Amoris laetitia: Priestly Formation

Seminarians should receive a more extensive interdisciplinary, and not merely doctrinal, formation in the areas of engagement and marriage. Their training does not always allow them to explore their own psychological and affective background and experiences. Some come from troubled families, with absent parents and a lack of emotional stability. There is a need to ensure that the formation process can enable them to attain the maturity and psychological balance needed for their future ministry. Family bonds are essential for reinforcing healthy self-esteem. (203)

Arriving at this paragraph in Amoris laetitia made me happy.

Priests don't fall out of the sky fully formed. They are people who have a background and a family of origin just like the rest of humanity. And as the Pope notes, these backgrounds--like everybody else's--can have their troubles and dysfunctions.

This isn't a bad thing. It is the work of the Holy Spirit to transform suffering and alienation into compassion; this is one of the ways that the pattern of the Lord's paschal mystery of his passion, death, and resurrection comes to take form in our lives. And so it makes sense that many vocations to service, the priesthood included, can have roots in situations of difficulty and personal suffering.

My Six

I read this morning a startling statistic announced by the Pew Research Center, that for every convert to the Catholic faith, six people abandon her.

I'm a convert to the faith, so apparently I am correlated to six people who have left.

So I decide I need to be praying for my six.

Certainly the Holy Spirit will give all of them occasions to return to the faith; marriage, the birth of a child, the need to bury a loved one, serious illness, etc. I should be there for them with my prayer when these occasions come.

How many of them left because of my bad example? How many because of the sins and crimes of religious and priests? If, having left because they were scandalized by one of us priests, they then commit any sin in malformed conscience, surely God will make us priests accountable for the guilt of such sin. Have we taken seriously the Lord's warning that scandalizing the innocent can result in our damnation? Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea. (Mark 9:42) Do we believe in hell?

As a priest, I must pray the Holy Spirit to teach me not only how to begin to do penance for my own sins, but also for the sins any of my six commit because they have abandoned the truth.

How many of my six will one day return as strong and joyful reverts? For this I entrust them to the prayers of Blessed Anthony Neyrot.

May I pray as though God has entrusted to me the spiritual care of my six. Amen.

Praying for the Unborn

Today here in Rome it's the feast of St. Vincent Pallotti, founder--you guessed it--of the Pallottines. His obligatory memorial creates the potentially confusing liturgical situation of suppressing the optional memorial of his namesake, St. Vincent, deacon and martyr.

But I can't forget that as folks wake up at home in the States, it's neither the feast of one Vincent nor the other, but the Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children. May I remember in prayer today first of all the unborn who find themselves in danger and for their parents. May I pray for all who by prayer, work, and witness seek to defend the right to life of our sisters and brothers not yet born.

May I pray for the grace of conversion for our culture and our Churches, that our hearts might be softened toward all human life from conception to natural death: the child, the elderly, the foreigner, the sick, the abused, the imprisoned, those suffering from the many forms of poverty, but especially for the unborn because they, unlike the others, enjoy no legal protection and even more, because the disposability of their lives has become--in our tragic confusion--something even to rejoice in.

In my time as a parish priest I received the occasional criticism. Most were easily dismissed either as someone's misunderstanding of Church teaching or my intentions, but some stuck with me. One of these latter is the lady who came up to me after Mass and said,

"You're a good priest, Father Charles, but you're not pro-life enough."

So just as it has become part of my ordinary intentions that the Lord would let me know what I can do in reparation for the crimes of my brother priests who have sexually abused children, today, as I join my prayers to everyone praying at home, I also pray the Lord that he would let me know how I can be more pro-life.

An Inmate, a Decree, and a Donkey

The journey is a funny business with all its twists and turns. They all bear and speak of grace, though it's not always easy to see at the time. And grace itself isn't always easy. True, it's often consoling or even comforting. But just as often it's the pruning that the Lord promised. The pruning hurts, but it's also a sign that we have already borne fruit.

It just amazes me sometimes when I look back, how I could never have imagined what would become of me in this religious life, what would later become my relationship to certain brothers and sisters, places and times.

In the summer of 1995 I was a novice in the OFM, spending the summer at St. Bonaventure University. The weather was lovely, the group of novices was still in the 'honeymoon' phase, my prayer life was rich with experiences and consolations and I was full of the giddy pleasure of being finally a real religious, in the habit and everything. There I made my first Capuchin friend, a young friar on his way to priesthood. I coveted his theological knowledge, I admired what seemed like his confidence and I guess you might say, verve. In the lightness of those days I could never have imagined that eighteen years later I would be a Capuchin priest and he would be in prison for sexual abuse.

Seven years later, in the summer of 2002, I was on retreat in preparation for religious profession in the Capuchins. We were in a great old house of the Order in that part of the world, full of history and the old spirit of religious life in North America. It's true that in those days I gave little thought to what would become of me in the Capuchin Order, but I never could have imagined that eleven years later I would be sitting in front of a computer in a little room on the outskirts of Rome, filling out a form that would become the decree to suppress the same house.

I guess it's an ordinary grief of the journey, to watch what were the landmarks behind you crumble. On the positive side it produces a certain detachment in the knowledge that what presents itself as so pressing or attractive in this moment is also destined to a crumbling transformation into memory in the future, and it also reminds the soul that what we were really always drawn to, what we were always truly leaning on was the Spirit of God woven into all these things in his humility and with which they were shot through in his power.

It reminds me of the late spring of 1994. I had graduated from college and my parents had kindly given me a pilgrimage to the Holy Land as a graduation gift. I went with the pilgrimage office of the OFM, the Order I was soon to enter as a postulant. The pilgrimage was led by Fr. Callistus Bamberg, may he rest in peace. Towards the end of the trip he gave me the gift of a little olive wood statue of the Holy Family in their flight into Egypt; Joseph walking, Mary on the donkey holding the infant Jesus. He said, and this has always stuck with me,

"Whenever you look at this, remember that it's a journey."

Abortion Ramble

Back when I was at the parish, one night I was locking up the church and a lady stopped me to say something.

"You're a good priest, Father, but you're not pro-life enough."

Naive and Pessimistic, All At Once

Probably a mistake, but yesterday I took a look at the newspaper. There was an article about the problem of rape in the military. Another piece spoke about a prelate recently accused to inappropriate behavior against his subjects.

The two things stuck together in my thoughts.

Toward Chastity

Last night I went to chapel early so I could pray my Franciscan Crown before Vespers. I thought to pray for the young Indian woman who has been in the news. Last night she was still alive. This morning I read that she had died.

While I was praying for her I found such a terrible sadness. It was, on the one hand, grief at the meaninglessness of her suffering and the loss of her life. It was clear yesterday that even if she were to have survived the injuries inflicted by her attackers, it would have been with a mutilated body. On the other hand, my sadness was for the knowledge that the roots of such violence and unchastity live also in my own heart, and every time I have been unwilling to suffer anything rather than indulge and nourish them, every time I have given in to the world's wish to co-opt and collude with them for its own vile purposes, I have made myself, spiritually, an accomplice of those miserable men.

It is not enough to be chaste, if by chastity we mean solely a personal project focused on the self. It might be the one of the most difficult things in the world to begin to mortify our own acquisitive gaze, our tendency to objectify and instrumentalize other persons, and our own lust for control and coercion, all in the name of achieving some degree of physical and affective chastity according to our state in life. But it's not enough. The world is so injured by the terrible, destructive power of sexualized violence that if our chastity is to mean something, it must also be a positive force directed outward into the situations and relationships of our lives.

I used to think about and pray on this back when I was working at the parish. At the beginning I was put in charge of the altar children. As I worked with the kids I used to wonder to myself what it should mean for me, given that some of my brother priests, doing this same ministry, had abused the children in their care, leaving their lives wounded forever. Of course it meant that I had to carefully observe and implement all of the plans and guidelines that had been put in place to make sure that we had a 'safe environment.' I knew that it meant keeping a calm but watchful eye on things, always being aware of where the kids were and who might be with them. But in my prayer I realized that it had to mean more than that. I realized that in how I worked with the kids, in how I spoke with them, in what I would say and how I would say it, I had to notice and take opportunities to recognize their human dignity, to build them up, to let them know, somehow, the great dignity of their very being. Over time I began to know that this was, in fact, my primary ministry with the children. All the practicalities were secondary. The most important thing was for me to actively and purposefully treat the kids as integral persons, as creatures seen as good by the Creator and as human beings infinitely dignified by the Incarnation of the Word. In my prayer I knew that I had to do this if I wanted to have any hope of being faithful to the children who had suffered such abuse from my brother priests.

In the same spirit I pray today for the eternal rest of that Indian girl and for the consolation of her family. I pray in thanksgiving that our society is still outraged by her suffering and death, and I pray that it might come to see more clearly how it accepts and even celebrates other forms of violence and unchastity continuous with them. Finally, I pray that God let me know how I may begin to do penance for what she has suffered, and for the loss of her life.

Vocation and Pathology

From time to time I'll see something ranting against celibacy, saying that it's a pathological choice or at least can't be healthy, etc. It seems to me that these usually fall into the kind of black and white thinking that doesn't take seriously the work of grace.

Sure, some people take up the celibacy of religious life or the priesthood for imperfect reasons, and even from pathology. And, of course, some celibacies end in disaster and suffering not only for the would-be celibate, but also for others, as we know all too well in our time. In religious life one has the joy of seeing old celibates for whom the charism has worked as advertised, having broken them open to a chaste and non-exclusive love for the world which reflects the love of God in its own particular way. But one also gets to see the celibacies that have gone wrong, leaving celibates dried up in an affective dead-end.

One can say the same things, mutatis mutandis, of marriage, or of any vocation we enter into with every good intention, but as the wheat and weeds of our blessed and broken selves.

The danger is to think that reasons and motivations are all good or all bad. We are mysterious messes, made of the goodness in whose image we are created together with the festering and rotten injuries left by the effects of sin. Can God call us to the vocation he gives us for our salvation--and for our chance to participate in his salvation of the world--as this total person? In other words, can God call us to our vocation with both our good reasons and bad for our attraction to the choice, with both our sanctity and our pathology at work? Yes. It's called redemption.

When it works, when someone succeeds in surrendering to this work of salvation, it's a truly blessed and amazing thing. Pathologies are flipped, turned inside-out--pick your metaphor--by the opportunities for grace and growth that the vocation brings and become gifts given for the encouragement of others and their salvation. Just because it sometimes doesn't work when we don't succeed in surrendering to grace, just because sometimes pathology swallows up what would have been sanctity and uses it for its own rotten and meaningless ends, that doesn't make it the fault of the vocation.

Comfort in Ruin

In various places I saw this week the announcement from the Canadian bishops' conference regarding bishop Raymond Lahey having been dismissed from the clerical state. (Read the whole thing here.)  Lahey, you will recall, was caught with child pornography at the Ottawa airport.

The bishops' announcement details the effects of the penalty: "loss of the rights and duties attached to the clerical state, except for the obligation of celibacy; prohibition of the exercise of any ministry, except as provided for by Canon 976 of the Code of Canon Law in those cases involving danger of death; loss of all offices and functions and of all delegated power, as well as prohibition of the use of clerical attire."

But it's the next sentence that struck me the most: "Lahey has accepted the Decree of Dismissal, which also requires him to pray the Liturgy of the Hours in reparation for the harm and the scandal he has caused, and for the sanctification of clergy."

I find that very comforting.

Even I should make a complete ruin of the vocation God has given me in his mercy, and even if I should become such a wicked priest as to require my dismissal from the clerical state, I will still have the Liturgy of the Hours and the privilege of praying it for the Church and the world. Even if I should make such a mess of the vows of my religious profession and the promises of my ordinations, that promise I made to pray the Hours on the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary in 2006 will always be with me. Even if I should die and go to hell, it will be my last joy to tell the devil that it was the privilege of this ruined soul to pray his breviary up to that moment.

One doesn't just all of a sudden have a laptop full of child pornography. I'm guessing that on the way to such a thing there are various moments when one might notice the destructive and abusive descent he was making. But anyone who is a sinner knows the power of concupiscence and denial in this regard.

So as I was praying the Office of Readings and Morning Prayer today, it was one of my intentions to pray for those who were abused in the production of the images on Lahey's laptop. And I pray also that all the victims of sexual abuse by priests would forgive me for praying for them without knowing what else to do about the sicknesses in the clergy at the root of their victimization. And I hope that Lahey, according to his decree of dismissal, is praying for me.

Sexual Abuse and Crucified Humanity

In today's gospel (Mark 9:30-37) the disciples are discovered to have been arguing about who was the greatest. In response, Jesus takes a child and declares it his ambassador, just as he is the emissary from the Father.

As startling as this must have been in its own context, to take a powerless child, a nobody in the world, and declare it one's representative, in my own prayer through this passage this morning I began to wonder if it might not have an even stronger meaning for us, and especially for us priests.

As happens frequently enough, I started to pray for those who have been abused by priests. Perhaps they, in a very particular and pointed way, are representatives of Christ in their crucified humanity. As a presbyter of the Catholic Church do I try to give myself the rotten and false consolation of telling myself that their crucifixion is someone else's fault? Or do I, as a priest of Jesus Christ and as one who at least desires to be a beloved disciple, seek ways to pray and weep at the foot of their crosses?

Sexual Abuse

Everything going on in my life these days has meant a lot of walks. I've always been someone who thinks and processes experience in the solitude of walking. Everywhere I live I fall into habitual routes.

On my walk yesterday I was thinking about the big news of the indictment of bishop Finn. From there I got to remembering another priest, whom I met very early on in my religious life. He had that perfect mixture of sincere devotion and don't-take-it-all-too-seriously bemusement that seems to be the charm of us Franciscans. He was fun and full of quotes from the saints. He seemed self-confident in his love of the vocation. I looked up to him, and hoped that one day I would be like him.

Today he's in prison.

When I think about this it reminds me of how sexual abuse in the Church is still an issue. Now I'm not putting down all the programs and checks that are in place for the protection of children; I have great respect for the folks who work hard at implementing and administrating these things, and I have no doubt that they have been a great help. But I am saying that I don't think we have yet taken seriously the larger problems of the use of power and endemic emotional immaturity of which the sexual abuse of children by priests is just the horrific, criminal edge.

It gives me pause to remember that a friar who seemed in every way to fit in, and was even someone to look up to in his apparent happy adjustment to our life, and to whom I myself looked up in my first steps as a religious, is in prison as I write this post. But the betrayal I feel as I think back on myself innocently looking up to a friar who seemed so successful and cool is but the tiniest taste of the injuries of those who have been abused by priests.

But maybe God wills that tiny taste to be an invitation.

A couple of years back there was a spell when it would often come up in my prayer that I should accept some particular penance or work of reparation for the sexual abuse committed by my brother priests. I don't think I ever decided on anything. Maybe it's time to seek such a thing again in my prayer.

Fleeing From Sodom

In religious life and ministry we're all familiar with the pejorative sense of 'pastoral.' It's when in the name of being nice or avoiding difficult conversations we compromise the orthodoxy of our teaching or fail to give real pastoral care. For example, if a parish priest provides sacraments and services to everyone who calls or comes to the door, no questions asked, he is not really the kind and 'pastoral' minister he thinks he is, but has avoided real pastoral relationship just as much as the mean priest who discourages and dismisses people with all kinds of conditions, demands, and paperwork.

I have to say that one of these 'pastoral' moments comes up in the lectionary in these days. Between yesterday and today the gentle editors of the lectionary have us skip over the first part of Genesis 19, the sin of the Sodomites. Yesterday Abraham was pleading for Sodom, and today Lot and his family are escaping its destruction. What happened in between is safely omitted.

What was the sin of the Sodomites? Was it homosexual acts as it is in the common cultural imagination? Or could it be more properly violence, rape, and an egregious failure in hospitality? The lectionary, by omitting the passage, relieves sacred ministers from having to preach on these questions, and gives the praying Church permission not to reflect on them and wonder what grace of new understanding God might desire to give us.

And how salutary such a reflection might be in a Church which needs to struggle with its own legacy of the sexualized abuse of power!

But thanks to the lectionary today, we have one more nice little way to excuse ourselves from that challenge. How pastoral.

Prayer to St. Charles

It seems to me that St. Charles Lwanga and his companion martyrs are under-recognized patrons and under-utilized intercessors for our time, martyred as they were, in part, for resisting a situation of the sexualized abuse of power.

Most High, Glorious God,
through the intercession of St. Charles,
help us to bring healing to the legacy of sexual abuse in the Church and the world.
May the wisdom of the Cross overcome every abuse of power.
We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, forever and ever.

Mass for Continence

Today I have noticed something interesting in my 2002 Missale Romanum. Amid the formularies for missae et orationes pro variis necessitatibus vel ad diversa, called in English, "Mass for various needs and occasions," there is a Mass that seems to have been omitted in our current edition of the American English Sacramentary.

There it is, under section three, ad diversa: right in between the Mass pro remissione peccatorum and the Mass ad postulandam caritatem: number 39: ad postulandam continentiam. "For seeking continence." That's sexual continence, for sure

The American English Sacramentary seems to skip this one; it goes right from "For Forgiveness of Sins" to "For Charity."

So...a couple of questions arise...is this Mass formularly new in the 2002 Missale Romanum, or did it exist previously but was omitted in the English language editions? Will it be included in the new one when it appears? Or have we been denied the Mass for praying for continence all this time? Would it not have been a good idea for some priests to have had this Mass available to them?

Prayers on the Feast of St. Charles

Dear St. Charles, you were martyred, at least in part, for refusing to accept a situation of sexual abuse. Pray for our bishops and priests, and for all of us who serve in the Church, that we might have the same zeal and resistance, as well as the courage to name the sicknesses and immaturities in our own culture.

Pray for the people of Uganda, for all African people throughout the world. By your intercession, may all people seek the true peace based in justice. May God help us all to desire and work for reparation and reconciliation for all the injustices bequeathed us by our ancestors.

Last of all, pray for me, Brother Charles of New Haven, friar of the Capuchin Franciscan Order, that I--having already wasted enough time to merit hell--may finally consent to the grace to make a beginning of a spiritual life.

What's At Stake: Sexual Abuse and Apostasy

Last night I received an email from an old friend, a sometime companion on the inner journey of prayer. He wrote to tell me that the scandals in the Church had become overwhelming for him, that he did not have much hope, and that he had apostatized from the faith and been received into another ecclesial community.

I don't know if I'm supposed to answer, and I don't think I will. It's not really any of my business anyway. What would I say? Shall I apologize for crimes and negligences for which their is no apology? Shall I beg him to return from error? I don't think either of these are called for; it's just that we were once important to one another in the Lord, and he only wanted to share his grief and let me know of the difficult decision he had made.

It raises the question for me: Do I have a limit? Could things get so heinous and discouraging that I would be tempted to apostasy? Of course I want to say no; but that would be vanity and bravado. My faith is imperfect, and my practice barely adequate; on the internal level I hardly live up to my vows. I only barely keep intact the prayer life I have promised through our Rule and Constitutions. I am not such a good Catholic and my faith is not so strong. I probably have a breaking point too, God help me.

But I just don't think I could leave the Catholic Church. How is it that I first heard the Gospel? What were the conditions of possibility of my having a Bible in my room on the hot summer night in 1991 when I first read St. Matthew with open mind and heart? It is that anyone can buy a Bible at Barnes & Noble? No. Is it because of the great work of translators, from the seventy-two rabbis of Alexandria down to the scholars who produced the RSV I held in my hands in those days? Not really. I heard about the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Christ because the apostles and martyrs gave their lives and suffered in order to keep it alive for me. It was this community of witness that produced the New Testament, and they have passed down the apostolic teaching, even into the hands of the bishops who ordained Fr. Larry and Deacon Ron, the first men to suffer the pastoral care of my stupid and distracted soul.

Without that faith I would be dead, or at least living some close approximation of death. And the world still wants me dead.

This apostolic tradition is all I have to stand on in this world. I'm sure that some of my teachers and confreres would judge me narrow-minded and hopeless in clinging to this sense of Catholicism after all the theological education they have given me in their generosity, but that's how I see it. And as much as my conscience is very troubled and I am very angry, I don't think I would ever try to seek comfort by settling for a facsimile of the Church and play-acting through 'sacraments' I knew in my heart to be invalid. Untethered from accountability to the Petrine ministry (or at least the ministry of some patriarchal see), Christianity has no defense against accepting and assimilating whatever errors or moral chaos happen to be the current worldly fashion. Indeed, sadly enough, this struggle is hard enough even within the apostolic churches, but it is hopeless without.

I don't mean all this in a triumphal way. I am upset too. I am increasingly convinced that the health and even the survival of my vocation depends on my making my life into some kind of integrated response to the issues raised by the sexual abuse scandal. When I, who was born with the name Charles L., decided to be baptized under the patronage of Charles Lwanga, I thought it just a matter of convenience. But it was no accident. St. Charles was martyred, at least in part, for his unwillingness to accept sexual abuse. Nor is it an accident that certain experiences of my own religious life and priesthood have put a harder edge on my own reflection on the festering illnesses behind the scandals. My own vocation is meant to be something with regard to this. I don't know what it means yet, and it might not even be anything external, but it has to be something.

I don't know if you ever look at this blog, old friend. But if you do happen to read this, please don't be offended. This post is about my conscience, not yours. It's not a condemnation or even a disapproval. It's my way to trying to encounter, in my heart, the same issues that you are working to take as seriously as you can. Oremus pro invicem.

Defending Ourselves

I have to admit that I'm getting a little uncomfortable with this business of defending ourselves against the "attacks" of the New York Times and others in the secular press. I love Benedict XVI, and an examination of his ministry shows that he has done an immense amount of work--especially at the CDF--against the legacy of negligence with regard to the child abuse and other sexual misconduct of the clergy. But we can't give the world the idea that we feel we are being attacked in complete unfairness.

Yes, we should calmly point out when matters of fact are distorted. Yes, we should try to show how we have made our ministries and institutions safe for children. But we have to admit that crimes have been committed, and the negligence of bishops and superiors have allowed them. Bishops too have to admit that there the roots of their own failures go deep. The homosocial world of seminaries and presbyterates in which they themselves grew up sometimes had a power structure of the patron and client culture, a culture that can sometimes edge into crypto-erotic and even the genital. Behavior which is an abuse of power and a crime against the developmental flourishing of a child might have been more or less normalized for them by their own upbringing in the church, which is not to say that they were comfortable with it. There are culturally embedded confusions at the root of this crisis which are not reducible to incomplete blamings of homosexuality or celibacy. Add to this The Church's persistent sin of "desiring to restore confidence rather than to restore souls," (Philip F. Lawler, The Faithful Departed, 156) and the failures of leadership are set up.

Jesus warned us that the world would hate us, and indeed it does. The world hates us because our belief and celebration of the humility of Christ in the manger and on the cross undoes all of the world's pride and addictions to violence and power. So we should not be surprised if an organ of the world like the New York Times hates us. We can't act like all of a sudden the world is going to look at us with a hermeneutic of appreciation. This is not a reason to imagine, however, that the secular media is only out to discredit and smear the Church, though they are happy to be able to do so. They all also report on facts, the sins of the church among them.

So let's use this historical moment not to get up and defend ourselves in the stance of the courageous victim, but let every cleric kneel down like the publican and express his desire to be converted from any root of these negligences and abuses that he allows to live in his heart.

Sexual Abuse

For years I have been praying and daily offering the intention of my sorrow for the victims of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Though the issues are complicated and I don't feel as if I have it all figured out, I have come to believe that this only the tragic and criminal edge of larger sicknesses that enabled both the abuse and the negligence in responding.

Nothing shocks me anymore, both because we are saturated with terrible revelations, but also because I have seen the roots of the whole thing at work. One time I met a priest and jokingly remarked to myself that I would see him in the newspaper. A couple of weeks later, there he was, not for the sexual abuse of children, thank God, but for another sort of criminal sex offense.

What does a person do with such a "coincidence?" Laugh? Cry? In my own prayer, I have to come to realize that I need to do something.

For every priest who has abused children, there are many more who are just creepy without doing anything criminal. My eye must be upon them too. With whatever authority or jurisdiction the Holy Spirit gives me, I must always be working to keep them away from any child at risk of losing his integrity or dignity in even the slightest way. In my own teaching and pastoral care of the young, I must make myself the intense servant of their dignity and freedom, doing and suffering whatever I can in the name of their flourishing. Even if I did this at every moment for the rest of my earthly life it would hardly amount to any reparation, but at least it would be something.

I must ask the Lord for the grace, willingness, and opportunity to do hard penance on behalf of my brother priests. I must be ready to accept with patience the public suspicion and anger we have brought upon ourselves.

I need to do something. Yes, dioceses have put procedures and trainings in place to protect children, and I have no doubt that they will work. I am an administrator of such procedures where I work, and I believe in them. But they don't approach the sicknesses in the priesthood itself.

I have to come to realize that at some level my own vocation has to be a lived as a response to this situation. I'm not sure exactly what this means or what it will look like, but it has become increasingly clear to me that through the ins and outs of my own journey, the Holy Spirit has been preparing me for this. Pray for me for the courage to be faithful to it.

It has been hard to write this post without crying, but that's the least I can do.

What's At Stake

I've been incubating this post for a couple of weeks, and now I realize that it will have to be a series of posts. It has to do with a shift I've been going through in my internal sense of the trajectory of my own vocation within the Order.

Since the time of my perpetual profession four years ago, I have had a certain sense of how the brothers saw my assignments unfolding. I was to finish my licentiate degree, be ordained priest, spend three years working in a parish, and then return to studies to attempt a doctorate. As I begin to come close to completing those three years in the parish, I have come to notice some of my own internal assumptions about this plan and how they now demand revision. I guess I had thought that I would learn the presbyteral trade, file it away among my credentials, and then return to the library to pick up my reading where I had left off. But now I have had to admit to myself, with some difficulty and resistance, that I can't just go back to school as if nothing has happened. My experience here in the parish will have a significant impact on what I want to read and the questions I will want to write on. In other words, I didn't foresee that working as parish priest would have an effect on my life of theological reflection, but it has, and in a big way. Experience has come into the equation for me in a way I have not known before. "Knowledge without mileage equals BS," as Henry Rollins says.

It reminds me of something one of our teachers used to say. In taking up a theological question, she would challenge us to think about 'what's at stake.' What were the 'real world' implications of our reflection, and for whom? I admit that at the time I was resistant to this and sometimes found it annoying. The conceits of my Ivy League upbringing and my native love of purity of concept made it hard for me to want to think this way. (If I had not allowed myself to be distracted from mathematics towards the end of freshman year of college, perhaps none of this would have happened!) I also think that I didn't understand exactly how much is at stake for the Church and the world, and even for belief, or life itself. After three years here in the parish I'm ready to reflect through 'what's at stake.' Even more, I know that I have to if I want to ever achieve even a token level of responsibility as a steward of the mysteries of God.

This is all a little disconcerting, because it means that I have even less of a good idea of how I might approach the opportunity of going back to school. On the other hand, it's not bad because it's the giddy kind of liminality that makes you feel curiously alive because you know it's from God.

So, my thought is to try to write a series of posts on what seems to me to be at stake in my theological reflection. These are subject to change, of course, but right now I think that the topics will "Populations," "Reverence/Life," "Belief/Practice," "Catholicity/Orthodoxy," and something about the meaning and implications of sexual abuse within the Church.

The posts will begin with experiences of my ministry. These are particular to my location and moment in the Church's pilgrimage through history and geography.

My Catholicism

The other day I noticed a Facebook 'status update' from one of the classmates from theology. It was a reproduction of a quote from a 'Catholic' publication in which the hierarchy and priests were put down for being out of touch, and various sorts of deviants and dissenters were held up for what was called their heroic and long-suffering faithfulness.

It's curious to me how people could go through the same course in theology and come out with such different view of things, but I suppose it happens all the time.

I guess my trouble with such proclamations is that despite any sophisitication as a Catholic I have grown into over the years and despite the very fine theological education I have received thanks to the generosity of God's people and the trust of my Capuchin brothers, my own Catholicism still sits at its original location in a desire to 'follow the instructions.'

Part of my own conversion to the faith, and the ferocity with which I pursued it at the time, was driven by my unwillingness to live in a world without unified, demanding, and ultimate meaning. I was burned by one of my first philosophy professors who consented with glee to the conclusion of our class that there was no such thing as a 'meaning of life' but only 'meanings in life.' It wasn't good enough for me; I needed something better to stand on. And from my first St. Joseph Sunday Missal and rosary pamphlet, down to my cover-to-cover devouring of the Catechism when it first appeared in English, to the Code of Canon Law and the GIRM and GILH and my Denzinger enchiridion, I have rejoiced to find in these the authentic, apostolic interpretation of the Sacred Scriptures that I first began to read during the hot summer nights of 1991, when I took my first eager but stumbling steps to go out to meet the Person who had been coming to meet me all along, Jesus Christ.

I just want to follow the instructions and find in them deliverance from the entangled mess of confusion and passion and noise that Christian Tradition calls the 'world.'

Not that I don't have my criticisms of bishops and priests as well. All of us--bishops especially--should be doing public penance for the crimes we have committed against children. Even in this, our bishops made a mess of themselves in Dallas. Though I have known many priests who are among the sea of quiet saints who hold the Church together, men of humility and work, gentleness, devotion, and prayer, I am the first to admit that I am daily scandalized and disedified by priests who seem to take the promises of their state very lightly, seem to relish to indulge the disorderly parts of their personalities, and who display a spirit of bourgeois and privileged entitlement in their lifestyles. These things have been sources of scandal, hurt, distraction, and confusion since my very first day living among religious and clergy. At a few moments in the course of things it has gotten so bad as to distract me from everything else and threaten my own vocation and resolve. So I know what it's like to be hurt and feel betrayed.

But I will never condemn my priests and bishops, nor recommend that they 'get over it' and start to conform to the confusions, errors, and glittering fashions of the world, because it is from them that I have received the apostolic teaching that has given me a reason to live in this world and something to do while I do.