TO STAY OR TO LEAVE?
Keen, Suzanne
TO STAY OR TO LEAVE? Two responses to the sexual-abuse scandal Suzanne Keen On the end, I left the Catholic Church out of love for my son, not out of the anger I had for so long felt and...
...Mom, I want to go to the feast," he insisted, and then he took his request to his Sunday school teachers...
...As a homilist, his manner was strange, almost childlike, with credulous tone and simple sentence structures...
...Like many Catholics, I had noticed the renewed urgency in church bulletins and homilies about the outward signs of behavior that would identify the loyal and mark out dissenters-those who stand instead of kneel, and so forth...
...He was well known for his quaint superstitions...
...I picked up my kid and ran...
...kneeling at the rail for Communion...
...And the music...
...I like to think that my love for my son was the conduit for the grace that finally permitted clarity...
...Compared to the packed Catholic Masses, the congregation seemed sparse, except for a crowded group in the choir...
...It would be insulting to victims of abuse to suggest that I had been scarred by this experience...
...The loss of family solidarity on Sunday was a worry, and I didn't want to initiate spiritual vagabondage in my son...
...No, I am not a victim of clerical abuse, or of any of the Catholic school bogeymen and women of the popular imagination...
...Was this the inheritance I wanted for him, I asked myself...
...My gradual alienation is the product of much more humdrum and unsensational experience: a growing frustration that turned to anger and then to fear...
...He once described how, thanks to a statuette of Saint Joseph buried in the backyard, his mother's house had been preserved in a storm that had destroyed the houses next door...
...Just as the second reading ended, an elderly lady joined me in my pew...
...I didn't get to have the feast," he complained, referring to Communion...
...Nothing was wrong with my parish, but I found that I could no longer maintain the illusion that my local church is separate from the troubles that bedeviled, and still afflict, the larger church in places like Boston...
...There were the loaf of bread, the priests, male and female, and the parents, nervous that their children would say or do something irreverent...
...On several occasions, visiting my husband's home parish in Weston, Massachusetts, I had heard the now notorious, then unsuspected, recently murdered pedophile Father John Geoghan preach...
...Yeah, right...
...Soon everyone seemed to know him...
...I have found it hard enough to answer the theological and moral questions that come so readily to a kindergartner, without having to explain why we were joining that exodus, especially when my husband has remained a Catholic...
...I admit it wasn't logical to fear what would happen if a five-year-old, some years from now, felt called to the priesthood...
...No one would touch my son...
...It brought a host of other reservations about the church, especially its treatment of women, to the surface in an unig-norable way...
...I no longer feel obliged to stifle my reactions to the weekly bulletin's touting of natural family planning-"Just as effective as artificial birth control...
...Would it be irresponsible of me to continue to compromise and to continue to suppress doubts I had about the church's practices...
...And the clothing-how the Episcopalians dress up...
...A few months into our new routine, Jake, who by that time was close to six, startled me with a request...
...If my son were to be called to that vocation, as he had so clearly been called to participate in the communal feast, I would have little to fear...
...Boston will likely pay nearer $100 million...
...Then the kids were allowed to act out the parts of the priest and the communicant, the communicant and the priest...
...I wondered...
...Fight or flight...
...It didn't happen again...
...Shortly my husband and I received an invitation to bring Jake in for an introductory session about Eucharist...
...The priest at the neighboring Episcopal church assured me that I could raise my son Catholic there...
...The parish had made a recent commitment to improved religious education for the children, and each week more families with kids showed up...
...The parish was small, perhaps a third the size of the overlapping Catholic parish, but it was a busy place...
...The Diocese of Louisville recently settled with abuse victims for $24 million...
...The class itself would be perfectly safe-taught by a pair of lay parishioners-and in any case, all responsible priests are now so careful around children that I felt no worries on that account...
...I have postponed the explanation until a time-when will it be?-when talking about pedophilia and hypocrisy and broken trust, about misogyny and homophobia and lies, would not damage the growing faith of my child...
...I resolved not to mind being the slobby lady in her weekday clothes...
...I made up little safety rules, such as "Always accompany child everywhere in church," and I tried to ignore how bad it felt to need such a code...
...It didn't occur to me for a long time that conscience could feel this way, so discomforting, so unresponsive to my efforts to pray the reactions away...
...I admired the people who in other parishes started chapters of Voice of the Faithful, for I recognized that much of their effort was to hand on the best of the church to the young...
...Was it really necessary to take so much that was bad and stultifying along with what is good...
...What a blessing not to have to exercise the selective dissent of the much derided "Cafeteria Catholic," picking and choosing the palatable bits of a faith...
...The three little boys and their parents gathered at the altar...
...Back at home, I called my mom, a lapsed Episcopalian, for counsel...
...Two responses to the sexual-abuse scandal Suzanne Keen On the end, I left the Catholic Church out of love for my son, not out of the anger I had for so long felt and suppressed-or so I told myself...
...I remember another homily in the advent to Christmas...
...Some of the Lost Boys of the Sudan were in the area, and the Diocese of the Sudan was considered one of our companion parishes...
...Then he rejoined me in the church for the eucharistic part of the Mass, arriving with the other small children in a bell-ringing parade down the center aisle...
...Yet when it came to putting my son into the hands of men of the church, my throat closed in panic...
...He enacted line by line, and with guileless enthusiasm, the upcoming pageant he had been rehearsing with the children, taking the role of each: "And then the DON-key said...
...When I decided we should leave, I didn't go far...
...hearing so much about money...
...When I think back now, I can only shudder...
...Eventually, I noticed that I was not the only Roman Catholic among the Episcopalians, and I met people, mostly women, who had made the same journey...
...Some background may be illuminating...
...A Quaker by birthright and conviction, I converted to Catholicism at the time of my marriage...
...I met the director of Christian education, an ordained minister, a woman, a working mom like me...
...It was a charade of innocent delight, so silly, so seemingly harmless, and we were taken in...
...I was too busy trying to find my place in the Book of Common Prayer and in the two hymnals to worry...
...Like many Catholics, I had felt pangs about where so much of the money was going...
...No one, that is, but God, whose work I could already see in the curious and pious child in my care...
...My son is not lost, and neither am I. Suzanne Keen, a longtime contributor, is professor of English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia...
...I couldn't give them the money they needed and also improve my Sunday wardrobe...
...But all that changed when it was time to sign up for the kindergarten Sunday school class...
...We conversed for an hour: I felt recognized and welcomed, a refreshing change...
...Anyway, I reminded myself, I was doing this for my son, and he was thriving in his new church...
...Was it my clothes...
...You were in her pew," she explained...
...I recall reading a lament in Commonweal about educated women leaving the church in a silent exodus and the catastrophic consequences that would follow...
...we'll wait a year or two before you do that...
...Like many women, I marveled at the cluelessness of the hierarchy, but managed to ignore it, most of the time, in order to keep the ritual, the community, the connections to a deep past (especially the Eucharist) and to other Catholics in the world...
...In the meantime, what a relief it has been for me...
...They were finishing up a Habitat house, built in collaboration with a local black church...
...Then he went to a short service in the children's chapel and to Sunday school...
...And on and on...
...His Sunday began with choir practice with the young, gifted music director...
...I did have my little brush with history...
...I realized that the clerical sexual-abuse scandal had taken something from me: at the very least, it had broken my trust in the goodness and benevolence of priests...
...She gave me a sour look...
...It was like an NPR fundraising drive that went on for months on end...
...At the time, it only seemed risible to me, sad evidence of the bottom-of-the-barrel scraping the priesthood had come to when the vocational crisis was about low SAT scores rather than pedophilia...
...I have neither traumas to reveal nor grudges to avenge...
...Like many Catholics, I felt bad for the priest in my parish, a good man who radiates the inward light of his vocation...
...The choir, the bell choir, the hymnal-all marked improvements and sources of delight...
...The first time I went to a Sunday service, I sat toward the back, in an empty pew...
...Visiting the local Presbyterian church to see their beautiful renovations after a catastrophic fire, we had to quash my son's idea that we might switch to this church next, because it had a better balcony...
...At the sign of peace, she ostentatiously refused to notice my outstretched hand...
...I had also promised in a baptismal vow to raise my son Catholic, and this above all kept me in the church, despite sordid revelations about the wicked behavior of priests and the inadequate responses of bishops and leaders of the orders...
...Every Sunday a variety of classes for adults ran at the same time as Sunday school for the kids...
...I was not...
...In the end my decision was precipitated by panic...
...It had made me suspicious and angry...
...Don't worry about it...
...With so few people, so much was going on...
...I no longer have to put up with catechetical material for seventh-graders that says artificial birth control violates the Sixth Commandment...
...Some things were strange: keeping up with a service that was so very similar but not quite word-for-word...
...Our children, the author suggested, would be lost...
...By and large I found much to love in the church: the rhythm of the liturgical year, the sense of connection to the world church, the bracing social-justice witness, and the private intensities of ritual and prayer...
...Her most recent book is Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction (University of Toronto...
...That's a very serious thing, I told him...
...The Mass and the message would be close to identical, and I wasn't going to worry overmuch about the difference between transubstantiation and consubstan-tiation...
...He seemed to me sadly misplaced in his well-educated and affluent congregation, and surely he was an object of derision for some...
...I felt an immense relief...
Vol. 130 • September 2003 • No. 15
