The Worst that Men Can Be
Between books, films, theology, lectionary, weather, Rhode Island, Bible, cars, oysters, mullet, 7H, Navy, Panama City, summer camp, WashDC, family, Japan, California, church, Anglicanism, and other growing-up memories, now and then politics, I have more than enough that occurs to blog about mornings. But this particular issue (scroll down) brings something back to mind.
The spring of 2008 I attended Credo, an eight-day invitational retreat for active and retired Episcopal clergy. Mine was for retired priests, and at 72 I was neither the youngest nor by far the oldest clergyman there. Some of them were quite well known in the church as leaders, authors, professors, teachers. One had been on faculty at Sewanee and while a professor there had taught a seminary student, an extremely difficult priest whom I had served with, and told me the faculty had found him "incapable of learning" and the seminary had not recommended the man for ordination, but that his bishop had (obviously) ordained him anyway - - which had not turned out well.
At Credo we had eight full days and evenings of sessions both plenary with the whole crowd of us, maybe forty or fifty priests, I really don't remember; and also the ubiquitous "small groups" that conveners invariably resort to when they don't know what else to do with all the people. Our small groups were four men each (there were no women clergy there as I recall), except that they were one short for all quadruplets and my group had three, myself and two others. The sorting into small groups may have been done alphabetically until they ran out with our group of three.
I don't remember their names. One was a nice but almost insufferably self-focused fellow who somewhat confrontationally wore a ballcap reading "Obama 08" and who, though we were unendingly patient with each other, we had trouble tearing him away from talking about all that he'd done, the book he had written and was still for sale and he had brought a few copies along to Credo and we could buy one from him for $XX, and begging us to recommend him to the national Credo director at Episcopal Church HQ in NYC to serve on Credo staff in the future. The other guy probably was kind enough to do that, I was not (although I did buy his book); and if he'd been a naval officer under me I wouldn't have given him a good fitness report either.
But about the other guy. An Episcopal priest as we all were, he had grown up Roman Catholic and had been ordained in an RC religious order, I don't remember which one, so he was not what they call a "secular priest." He seemed a sad and broken man. As a monk, he had fallen in love with a divorced woman whom he'd met, left his order, renounced his priesthood, married her and they had children in addition to children she brought from her first marriage. And he soon thereafter came into the Episcopal Church as a priest, as Roman priests now and then do, and vice versa. At Credo, he was now retired.
I'm writing a full decade, ten years later this morning, so some of my recollection details may be off. Anyway, now with our small group as audience, this man had memories he needed to share. As a boy, his RC parish priests were known sexually to seduce young Altar boys in the parish, but it was unspoken, nobody talked about it. He said that every summer, the Altar boys in that parish, and in several surrounding parishes in the diocese, were invited by their clergy and were expected to attend, summer training camp for Altar boys, and I believe he said it was a week or two, out of the country on an offshore island nation, maybe Bermuda or Bahamas, I don't recall; and that the real agenda was sexual, young boys nudity with the priests. I asked if he went, and he said that when he found out what it was all about, he had refused to go. That his parents, lifelong faithful Roman Catholics, had been upset with his refusal to go to this more or less institutionalized summer camp event.
Again, I remember him kindly as a broken man who had experienced in the Catholic Church the worst that men can be among those who trust, look up to and even idolize their clergy, who came out of the Church seeing the cancer of sexual abuse of children as institutionalized, endemic, systemic, kept quiet but known and accepted among the clergy, like a lodge secret. What else do I remember? That we also discussed cars, and his car, perfect for his remote home in New England winters, was an AWD Toyota FJ Cruiser
that he and his wife loved as their car. I think of him with enormous sadness everytime yet another sexual abuse scandal explodes in the Roman Catholic Church somewhere in the world, and he came to mind again with this latest sickening revelation. It is a fact that sometimes even large institutions can best serve humanity, earth and Maker by going the way of all flesh. From my car perspective, Packard, Franklin, Nash, Studebaker, Crosley, Auburn, Kaiser; the Roman Empire, the British Empire, European colonialism, the Empire of Japan; in this case, a Church which has befouled, desecrated and blasphemed its role and image as the Body of Christ: for the love of God, GO.
T
Below, Monday morning from Rome:
Also Tuesday, the Catholic World Meeting of Families opens in Dublin, Ireland, with Pope Francis expected to attend over the weekend. The gathering, which happens every three years, unites as many as 20,000 faithful from dozens of countries. It comes as the church grapples again this year with fallout from decades of child sexual abuse by clergy, with cases reported from Pennsylvania and New York to Chile, Australia and the Vatican. The Pope also recently has made waves with changes in how the church views the death penalty and homosexuality, so there’ll be plenty to talk about.
Pressure is mounting on Pope Francis to respond to the Pennsylvania grand jury report that details decades of sexual abuse of more than 1,000 children by hundreds of priests and bishops in the state, along with various cover-ups. The Vatican hasn't commented on the explosive report yet. A Villanova theology professor called the Vatican's silence "disturbing." The clergy sex abuse scandal is a growing crisis, with the Catholic Church forced to deal with abuse allegations around the globe that for many have meant a lifetime of trauma.
The spring of 2008 I attended Credo, an eight-day invitational retreat for active and retired Episcopal clergy. Mine was for retired priests, and at 72 I was neither the youngest nor by far the oldest clergyman there. Some of them were quite well known in the church as leaders, authors, professors, teachers. One had been on faculty at Sewanee and while a professor there had taught a seminary student, an extremely difficult priest whom I had served with, and told me the faculty had found him "incapable of learning" and the seminary had not recommended the man for ordination, but that his bishop had (obviously) ordained him anyway - - which had not turned out well.
At Credo we had eight full days and evenings of sessions both plenary with the whole crowd of us, maybe forty or fifty priests, I really don't remember; and also the ubiquitous "small groups" that conveners invariably resort to when they don't know what else to do with all the people. Our small groups were four men each (there were no women clergy there as I recall), except that they were one short for all quadruplets and my group had three, myself and two others. The sorting into small groups may have been done alphabetically until they ran out with our group of three.
I don't remember their names. One was a nice but almost insufferably self-focused fellow who somewhat confrontationally wore a ballcap reading "Obama 08" and who, though we were unendingly patient with each other, we had trouble tearing him away from talking about all that he'd done, the book he had written and was still for sale and he had brought a few copies along to Credo and we could buy one from him for $XX, and begging us to recommend him to the national Credo director at Episcopal Church HQ in NYC to serve on Credo staff in the future. The other guy probably was kind enough to do that, I was not (although I did buy his book); and if he'd been a naval officer under me I wouldn't have given him a good fitness report either.
But about the other guy. An Episcopal priest as we all were, he had grown up Roman Catholic and had been ordained in an RC religious order, I don't remember which one, so he was not what they call a "secular priest." He seemed a sad and broken man. As a monk, he had fallen in love with a divorced woman whom he'd met, left his order, renounced his priesthood, married her and they had children in addition to children she brought from her first marriage. And he soon thereafter came into the Episcopal Church as a priest, as Roman priests now and then do, and vice versa. At Credo, he was now retired.
I'm writing a full decade, ten years later this morning, so some of my recollection details may be off. Anyway, now with our small group as audience, this man had memories he needed to share. As a boy, his RC parish priests were known sexually to seduce young Altar boys in the parish, but it was unspoken, nobody talked about it. He said that every summer, the Altar boys in that parish, and in several surrounding parishes in the diocese, were invited by their clergy and were expected to attend, summer training camp for Altar boys, and I believe he said it was a week or two, out of the country on an offshore island nation, maybe Bermuda or Bahamas, I don't recall; and that the real agenda was sexual, young boys nudity with the priests. I asked if he went, and he said that when he found out what it was all about, he had refused to go. That his parents, lifelong faithful Roman Catholics, had been upset with his refusal to go to this more or less institutionalized summer camp event.
Again, I remember him kindly as a broken man who had experienced in the Catholic Church the worst that men can be among those who trust, look up to and even idolize their clergy, who came out of the Church seeing the cancer of sexual abuse of children as institutionalized, endemic, systemic, kept quiet but known and accepted among the clergy, like a lodge secret. What else do I remember? That we also discussed cars, and his car, perfect for his remote home in New England winters, was an AWD Toyota FJ Cruiser
that he and his wife loved as their car. I think of him with enormous sadness everytime yet another sexual abuse scandal explodes in the Roman Catholic Church somewhere in the world, and he came to mind again with this latest sickening revelation. It is a fact that sometimes even large institutions can best serve humanity, earth and Maker by going the way of all flesh. From my car perspective, Packard, Franklin, Nash, Studebaker, Crosley, Auburn, Kaiser; the Roman Empire, the British Empire, European colonialism, the Empire of Japan; in this case, a Church which has befouled, desecrated and blasphemed its role and image as the Body of Christ: for the love of God, GO.
T
Below, Monday morning from Rome:
Pope on Pennsylvania sex abuse report: 'We abandoned the little ones'
![[File photo] The Vatican's envoy to the Dominican Republic Jozef Wesolowski in Santo Domingo, on August 12, 2011.](http://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/140627151227-jozef-wesolowski-hp-video.jpg)
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| Wasted our lives’: Catholic sex abuse scandals again prompt a crisis of faith |
| The Vatican referred to this as “the summer from hell for the Catholic Church.” In the pews on Sunday, many struggled to cope. |
| By Julie Zauzmer, Michelle Boorstein and Michael Brice-Saddler • Read more » |
Also Tuesday, the Catholic World Meeting of Families opens in Dublin, Ireland, with Pope Francis expected to attend over the weekend. The gathering, which happens every three years, unites as many as 20,000 faithful from dozens of countries. It comes as the church grapples again this year with fallout from decades of child sexual abuse by clergy, with cases reported from Pennsylvania and New York to Chile, Australia and the Vatican. The Pope also recently has made waves with changes in how the church views the death penalty and homosexuality, so there’ll be plenty to talk about.
| 5. A bombshell hit the Catholic Church. |
| A searing report issued by a grand jury on Tuesday said bishops and other church leaders in Pennsylvania covered up child sexual abuse by more than 300 priests over a period of 70 years. |
| The Vatican’s response, two days later: “The abuses described in the report are criminal and morally reprehensible.” |
| Across the country, Catholics reeled from the graphic descriptions in the report and parishioners at one Pittsburgh church finally found out why their priest had suddenly retired. |
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David Von Drehle Pressure is mounting on Pope Francis to respond to the Pennsylvania grand jury report that details decades of sexual abuse of more than 1,000 children by hundreds of priests and bishops in the state, along with various cover-ups. The Vatican hasn't commented on the explosive report yet. A Villanova theology professor called the Vatican's silence "disturbing." The clergy sex abuse scandal is a growing crisis, with the Catholic Church forced to deal with abuse allegations around the globe that for many have meant a lifetime of trauma.
| • The Vatican said in a statement on Thursday that the widespread sexual abuse of children by priests, detailed in a grand jury report released this week in Pennsylvania, was “criminal and morally reprehensible.” |
| “Victims should know that the pope is on their side,” the statement said. |
| Pope Francis has faced mounting criticism that he had a blind spot in dealing with the abuse of minors by clergy. |
| • A top Roman Catholic Church official in the U.S. said that much of the blame lay on the shoulders of bishops and promised that there would be change. |