Clericalism: Yielding Poisonous Fruit

These are everyday sermons, usually not the same sermons Deacon Michael delivered on Sundays.  He takes the liberty of personally addressing, the people who came to the 6:30 communion service, whom he loved so much, and who loved him.

Deacon Michael was a history major. His home was filled with many history books. This is one of the sermons where his love of history shows in his analysis.

IF YOU LIKE, READ ALONG WHILE YOU ARE LISTENING:

I remember when I first started getting interested in the diaconate, we had to go to programs.  And one of the things that they talked about that we had to be careful of was the sin of clericalism. 

Have you ever heard of the sin of clericalism?  Nah?  I felt the same way.  What in the world are you talking about? 

And that is one of the things: the Second Vatican Council was a pastoral council.  It wasn't a dogmatic council, it wasn't defining dogma.  It was describing how the Church, as a pastor of the soul, should be acting, and the interaction of the members of the Church. This is why I wanted to read the whole thing from Corinthians.  Because that’s very much in the line, in the recognition of the importance of each part the body.  The body being the Body of Christ which is the Holy Catholic Church.

And we see both in the first reading, where he is talking about the one body, and then we see in the gospel, where Jesus goes to a city, I didn't look up where the name is, but it was a city that was different from where he normally is and you notice that the focus of the attention was on a widow. 

Widows at that point in time were pathetic.  They were in trouble, especially as in this case: the boy who died, the man who died, was her only son.  Which means she had no husband, she had no son, and she had no one to take care of her.  And one of the extraordinary things of Jewish religion, was that, way back when, they tried to take care of the widows.  But for the most part, the life of being a widow was a very uncomfortable situation.  You didn't have anybody taking care of you.  They weren't housing you, they weren't feeding you.  You were on your own, dependent, in most instances, on charity.

So we see Jesus very much rejecting the idea of any hierarchical relationship.  We see the same thing in St. Paul.  And that, though, has been a model of the Church. But again, the Church is a human institution.  It is divine, but its members are human.  And any time you have an institution, of, I'm not even sure what the point is: it may be three or four, it may be five [people], there is going to be a hierarchy.  Someone is going to be more important within that institution than other people. 

You are our leader.  You are the one who provides the bridge cards that we have every week.  You are the one, the important one, who does it.  There is a hierarchical nature to human relationships, and you see it within the Church.

And the Church warns against it.  It is contrary to the teachings of Christ because it creates within [the Church] a situation of... let's assume there are ten people getting together for a common purpose... there is going to be one person who is the leader.  And that one person has the tendency to think of everyone else as "them", or "the followers", or his or her "people".  It becomes a hierarchical situation.  

The hierarchical situation is a dangerous thing to occur.  And we see, after Vatican II, where, you know, there were so many priests that were lost, and the removal of the stress on clericalism.  We see a situation that arose within the Church involving clericalism, ironically, one of the things that the Vatican Council was trying to counsel against. 

And it is, again, like I talked about yesterday, and it is something very important. "Us" and "them" creates a situation where you can justify sin.  I can justify treating you differently because you are a woman.  I can be nice to him because he is a man.  I can be nice to him… nah, we don't have any young people… I can be nice to her because she and I are the young ones around here.  But... you old people... whew!  You see this... [you see] what it is.

Well, in the church you have the ordained ministers.  The deacons being the lowest of the bunch.  But... I am still ordained.  There is a... I can... I have told people this before... if I walk into a group of priests and bishops standing around talking, and I say, "Hi!  I am Deacon Michael," they will welcome me.  [If] you walk into a group, unless they know you, they're gonna go, "What do you want?" 

The danger is, when we get past the teachings of St. Paul, and the teachings of Christ, is, what does that lead you to?  And, in my opinion, this is one of the contributing factors, among a whole bunch of other stupidities, that lead to the sexual abuse scandal that we have, particularly on the concealment.  Because, there’s "us" and "them."  You're "them."  If someone in the "us" group says something to the "them" group, and the "them" group says, "Well, Fr. So-and-So did this to me," the natural reaction is, "Aw, gee, she's just a hysterical woman.  You know how women are."  Or, "He's just a hormonal young man, you know how 'they' are."  And there is a tendency to discard the statements of someone, to not treat them as St. Paul asked us to treat [them], understanding that each and every one of them is a member of the body of Christ.  That each one of them is given the dignity, the lowest of them particularly, by Christ.  The dignity of being a child of God. 

So you have a natural tendency to say, if Beth comes in and complains to me about the bishop, I go, "Aw, come on, Beth!"  That is a normal reaction, but that reaction gets out of hand when you have an insular community.  And the situation that we faced with the sexual abuse is: the bishop would hear about it, and the bishop would say, "Robert's a good priest.  I like Robert.  We need to take care of the situation.  Robert, we are going to send you to such-and-such clinic.  Or, we are going to take you from Mary Immaculate and we are going to put you down in St. Cecilia's.  We are going to move you somewhere else, away from the temptation," failing to recognize the reality of what has occurred.  And that is also a sin.  Because, again, it flows from "us" and "them."  The very "us" and "them" that Jesus, and St. Paul and all of the apostles teach us [about]. 

It isn't "us" and "them."  And so one of the things that we have to watch out for within our Church, is to recognize that tendency.  We have the tendency... and I'm... I'm sorry... I shouldn't say this... but this last statement about Francis, by Francis about how it was really Satan attacking the bishops [by] raising questions about the concealment of sexual abuse, and the sexual abuse itself, is a prime example of treating "us" and "them."  You, as a complainer, don't have merit, because you are simply the tool of Satan.  That is an epitome of the sin of clericalism. 

And that is a major issue that our Church is going to have to face in the next coming twenty... ten, twenty years.  It is that very fundamental operation within our Church of, "Well, let's conceal...not conceal... protect ‘us’ from ‘them,’"  And they mean all of you, and probably me because I'm not very high in the hierarchy.  “Let's protect,”... instead of taking the reaction that you would anticipate someone giving as a person of God, of, when [mumbles as he is looking for someone to address by name and finding no one] someone comes to me and says, "Father 'Andrew' did something to a young man," and any time that I have the reaction of other than total and complete revulsion of what was done and the instinct that that has to be fixed, immediately, there is something wrong.  There is something fundamentally wrong.

Now the arch-, the actually, cardinal, of the Galveston... Harris County... Galveston/Houston diocese has come out with a very simple statement... and I think Bishop Burns has done the same thing [though] I haven't read his. He says if you face the situation where a priest has done something, [that] if Robert did it, what was your reaction?  If someone came in and said, "Robert has done the following thing..." what would your reaction be?  And if your reaction would be, “Call the police and arrest him,” do exactly the same thing for a priest.  Exactly the same thing. 

That is very fundamental.  Because that insulation of the priest through clericalism has led to where we are.  That the revulsion that you would feel knowing that a man [who] was abusing 13-, 15-, 16-year-old boys... sexually abusing them... was insulated by his position and by others in them saying, "Well, we need to protect him.  Well, we need to protect him within the hierarchy." 

No. He is nothing special in that regard.  If he has a degree by which he is special, he has lost that specialness by virtue of his conduct. 

And that’s where the Church fell off the rails in my opinion.  Not with regard to how did we get those people around, but how we protected them.  Because the Church, our Church, didn’t act with total and complete revulsion of what was going on, and say, in the case of Mayve (I am just picking on you) that when Mayve comes and says, "That priest abused me," the reaction was, "Well, she must be crazy," or "Let’s be real careful. This is a man who is a good priest, let’s take him away from the temptation," instead of saying, "No, its wrong."  Because the priests are human and by doing it otherwise, we’re engaging in what the Church itself describes as the sin of clericalism.

September 1, 2018