Sins of the fathers
Garvey, John
told me in Mexico City. "We are not fighting to incorporate ourselves into the status quo. We are not trying to solve our--the URNG's--problem by integrating ourselves on generous terms while all...
...What black Americans have to deal with is not a suddenly decreed "equality of opportunity," as if that could be made to happen by governmental fiat...
...They will fit well into a society that desires such citizens--but from what basis will they be able to tell us anything we might need to hear, or teach, or heal, or offer stories that could be instructive at any level that we need to know...
...We are not trying to solve our--the URNG's--problem by integrating ourselves on generous terms while all else remains unchanged...
...I am not doomed to be what my father and grandfather were, if my father was a Nazi and his father an instigator of pogroms...
...I have even met people who manage this, who have no religion, who downplay to the point of near-nothingness their religious or ethnic identity-they make white bread look positively dari n g - i n their desire not to be anything in particular...
...If a deacon or priest is widowed (or divorced, an increasing phenomenon) he is expected to become a layperson if he marries again...
...The experience of the church is that it seems to...
...and then they chose-----often for very good and sound reasons--to move away from the priesthood...
...In Orthodoxy this problem also exists, but on a smaller scale...
...The complications they involve may not be solved in the ways proposed by conventional liberalism, and conservatives have taken appropriate note of that fact...
...As accurate as the psychological observation is, and as ugly as the phenomenon it refers to is, something else can be found in the statement as well...
...Originally the bishop was the center of every eucharistic community...
...The notion that ordination is a right or confers a power, on the other hand, looks pretty strange to us and ought to look pretty strange to Catholics...
...The status quo in Guatemala means continued impunity by the security forces...
...As Jonathan Kozol has pointed out, this is one problem that really can be solved by throwing some money at it...
...In my youth, pederast Catholic priests were a problem that was closeted (I encountered such priests, and so did several friends...
...It sees priesthood as a power or resource that is apparently granted independently of the church (meaning independently of bishops and a real community), a power that inheres, once granted...
...I don't know that this calls for reparations of any sort, or quotas, and I am not sure that it can be solved governmentally...
...Baez asked how old she was, and then pointed out that she wasn't old enough to have been oppressed for that long...
...No one in modem times has forced anyone to be a priest...
...It was or should have been a choice freely taken, both times...
...PATRICK LACEFIELD Patrick Lacefield is associate director of the Commission on United States-Latin American Relations in Washington, D.C...
...In Orthodoxy, celibacy is demanded only of monks and bishops, which narrows the percentage of clergy who are tempted "Schyler is keenly aware of histo...
...We haven't and probably won't have the number of scandals that have hit the Catholic church in the U.S...
...God, I would argue, didn't call any of these men to priesthood...
...A lot of kids don't...
...This explains in part the weight of wariness black Americans carry when they deal with whites...
...Most of these kids are black, and that isn't an accident...
...On the other hand, such definitions can be murderously inclusive...
...In the same way, you may--perhaps appropriately--fear that something of nazism was handed on in children of Nazis, but you may not assume it...
...From the Orthodox point of view, to marry after ordination means that you become a layperson--no problem there...
...And it means honest cops like Jose Merida Escobar put their lives on the line in more ways than one...
...I'm glad he had a strong grandfather and encouraging nuns...
...The CORPUS approach, however, seems--from the Orthodox point of view, anyway--a strange one...
...I may hope that something was handed on, but can't claim it...
...They also can't be sentimentalized away, as the rhetoric of some of Clarence Thomas's defenders suggested...
...This isn't an arbitrary canonical regulation but something that Paul says: the bishop--in the early church this was the ordinary pastor, the one who presided--should be the husband of one wife...
...The priest is the person appointed by the community to do the Eucharist...
...Where such pastorally intimate situations as confession are concemed, my wife and I have found Orthodox practice much more helpful than Catholic practice, precisely because the priests we confess to are married...
...One priest said to me of a friend of his, who was a priest and married after the death of his wife, while remaining deeply involved in his parish, "He understood that what matters is the chalice, and not who holds it...
...We need the "us," the identification that makes Germans and Jews see themselves not as individuals only but as people who come from something and know and remember it, with all its pain and complication...
...Should white Irish Americans pay reparations to black Americans on the grounds that, by virtue (or vice) of their being white they have oppressed black people-----even if their ancestors were busy being oppressed by the English, did not arrive in America until 1925, and may never personally have participated in racist structures...
...A married priesthood in our time often involves unstable clerical marriages, occasional divorces, and consequently upset parish communities...
...A married priesthood isn't a cure for priest shortages: there are Orthodox parishes that can't be staffed for want of priests, and many Orthodox parents discourage their sons from becoming priests...
...In all cases, it was an appointment by the church (not a vocation that came from God, independent of a specific community call, or independent of a bishop...
...It means a continued division of the country between the few who have the power--and wealth--and the many who hold little of either...
...n a recent issue of Commonweal (October 11), editor Margaret O'Brien Steinfels argued that a meeting of CORPUS, an association of resigned Roman Catholic priests, was wrong to celebrate a liturgy at which the officiants would be former priests...
...now it isn't, but it is coming close to bankrupting some dioceses...
...That really isn't a bad point...
...Such worries--and the failure to address them well, as economic times get tough--are responsible, among other factors, for the success of the neoNazi candidate for Louisiana governor, David Duke...
...You do have every right to suspect that something was handed on where you encounter defensiveness...
...in fact, the quality of pastoral care is usually better and more attentive, perhaps because of our smaller parishes...but the smaller parishes are possible because we have more priests per capita than Roman Catholics do...
...a lot of kids live in places where, as is the case in one part of New 22 November 1991:679 York City, there is no money for a building, so school is held in a skating rink with teachers who, simply because of the number of students per teacher, have to act like cops at a concert more than teachers in a classroom...
...On the same grounds, in other circumstances (if for example I were a direct descendent of Thomas More), I may not claim my ancestor's heroism, courage, or wisdom...
...to use a false celibacy as a shield...
...Some people are born into this condition, a new phenomenon...
...Married priests make more pastoral sense than compulsorily celibate ones, but married priests won't solve all problems-- including even the priest shortage--though they would probably go a long way toward helping to alleviate it...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey SINS OF THE FATHERS NOTHING PREORDAINED 6 he Germans will never forgive us for their having gassed us at Ausc h w i t z . " These words of a rabbi, quoted in a recent New York Times book review of The German Comedy by Peter Schneider, referred to a new form of anti-Semitism, which blames Jews for tamishing the self-image of their persecutors...
...In the Orthodox approach to priesthood, marriage must occur before ordination...
...Without addressing the particulars of the argument, I think it might help to look at the experience of a church that has known the experience of married priests for all of its history, and has a theological perspective that may help Catholics, who will be forced to examine this question as supplies of priests dwindle...
...The "us" is not the people who were gassed, but Jews who identify themselves with the victims of the Germans, for reasons of family and nation...
...The Germans referred to here are not the Germans who did the gassing, but Germans who identify themselves with them, for reasons involving family and nation...
...later he appointed presbyters to preside in his stead...
...A married priesthood has not, in my experience as a convert to Orthodox Christianity, meant less pastoral care than I found in Roman Catholicism...
...but he can't do anything about it...
...I know Orthodox clerics who after the death of a wife or a divorce have been laicized...
...but it is a fact, and collective identities adhere to us whether we like it or not...
...I have overheard a lot of arguments that go roughly like this: nationhood and religion are responsible for so much hatred and bloodshed that it would be better to adhere to neither, to see oneself simply as a self, not limited or defined by allegiance to anything else...
...A person who chooses to marry after ordination is laicized--with no negative connotation attached...
...A significant number of our priests support themselves, because the communities they serve can't afford to support them full-time...
...I really did not do these things...
...It is right for me to insist on that, and to insist that you may not absorb me into their deeds, their hatred, their cowardice...
...Should the children of black lawyers or doctors be given preference over the children of unemployed white assembly-line workers in college admissions...
...The very fact that as a white man I ~ u i t e a c c i d e n t a l l y ~ o not encounter barriers that black people commonly encounter (do not, for example, have cabs routinely pass me by in Manhattan) is relevant...
...She was answered by Thomas McCabe, a CORPUS official...
...But even if it were solved, like the relationship between Jews and Germans, something more than class would be involved here...
...The implication the church has taken from this is that the marriage should occur before ordination, and Paul makes it clear that the point is that a man's stable family life might indicate a similar stability with regard to the larger community...
...They are the ideal post-Enlightenment products...
...They are as helpful to their churches as most priests are (and in some cases, a good deal more helpful...
...They may have wanted to remain priests, but that's another question: the need to be a priest, or the feeling that one has a fight to priesthood, is more a pathological than a theological question...
...Any Orthodox bishop who cares deeply about canon law or Pauline scripture or church tradition would deal with this situation as Catholic bishops have, and should...
...and Canada, but we have had some...
...680: Commonweal...
...I remember reading about an exchange between Joan Baez and a young black woman, who said, "You have been oppressing me for two hundred years...
...Most of the discussions going on about black/white relations now avoid the more troubling issue of class, because we would like to believe that this is not a major issue in America...
...The church did, in the person of the bishop, and approved them for ordination...
Vol. 118 • November 1991 • No. 20
