Correspondence Weakland, Schiltz & more
SCHILTZ, PATRICK J. & PLATT, WALLACE & HEANEY, ROBERT P. & GLEASON, PHILIP & WILKINSON, GERTRUDE & MCKONE, HARRY & EICHENBERGER, JOSEPH P. & NUNZ, ROBERT A. & MORRIS, CHARLES R. & Russett, Bruce & Dinter, Paul E. & Cooke, Bernard
CORRESPONDENCE To the Editors From the flock Thank you for the excellent article by Archbishop Rembert Weakland ("Looking Forward," August 15). As you indicated in "Et cetera," his "service and...
...This has two implications for Iraq and for future wars...
...Still, it only tells part of the story...
...Those readers- and those bishops-are equally wrong...
...Though understandable, it was not inevitable...
...The black-and-white thinking that has led some readers to conclude that I am "antivictim" is the mirror image of the black-and-white thinking that has led some bishops to conclude that I am "antichurch...
...If not for the 'Globe' I read Patrick J. Schiltz's article with interest and concern...
...Their charges were that newly disclosed records put the lie to the archdiocese's decade-earlier defense that (in Schiltz's words) while bishops had made "horrible decisions," they had not truly appreciated the problem, and were anyway relying on "respected and experienced experts...
...Few parish bodies, in my experience, know a good English version of the Benedictus (from morning prayer) or the Magnificat (from evening prayer...
...The original Boston Globe report that triggered the episode was not about new cases of abuse...
...Proportionality revisited Jack Miles's article, "The Iraqi Dead" (July 18), rightly calls attention to the thousands of civilian deaths expected this year not from combat, but from diseases caused by wartime physical destruction and human displacement...
...PAUL E. DINTER Cortlandt Manor, N.Y...
...Second, even after the war is over, many of these deaths are not inevitable...
...He writes that "far too many journalists are acting irresponsibly in exercising their power...
...Continued on page 4) (Continued from page 2) On a much more fundamental level, however, Schiltz fails to address the conspiracy of silence that continues to permeate the church...
...Indeed, nothing I know of gives so chilling a picture of the gradual dissolution of social peace, as people who have known each other for years became enemies capable of midnight roundups and summary executions...
...As a religion reporter, Peter Steinfels understandably emphasized the behavioral, objective components of eucharistic liturgy-its "execution...
...The Globe showed that Cardinal Bernard Law and his circle actually knew in detail what was happening...
...One can believe, for example, that the Boston Globe did a great service in disclosing the extent of Cardinal Law's perfidy and also believe that the media as a whole have done a great disservice by failing to disclose that most bishops rid their dioceses of sexual abuse ten years ago...
...There is no doubt that we do it badly, that it is important to do it well, and that doing so makes a difference in regular Sunday attendance...
...one who cannot learn should be pensioned off...
...The author replies: I have spent a good part of my professional life working to prevent clergy sexual abuse, to help those victimized, and to hold accountable those responsible...
...Shortly after the Second Vatican Council, Aidan Kavanagh, OSB, wrote that a minister "who does not know should be instructed...
...I have drafted laws criminalizing clergy sexual abuse...
...PHILIP GLEASON Evanston, III...
...Such inevitable shortcomings do not, of themselves, render our celebrations null...
...His essay is most important, not just for its open and honest appraisal of our present situation in Catholicism, but for the vision and hope it provides for what the future can and should be and what we need to do to get there...
...It seems to me that our greatest liturgical challenge is actually anterior to liturgy...
...Eucharist by its very name is an outburst of gratitude to God for being saved...
...BRUCE RUSSETT New Haven, Conn...
...He rightly points out that our greatest need is to create a spirituality that is genuine and appropriate to our world, a spirituality that is sensitive to the aesthetic dimensions of faith and worship...
...Most congregations still attend Mass as if they were in a court of law, not as if they are joining with the angels and saints in their song of praise...
...But if most of the consequent civilian deaths are incurred over a long postwar span, our calculus of proportionality must change...
...Omaha, Neb...
...This is not necessarily the case in immigrant parishes where the "priest-is-god" philosophy still holds...
...More recently, I called for Cardinal Law to resign long before it became fashionable to do so, and I was quoted in the New York Times characterizing an action of the American cardinals as "idiotic" in its insensitivity to victims...
...The victim of that abuse of power is the truth...
...Perhaps it's no surprise, because the reform of the Roman breviary favored a studiously monastic style of praying the hours of the day, making little effort to broaden Catholic worship beyond Mass-going...
...The allegations were voluntarily made public by the archdiocese, as has been its standard practice for over a decade...
...Imagine, then, my surprise at being accused by Commonweal readers of "minimizing" clergy sexual abuse or somehow defending the behavior of Cardinal Law...
...Through agencies like Commonweal we have contact with individuals like Weakland, who help to bridge the divide between "them" and "us...
...one who will not learn should be removed from the ministry...
...That they were well informed on the completely out-of-control predation of characters like Shanley and Geoghan and chose to cover it up again and again...
...Fit to print Patrick J. Schiltz ("Not All the News Is Fit to Print," August 15) is right that the media have served up seriously distorted coverage of the church's sexual-abuse crisis, but I'm afraid he has added some confusions of his own...
...There is a difference between teaching correct conduct and ordering someone to follow it...
...The World Health Organization estimates that 269,000 people died in 1999 directly and immediately from all wars occurring in that year...
...An uncommon bishop Thank you for Rembert Weakland's article...
...Also, not all presiders can function at the level of the great ones, just as not all family birthdays can meet Martha Stewart's standards of elegance...
...They have accused me of being disloyal to the church, unforgiving toward abusive pastors, and soft on victims...
...I (Continued on page 43) (Continued from page 4) began doing this in 1987, when few people agreed with me...
...And Boston wasn't the only diocese where there were such revelations...
...Schiltz clearly describes the other side of the story...
...As a result, nonliturgi-cal devotions to Christ in the Eucharist, to the Divine Mercy, and to the Blessed Mother have reemerged to fill this gap...
...GERTRUDE WILKINSON Oconomowoc, Wis...
...BERNARD COOKE New Orleans, La...
...What is palpably lacking on both sides of what was once the altar rail is a sense of having been saved...
...Gironella's epic Thanks for the piece on Jose Maria Gironella ("True Fiction," June 20...
...It would be interesting to know why Gironella failed to continue the series...
...WALLACE PLATT, CSB Toronto, Ontario Neglecting the hours Peter Steinfels's "Fixing the Liturgy" (July 18) serves up a batch of crucial issues that Catholics must face if they really care about the quality of their worship life...
...One-sided In his article, Patrick J. Schiltz takes the media to task for being one-sided in their dealing with the crisis...
...For example, he states that, at present, "congregrants and parents are...hyperalert to indications that their pastor is committing abuse...
...We need more...
...I challenge Schiltz to cite a single time in the past decade, the past two decades, the past three decades, the past four decades, ad infinitum, when the sexual abuse of a child by a member of the clergy was voluntarily made public by the hierarchy of the Roman Church or by any one of its three hundred bishops in America...
...That the "respected experts" were diocesan hacks called in to make a paper trail...
...ROBERT P. HEANEY, M.D...
...If we really felt that gratitude, you couldn't keep us from joining with others to thank God for that ongoing miracle...
...Salvation" is a catechism word, carrying little or no meaning in the experience of most American Catholics...
...Yet in a manner that echoes the clergy's own silence on the matter, his survey focuses exclusively on the Eeucharistic liturgy and passes over any consideration of the liturgy of the hours...
...Cite a single example, please...
...It is our need for conversion...
...A kind of "minimize and move on" sophistry seems to be at work in Schiltz's approach...
...It's too much to expect the mass media to get this right, of course...
...As for Joseph Eichenberger's challenge: I could cite many examples, but the first to leap to mind is Father Robert Zasacki, who was serving a parish neighboring my own when he resigned last year after being accused of sexual abuse...
...We cannot afford to lose the benefit of his wisdom and experience...
...For years he has been an uncommonly honest, perceptive, and balanced commentator, open to the changes advocated by Vatican II and by "the signs of the times," but insisting always on the need to honor and be guided by tradition...
...First, those of us who adhere to just-war principles need to rethink how we evaluate one of its key tenets: proportionality...
...We find that over about a ten-year period, roughly ten times as many people die from the consequences of war-destruction of civilian infrastructure, devastation of the economy and the public health system-as from combat...
...The need for conversion It was good to see, once again, an article on liturgy in Commonweal ("Fixing the Liturgy...
...ROBERT A. NUNZ Los Alamos, N.Mex...
...May he continue to share his vision and his hopes with us...
...The assertion is ludicrous: the need for the Dallas Charter, the formation of a national review board, the resignation of the head of that Board based on perceived noncooperation, the early resignation of an American cardinal, the formation of priests and lay groups to seek greater voice in governance-these are all new developments, all tied to failures of accountability by the hierarchy...
...The major agents are infectious diseases like AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis that are communicated far more widely, and with more deadly consequences, than before the war...
...It is as good as he says...
...Or one can believe that some bishops acted reasonably in following the advice of psychologists without believing that Cardinal Law was one of them...
...You are right, of course, in calling for reasonable and respectful discussion in a democratic atmosphere...
...I have persuaded reluctant bishops to implement policies requiring abusive pastors to be removed from ministry and requiring full disclosure of all abuse...
...We are still too much "two churches," officials and nonofficials, talking at one another instead of with one another...
...The second was about a corrupted episcopacy, which seems a far worse problem...
...Boyle does not mention Gironella's two other books that continue the story-One Million Dead, which covers the civil war years, and Peace After War, which ends as one of the central characters goes off to fight the Russians...
...I believe that the mistakes he made, his public apologies, and his acknowledgment of his personal need for healing and forgiveness from both the local and universal church have enriched his experience, and deepened his understanding...
...Yet, important as it is, ministerial incompetence is not, I believe, at the heart of the problem...
...Prompt and massive assistance to repair the infrastructure and restore the public-health system could prevent tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths...
...I believe that the United States government, for whatever mix of reasons, made great effort to limit direct and immediate civilian mortality in Iraq as well as in other recent wars...
...Schiltz should first cast out the beam in his own eye before he scores others so easily...
...Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and his associates are certainly not so naive as to think they can give orders to the American people-or anyone else...
...If any real effort had been made to introduce Catholics to the poetry, Scripture, song, instruction, and petition that fill out the church's eu-charistic worship, then Catholics might have learned that worship is supposed to be about giving praise and thanks, not about fulfilling a just debt...
...One does not have to choose sides...
...PATRICK J. SCHILTZ Rome is not naive The title of your editorial, "Orders from Rome" (August 15), is misleading and rather unfair...
...Call to Action and Voice of the Faithful offer the possibility of genuine conversation where the reign of God can be the ruling objective...
...All credit for exposing the malignancy of child sexual abuse by the clergy of the Roman Church must be credited to the bravery of those abused, and to the expertise of countless lawyers, judges, district attorneys, and members of the press...
...It is so good to know that his retirement as Milwaukee's archbishop did not mean that we lost his important voice in the U.S...
...In return, I have been harshly criticized by some bishops, priests, attorneys, and insurers...
...Zero credit goes to the church itself...
...Catholic Church...
...Have not the Catholic people-indeed, have not all people- the right to hear the voice of the church loud and clear...
...Examples, please To quote from paragraph seven of Patrick J. Schiltz's article: "I have challenged reporters to cite a single major element of the clergy-abuse story that was not widely reported a decade ago...
...JOSEPH P. EICHENBERGER New York, N.Y...
...I have prosecuted abusive pastors in church disciplinary proceedings...
...Overemphasis on execution risks an "entertain me and I'll come" approach to the problem...
...I have spent hundreds of hours speaking to church leaders, trying to convince them, for example, that false reports of abuse are rare, that abusive pastors should not get a "second chance," and that churches are morally obligated to compensate all victims, even those who cannot sue...
...That in one case Law apparently sent back a report that Geoghan was an "explosion" waiting to happen with orders to rewrite it...
...The document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith is doing what it is supposed to do: teach morality...
...Yet in an intuitive way the public seemed to...
...Both were published in the 1960s...
...Like John Boyle, I came late to the reading of The Cypresses Believe in God...
...The point isn't to make noise, or even to make music, but to make poetry out of our lives, our struggles, and our conviction that even now, we share in Christ's "sacrifice of praise" to God...
...The first sexual-abuse crisis was about some twisted priests...
...In the May issue of the American Political Science Review, Hazem Ghobarah, Paul Huth, and I examine the effects of wars long after the shooting stops...
...We have an obligation...
...HARRY MCKONE Boston, Mass...
...This is not a football game...
...Were it not for the reporting of the Boston Globe, however, Schiltz's side would be the only side we would know...
...His cardinal point is that "every major element of the overall story-every single one-had already been reported years ago...
...I certainly agree, but I think another item should be high on our agenda: the establishment of a new structure of conversation in the church...
...I think this is beneficial to all and serves the democratic process admirably...
...The crisis in Boston ended, not when more priests went to jail-Shanley and Geoghan were already there- but when Law resigned and an apparently honest man replaced him...
...For Schiltz to even imply otherwise gives new meaning to the word disingenuous...
...One does not have to believe that the media are all good and the bishops all bad or vice versa...
...As you indicated in "Et cetera," his "service and dedication to the church can be a great resource...
...By our analysis, secondary deaths attributable to those wars would approach 3 million...
...Schiltz makes a few good points, although I would question several of his generalizations...
...Hence in church we don't "sing of our salvation," we check in with the Boss...
...I see nothing objectionable, however, in clearly stating Catholic teaching...
...CHARLES R. MORRIS New York, N.Y...
...I wonder, too, what, if any, connection there might be between the author's name and the city of which he wrote, Girona...
...Teaching is the primary mission of the church given by Christ...
...As a Boston native who lives literally in the shadow of the Roman Catholic cathedral, I have seen firsthand the horror that clerical silence and cover-up can cause...
...Why not seize the moment and nurture such movements...
Vol. 130 • September 2003 • No. 15
