Does that seem unfair? Does it feel like I'm piling on? If it does, I'm not surprised. I once felt that way myself following the breaking of the Mount Cashel scandal here in Canada
Last round of scandals I read a commentary in a Catholic publication that argued that some people were exploiting the scandals to destroy the Catholic Church's authority to teach sexual morality. It is no doubt true that some enemies of the Church are relishing the advantage the Church has handed them but the Church did hand it to them.
The Catholic Church's authority to teach on matters of sexual morality has indeed been severely undermined but almost all that damage was done by the Church herself.
It's going to take decades to earn that authority back. And it is worth underlining here that the blame lies entirely with the hierarchy and it is overwhelmingly their responsibility to fix it. A good start would be to stop thinking of this as something that happened to the Church—it is something the Church did to herself. I think Benedict gets this. I'm not so sure about a lot of others.
The first post in this series is here.
The next post in the series is here.
This shows you how far afield the Church became after they seemed to toss aside "Love God and love your neighbor as yourself," in favor of "biblical scholarship." That was the beginning of the end as I see it, but it--and what followed--provided the context in which the sexual abuse scandals were allowed to happen.
ReplyDeleteThis really hit me about 4 years ago during an Easter Vigil service. I had gone to that service for many years primarily because its never crowded because its long, and people don't want to sit through all the readings, so you can always get a seat and your not sitting on top of the person next to you. This one particular year the fact that all but two of the readings are from the Old Testament really struck me. As I thought about it more and more, it became clear to me that the Church essentially turned Jesus into a policeman--a Super Cop--for enforcing the Old Law. Since that year I have timed my arrival at the Easter Vigil for just after the Old Testament readings are finished, I told my priest and he agreed with me! I know, I know, Jesus said He was the fulfillment of the Old Law, and apparently that has been interpreted as a reinforcement or validation of it. I don't interpret it that way. Jesus' message was clear and simple "Love God and love your neighbor as yourself." Jesus never said anything about sexual morality, save for the woman caught in adultery. But as I understand it, under Mosaic Law, adultery was defined specifically as sleeping with your brother's wife. Loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself is much more difficult to quantify and much more difficult for the Church to charge people with crimes or sins against it, or exert control over them because of it.