The Catholic New World - Cardinal's Column, Calendar & Appointments

The Body of Christ and the spring meeting of the U.S. Catholic bishops

We have just celebrated the feast of Corpus Christi, the solemnity of the Body and Blood of the Lord. Talking to the first communicants at St. Laurence Parish, I said that appearances are deceiving when it comes to the Holy Eucharist. It looks like the bread of Jesus’ time, tastes like unleavened bread, smells and feels like bread; but it’s not bread. It’s the body and blood, human soul and divine nature of Jesus of Nazareth, risen from the dead. They believed this, because they had been well instructed. They looked beyond appearances with the eyes of faith.

Appearances and reality are different also when looking to the upcoming meeting of the U.S. bishops in Dallas, June 13-15. On the level of both appearance and reality, the bishops will be addressing the scandal of the sexual abuse of minors by a few priests and the failure to correct this shameful conduct effectively and quickly on the part of some bishops. The meeting will address the scandal by passing policies which will correct the way bishops handle these sinful and criminal actions. The first draft of these policies is now public, and I will compare them to what I have heard from priests and people in the Archdiocese. But the deeper reality also at stake throughout the discussion of policies is the holiness of priests and the trustworthiness of bishops.

With the eyes of faith, believers can see that the current scandal in the Church is an instance of the struggle between “the principalities and power” that originate in evil and the grace of God given us by Christ through His Church (Ephesians 6: 11-12). Approving good policies will help protect children and adolescents and may restore some trust in the bishops’ governance of the Church. Apologies to victims will be public and sincere, and the policies mandate assistance to them.

Beyond the level of policies, however, the Church is a work of grace. We believe that the Church is holy because Christ is holy, and the Church is His body (Lumen gentium, 39). We know that this holy Church is marked with the sins of her members. “All members of the Church, including her ministers, must acknowledge that they are sinners” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 827); but the Church also has from Christ the means of forgiving sin. Policies can appeal to juridical or psychological or sociological means to address an issue; but the Church herself operates on the level of sin and forgiveness. At Mass, the priest prays: “Look not on our sins, but on the faith of your Church...” A priest of the Archdiocese commented a couple of weeks ago during one of the meetings about the Sacrament of Penance that people today haven’t so much lost a sense of sin as a sense of forgiveness. In the midst of all the shame and scandal, the Church must speak of forgiveness or she will forget her own identity in Christ. There is now much justification for anger; but there is never justification for self-righteousness. Where there is self-righteousness, Christ can do nothing.

Some weeks back, while talking to an Associated Press reporter about policies for priests who have sinned, I made mention of St. Augustine’s controversy with the Donatists in the fourth century. The reporter didn’t know who the Donatists were, so I explained that they were a group of Christians who rejected other Christians who had denied the faith during the times of persecution. Donatists held that only those Christians who had never sinned in denying the faith under threat of their life truly constitute the Church. The Donatists were the prototypical sectarians. St. Augustine argued that the sheep may stray from the flock, but they still carry the mark of the branding iron. In particular, the efficacy of the Church’s ministry and of her sacraments does not depend on the personal holiness of her ministers. Even unfaithful priests, like rusty pipes, are conduits for the water of divine grace in the sacraments.

A crisis of authority in the Church cannot be resolved if bishops don’t act like bishops. A bishop has responsibility before Christ for keeping people united to Christ. A bishop therefore sets boundaries, in the matter of sexual misconduct or any other matter; but, more fundamentally, he encourages people to live virtuously in Christ. When people are “in Christ” and not full of themselves and their own lives, they are the Church. Since the bishop is the visible point of reference for union with Christ, people divorced from their bishop are not part of the apostolic Church. Hence the terrible trial for the Church when priests and people and bishops are not together in purpose and in life.

On June 2, a leading Chicago paper complained that, “It has been difficult for Chicago-area Catholics to formulate the end of this sentence: ‘My cardinal gets the loss of confidence in the hierarchy, and he says we really have to...” In fact, a bishop who doesn’t get the loss of confidence in the hierarchy today must be comatose. But bishops cannot address that loss outside of the context of faith which creates the Church as Church.

The sentence therefore has to finish like this: “My cardinal gets the loss of confidence in the hierarchy, and he says we really have to ask for the grace to be more faithful disciples, in what we believe and in how we act, bishops and people together around Jesus Christ.”

That sounds simplistic only to those who don’t see with the eyes of faith. Despite appearances for those without the faith, the Church is not governed like a country, a corporation, a political party or a newspaper, because Christ is the head of the Church. The Church doesn’t need a self-appointed guru, even a cardinal, to give answers about “restoring confidence” in authority. Those who live under the authority of bishops understand when it is being exercised correctly and when a bishop is sinning against his office. If the bishop is doing his job, the people have a certain security in their relationship to Christ. If we are all faithful, Christ himself will forgive our sins and heal our wounds. That is all that is possible, and that is more than enough.

A certain hypocrisy permeates the discussion about bishops when the same people who denounce them for not controlling immoral priests also denounce them for trying to control anything at all. The real agenda of many who now control the public discussion about sexual misconduct by priests is the discrediting of episcopal authority, cheered on by Catholics who have become upset with the Church for various reasons, and the weakening of the Catholic Church’s influence in American life. That is why the discussion is now moving from sexual misconduct with minors over the past 50 years to homosexuality in the priesthood to sexual sin with adults to sexual abuse of children by Sisters. These investigations and stories will not end very soon. Sin and forgiveness are an old story in the history of the Church, and so is dislike of Catholicism. There’s a saying in the French language which roughly translates: the one who eats the Pope dies of a stomach ache. Bishops discredit themselves when they sin; but their office is integral to the constitution of the Church.

In this country, setting policies for the Church is complicated by people’s attitude toward the law. In the Protestant Reformation, it was the prince or the emerging nation state that protected the reformers. As a consequence, civil law in Protestant lands trumped Church law. In our form of Protestant culture, canon law struggles to have its own standing along side civil law. As I was once told in Oregon, where the state had violated the seal of the confessional in order to obtain evidence in a murder trial: “You have your own rules for your religious club, but we have to get evidence where we can.” Similar sentiments have been voiced in the past few weeks in Illinois. The Attorney General of Massachusetts recently suggested that his office ought to be concerned with the recruitment and training of priests. The Clinton administration actively supported groups in the Catholic Church who want to conform Church teaching to civil law in the matter of abortion. In this sense, there is no separation of Church and State; rather, the State in its system of law reaches to govern even the internal life and teaching of the Church.

Throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, Catholicism was denounced repeatedly as foreign to America, a threat to children and progress, priest-ridden and secretive. Catholics faithful to the Church and their priests were often under suspicion as second class citizens. Today, many groups and people, including some who still see themselves as Catholic, have a vested interest in the failure of the bishops at Dallas. No matter what is done, it will not be enough. And, given our culture, that’s largely true. As the bishops move now to diminish and control sources of corruption in the Church, even among themselves, this larger social context of suspicion will remain. It’s part of our history. The bishops must do their work and govern the Church as a faith community, but it is the Catholic laity who will determine what is fair in reporting and judging the actions of priests and bishops and it is the laity who will determine the place of the Church in this society.

There will be no place, because there will be no Catholic Church, no visible body of Christ, if people and bishops are not united in Christ. That’s the reality. Please pray to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, whose feast we celebrate in June, for the U.S. bishops during our meeting in Dallas, June 13-15. You and those you love are daily in my prayers. God bless you.