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The Stalemate of Silence
by: Paul Kelly
Reprinted with Permission

Saturday, February 26, 2005

Paul Kelly
3 Sea Rose Lane
Pine Point ME 04074

Tel: 207.8836.6075
E-mail: pkelly04@maine.rr.com

USCCB News Conference, February 18, 2005

There was an important news conference on Friday, February 18, 2005, in Washington DC at a Press Conference of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, discussing the statistics from the 2004 Report of Bishops’ Compliance with the Charter and Norms. That conference demands that I pray for the Faith That Dares To Speak more forcefully and passionately than at any time during the past three years.  

" ‘The crisis of sexual abuse of minors within the Catholic Church is not over,’ Kathleen McChesney, executive director of the U.S. Bishops’ Office of Child and Youth Protection, told reporters Feb. 18, “CNS reported.

The former leader of the USCCB’s National Lay Review Board was Illinois Justice Anne Burke. She spoke at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts and said that the church was still “unchastened.”  Justice Burke was also reported by Philly.com, on February 25, 2005, for having said: 

"I would like to believe that the contrite words of present-day members of the hierarchy are trustworthy when they say they are dedicated to ensuring that this will never happen again. And I do believe many of them. . . . But I have also experienced firsthand the Byzantine intrigues of others who, no matter how contrite they might appear, remain worried that this whole episode should be done with by now so that they can return to a style of authority and control that, for my money, hatched the whole scandal in the first place."

SNAP issued a press statement on that same February 18th, which is simple, direct and in plain English: First, prudent people will wait for proof before assuming these so-called reforms are working. Second, much of what’s being touted as reform is irrelevant or ineffective. Third, the crux of this crisis fundamentally remains unaddressed. Before we talk specifics, take a minute and remember how all this came about.

Bishops have devised the rules of play, hired the umpires, chosen the players, and in about an hour, will declare that they’re winning. They wrote the charter, they hired their own so-called watchdogs, they decide who gets interviewed and who gets heard. This is crucial prior to January 2002, each bishop was in charge of handling sex abuse in his diocese. Today, each bishop essentially still is. 

Disclaimer

It is not my intention to accuse the vast majority of the priesthood or the hierarchy. This essay is concerned with those few priests who committed the crimes of sexual abuse on children and those equally few bishops who covered it up. The good and the decent know who they are, as do the evil and the corrupt. We seek justice and request accountability from those responsible, whether priest or bishop.  Our hope is for careful reform and renewal within the Church.

We are convinced and state it without mincing it in any way, that the primary problem in Catholicism, the source of all its issues, is its structure of governance based on the absolute power of the hierarchy, whether in the papacy and it’s Curia, or in the colleges of cardinals and of bishops. Whatever is written about the governing structure in the church does apply to all priests and bishops, because their individual goodness and decency have little to do with the opportunity to wield absolute power, which is, in and of itself so prone to impure evil that it can be handled only by Plato’s philosopher/king, or in Roman Catholic parlance, by a saint. We must recognize that our hierarchs are of the human variety, although some of them might aspire to sanctity, by the grace of God. 

Need for Change Now

There can be no reform without abolition of absolute power of any kind, particularly the power claimed and wielded by celibate males in the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. There are, I think, 4,650 bishops, all celibate males, in the world, who assert their absolute control over approximately 1,200,000,000 souls. In the United States, there are 195 bishops plus assistants over 67,000,000 people. It is quite difficult to assimilate these numbers, to accept the unacceptable reality that so few aloof men can control so many millions of souls, merely by issuing edicts and decrees. Bishops expect immediate obeisance. And they get it, without much of a murmur. In our modern civilization that readiness to obey is startling, but is rendered quietly, as a matter of fact, by most Roman Catholics. The church of these hierarchs high priests is the last of the feudal systems, the other feudal remnants having died out or been banished 500 years ago. Change is necessary now, in our times, because of the disastrous scandal which threatens to destroy both the church and the religion.

If we, the people of God, have the Faith That Dares To Speak, there will be change in the power structure of our church. If not, then that church is doomed, will cease to exist, and Catholicism could well be extinct within a few years, except for the promises of Our Lord and his gift of a Paraclete. Hammock Catholicism, where we lay back and let the Lord do all the work, is not a feasible solution to the issues facing us now. They are our responsibility.

We and the bishops are responsible, for we are,  together, the people of God. The American bishops, through their loose confederation the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the USCCB, have had three years to show some leadership. There is precious little to be seen, lots of grandstanding and bickering, but little leadership.   Some progress has occurred, but most of the promises made are broken and now lie empty, proper disclosures have not been made to law enforcement, and our children are still in danger, at risk, not safe, not protected.

What is most distressing and repugnant is the attitude of the bishops towards us, one of such hostility and suspicion that most bishops have enveloped themselves in a shroud of silence; they just will not talk to the people. The bishops are antagonistic and they fight everybody: us, reporters, lawyers, courts, attorneys general, any critic of any shape or size. They whine a lot, but they will not sit down in adult conversation and attempt to resolve differences. They do not know how to listen or how to respond to anybody other than themselves. In effect they have turned their backs on us and left us and themselves in a cruel posture which I brand as The Stalemate of Silence.

There is no forum where we and they can sit down and talk with each other. Our attempt to dialogue is like asking the lawyers on either side to try their case to the newspapers, without any court system at all. Nobody presides. Nobody decides. We try to speak.  They won’t answer. Is a bafflement. How do qualified persons work for a church, which won’t acknowledge their existence, let alone his voice, her hands, their presence, except in church on Sundays, particularly at the time of the collection or during the distribution of the Eucharist?

Little wonder that it takes a great deal of courage for one of us persons to pray for the Faith That Dares To Speak, as the title of Fr. Cozzens’ latest book of encouragement says. I do not think that anyone would ever believe me were I to tell them that a couple of hundred men, acting like petty celibates, are able to keep 67,000,000 people at a standstill, when the church is collapsing all around all of us in bankruptcy petitions and the closing of parish after parish after parish. We do not know how it is that they succeed in such control over so many millions of people, but our American bishops are doing just that and will continue to do so until they are stopped by us. The Stalemate of Silence will end, and it will never be restored. Never.

If it were possible to get their attention, I have often felt like addressing the American bishops in a manner which might be deemed disrespectful, but how else can we demonstrate our frustration to those who treat us with such scorn?  For example:

Message to the USCCB for the Bishops of America

Bishops of America, come out of hiding, wherever you are, and talk to us. The Sacrament of Holy Orders by which you were ordained requires that you do so. Or resign. There are only 195 of you as Ordinaries. If you are incapable of fulfilling the duties for which you were ordained, we shall take over the church ourselves and do without you.  With all the respect that you are due, we are not asking you. We are entitled to your courtesy and respect to us as the people of God. If you find it impossible to fulfill the obligations of your position, then resign. We the people of God will not permit you to destroy our Catholic Church, no matter how piqued or peeved you may be. Grow up, even as we have grown up and will not tolerate your treating us as little children. 

If there are any real gentlemen among you, we will talk with them. The rest of you are free to retire. Do not dare interfere with the work which we must now do for our Catholic Church. You are more than welcome to help us, to offer us the guidance for which you have been trained, and we will treat you with the respect that you deserve as a bishop of the church. But, first, you must be a bishop. Many of you will have to earn our trust by your conduct. So far, since Dallas in June, 2002, nothing you have done or failed to do in the past three years has restored any of that trust. The Stalemate of Silence may well be your own doom.

The Last Three Years

It was January, 2002, just over three years ago, when The Boston Globe published the first startling news that awful crimes had been committed by some sick Catholic priests who sexually abused minor children for years and years.
The numbers were enormous. At first hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands. In a few news items, estimates reached over 100,000 innocent children abused. The superiors of those clergymen being accused, in particular their bishops, archbishops and cardinals knew, or should have known, what was happening, and some of them covered up
the crimes of those priests, transferred them around to protect the institutional church. They looked the other way.  In the ensuing months, until June of 2002, the daily news was constant, more and more revealing, ultimately so shocking that few of us could comprehend the magnitude of the horror, or even begin to grasp the extent of corruption in the ranks of the hierarchy itself, from the lowliest assistant bishop to the one who wears white and prides himself in being the first among equals, Pope John Paul II. 

The people of God, called the laity, a term of ugly degradation which should be abolished forever as caste discrimination of an entire class somehow unequal to and beneath the holiness of the clergy, could not digest the news, even though it came out slowly in those daily dribs and drabs, made infamous, rather than famous in a daily service provided by Kathy Shaw, then a reporter for The Worcester, MA Telegram, in the daily Abuse Tracker, published at first by The Poynter Institute, and now by The National Catholic Reporter. It is the prime, the only source of each day of news, from all over the world, dealing with the sexual abuse of minors crisis within the Roman Catholic Church.

Now, in the waning of February,  2005, The Abuse Tracker continues with its ministry of keeping the world informed of what is still an unimaginable, incomprehensible expose of the filth and depravity of human beings towards children, magnified by the fact that most of the perpetrators are priests, a small minority of that profession to be sure, but one which was then, and still is, being protected, hidden from the public, from prosecutors, and even sustained in part by monthly stipends for living expenses by some Ordinaries, that group of bishops who hold absolute power over them and continue to resist any interference with that absolute power, whether it comes from the prosecutors of the State or the people of
God themselves. We were unable to understand what was happening when we were first told in January, 2002. Now, in February, 2005, we are aghast that our bishops could be so authoritarian, so inherently cruel, so immeasurably corrupt that they are still in office and are trying to command us to be obedient Catholics. 

These bishops cannot be allowed to continue managing the problem, at which they are failing miserably. There is such little progress, because they cannot even work with each other due to their constant bickering and the jealousies of inner cliques. They are annoying human beings, who should not be allowed to remain in office, because they are so reluctant to cooperate with anyone outside their supposedly sacrosanct circle. They are not evil men, but are acting as if they were.  Inadequate as human beings, they are devoid of social courtesies, fall below the minimum of human compassion one might expect from men in such positions of leadership. They act like they are ruthless, heartless businessmen in a fitness gym’s locker room, intent on whatever it is that constitutes their bottom line, which appears to be, God help us, getting good grades from the Curia. Why we put up with such pathetic mediocrity is either an unfathomable mystery or total apathy on our part.

Most of our bishops are so cowed by Curia bureaucrats that they tremble when told a dicastery is on the line, or are handed an envelope postmarked “The Vatican.” It does appear that they hold the Pope in awesome respect, way up there on a pedestal out of reach as well as out of sight, and yet speak blithely of him as merely a first among equals, saying,
“He is just the bishop of Rome. We are all equals, you know.” They are all equal as bishops, that’s right, for there is no higher ordination than that of bishop. Archbishops, cardinals, popes receive no higher ordination, their ceremonies of installation being just that, an installation of an honor. All bishops know that “Cardinal” is merely an honorific, yet they treat one as if he were their ordained superior, sort of a four star general ranked so much higher than their own small colonelcy.

A cardinal is just a bishop without a see, who works in Rome as a cabinet secretary or minister and is therefore given a titular church to pretend he has a see, as all bishops must. If he does have a see, as do several in the United States, being cardinal then means he is the bishop of a large city like Boston, Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles. So, too, with the word “arch’” in front of diocese or bishop. An archdiocese is just bigger than a diocese, though not so big as to be called a metropolitan area as it is in some other countries.

All of these gradations and elevations and pomps and pecking orders of seniority arise out of the two thousand years of the accretions of history, mainly from the copycat envy of royalty and nobility in ruling classes of society, as the church grew apace with the rest of civilization.

The embarrassing anomaly in today’s society and its ruling classes, is that the hierarchs of the church stopped its growth when they found fiefdoms and the feudal society levels of strata and class and, worst of all, caste. The rest of the world kept growing, into cities and states and realms and nations, many of which have a democracy of one form or another. Not the church, with its ancient classifications and costumes, regalia and jewelry, indicia and accoutrements of power in rings and croziers and colors and distinguishing piping on their ordinary street clothing. Hierarchs need special tailors, costume makers, valets, a whole retinue of people just to make sure they are dressed properly for the occasion or ceremony they are about to attend, with cameras rolling constantly.

One thinks of Our Lord and his fishermen, walking along the sandy shores at Lake Caparnaum, talking about the kingdom of God, learning the Our Father, sharing thoughts with each other, dropping in on Martha and Mary for a break and a bit of rest. They didn’t even have a flag or a pennant. No rings. Nothing out of the ordinary. Not a basilica in sight. There was a large Temple, in Jerusalem. One. The contrast is extreme, very, very, extreme, so much so that it is quite easy to believe that Jesus Christ would be denied entrance to St. Peter’s Square on a Saturday afternoon and would never ever be granted a private audience with His Holiness. The Lord, the Son of God, might have made it into a soup kitchen in the Bronx, though, the one run by those zen monks.

Reflections on Abuse of Power and Our Own Apathy

As a group, bishops appear to be powerful enough to avoid accountability, to evade justice. Only one has resigned, Cardinal Law, and his reward was one of the four finest Basilicas in all of Christendom, with a handsome annual salary for keeping the place neat and clean. He is still a cardinal and one of the electors of the next Pope. Nobody else in the hierarchy has been charged. A couple have copped pleas, but apparently took back their agreements, and are now litigating the implications of what they said or claimed they didn’t say, as in New Hampshire with Bishop John B. McCormack and the Attorney General of that State. And so, for those hierarchs who should be held accountable and who continue to oppose the people of God, whether here in American or there in Rome, with all the faith I can muster, I dare
to speak.

These mediocre men are, in all probability, among the least qualified ever to claim  authority over other human beings in the history of the United States of America, and, indeed, of the entire world. They tend to corruption, because power corrupts, to absolute corruption, because absolute power corrupts absolutely. They may well be thought to be evil men,
but are probably merely weak men whose lust for power had blinded them to the beauty of just being human. They are nonetheless mediocrities who should be deposed and removed from the public, lest they continue to do more harm than they are doing now. Their attitude is obviously, “Who can stop us?”  Our attitude is, “We can, quite easily.” No more money. Not a widow’s mite.

Cardinals, archbishops, bishops will not be judged by us, but by God for their mismanagement, lies, deceits, broken promises under the Charter and Norms which they themselves adopted in June and November of 2002, and over which they have exerted absolute and secretive controls ever since, so that both are as meaningless as the episcopal promises and piousities with which they were launched. They might also wish that a great millstone be prepared, rather than the other punishment the Lord may have in store for their treatment of the little children.

Their obtuseness and defiance continues, as shown in the revelations they themselves made on February 18, 2005, in which they once again applauded themselves for doing so little and for continuing to obstruct justice in whatever court they are being called upon to make disclosures of the names and addresses of priests accused, and for document discovery of those files which are the Secret Files commanded by Canon Law that each Bishop maintain, so secret that the same Canon Law prescribes that he and only he has possession and control of the key

We the people ourselves are to blame also, for having been so patient for so long a time that we may well have fallen into inertia, making us just as corrupt as the bishops we so despise.  We may well be so deep into apathy, that perhaps nothing will move us to live up to our own responsibilities either. What will it take to wake us up? The February 18th news report said that in 2004 there were 1,092 more cases of sexual abuse in 2004. February 18th. This year. I hear the bishops’ voices in my imagination, “After three full years of success and congratulations on the fine job we bishops are doing for you the people.” What do we need, people of God, what do we need? 10,092 children to be raped in 2005? 100,092, perhaps?

The Issue is Also Religion Itself

Please try to focus on this last simple fact. We are talking about a religion. We are talking about a Church. We are talking about its selected and ordained leaders called bishops. We are not talking about a business, an enterprise, a professional athletic league, a municipality, a state, a nation, the United Nations. We are talking Church, the Roman Catholic Church, which professes to foster a religion called Catholicism based on “official teachings,” which are whatever those same bishops say it is. We are talking about our own very relationship with God and His with us.

There are bishops in the way between God and us, bishops who are not bishops but flawed human beings now incapable of overseeing anything, of being episcopal. These bishops, those who are accountable, must not be allowed to tamper with our souls any longer. They have failed. The good and decent bishops must step forward and out and up and lead as only a successor to St. Peter and the other apostles can do. Sift out the pebbles. Keep the stones and the rocks. Rebuild.  
The bishops of America should end The Stalemate of Silence.

In the past, I have quoted Cicero more than once. The opening line of one of his Catiline Orations rings in my heart every day that I read The Abuse Tracker  or see yet one more story of episcopal arrogance and authoritarianism cast down on prosecutors or people.  Cicero started right off, in the very first sentence to the Roman Senate that day with this:

Quo usque tandem abutere, O Cataline, patientia nostra?

How long, O Catiline, will you continue to abuse our patience?

I repeat that to those bishops who deserve it.

Quo usque tandem abutere, O Episcopi, patientia nostra? Quo usque?