The Silence We Keep: A Nun's View of the Catholic Priest Scandal (3 page)

The Middle Ages were no less notorious for the rampant debauchery of the Catholic Church’s popes, bishops, and priests. One twelfth-century bishop fathered sixty-five children (imagine child support!), and Pope John XII (955-964), known for adultery and incest, had no interest whatsoever in spiritual matters and died of a heart attack in the bed of a married woman. Some believe the woman’s husband found them together and beat him to death. Most errant of the “bad popes,” though, has to be Pope Innocent VIII (d. 1492). He was the first Pope to brag publicly about his brood of “bastards” and be forgiven by his priestly brothers for being so open and honest. Sound familiar? As much as we’d like to take comfort in the fact that this is now and that was then, I’m not sure that the priesthood today is much different than it was in the Middle Ages. What was called clerical concubinage in the Middle Ages appears to be an “unbroken tradition” still alive in the priesthood. It was still alive in our home parish of Saint Stanislaus, and nearly everyone I ask tells stories of places where it’s still alive in their parish. We’ve always accepted priests who live married lives.

Few Catholics express grave concern over monogamous clerical relationships, least of all the priesthood. Most just seem relieved that it’s not pedophilia or some other sex crime. We’ve grown so accustomed to that kind of spiritual hypocrisy that we
no longer notice and rarely seem to care. While Catholics for centuries supported the church’s teaching on priestly celibacy, we’ve also learned how to accept in silence all priestly evidence to the contrary. Only now are we beginning to see how devastating and deadly such hypocrisy can be for the priesthood, and the people as well.

One sexual activity that has never been accepted by anyone but the Catholic priesthood is the sexual abuse of children. Even the most silent of Catholic women knows outrage when it comes to child abuse. How could the Catholic Church and its holy fathers let that happen? How could they not see the clear criminal difference? And how long, O Lord, has this been going on in the priesthood? It’s as though for decades, if not centuries, every priest who knew of child abuse chose at some soulful level to ignore it and let it be. In the real world that kind of thinking bears the criminal sounds of silence, so much so that questions are now being asked about the liability of those clerics who aided and abetted pedophile priests. The soul-stunning question for most Catholics is how our holy fathers could let this happen. How could the leaders of the Catholic Church accept in its priesthood a sexual deviance even the law of the land forbids? And how can they still not see, as the rest of the world can, the evil of their ways?

Even the most faithful and blindly obedient of Catholics dares now to question and challenge the priesthood because no one but the Catholic Church protected priestly pedophilia as if it were just another sexual practice to be overlooked. And no one but the Catholic hierarchy continues to behave as though nothing terrible happened, and to say that even if it did, the priest was not entirely at fault. The kind of thinking we hear today reflected in the statements of church leaders still reveals a quickness to
forgive the priest and a persistent tendency to blame and overlook the victim. In the eyes of the hierarchy, the media bear major blame for inflating the importance of the problem. Every clerical effort continues to be made to keep the whole truth from being spoken. The only prayer we hear now from the priesthood sounds more like that of wishful thinking: “This too shall pass.”

In trying to understand how this could have happened, I found myself returning to the beginning of priesthood. I suspected the roots of this scandal were deeply grounded; this crisis appears to have a very old soul, so to speak, as old as the Catholic Church. All the more reason to return to the beginning and examine how the abuse, the silence, and the criminal thinking started. What happened in the early Christian community that made “priesthood” and “church” necessary? And if an all-male celibate priesthood was the divine answer, what was the divine question? How did the Catholic Church become so obsessed with sex and when did its criminal thinking begin? Those are some of the questions for which you’ll find my answers in the pages ahead.

Once it becomes clear how and why the Catholic priesthood evolved the way it did, it will also become clearer why we are where we are today. In looking closely at how the priesthood evolved, you may wonder more and more, as I surely did, how did we
not
see this coming? Given the history of priesthood, with its scandal and infallibility sitting uncomfortably side by side, falling apart this way was inevitable, as though destined to self-destruct with the same divine sword it pretended to live by. A priesthood that divided against itself simply cannot survive. What we see happening in the priesthood today is a mortal wound that is completely self-inflicted. That’s the clearest sign of divine intervention I know, a sign that hidden transformational forces are at work even in all the silence we keep. God is with us.

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Priesthood in the Beginning

W
HEN I RETURNED
to the beginning of priesthood, I looked first to the Gospels. As Christians, it’s our rule of life as well as our beginning; and as sisters, the Gospels are daily bread. “In the beginning was the Word.” That’s how Saint John, beloved of Jesus, starts his account of the life of Christ. I see it as a divine hint of where we should begin our search, too. Especially since the first verse goes on to tell us point-blank, “The Word was with God and the Word was God.” Which is like saying we can’t get any closer to God than that. The words every true religion finds in their scriptures are the closest, most direct, and most inspired messages they have from their God. The Gospels are where the thinking of the Christian God can be found. That’s where the divine intent behind everything can be found. And that’s where I looked first to see what kind of priesthood God had in mind in sending Jesus Christ into this world. Because the life of Christ is God’s divinely brilliant idea of what priesthood should look like, that’s where I began.

Based on what we find in the New Testament—Gospels, Acts of the Apostles, and the letters of Peter and Paul—we know that celibacy and priesthood were holy and hotly discussed issues in the early Christian community. But the spiritual exercise of celibacy in priesthood is not new with Christianity by any means. Remaining unmarried in service of the deities is as old as religion itself. Virginity was always part of high priesthood for men and women, as is found among the gods and goddesses of ancient
Greece and Rome, as well as those of the Incas and Aztecs. Deities have always called single-heartedly a handful of men and women to do nothing but divine work on earth. Long before Christianity was born, virginity was an essential part of high priesthood.

Inspired as they were by the virgin deities of mythology, many ancient religions evolved with a sacred tradition of celibacy among their divinely enlightened leaders. The vestal virgins of Rome exemplify the extraordinary powers of celibate women. The Hindus even have a celibate god. In the Hindu community of deities, Shiva is worshipped as the god of celibacy and passion (creative power). Hindu ascetics vow celibacy in his service. Among Buddhist priests and nuns celibacy is also vowed, as are nonviolence and poverty. Buddhists believe celibacy to be the fullest expression of our highest state of consciousness. In other words, it’s the key to everlasting happiness. The oldest and truest religions we know all seem to find a divine connection between the practice of celibacy and a powerful experience of God. All found some period of sexual abstinence to be essential preparation for communion with the gods. That’s why celibacy became so important to the meaning of priesthood. Religious leaders were unable to discern the voice of God clearly without it.

In primitive religions, abstaining from sexual activity, temporarily or forever, was the most important way to prepare for communion with God in religious rituals. Similar to fasting in its effect, celibacy was experienced as a source of tremendously creative, even miraculous, energy and the most compassionate of loves. Widows, for example, were singled out in primitive religions as a mysteriously powerful group of women. There was something otherworldly about those who chose not to remarry, something divine about the independence that came to widows as they got their lives back. They were no longer “owned” by
anyone, free in ways no other woman could be. Once again, or maybe for the first time ever, widows knew the joys of solitary splendor. And the longer they remained unmarried, the freer they were. In the early church, for example, they could follow Jesus and the disciples at a moment’s notice, as many wealthy widows did.

Biblical theologian Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza notes how, in the first century, wealthy women (many of them widows), were “notorious” for opening their houses to religious cults and their worship rituals. In the early Christian community, large numbers of wealthy women became their financial benefactors, as well as organizers and presiders of communities in “house churches.”
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The Emperor Constantine’s mother, Saint Helen, is recognized as one such wealthy widow who devoted her life to promoting Christianity, and donated her money to relief of the poor and to the founding of churches on sites sacred to Christianity. While some question of authenticity remains, Saint Helen is associated with finding the cross on which Jesus was crucified, and in art she is depicted with the cross as her emblem. The unmarried status of women disciples is something Saint Paul commends often. In a letter to the Romans, Paul acknowledges as “fellow workers” the missionary partners Prisca and Aquila; women who not only supported Paul’s ministry financially, but even risked their lives for him. In sending greetings to them in his letter, Paul asks “Remember me also to the congregation that meets in their house” (Rom. 16:25).

Saint Paul understood how invaluable the unmarried worker was in every Christian community. He also saw being unmarried as the perfect missionary lifestyle. In advocating celibacy, however, Paul makes it clear that he has no intention of placing restrictions on anyone. He simply wants to encourage what is good and what will help devote ourselves entirely to God (1 Cor. 7:35). In
using widowhood as an example of the ideal lifestyle for discipleship, Paul explains that if a woman’s husband dies, she is always free to marry. “She will be happier, though, in my opinion, if she stays unmarried. I am persuaded that in this I have the spirit of God” (1 Cor. 7:40). The divine connection between the “unmarried” state and doing God’s work began to be wedded together in our thinking as Christians from the very start of the church, and most likely long before. In the beginning of priesthood, the unmarried become highly valued members because they are able to give their whole lives to the work of the church.

All ancient religions with a sacred tradition of celibacy have their priestesses, shamans, saints, priests, nuns, hermits, and holy ones. Always associated with celibacy are its divine powers and those who exercise them. Those to whom virginity is God-given seemed naturally (or supernaturally) capable of focusing their whole lives on creative work and lives of service. By sublimating in the divine all sexual energy, they seemed capable of finding all life sublime, even miraculously so. For example, among Christians martyred for their faith, suffering and death were actually experienced joyfully, as divine gateways to new and everlasting life. In the lives of the saints, it’s those designated as virgins and martyrs who are most highly regarded as miraculous. One of the earliest is Thecla, a convert and companion of Saint Paul who was persecuted for “dedicating her maidenhood to God.” Neither fire nor beasts could kill her. It’s also reported that Joan of Arc, burned at the stake for witchcraft (hearing divine voices), never felt burned by the flames that consumed her.

A personal favorite is the amazing Saint Lucy. While few have confidence that the story is true, we were told that a young man lusted after Lucy so badly because her eyes were extremely beautiful. Rather than give up her virginity to someone who repulsed her, Lucy plucked out her eyes and said something like,
“If you love my eyes so much, you can have them.” In art, she’s often represented as dressed in red and holding two eyeballs in a dish. And in the story, Lucy’s eyes grew back more beautiful than ever before. All of life is experienced as divine for those to whom celibacy is God-given.

Side by side with the sacred tradition of virginity among priestesses emerged in some primitive religions an unthinkable (to me) but common practice among men to castrate themselves in the service of God—making castration appear the most supreme sacrifice in male “ordination.” “The Church Father Origen; the obscure Valessi, a heretical Christian sect of the third century about whom little is known; and the thirteenth-century Russian Skopts are examples of these self-determined celibates.”
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So, too, was the leader and members of California’s Heaven’s Gate cult, all of whom committed mass suicide in 1997. While the women (vestal virgins, for example) seemed able to live without sexual relationships naturally, even with great peace and happiness, the only way the men could abstain from sex with just as much inner strength and confidence was to castrate themselves, to fix themselves in order to make themselves “men of God.”