Wrath Has Moved From Priests to Bishops
I remember a former Manager, Tom Kelly, of the Minnesota Twins baseball team talking about the psychology of dealing with players. He did not tell pitchers to "keep it low" or "throw more curves" he said. "You don't want to play with the guy's brain," was his strategy.
Playing with the guy's brain is exactly what early theologians did in the Catholic Church. While it didn't happen for a thousand years of so, eventually they made priests believe they themselves are some sort of god. They are not allowed to marry because then there would be competition for their allegiance between their wives/children and their bosses in the bureaucracy. In exchange, the bureaucracy pledged life-long protection and job security. A marriage of sorts happened between priests and their bosses "until death do us part."
Probably there were always crooks and sex abusers among the clergy but they were protected. Recently, abusive priests have been exposed. After that the Bishops who pledged to cover them came to light. Now, the Bishops instead of the priests are being vilified.
But, the villain it the church itself which put into place a system of actual or implied contracts which exchanged celibacy for economic security. Better would be a contract where the duties of priest are spelled out, the hours and the person's private life is left outside the church. Priests would find their own housing and most would have wives and families. Eventually, it would include women.
That is the only way this bad chapter in the church will ever end.
More like bad ecclesiology over reaching into theology
ReplyDeleteI see an organization that is corrupt to the core and has been for centuries. Their claims of being the one true moral teacher and guardian rings hollow when they break their own rules. How dare they preach sexual behavior to parishioners, have some excommunicated they use birth control or are GLBTQ while they molest and rape boys, girls and or have affairs with adults. In the Pennsylvania report, some brought pregnant girls to appointments for an abortions.
ReplyDeletePriests now come forward and say I heard about this or that priest, bishop or cardinal and children but never said anything. For godsakes why not, by inaction they are complicit in a horrible crime against children. Bishops and cardinals kept moving these guys around, in and out of treatment and then back to small parishes. It is morally wrong to do so, morally wrong not to investigate and involve the police, its morally wrong to allow even more children to be vicimized and its morally wrong to cover it all up.
For sure the whole church is corrupt to the bone and should be investigated from the top down and run out of business because money is all they really care about.
Up yours Matt Noah, I already know the mindless, thoughtless drivel your going to post and I won't read 1 letter of it
No intellectual rigor. Just wild-eyed conjecture from a lunatic.
ReplyDeleteMatt 7:05 "No intellectual rigor. Just wild-eyed conjecture from a lunatic."
ReplyDeleteYou are no doubt right on all counts. I should have gone further into the origins of Catholic problems. An atheist wrote recently he liked to study religion because it was such a good reflection of the society it came out of. Today's Catholic Church (and all other branches of the faith) come out of our society and whatever is wrong in society will be wrong in church organizations. It's sociology.
No one can change that. But, we can adjust how institutions are run to intercept the bad things in society before that happen. Of course, we don't stop all bank robberies but we put bars on bank windows, put money in vaults and require ID for some transactions because we anticipate bad people are out there.
The Catholics didn't do that. They should have observed a thousand years ago that humans have weaknesses. They could have assumed these weaknesses would show up in clergy and adjusted how the organization was run. Instead, they chose in live in a make believe world where priests could be given opportunities to harm others but would never do so. But, if they sinned they would confess, be forgiven and not sin again.
Bad assumptions.
interesting comment. I thought that the Catholics, in your mind at least, take a dim view of human nature, burdened us down with guilt and otherwise rained on our parade. Now you claim that we missed the fact of human weakness (wickedness?), that we should have awakened to that reality a thousand years ago. Maybe, just maybe, an explanation is in order here. BTW, no one assumes that going to confession will mean that the penitent will not sin again. Anyone who thinks this is either extremely naïve or is making things up to shore up his own agenda. See no evil. hear no evil. Seems to me that a lot of people, Catholic prelates included, have come to rue the days when they played that game.
DeleteFr. Metzger gave a stirring homily at Mass today at Sts. Anne and Joachim in Fargo. A "call to priests" if you will. Every family should encourage their sons to listen to the will of God in their life. If God is calling you to be a priest, be a priest. If an engineer, an engineer. If a musician, a musician. But listen to God. Several young men from our parish are in seminary right now, on their road to the priesthood.
ReplyDeleteAnd what if you didn't moderate any of the comments posted here but simply let them get posted? I won't state that you are censoring because the correct use of that term only applies to governments, and, you, thankfully, are not part of the government. But this blog is painfully uninteresting because people are accustomed to seeing their comments published instantly.
ReplyDeleteThink about it. I'm going to wash my hair.
Matt--I don't think this site, Blogspot, has as many, or any, filters. Area Voices had really effective filters. Several million spam posts were blocked just on this blog alone. In the near future I will be changing to the Forum's new blogging site. We'll see what that arrangement is like.
ReplyDelete