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From the Pastor
Periodically, I comment on current events here. I believe that the pulpit should be used for preaching the Gospel, and that I should preach recognizing that people come to hear me because I am a priest and pastor - an official role - something more than just me. But being a writer, with years of experiences and a lot of ideas, I want to share them. So I do that here, where they are just one man's reflections. I add the most recent on the top, and the older ones just get pushed to the back of the bus.
About fifty years ago, in what became my family parish - a "family"much reduced by death, I must admit - there was talk of building a Catholic church. This was out in what we referred to as horse country, in rural New Jersey. Rural, but on a railroad line that went in to New York in less than an hour, and which I rode for two years starting in 1989 when I worked as an editor down on Mulberry Street, in Little Italy.
So it was also a commute town - of sorts. Two thousand people in 42 square miles. Much of the commute was to Wall Street. And I usually entered the city through the World Trade Center, which my cousins had helped build. And after the first bombing my cousin Mark, who was running things after his father's death, was called in to scaffold the bomb cavity. He said it was five stories deep - and they thought that if the van had been moved forty feet closer to a corner it could have toppled the tower. I was in the Trade Cente rjust a few days before it was destroyed, getting ready for a trip to Lithuania. And not having seen the attack on TV - just the snippets you get of news on the other side of the world - I did not have the harrowing, non-stop experience nearly all you people had.
Meanwhile, back in the tight little town of farmers and bankers 30 years earlier, some of them didn't want "the Catholics" anywhere around. And they told a local land-owner who was thinking of selling a parcel of about 50 acres which he owned to the church not to even think of doing it.
The landowner, Allan P. Kirby, a Woolworth heir who also owned a controlling share of stock in the New York Central Railroad and one tough character, was not one to have anyone tell him what to do. So he agreed not to sell the land. He gave it to the church.
But before the community could build their church they had no place for Mass, and Christmas was coming. So one of their future neighbors, a Presbyterian, allowed them to celebrate Midnght Mass in his barn, with the horses watching and the sheep in their own pen. The symbolism was lost on no one.
When it comes to thinking about who can and who cannot build religious sites in our land I cannot forget the history of the church down the road from our house, where I said Mass and where I held the funeral Mass for my brother.
Whatever people decide in concrete situations - and not having lived and worked in New York for over twenty years - I leave properly local decisions about their city to the people who do. But as it says in the Hebrew scripture, "remember you too were once strangers in the land of Egypt." A good reminder, for none of us really wants to remember what it was like to be on the outside looking in, and being told we weren't welcome. And in a land of immigrants it was a common experience.
This is a version of an article printed in the Catholic Voice in April of 2010
These days reports of sexual abuse in the past are big news. We talk about abuse of children as though it were a rare occurrence in our society. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Although there are no concrete statistics, counselors and others who work with families believe that by the time America’s children reach 18 years of age, one out of every four women and one out of every eight or nine men has been sexually molested in some way. Most of these experiences take place within the family or in social settings where children spend much of their lives.
To put the percentages into perspective, it is likely that on a professional team of 25 male athletes, statistically three will have been sexually abused as children. And in a college classroom with 40 women students, 10 will have a history of sexual abuse.
Set this into the population figures for the United States and we are talking about well over 30 million women and 15 million men who were sexually abused as children.
Continued silence
If sex abuse is so common, why have we heard so little about it, except in the context of news reports? The number one reason is that people don’t want to talk about being abused. It is a closed door that few want to open because of the pain residing within. There is a silence concerning sexual abuse that amounts to a taboo. Today it is becoming safer to talk about a jailed or dead priest, but just don't talk about Grandpa Joe.
Reluctance to report
First, there has been, and still seems to be, a reluctance to call the police. So the parents who decided to to do something about their child’s abuse commonly made their complaints within the abusing system itself, seeing it as some kind of family matter, the kind you take care of out of court. So they went to the pastor or to the school principal.
Unfortunately, in both church and school situations, the authorities also saw themselves as members of a family-like system, deciding to handle the situation within the system and in the process often misread their responsibility to notify the law.
And I am not so sure if, 50 years ago, had they reported it to the law that the district attorney would have accepted the report. It is likely it would have been sent back to the school or church. In any event, the lack of clarity or the reluctance to act seem to have been shared by both parents, institutional authorities, and the legal authorities themselves. And I choose the word 'reluctance' on purpose. Dealing with sexual abuse or harassment was something most people seem not to have wanted to go into. also
There is the real possibility that parents wanted an easier alternative than going to the law. It could be that they wanted to avoid the spotlight that a legal case would shine on their child. And they could also have wanted not to be challenging a system that friends and neighbors counted on provide them services.
When the situation involved an institutionalized child, parents who blew the whistle on the institutional caretaker of their institutionalized or handicapped child could have ended up with the child back in their home, even when they were unable to provide appropriate care.
For us Americans, the separation of church and state is an important value, one that Catholic practice supports completely. State and church are each valid societies with very different work to do.
Church purposes are spiritual and religious – to live and preach the faith we have received from Christ. The state’s role is to promote civil order and justice and to arrest and prosecute those who violate that order. The state does not have or preach religion, and the church does not prosecute crimes, it has no criminal justice system.
At most, the Catholic Church disciplines offending clergy, stripping them of the right to serve as priests. And disciplining clergy takes place on the diocesan level, since the diocese is the base unit within the church. Vatican courts are appellate courts, serving as appeals from religious decisions made on the diocesan level. But in neither level is there a system to prosecute crime. Crimes are referred to te state.
The Vatican made that very clear in its recent directive that bishops report allegations of clergy sex abuse to the police, something called for by the U.S. bishops in their 2002 Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.
The protection of children against abuse is still a thorny issue. As a people we are just coming to understand the importance of acknowledging the sexual abuse of kids, especially when it is close up – in our families, our schools, our Church. Of course, what makes the violation of a child by a Church official so heinous is that it is not only a crime of assault, but religious hypocrisy as well.
The taboo is still solid. It is time to open wide the door – to talk about the abuse that happened years ago that continues to wound its victims and to do everything we can to insure that today’s children are cared for well and safely.
February, 2010
Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent. With the country going through a difficult period, with the greatest difficulties still waiting in the wings to turn into real crises, we probably don't need another call for reflection. And in this country they usually never work, anyway. We as a people don 't reflect much. Our role, as we see it, is to tell others how to reflect so they can become more like us. Well, it obviously doesn't sell anymore - not even at home. So, for lack of alternatives we may have to start reflecting, even reflecting intelligently. Here in California we have made made an art - a pop-art at its worst- of self-revelation, and self-revelation with hardly an ounce of self-reflection. But with things falling apart we may be forced to re-learn the art of self-reflection. .
Spring, 09
Several months ago the California Supreme Court overturned a law passed earlier by the voters defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman. A ballot initiative passed supporting the older view. And needless to say, there is a lot being said the definition of marriage. Here I want to make just one point, a particularly Catholic one.Actually two points. One about the origins of the church's interest in the legal definition of marriage. And secondly, what we mean by marriage in the church. The history, unfortunately, has been lost sight of. And that is unfortunate because it is as relevant today as it was 900 years ago. And comparing and contrasting what we mean by marriage in the California code and what we mean by marriage in the church is also important because they are so different. In some ways what they have in common really is the word itself.
First, I want to look at some of the key arguments we hear today, especially the words used in the discussion. And the first one is equality. We are told that legalizing gay marriages is designed to promote equality. This represents a radical difference in the way we look at marriage. Because the one thing that the laws on marriage have never been about is equality. Just the opposite. The laws were set up to address the most basic inequality of all - guys don't get pregnant. Women don't get guys pregnant and abandon them and their kids. Guys get women pregnant and abandon them. And that is what the laws on marriage were set up for in the first place. They were ste up to protect women and their children from adandonment, from poverty, and from having no guarantees to family resources and inheritance, and no legal access to needed support. The word, note, is "matrimony" It is about protecting mothers - women with children.
Laws come from somewhere, from social need. For the first 1,000 years marriage in the West had few laws. The consent was essentially private, just between the couple - which was a valid consent. But then the number of women, married in what were called "clandestine marriages,"and later left by their husbands, became so large that it created a serious social problem. The man would claim that they were not married. Or he would die leaving no legal title to support for the woman or child. Or his family would throw her and the child out on the street to make sure that they had no claim on family funds.. Or the mother would die with no legal document crtifying who was the father responsible for the child's care.
My own view is that this is as real a problem today as it was 900 years ago, mybe even greater. All over our cities there are single mothers rearing their children, with little or no help from the fathers of the children. Of course, they are poor. And the welfare of poor women with kids has never been a high priority in thic country. Our Catholic laws on marriage and family take this reality seriously, as do the nymbers of social institutions we have set up to help women and kids in need.
The place of inequality is not the only difference between marriage as seen in our society, and marriage in the church. The dispute that is currently in the press and on the ballot is not a particularly Catholic one. For what we mean by marriage in the church and what it means in civil law, and American society, have been very different for a long time. The definition of marriage as a union of a man and a woman is effectively the remnant of an earlier view that has already been changed in its very substance. There has long been an essential - essential - difference between civil and Christian marriage. What marriage exists for - its purpose - has been very different for many years.
We see marriage as a sacrament. A sacred union. Many other christian churches do not see marriage as a sacrament. Going back to the time of the Reformation they said that it was not a sacrament, that it is a contractual union set up between couples under civil law. And that view has set the tone in our country since its early days. The Catholic understanding of marriage as a sacrament has, like many Catholic beliefs, been an outsider's view.
In the church's current code of law marriage is described as "an intimate union of life and love" and "a union of the whole of life" entered into by a man and woman of requisite age who are free to marry. In the church, marriage is an equal union between man and woman. The vows are the same for each. It is further described with three basic characteristics: it as a faithful union, a life-long union, and a union that is open to the possibility of having children. Exclude any of these three aspects or qualities and whatever the union might be, it is not marriage as understood in the church.
In the California code, by contrast, marriage is described as "a personal relationship arising out of contract." But what enters into that contractual relationship? It doesn't say, and legally it doesn't matter. That is left up to the partners to decide. It has no built in or presupposed properties. And that makes sense in a region like our, with such a variety of cultures and religions. But if the marrying couple excludes any or all of what the church sees as necessary for a sacramental marriage - permanence, faithfulness, child-bearing - it is still a perfectly valid marriage in the civil law of California..
But even in civil law marriage in California is not like other contracts. Contracts are commonly bilateral. Both pareies have to agree to make them, and both parties have to be involved in ending them. Marriage in the civil code is not like that. It can be ended unilaterally. One partner decides that he or she wants out, and then goes through the legal steps and it is ended. So civil marriage is one of the weakest of all contracts. It is a weaker contract than your contract with the phone company, or between the driver and the gas company at the gas pump when you fill up your tank. Like it or not, you have to honor the terms of the contract. Try to tell Verizon that you want out of your two year cell phone agreement "just because," and you will see the difference between a bilateral and unilateral contract.
We are seeing a lot of opposition from some churches far outside the Catholic tradition to the state court's ruling. But whatever it is about, the discussion is not about the nature of marriage as traditionally understood. They gave up on that years and years ago. I am not sure what these protests are about, since most people seem to have given up a long time ago on the meaning of marriage as understood in the Church.
For us, as Catholics, the challenge remains what it has been right along - to recognize that our religious, moral, and ethical values are minority views. Living them out faithfully is and always will be tough. We live in a world with values very different our Catholic beliefs and values. And today the most vocal Christian churches outside our tradition, with their emphasis on power and social control, also have values so very different from ours. In some of them they say that men should rule women, and parents should rule children. We don't believe that. We do believe in p[ersonal equality. And once again, we really are a minority.
January 18, 2008
A few weeks ago the California Report - an NPR morning radio program - reported that in San Francisco there are about 3,000 youngsters, aged from 13 up 18, working as prostitutes in San Francisco. Work this into the US Census figures for San Francisco, and it means that one young girl in sixteen or seventeen in this age group in San Francisco, obviously all minors and supposedly protected by the law, is on the street as a prostitute. In effect, an under-age sex slave. We talk a lot about the great things going on in San Francisco. It is also apparently a predatory place, unsafe for kids. These things no one talks about.
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