{"id":819,"date":"2010-03-26T23:21:55","date_gmt":"2010-03-27T04:21:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=819"},"modified":"2010-12-19T21:59:49","modified_gmt":"2010-12-20T02:59:49","slug":"benedict-unfit-to-serve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=819","title":{"rendered":"Benedict: Unfit to Serve"},"content":{"rendered":"

Previous I Read The News Today Entry<\/a> | Next I Read The News Today Entry<\/a><\/p>\n

Benedict: Unfit to Serve<\/h2>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It seems pretty clear, from two reports in yesterday\u2019s New York Times, that the Pope was implicated in two separate coverups of child abuse by priests.\u00a0 In one instance from 1996<\/a>, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,\u00a0a body with some\u00a0jurisdiction to sanction priestly abuse, ignored two complaints about the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who apparently molested 200 boys at a school for the deaf, and then, to all appearances, Ratzinger, through his second-in-command, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, put a stop to a secret canonical trial of Father Murphy.\u00a0 In another instance from 1980<\/a>, it appeared that then-Archbishop Ratzinger lent himself and his archdiocese to the process of shifting around rather than exposing and discharging a priest, in this case a Rev. Peter Hulleman, known to have molested children.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Acknowledging that the practice Benedict engaged in \u2013 try to get them treated, hush the matter up, and put them back in service \u2013 was standard operating procedure for the Church of that era, for my money these revelations show that Benedict is absolutely unqualified to serve as pontiff.\u00a0 I\u2019m not saying Benedict is evil (I have no idea), but I am saying he\u2019s not papal timber.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If the faith is about anything it must be about the truth.\u00a0 Either there is a God who gives our lives meaning and purpose, or there isn\u2019t.\u00a0 And those who teach that God exists are pulling against the weight of\u00a0considerable evidence, it must be said. \u00a0If they are to dispel our reasonable doubts, they must be visibly and consistently honest and reliable.\u00a0 Someone who has participated in a coverup of criminal activity simply cannot command our trust that way.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There\u2019s more to it than that, though.\u00a0 I know from my own religious upbringing that a large part of the process of developing faith is being taught by holy people.\u00a0 People who are close to God can help us see Him\/Her.\u00a0 With all the disillusionments I and every Catholic of my generation has gone through, I still believe there are holy people (many of them being of other creeds, I can add, but that\u2019s okay; they still help us understand and believe).\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Church has invested a great deal of energy in trying to make us picture a\u00a0guild of allegedly celibate males as the acme and epitome of teachable holiness.\u00a0 Look at the pantheon of canonized saints (i.e. men and women whom the Church has picked out as patterns of holiness), and pick out how many of them were explicitly sexually active during their holy time.\u00a0 You won’t find many.\u00a0 (Saints sexually active in their misspent youth like Augustine don\u2019t count towards that total.)\u00a0\u00a0Look\u00a0for the women.\u00a0 You won’t find many.\u00a0 Look\u00a0for lay people.\u00a0 You won’t find many.\u00a0\u00a0It’s priests\u00a0who are the vanguard of official sainthood, and priests we are mainly encouraged to look to, both those in the great hereafter and those who are here.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s time to\u00a0stop looking so fixedly at the priests, at least as we recruit them today.\u00a0 It\u2019s time to stop pretending that celibacy is either healthy or achievable for most people, or that it is a particularly reliable path to holiness.\u00a0 It\u2019s time to stop pretending that most priests can stop having sex lives, or that the supposed suppression of their sexuality\u00a0makes them holier with any reliability.\u00a0 It\u2019s time to recognize that the reason most people who do it\u00a0gravitate towards a life of ostensible priestly celibacy is that it frees them from something, be it demands for the give-and-take of family life,\u00a0expectations of heterosexuality, or scrutiny of their activities with children.\u00a0 It has precious little, much of the time, to do with holiness.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Let me be clear; I am not saying that celibacy is never achievable and\/or never<\/em> frees people up to be holy.\u00a0 Sometimes it achieves those ends, and I have been fortunate enough to know some splendid priests I believe were able to follow bona fide celibacy as a path to holiness.\u00a0 (I should add though that the very holiest priest I ever knew, the one who had the most to do with my beliefs to this day,\u00a0I am pretty certain was actively gay, God rest his soul.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 What I am\u00a0saying is this:\u00a0that\u00a0populating the priesthood (the supposed holiness specialists, if you will)\u00a0solely\u00a0with\u00a0purportedly celibate males has proven a disaster in good measure because it encourages the flock to look for patterns of holiness amongst a group whose members will more often than not be either sexually or socially dysfunctional to a degree, or closeted homosexuals who may have chosen ostensible celibacy as a cover for something good and natural but not necessarily spiritual, or at worst frank predators who chose ostensible celibacy as a cover for something bad that was certainly not spiritual. (A friend told me that the dullest, most content-less sermons she ever sat through were delivered by a priest she later heard had been an abuser.)<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The deception that Benedict contributed to in his by-the-late-20th<\/sup>-Century-book approach to priestly child abusers was all about shoring up that\u00a0image of the priesthood and the mystique that made it almost the exclusive pattern of holiness\u00a0\u2013 and by implication distracting the flock from the more reliable, not to mention applicable,\u00a0exemplars of faith, most of whom would be lay people of every marital status and sexual orientation.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I cannot count how many Catholics I know who have been turned away from their faith, not so much by the abuse as\u00a0by the coverup.\u00a0 We need a pope who had no association with those callous lies.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We need to start focusing on the people in our midst who really can tell us about God — and few of them\u00a0are priests.\u00a0 The present pope will never tolerate that shift of focus.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And we need to integrate the priesthood now.\u00a0 No good can come of excluding the sexually active, the avowedly homosexual, the married, and the female any more.\u00a0 We have seen that exclusion, and we know how it inevitably\u00a0ends,\u00a0with scandal and coverups.\u00a0 The present pope will never allow the priesthood the required\u00a0kind of inclusiveness.\u00a0 But it needs to happen.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For all these reasons, Benedict should go.<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn<\/p>\n

Previous I Read The News Today Entry<\/a> | Next I Read The News Today Entry<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If those who teach us about God are to dispel our reasonably doubts, they must be visibly and consistently honest and reliable. Someone who has participated in a coverup of criminal activity simply cannot command our trust that way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[791],"tags":[903,902,898,893,896,892,894,890,891,901,897,899,900],"class_list":["post-819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-i-read-the-news-today","tag-benedict-xvi","tag-cardinal-joseph-ratzinger","tag-cardinal-tarciso-bertone","tag-celibacy","tag-congregation-of-the-doctrine-of-the-faith","tag-holiness","tag-homosexuality","tag-pedophiles","tag-priests","tag-ratzinger","tag-rev-lawrence-c-murphy","tag-rev-peter-hulleman","tag-st-augustine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=819"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":823,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819\/revisions\/823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}