many actually believe quite simply that things have to be the way they are. If this should happen to mean they are obliged to commit injustice, then they believe that others are responsible… I am convinced that it is still best that I speak the truth even though it costs me my life.”

And so it did. After the war, American sociologist Gordon Zahn investigated Mr. Jaegerstaetter’s life. The Bishop of Linz, who’d pleaded with Mr. Jaegerstaetter to go along and get along, told Mr. Zahn – even with full awareness of the horrors of the Nazi regime – that Mr. Jaegerstaetter was wrong and that the true heroes were the Catholics who obeyed, joined up, fought, killed and died.

A bishop’s political reality is precarious. The good shepherd, Jesus said, leaves his flock to find the stray sheep. What if the whole flock strays and only one sheep remains in the green pastures by still waters? Surely, the shepherd must chase the strays, but must he also condone the straying?

A German youth who did join – first the Hitler Youth and then the German army – was Josef Ratzinger. Now he is Pope Benedict XVI. In 2007, he beatified Franz Jaegerstaetter, moving him along the path to sainthood. Pope Benedict says he did not espouse Nazi beliefs. He says he joined and served against his will. I believe him. I am in no position to judge his life (or anyone else’s, for that matter).

I will, however, meditate Sunday on my own failings. At what points does my life touch injustice or evil? Modern society is very good at the division of labor. Like an auto assembly line, we all have to contribute just a bit for something to happen, whether that something is good or evil. Just because someone else is more responsible for injustice in our society does not absolve me of my role – even if the bishop says it does. That’s just another reminder not to let anyone do my thinking for me.

© Mark Floegel, 2009

As the current case goes to the jury, today’s Burlington Free Press has a story about our current bishop, Salvatore Matano, who in 1980, was director of personnel for the diocese of Providence in Rhode Island and oversaw the transfer of a priest who’d molested children.

Bishop Matano defended himself by saying he didn’t know why the diocese ordered the priest’s transfer. The Free Press reports that then-Father Matano received a hand-written note from Bishop Kenneth Angell saying, “Sal, for confidential reasons, Father Roland M. Lepire now at St. Aloysius in Woonsocket must be transferred at once. He should not be reassigned in the Woonsocket area.”

Fr. Matano may indeed not have been told the reason for the transfer, but it doesn’t take much to read between those lines. Further, when Fr. Matano suggested Fr. Lepire be assigned to a retreat house (conveniently away from children), the transfer was vetoed by a nun working at the facility, saying she did not want Fr. Lepire on the premises.

So, we asked to believe that the nun figured out what was up, but the director of diocesan personnel remained blissfully ignorant. Keep you mouth shut, stay loyal to your superiors and too bad about what happens to the kids. That, sadly, is how one gets to be a bishop in today’s American Catholic church.

Saturday, a friend confessed that he has been indulging in schadenfreude. (Schadenfreude: noun, to take pleasure in another’s misfortune – German.) “I know it’s wrong, but I can’t help enjoying watching the Republicans self-destruct.” He’s right; it’s wrong. I’ve indulged the same guilty pleasure – mea culpa redux.

It’s wrong to take pleasure in the wreckage strewn across the American landscape by the people running the country, because it is our country that’s being ruined. It is, however, important that these moral and ethical failings come to light now, before the election, because voters need to know about them and act on that knowledge when the curtain closes on the voting booth.

Wednesday’s Washington Post said stories about ex-Rep. Mark Foley’s (R-FL) inappropriate behavior with House pages had been noted, by the pages at least, since 1995, the year the GOP took over the lower house of Congress. The pages may not have told the authorities in ’95, but it’s clear the House leadership has been aware of this issue for three or four years and while they took deliberate actions to keep the whole thing quiet, they took no action to protect the underage citizens entrusted to their care.

Now that the sad story is being revealed, House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) and Rep. Thomas Reynolds (R-NY), chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, who look to be the primary cover-up culprits, are puffing up their chests and resisting calls for their resignations.

In Vermont, Martha Rainville, the Republican candidate for our state’s lone House seat, got caught plagiarizing policy language from three other candidates (two Democratic, one Republican). She fired a staffer and revamped her campaign web site. Then she was accused of covering up a pornography scandal in her former job as commander of the Vermont National Guard. Unclear yet how it will all shake out, but Ms. Rainville has for now adopted the Republican Posture.

That posture – chest and chin thrust out – is a common one in Republican Washington. It was all too much on display in the excerpts from two new books published over the weekend. It seems the higher up the chain of command one goes the more pronounced the swagger becomes.

Karen DeYoung’s “Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell” draws a detailed picture of the lengths to which Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld went to marginalize and humiliate former Secretary of State Colin Powell or anyone else who disagreed with his lunatic plans for the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. (Humiliate: verb, to cause a person a painful loss of pride, self-respect or dignity.)

Bob Woodward’s “State of Denial” shows the same virus rampant in the White House, reaching epidemic states in the offices of vice president and president. The United States of America has been ruled for the last five years by people who have no vision, no competence, no compassion – all they have is the arrogant, swaggering posture. They brush aside laws, the Constitution and international treaties with no regard for anything other than feeding more money and power to their already-bloated cronies. The leading posturer in the judicial branch is Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the man who engineered this mess in December 2000.

They chastise critics and opponents as “weak” and “wafflers,” because perhaps those people lack the same idiotic swagger. It doesn’t mean you’re weak if you admit you might not have all the answers or that maybe the best answer isn’t the perfect answer. It might mean you have a measure of humility. (Humility: noun, an awareness of one’s own imperfections.)

They don’t know that humility and humiliation are far different things; as a result they’ve humiliated us all in the eyes of the world and history. We will all need a strong draft of humility to repair the damage they’ve done. Let’s hope the season of repentance and days of atonement are not yet passed. It’s going to be a big schlep.

© Mark Floegel, 2006

Anti-death penalty advocates are, by definition, abolitionists – they’re trying to abolish the death penalty. The word “abolitionist” in America, however, connotes pre-Civil War anti-slavery activists. For a moment, I tried to imagine the loneliness of an abolitionist in 1850 or 1855. In those days, cotton was the number one American export. The value of exported cotton exceeded the value of all other American exports combined. All that money went into the hands of a relatively small group of men, who also wielded an inversely disproportionate amount of political power. Abolitionists, on the other hand, were a marginal group of freed slaves, mild-mannered do-gooders like Quakers and a few violent militia types like John Brown.

So it is with today’s abolitionists, small groups of advocates who sit vigil outside the nation’s prison death houses or lobby legislatures to overturn death penalties. While there is some overlap among those who oppose the death penalty and those who oppose abortion, death penalty opponents have never been able to rally tens of thousands of supporters to the Mall in Washington, as those who oppose abortion do on a regular basis.

On March 1, the abolitionists won a victory when the Supreme Court outlawed execution as a penalty for crimes committed before age 18. Justice Anthony Kennedy, for the 5-4 majority, wrote that the under-18 abolition is called for now by the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”

Justice Kennedy’s words were scorned on the Senate floor by Republican John Cornyn, himself a former Texas Supreme Court justice. Sen. Cornyn took particular exception to Justice Kennedy’s citing the laws of every other nation on Earth prohibiting the execution of children. In his speech, Mr. Cornyn linked decisions such as the Supreme Court’s to the recent spate of deadly violence toward judges and their families.

We as a nation should not always follow the example of other nations. We should not let the opinions of the world stop us from being the first to do the right thing, from taking the next step in the evolution of human civilization. Unfortunately, America has not taken civilization forward in recent decades. World opinion should prevent America from the being the last nation to stop doing the wrong thing. America was last among the western democracies to give up slavery and the only one that fought an internal war over ending the practice.

Many of the politicians now kneeling beside the pope’s bier, who recently clamored for a “culture of life” while intruding in Schiavo family affairs, are dedicated to America’s preservation of the death penalty.

In Monday’s New York Times, Sister Helen Prejean (author of “Dead Man Walking”) pointed out that in September 1997, Pope John Paul II removed from Catholic dogma the loophole that allowed the death penalty in cases of “absolute necessity.” For nearly eight years now, the Catholic Church has opposed the death penalty in every instance.

Sen. Cornyn would argue that the U.S government should pay no heed to the Vatican, a foreign entity – and I agree. But if we are to ignore the Vatican in our civic affairs, we should consistently ignore the Vatican. If a politician wants to hide behind the pope’s soutane on abortion or the Schiavo case, he or she should not scorn the pope as a foreigner on the death penalty. If bishops decide they have a duty to withhold the Eucharist from Catholic politicians who support abortion rights, they should similarly withhold it from politicians who support the death penalty (or the Iraq invasion).

As a Catholic, I oppose the death penalty because it takes days and years away from a criminal who might use them to find repentance and redemption. That’s a religious view; as a citizen, I have no right to force my religious views on Americans who don’t share them. As a citizen, I oppose the death penalty because it is inequitably applied, because the police and the courts too often put the wrong person on death row.

Let’s finish the work of abolishing the death penalty – not because John Paul II wanted us to or because every civilized nation on Earth already has – let’s abolish the death penalty because it’s the right thing to do.

© Mark Floegel, 2005

Three weeks ago, Rick Santorum, the Republican junior senator from Pennsylvania gave an interview to the Associated Press in which he compared homosexual sex to bigamy, polygamy and incest and said states should be free to outlaw homosexual acts, even performed behind closed doors by consenting adults.

In the interview, Mr. Santorum made a clear distinction between homosexuality and homosexual acts. “I have no problem with homosexuality,” he said. “I have a problem with homosexual acts.”

Senator Santorum is a Roman Catholic and his statement reflects precisely the official Catholic position on homosexuality – accept the person, condemn the action. The AP interview and the controversy that followed it, remind me of the 1960 election, when John Kennedy went to great lengths to assure Americans that, if elected, he would not take orders from the Pope on public policy.

Two decades later, Catholic Governor Mario Cuomo defended his pro-abortion position by saying he refused to impose his religious beliefs on others because he did not want others to impose their religious beliefs on him. Another two decades pass and Senator Santorum is conforming his views on public policy with the Pope and he seems willing to impose his views on others.

For me, the most disturbing thing Rick Santorum said in the interview was that, in his opinion, there is no constitutional right to privacy. Mr. Santorum may be able to unerringly quote Catholic doctrine, but it’s shocking that a member of the United States Senate thinks there is no constitutional right to privacy.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution makes clear that Americans shall not be subject to unreasonable searches. If that’s not a right to privacy, I don’t know what is. Rick Santorum seems to think the police should have a right to barge into our homes to see if anyone is committing what he calls “acts outside of traditional heterosexual relationships.”

Aside from the specific protection afforded under the Fourth Amendment, the Constitution guarantees all Americans are equal before the law. That means there can’t be one law for straights and another for gays and lesbians.

If Senator Santorum has his way, where would he draw the line? Perhaps states could outlaw inter-racial relationships as “non-traditional.” How about inter-faith marriage? The Pope frowns on that too; maybe we should outlaw “Bridget Loves Bernie.”

Mr. Santorum is free to believe and worship as he chooses, but he took an oath, swearing to God, that he would uphold the Constitution of the United States of America. Having sworn that oath, he has an obligation to live up to it.

It seems, however, that Senator Santorum sees fit to ignore his oath on issues he feels strongly about, especially if his strong feelings are shared by his political base on the religious right.

The worst aspect of this sorry affair is the hypocrisy. While Rick Santorum is willing to march lock-step with the Vatican if it means denying constitutional protection to gays and lesbians, he becomes conveniently deaf when the Pope announces moral opposition to the war in Iraq.

(c) Mark Floegel, 2003

Researchers have announced the tentative identification of genes that may be linked to schizophrenia. That’s good news, but it’s gotten me thinking. What would life be like if I had developed schizophrenia 20 years ago, just as I was graduating from college? What cruel delusions would I hear the voices in my head whispering?

“The president says we’re at war, but he won’t say who we’re at war with. The military has taken prisoners from several different countries and they’re keeping them locked up on a military base in Cuba. They all have to wear orange suits and no one can talk to them. And Americans, there are Americans who have been arrested too and put in special jails and no one can talk to them either. And the middle eastern men, there are dozens of middle eastern men in jail and the government won’t say who they are or where they are or how many or what they might have done and I hear they’re being secretly deported. And the president, he wasn’t really elected. He lost the election, but he got his brother, the governor of Florida, to put in a fix and cheat people out of their right to vote.”

If Mark Floegel of 1982 thought he’d be saying these kinds of things in 20 years, he might have gone over to the mental health clinic to get checked out. Problem is, the more I think about paranoid delusions, the more I come up with.

“There are people out there trying to blow up airplanes with bombs in their shoes, so if you’re in an airplane, you have to be careful if someone starts playing with their shoes. The people in the airports make you take off your shoes before you can get on the airplane.”

And it’s not just paranoia about the government. Paranoia comes in many denominations. Roman Catholic, for example.

“The priests have been molesting children. It’s been going on for decades, but no one knew about it, because there was a conspiracy among the bishops and cardinals to keep it secret. Anybody who got molested, the church would pay them money to keep quiet. The police and prosecutors looked the other way for years because the church is so powerful.”

But these are only the recent ones. As it turns out, I might have gone schizophrenic in 1982. There was plenty of delusional thinking in the 1980s, if you knew where to look.

“The president says Iran is a terrorist nation, but we’re secretly selling them weapons to use in their war against Iraq, but we’re selling weapons to Iraq, too. We’re supposed to hate Iran, but we’re sending them Bibles and cakes shaped like keys. All the money we make by selling weapons to our enemies, it goes into Swiss bank accounts and we use it to finance revolutions against governments in Central America.”

If I really were a paranoid schizophrenic, the solution would be simple; I’d go live in an institution for the rest of my life. The mental illness we suffer from is not personal, it’s social. We’ve allowed ourselves to indulge in all kinds of delusions – that politicians can be trusted to use power sparingly and wisely, that business leaders will be responsible stewards for investors and conscientious supervisors for employees. A few years ago, two guys wrote a book called “Dow 36,000.” Were they crazy? Was their publisher? How about the people who bought the book?

In security, the economy, in politics, we’ve all been disillusioned lately. There’s more to come in the months ahead, but we should not see this as an opportunity for paranoia. What lies before us is a lucid interval – a chance for social sanity. Let’s make the most of it.

(C) Mark Floegel, 2002

It’s not the first time this particular type of scandal has erupted and, sad to say, it won’t be the last. The pederast priest has become a stock character in the national consciousness, along with the unscrupulous politician and the violence-prone postal worker.

The problem is not that a few bad apples have slipped into the clergy. The solution is not another empty promise about the church policing itself. There’s a larger problem here, one that calls for a larger solution.

The Roman Catholic Church has four characteristics that have led to the current state of affairs – it is monolithic, conservative, obedient and opaque. Until the church addresses these areas, we can expect more tragedy and scandal.

The church is monolithic. There’s one pope, one Vatican and a one-size-fits-all hierarchy. Everyone in that hierarchy, down to the lowest altar server, knows his or her place.

The church is conservative. Conservative in the truest sense of the word, which is “resistant to change.” Of course, the church should stand for some eternal truths, but the Roman church conducts itself as if the clock stopped in the 15th century. That’s why so many people find the church out of touch with their everyday lives. That’s why there’s been a 40-year shortage of priests. What capable, spiritually vivacious man would want to enter the priesthood? Instead of reforming itself to remain vibrant, the church lowered its standards, neglected psychological screening and threw open seminary doors to anyone willing to pay lip service to the party line.

The church is obedient. It goes with the hierarchy. If a bishop sees fit to ignore, transfer and placate pedophiles, everyone else decides it’s not their job to act responsibly. In New Mexico, one perverted priest’s predilections were so well known his fellow priests called him “The Chickenhawk,” but no one did anything about it. When it comes to covering up for a corrupt colleague, the black wall of the priesthood is worse than the blue wall of the police.

The church is opaque. Many bishops have been surprised by the extent of recent revelations. They knew they had a problem in their own diocese, but didn’t know what was happening in the next diocese over. Another factor in the church’s opacity is an extra-strong aversion to bad publicity. The pope claims the ability to speak without error; bishops and priests claim the right to forgive sins on God’s behalf. An institution that believes it holds the power to send immortal souls to paradise or eternal damnation will not gladly suffer criticism from the likes of the Boston Globe.

In response to this huge crisis, the Vatican is threatening to invalidate the ordination of gay priests, even though the overwhelming majority of pederasts are heterosexual. Like I said, 15th century.

Here’s what the church, in America and in Rome, needs to do:

1- Turn over every case of sexual abuse, every suspected case, every alleged
case, to the criminal authorities. Accused people are afforded all the protection they need by the Constitution. We don’t need the church interfering.

2 – Stop persecuting our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. God made us all loving beings in His image.

3 – End the priest shortage. There are thousands of women and men, married and single, who are far more capable of leading the Catholic Church than Anthony O’Connell of Palm Beach and Bernard Law of Boston. Start ordaining them.

4 – Priests need to open their mouths. None of the above will happen as long as priests continue to bite their tongues and call it obedience. The Catholic Church needs Christian soldiers, not German soldiers.

(C) Mark Floegel, 2002

Recent history tells us Kenneth Angell is bishop of Burlington, in what is now Vermont. Late last year, the Vermont Supreme Court decreed same-sex unions must be legally recognized and left it to the state legislature to determine whether gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry or if the state should establish a domestic partnership law, bestowing the legal equivalent of marriage. As you might imagine, gay marriage is the big issue of the 2000 legislative session. Vermonters have been turning out by the thousand to attend public hearings. The “God hates fags” people from the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas put in an appearance a few months ago, then quickly ran away.

Bishop Angell, our own anti-Valentine, stormed to his bully pulpit to denounce same-sex marriage and ordered Vermont Catholics to join him in a holy war against civil rights for gays and lesbians. The bishop not only opposes gay marriage, but even the civil equivalent. “God’s plan – one man and one woman,” say the buttons of the bishop’s supporters. Bishop Angell says he is not anti-gay, but feels he has to defend marriage.

Well, if it’s defending marriage the bishop proposes, I’m afraid he’s got quite a stack in his “in” box. Although the bishop is in the paper every other day “defending marriage,” none of his statements condemn spousal abuse, better known as wife beating. I haven’t heard Bishop Angell speak out against mail order brides – “Lovely Asian ladies long to do your bidding” – or the all-night, drive through, Elvis impersonator wedding chapels in Las Vegas and Reno. Or when one of those miscreant Kennedys plunks down a couple grand to buy quickie annulment. Not a peep about any of that. But when a man and a man or a woman and a woman want to stand up in public and promise to “love, honor and cherish, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live” – only then does Bishop Angell get aroused and come storming out of the cathedral.

Fortunately for Vermont, the Episcopal and United Methodist bishops and several rabbis disagree. They support and publicly call for gay marriage in Vermont. Bishop Angell has allies, too. The Mormons – who are out there defending marriage as one man and five women.

The students at St. Michael’s College, a Catholic institution of higher education, showed up to demonstrate at the statehouse in support of gay marriage. Their placards carried messages of love, tolerance and inclusion – three things I always thought should be at the heart of the Catholic message in America today. A priest who was at the capitol with Bishop Angell shouted at the students, screaming that they should have the decency to stop chanting while he was trying to lead a prayer. The poor man didn’t have to wits to know he was the indecent one – a prayer for intolerance is no prayer at all.

February is also the month for Burlington’s “Winter is a Drag Ball.” Vermonters, gay and straight, dress in drag and party like queens through the long winter night. No one seems to mind this – Bishop Angell does not crash the gate, flinging holy water in every direction. For all I know, he may be there, decked out in pink chiffon.

That’s the strangest part of this marriage thing – when gays and lesbians act queer, which is to say different, no one seems to mind. They fit into the narrow slot society has assigned them. It’s only when lesbians and gays start yearning for mainstream – even conservative – lifestyles, wanting to join the military, wanting get married – that the feathers start to fly.

(C) Mark Floegel, 2000