Waiting for Grace: The Only Way Out of the Cultural Box That Imprisons Our Bishops

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either the French and American revolutions, nor the current sexual abuse scandal of priests and bishops has been horrific enough to make the bishops of the world take a studious and professionally led look at the culture they inhabit. Buoyed by the innate narcissism of the culture, and hesitant from fear of those above them in the clerical pecking order, they deny to themselves and to the world that they have a problem.

        

There are two events that might be forceful enough to bring them to see themselves as they are: an overwhelming influx of grace or the departure from the Church of the wealthy. The wealthy won’t leave, as they have replaced the old aristocracy in the bishops’ eyes, and because the bishops honor and support the values and status of the wealthy, and court them. Recent studies have shown that the majority of wealth in the United States is held by one percent of the population, and that merely four hundred households have greater assets than fifty percent of all households in the country.

        

We hear bishops utter an occasional plea for the poor, but, while they can hurl excommunication and refusal of the sacraments to those who are pro choice in the matter of abortion, they simply have no stomach, on present course, to put such teeth into demands on those who deal death through poverty-caused lack of food, shelter, health care and the like. A sensible and justice-driven sharing of the world’s goods is beyond the ken of both bishops and the majority of those holding wealth. Any suggestion that there is enough for all, if shared, is met with cries of socialism or communism. Both “isms” carry the imposed stigma of being either anti-capitalist or atheistic.

        

Those with wealth who claim to be Christian, along with our bishops, should read and ponder the structure of the original Christian community:

         Those who believed shared all things in common; they would sell their property and goods, dividing everything on the basis of each one’s need. They went to the temple area together every day, while in their homes they broke bread. With exultant and sincere hearts they took their meals in common, praising God and winning the approval of all the people.” (Acts 3:44-47)

        

Since we cannot expect the bishop/wealthy tie to disintegrate, we are left with the hope for a giant infusion of grace to enlighten our bishops to flee their cultural box. Pray for our bishops. We should never give up hope. Grace abounds and can bring about a Catholic leadership that responds to the wisdom of the laity. Today’s bishops are not evil men. They are prisoners of a culture that oozes evil if the culture itself is endangered. To our bishops, serving the culture is serving God.

The Church's Unloving View of Sex

F rom contraception to abortion, from ‘dirty’ thoughts to masturbation, from heterosexual to homosexual sex, from natural insemination to artificially induced pregnancy, and from unmarried cohabitation to marital sex, our Church leadership is obsessed with SEX, and its utterances on the subject are mostly negative and/or exclusive to marital sex.          Curiously, Jesus never talked about sex per se. In fact, the closest he got were references to adultery. Maybe that should tell us something.          It wasn’t until after Jesus died and after the gospels were written that Church leaders began to focus on sex. Since then, centuries of teaching on sex have been based on its appreciation by the early church ‘Fathers,’ especially Augustine. Their teaching derived from the world view of the time, a philosophy that looked at the universe as composed of good and evil. Good was identified with spirit, evil with matter. Sex, having to do with matter, fell into the world of evil. Over the centuries this association of sex with evil evolved to a point where every ‘dirty’ thought, word or action outside of marriage was considered mortally evil and worthy of eternal damnation.          That kind of teaching scared the hell out of many an adolescent, and made their natural probing and experimentations furtive and guilt-filled. The number of teens afflicted with psychological problems because of this repression is probably beyond calculation. Calls are mounting in our time for a re-evaluation of sexual morality. Sex is good, a choice of the Creator. It builds intimacy and strengthens committed relationships. It fosters longevity and stability in those relationships. It is a servant of what the gospels are all about--love. Is it evil when it is in that service, whether among married or not, whether among straight or gay, whether used for the purpose of procreation from stored semen or ova?                      The argument that men and women should be held hostage to the strictly biological while not recognizing the intellectual, psychological and relational dimensions of sex is short-sighted on the face of it. A word on obedience, much touted by bishops as high on the list of virtues: There exists a delicate balance between love and obedience. Blind obedience is not a virtue. (Militarily, it is a tactic.) When blind obedience is demanded of adults, history reveals that it has too often been a substitute for competence on the part of the demanding authorities.