Last week, the Pennsylvania attorney general released a grand jury report detailing credible accusations implicating more than 300 Roman Catholic priests in sexually abusing more than 1000 children since the 1940s. As in other parts of the church, bishops and other church leaders protected the priests, downplaying and ignoring accusations of abuse and misconduct.
This news provides more opportunities for outrage about people who should have accepted responsibility and done things differently. Priests, those entrusted with sharing and teaching about the love of God and Jesus, perverting that message into a weapon for pursuing their own selfish desires through abuse and rape. Church leaders, who were entrusted with holding priests to account for their behavior, but who instead protected their friends and colleagues behind a wall of silence and a tendency to simply move accused priests to other parishes. Police and prosecutors who felt powerless to question the actions of respected church officials and so rarely investigated or charged those accused of these awful crimes.
Surely they all knew better. Yet they assuredly rationalized their behavior as what was "best for the church," which makes it even more outrageous and maddening. I can't say if the cover-up was worse than the initial crimes -- I find it all pretty equally nauseating.
My heart aches for the victims, for thousands and thousands (if not more) of people who were raped, groped, groomed, and in any number of ways treated as objects, rather than children of God. My heart aches for them when they dared to tell stories that often made them feel ashamed and guilty themselves, only to be ignored and shunned for years.
However, I think that the entire church needs to go deeper than just disgust, outrage, and heartache. We need to admit the reality of these crimes and cover-ups. We need to admit that many people see the church of Christ as a sham, rather than as community embraced by God's love and forgiveness. And we need to confess our sins of complicity and hypocrisy.
I write these words as a Protestant minister. I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the Roman Catholic Church. Often, this distinction encourages people to point fingers and say, in effect, "this is their bad behavior and their problem, not mine." However, that cop-out is more about our own egos than about a solid theology of what the church is and who the church is.
First, I imagine that if the light were shone on other denominations and parts of the church, we would find other shameful and illegal behavior that has been covered up and ignored. Catholic priests are not the only clergy who have used their positions of power to pursue selfish ends and pleasures. Unfortunately, I'm confident that there are many church leaders who have violated the trust of others, including cases of rape and abuse. So it's pretty foolish and short-sighted to point fingers at others.
More deeply, though, I take seriously the New Testament's explicit teaching that the church is the "body of Christ." Paul goes so far as to say that just because we don't think we need other parts of the body doesn't make them any less essentially a part of the body. He uses examples of hands and feet, but is it any less true of Roman Catholics or Baptists? We are a part of each other. Sometimes this is very beneficial and works out in our favor, as when we share in the benefits of the efforts of others. Sometimes, though, we share the sins of others too. (Don't worry: I'm sure they have opportunities to share our sins as well.)
Maybe you think that the church, the body of Christ, simply needs some thorough surgery to cut out the cancerous parts responsible for these abuses and cover-ups. Twice, Jesus himself suggested that it would be better to cut off sinful parts -- eyes, hands, or feet -- our our own bodies rather than to let these body parts lead us to spend an eternity in hell. Both instances are relevant to the issue of clergy sex abuse, given that one is offered as a teaching about adultery, and the other is about misleading children. Personally, I doubt that anyone could capably accomplish such eradication, though; I don't believe any of us can decide who should be forgiven and who cannot be, which instances were oversights and which ones were failures of oversight.
Plus, those outside of the church -- and especially those who are mad at the church -- don't differentiate between different parts. We did this. We failed these victims of rape and abuse. We traumatized them. We ignored them. We called them liars. We thought they didn't matter as much as the leaders. In the process, we grossly misrepresented the love of God -- the very love of God that the church is supposed to enact and exemplify in the world.
At its best, the church is a beacon of hope in a broken world. "You are the light of the world," Jesus said. Unfortunately, though, the church is made up of broken people, who have fallen short of the magnificence of God. We ought not make our brokenness worse by rationalizing that we don't have a problem or shirk responsibility by saying it's someone else's fault. Fortunately, the love of God is stronger than this brokenness, as is God's forgiveness. Now is a time that the entire church needs to admit that we need that forgiveness and that love.
This news provides more opportunities for outrage about people who should have accepted responsibility and done things differently. Priests, those entrusted with sharing and teaching about the love of God and Jesus, perverting that message into a weapon for pursuing their own selfish desires through abuse and rape. Church leaders, who were entrusted with holding priests to account for their behavior, but who instead protected their friends and colleagues behind a wall of silence and a tendency to simply move accused priests to other parishes. Police and prosecutors who felt powerless to question the actions of respected church officials and so rarely investigated or charged those accused of these awful crimes.
Surely they all knew better. Yet they assuredly rationalized their behavior as what was "best for the church," which makes it even more outrageous and maddening. I can't say if the cover-up was worse than the initial crimes -- I find it all pretty equally nauseating.
My heart aches for the victims, for thousands and thousands (if not more) of people who were raped, groped, groomed, and in any number of ways treated as objects, rather than children of God. My heart aches for them when they dared to tell stories that often made them feel ashamed and guilty themselves, only to be ignored and shunned for years.
However, I think that the entire church needs to go deeper than just disgust, outrage, and heartache. We need to admit the reality of these crimes and cover-ups. We need to admit that many people see the church of Christ as a sham, rather than as community embraced by God's love and forgiveness. And we need to confess our sins of complicity and hypocrisy.
I write these words as a Protestant minister. I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the Roman Catholic Church. Often, this distinction encourages people to point fingers and say, in effect, "this is their bad behavior and their problem, not mine." However, that cop-out is more about our own egos than about a solid theology of what the church is and who the church is.
First, I imagine that if the light were shone on other denominations and parts of the church, we would find other shameful and illegal behavior that has been covered up and ignored. Catholic priests are not the only clergy who have used their positions of power to pursue selfish ends and pleasures. Unfortunately, I'm confident that there are many church leaders who have violated the trust of others, including cases of rape and abuse. So it's pretty foolish and short-sighted to point fingers at others.
More deeply, though, I take seriously the New Testament's explicit teaching that the church is the "body of Christ." Paul goes so far as to say that just because we don't think we need other parts of the body doesn't make them any less essentially a part of the body. He uses examples of hands and feet, but is it any less true of Roman Catholics or Baptists? We are a part of each other. Sometimes this is very beneficial and works out in our favor, as when we share in the benefits of the efforts of others. Sometimes, though, we share the sins of others too. (Don't worry: I'm sure they have opportunities to share our sins as well.)
Maybe you think that the church, the body of Christ, simply needs some thorough surgery to cut out the cancerous parts responsible for these abuses and cover-ups. Twice, Jesus himself suggested that it would be better to cut off sinful parts -- eyes, hands, or feet -- our our own bodies rather than to let these body parts lead us to spend an eternity in hell. Both instances are relevant to the issue of clergy sex abuse, given that one is offered as a teaching about adultery, and the other is about misleading children. Personally, I doubt that anyone could capably accomplish such eradication, though; I don't believe any of us can decide who should be forgiven and who cannot be, which instances were oversights and which ones were failures of oversight.
Plus, those outside of the church -- and especially those who are mad at the church -- don't differentiate between different parts. We did this. We failed these victims of rape and abuse. We traumatized them. We ignored them. We called them liars. We thought they didn't matter as much as the leaders. In the process, we grossly misrepresented the love of God -- the very love of God that the church is supposed to enact and exemplify in the world.
At its best, the church is a beacon of hope in a broken world. "You are the light of the world," Jesus said. Unfortunately, though, the church is made up of broken people, who have fallen short of the magnificence of God. We ought not make our brokenness worse by rationalizing that we don't have a problem or shirk responsibility by saying it's someone else's fault. Fortunately, the love of God is stronger than this brokenness, as is God's forgiveness. Now is a time that the entire church needs to admit that we need that forgiveness and that love.
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