While many bishops and priests have closed ranks when faced with the extent of the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, Ireland, has consistently spoken clearly and directly.
This week Martin spoke at the Marquette University Law School’s conference titled “Harm, Hope and Healing: International Dialogue on the Clergy Sex Abuse Scandal,” as part of the school’s restorative justice program. “Archbishop Martin said what many Catholics want to hear, and they haven’t heard it from their Catholic leadership,” said Janine Geske, a professor at the law school who heads its Restorative Justice Initiative, in the National Catholic Reporter.
Also this week, Presbyterian pastor Peter James Vienna Presbyterian Church in Virginia stood before his congregation and acknowledged that the sexual abuse by a youth director was “far more devastating and horrific than we had imagined.” A row of young women, part of at least a dozen women who had been victimized over a four year period, sat in a back pew as James apologized.
“We failed as leaders to extend the compassion and mercy that you needed,” James said, publicly acknowledging the church’s failings for the first time. “Some of you felt uncared for, neglected and even blamed for this abuse. I am sorry. The church is sorry.”
Below are highlights from Archbishop Martin’s presentation. It needs to be read by far more than just Catholics.
I tell these events not to re-open history, but to illustrate just how difficult it is to bring an institution around to the conviction that the truth must be told. All institutions have an innate tendency to protect themselves and to hide their dirty laundry. We have to learn that the truth has a power to set free which half-truths do not have. The first condition for restorative justice is that all parties are willing to tell the truth and to take ownership of the truth, even when the truth is unpleasant. As I said at a recent liturgy of lament in Dublin: “The truth will set us free, but not in a simplistic way. The truth hurts. The truth cleanses not like smooth designer soap but like a fire that burns and hurts and lances”. ..
I still cannot accept a situation that no-one need assume accountability in the face of the terrible damage that was done to children in the Church of Christ in Dublin and in the face of how that damage was addressed. The responses seemed to be saying that it was all due to others or at most it was due to some sort of systems fault in the diocesan administration. …
But even those numbers, though shocking, have not got the right focus. Statistics are too often offender-focussed. We have to set out from the standpoint that the person who was at the epicentre of abuse was not the priest, but the victim, a child. A restorative justice approach would have to re-orient the way we draw up not just our statistics but our pastoral care. One victim constantly reminds me that the stern words of Jesus in Saint Matthew’s Gospel (Mt 18:6) about the “great millstone” to be fastened around the neck of anyone who becomes a stumbling block for the “little ones”, are quickly followed (Mt 18:12) by the teaching on the Shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep to find the one who has been lost. …
The culture of clericalism has to be analysed and addressed. Were there factors of a clerical culture which somehow facilitated disastrous abusive behaviour to continue for so long? Was it just through bad decisions by Bishops or superiors? Was there knowledge of behaviour which should have given rise to concern and which went unaddressed? …
A restorative justice approach which admits and addresses the truth in charity offers a useful instrument to create a new culture within the Catholic Church which enables the truth to emerge not just in the adversarial culture which is common in our societies, but in an environment which focuses on healing. At our service of lament and repentance I stressed that scandal of the sexual abuse of children by clergy means that the Archdiocese of Dublin will never be the same again. That is more easily said than achieved. After a period of crisis there is the danger that complacency sets in and that all the structures which we have established slip down to a lower gear. …
A Church which becomes a restorative community will be one where the care of each one of the most vulnerable and most wounded will truly become the dominant concern of the ninety-nine others, who will learn to abandon their own security and try to represent Christ who still seeks out the abandoned and heals the troubled. …
I love Elizabeth Warren. She’s “kick-butt.” As special advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, she’s been hailed as one of the “new Sheriffs of Wall Street.”
In a recent conference call hosted by Sojourners, “Sheriff Warren” said of predatory bankers: “Just because we’re not perfect human beings doesn’t give anyone the right to cheat us.” (Imagine it in Clint Eastwood’s voice.) In my opinion, Warren is taking up the cause of the prophet Isaiah, when he said: “The scoundrel’s methods are wicked, he makes up evil schemes to destroy the poor with lies, even when the plea of the needy is just” (Isaiah 32:7). Warren is determined to clean up the scoundrels in the financial industry who eat the poor for breakfast.
A group called the Main Street Brigade (MSB) released a Western-themed rap video calling for Elizabeth Warren to be chosen as the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – not “interim” or temporary, as she is currently.
The video features Los Angeles comedian Ryan Anthony Lumas rapping about how the country needs Warren to protect people from banks (“Sheriff Warren is what we need, ya’ll.”) Warren’s picture appears in the video only on the cover of Time magazine, and Lumas makes a reference to Oklahoma, where Warren grew up. MSB describes itself as “a rapid response team, nationwide, that can be activated to protect our communities” from “devastation” by the banking industry.
Also this week, Ralph Nader released anOpen Letter to President Obama calling Obama to account for welcoming with open arms General Electric’s CEO while burying Elizabeth Warren as far back as he can get her. When she spoke on the Sojourners call, she was sitting at a bench in the Rayburn Building because she doesn’t really have an office and the Republican-controlled House is working hard to defund what little budget she had. Here’s an excerpt from Nader’s letter:
An interesting contrast is playing out at the White House these days—between your expressed praise of General Electric’s CEO, Jeffrey R. Immelt and the silence regarding the widely desired nomination of Elizabeth Warren to head the new Consumer Financial Regulatory Bureau within the Federal Reserve.
On one hand, you promptly appointed Mr. Immelt to be the chairman of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitive, while letting him keep his full time lucrative position as CEO of General Electric (The Corporate State Expands). At the announcement, you said that Mr. Immelt “understands what it takes for America to compete in the global economy.” …
Compare, if you will, the record of Elizabeth Warren and her acutely informed knowledge about delivering justice to those innocents harmed by injustice in the financial services industry. A stand-up Law Professor at your alma mater, author of highly regarded articles and books connecting knowledge to action, the probing Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) and now in the Treasury Department working intensively to get the CFRB underway by the statutory deadline this July with competent, people-oriented staff.
Zainab Salbi is the founder of Women for Women International. In the mid-1990s, I worked with her advocating for Bosnian women in the middle of the Bosnian genocide. At the time, she and I were one of the few women in the DC-area who were organizing for peace in Bosnia. Zainab’s an Iraqi refugee and we bonded over Christian and Muslim women coming together for Christian and Muslim women in the former Yugoslavia. Zainab’s team at W4WI lifts up the stories of women in war zones around the world.
As the U.S. and others once again go to war in Libya – under the guise of “redemptive violence” – I’m prompted by Zainab to call to mind the women and children in Libya, the doctors, the pacifists, and all those who refuse to fight for any side. Pray for them. Look for their stories.
Below is a TED talk by Zainab from Oxford last summer.
I grew up with the colors of war — the red colors of fire and blood, the brown tones of earth as it explodes in our faces and the piercing silver of an exploded missile, so bright that nothing can protect your eyes from it. I grew up with the sounds of war — the staccato sounds of gunfire, the wrenching booms of explosions, ominous drones of jets flying overhead and the wailing warning sounds of sirens. These are the sounds you would expect, but they are also the sounds of dissonant concerts of a flock of birds screeching in the night, the high-pitched honest cries of children and the thunderous, unbearable, silence. “War,” a friend of mine said, “is not about sound at all. It is actually about silence, the silence of humanity.”–Zainab Salbi
“There are women who are standing on their feet in spite of their circumstances, not because of it. Think of how the world can be a much better place if, for a change, we have a better equality, we have equality, we have a representation and we understand war, both from the front-line and the back-line discussion.
Rumi, a 13th century Sufi poet, says, “Out beyond the worlds of right doings and wrong doings, there is a field. I will meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” no longer makes any sense.” I humbly add — humbly add — that out beyond the worlds of war and peace, there is a field, and there are many women and men [who] are meeting there. Let us make this field a much bigger place. Let us all meet in that field.”–Zainab Salbi
Here are a few lines of encouragement from Thomas Merton’s essay “The Street is For Celebration.”
Celebration is when we let joy make itself out of our love. We like to be together. We like to dance together. We like to make pretty and amusing things. We like to laugh at what we have made. We like to put bright colors on the walls–more bright colors on ourselves. We like our pictures, they are crazy.
Celebration is crazy: the craziness of not submitting, even though “they,” “the others,” the ones who make life impossible, seem to have all the power. Celebration is the beginning of confidence, therefore of power.
When we laugh at them, when we celebrate, when we make our lives beautiful, when we give one another joy by loving, by sharing, then we manifest a power they cannot touch. We can be artisans of a joy they never imagined.—Thomas Merton
Louis Templeman was incarcerated in Florida and was released within the last year. He has written a number of essays and poetry about his experience. The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world.
Here is an excerpt from Templeman’s essay “I Have A Face“:
Standing on a concrete pad where a large diesel tank had been removed, I stared out through the 12′ security fence, topped with razor wire. I saw the parade of men in blue going to lunch. It was very cold, windy, at most 45 degrees. It was so cold in the dorms that morning that one of our guards did the 7:00 a.m. count wearing gloves, insulated jacket, ear muffs and a hat. The living, moving swatch of blue shivered under cloth caps (if they were lucky) and cotton jackets. A fortunate few had long johns.
One man stood out. Octavio. I felt proud I finally remembered his name. He speaks almost no English. He is always enthusiastic in his greeting to me. Of the fifty or so men who flow by he is the only one I think I know. The way he walks. His posture. His face causes him to stand out against the river of men draped in state issue blue.
All prisoners dress alike. We live under strict dress codes. It is an attempt by the Florida Department of Corrections to separate us from our identities. This discourages staff from seeing us as individuals.
Separating us from our individuality facilitates the on-going negativism, condescension, cursing and regular issuance of suffering from F. D. C. staff. In some camps this allotment of trauma and fear comes from other state employees such as medical personnel clerks, classification and work supervisors. When this culture of fear is strong in correctional officers the non-security employees often buy into it and look for opportunity to taunt and torment the inmates.
Judges hand down our sentences. F. D. C. staff, primarily correctional officers, put the sting to it. The state employees who embrace this culture of hate do not appreciate the depth of suffering endured in the inmates’ loss of family and friends, children becoming fatherless, wives falling into poverty and promiscuity, removal from satisfying work and a pressing into an absurd counter-culture that forces an institutionalization that robs a man of his maturity, self-worth, and works to mold him into a childlike dependence on the state.
Theologian and activist Cornel West was interviewed recently about Barack Obama’s presidency. It’s 26 minutes of prophetic Christianity engaging both the noble democratic experiment and American empire.
How do we fight social injustice when so many seem to have lost hope? According to provocative intellectual Cornel West the answer is simple – love. “We are living in catastophic, catatonic, and catalytic times, says West, but we must face them with compassion.
Maryknoll Fr. Roy Bourgeois, the longtime peace activist and founder of the School of Americas Watch, has received a letter from his Maryknoll order that he has 15 days to publically recant his support for women’s ordination in the Catholic Church or he will be kicked out of the Maryknoll family and stripped of his priestly functions.
He’ll be defrocked, unfrocked, or laicized, depending on your denomination. The Catholic church and his order will no longer recognize his right to exercise the functions of the ordained ministry.
The letter, which is dated March 18, is signed by Maryknoll Fr. Edward Dougherty, the order’s superior general, and warns Bourgeois that his dismissal will also be forwarded to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith “with a request for laicization.”
NCR received the letter in a fax from Bourgeois this morning. Bourgeois, who attended and preached a homily at the ordination of Roman Catholic Womanpriest Janice Sevre-Duszunska in August, 2008, was notified by the same congregation shortly after that event that he had incurred a Latae Senteniae, or automatic, excommunication for his participation. Dougherty’s letter references that event and says Bourgeois’ continued support of women’s ordination since — specifically mentioning his Feb. 12 participation as a panel speaker at a showing of the film Pink Smoke Over the Vatican — has been “in disobedience to the explicit instructions of your Superiors.”
If Bourgeois does not respond with 15 days, the letter says he will be given a second warning, after which Dougherty will dismiss him for “publicly reject[ing] the teaching of the Holy Father.”
In the Catholic Church, a priest, deacon, or bishop may be dismissed from the clerical state as a penalty for certain grave offenses, or by a papal decree granted for grave reasons. This may be because of a serious criminal conviction or heresy. A Catholic priest may also voluntarily request to be laicized for any personal reason. Voluntary requests are by far the most common means of laicization, and the most common reason is to marry. Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI put an end to speedily granting laicization requests by priests or their bishops. John Paul ruled, soon after becoming pope, that no priest under forty could be granted an administrative laicization.
Part of the irony – or hypocrisy – in the case of Fr. Roy is that he is being defrocked for standing up for his conscience while hundreds of other priests were not defrocked when they were convicted of criminal action. I guess this indicates which kind of “sin” the Vatican feels better equipped to deal with: criminal behavior can be corrected from within but freedom of conscience is resistant to hierarchical pressure. Well, ever has it been thus.
When Fr. Roy was ordained, a phrase was sung over him: “You are a priest forever, like Melchizedek of old.” And when he was baptized – like all Catholics – he was anointed with oil as a sign that he was consecrated to God, sealed by the Holy Spirit, and joined to Jesus in this threefold mission as priest, prophet, and king.
While the Vatican may view the laicization of Fr. Roy as a punishment, many of us “laity” out here view it as a gift. Now Fr. Roy can move into the fullness of ministry in the Catholic church as represented by the people of God, rather than the inwardly focused bastion of clericalism the Vatican wants to defend.
So, as the story of Fr. Roy’s laicization unfolds, let us all welcome him home as a hero. As the Catholic community of Christ let us anoint Fr. Roy with the words of Pope Paul VI: “The holy people of God shares also in Christ’s prophetic office; it spreads abroad a living witness to Him, especially by means of a life of faith and charity and by offering to God a sacrifice of praise, the tribute of lips which give praise to His name. The entire body of the faithful, anointed as they are by the Holy One, cannot err in matters of belief.”
Five elders pray before sentencing by federal court. (Photo by Leonard Eiger)While Japan begins yet another multi-generational nuclear nightmare as a result of the nuclear power plant meltdown at Fukushima, here on the home front two grandmothers, two priests, and a nun go to jail for protecting you and me against a similar fate.
In Tacoma, Washington, on Monday, March 28, 2011, 5 of our elders were sentenced in federal court for calling to account the hundreds of U.S. nuclear weapons stockpiled for use by our Trident submarines. The Trident base at Bangor is home to the largest single stockpile of nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal.
For years there has been a concerted effort by the nuclear and defense industry to distance nuclear weapons production from nuclear power. In reality, it is all one industry that produces all one result: a deadly toxin with no known cure that kills everything it encounters either immediately or slowly over generations through cancer and genetic mutation. Whether used offensively in weaponized form or “passively” to boil water and turn on lights, nuclear fission–as an industry–must be dismantled.
(Note: Nuclear medicine accounts for a tiny percentage of radioactive material in the U.S. and can continue with proper regulation.)
Nuclear weapons and nuclear energy are all part of the same death cycle. It’s time to stop nuclear weapons production, research, upgrades, and extended contracts. It’s time to dismantle existing nuclear weapons.
It’s time to suspend licensing for all nuclear power plants. It’s time to end subsidies to the nuclear power industry. If we transferred the nuclear power industry’s subsidy money toward renewable resources, then within 5 years we could be well on our way to carbon-free energy independence.
So who are the grandparents out defending you against a radioactive future? Sentenced were:
*Anne Montgomery, 83, a Sacred Heart sister from New York, who was ordered to serve 2 months in federal prison and 4 months electronic home confinement
*Bill Bischel, 81, a Jesuit priest from Tacoma Washington, ordered to serve 3 months in prison and 6 months electronic home confinement
*Susan Crane, 67, a member of the Jonah House community in Baltimore, Maryland, ordered to serve 15 months in federal prison
*Lynne Greenwald, 60, a nurse from Bremerton Washington, ordered to serve 6 months in federal prison
*Steve Kelly, 60, a Jesuit priest from Oakland California, ordered to serve 15 months in federal prison
They were also ordered to pay $5300 each and serve an additional year in supervised probation. To consider whether you might join them, contact Disarm Now Plowshares or support them through your prayers, financial aid, and letters.
Just a reminder about the scale of nuclear weapons we are talking about at this one nuclear base in Bangor, Washington. In November 2006, the Natural Resources Defense Council declared that the 2,364 nuclear warheads at Bangor are approximately 20 percent of the entire U.S. arsenal. The Bangor base houses more nuclear warheads than China, France, Israel, India, North Korea and Pakistan combined.
The base has been rebuilt for the deployment of the larger and more accurate Trident D-5 missile system. Each of the 24 D-5 missiles on a Trident submarine is capable of carrying eight of the larger 455 kiloton W-88 warheads (each warhead is about 30 times the explosive force as the Hiroshima bomb.) The D-5 missile can also be armed with the 100 kiloton W-76 warhead. The Trident fleet at Bangor deploys both the 455 kiloton W-88 warhead and the 100 kiloton W-76 warhead.
Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency admitted this week that the Fukushima disaster was a level 5, which is classified as a crisis causing “several deaths from radiation” due to “severe damage to reactor core and release of large quantities of radioactive material within an installation with a high probability of significant public exposure,” according to the UN International Atomic Energy Commission.
However, the U.S. and Europe have put the Japan nuclear crisis at Level 6: Serious impact on people and environment with significant release of radioactive material. Usually, when it reaches this level, governments begin classifying the research on how it affected civilian and environmental populations. So it’s not known how many deaths, birth defects, genetic damage, or long-term cancers were caused by previous Level 6 disasters.
Orthodox Christian Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew said recently, “Our Creator has given us the sun, wind, waves, from which energy can be extracted for our needs. An ecological science has the ability to invent tools for the production of renewable energy that is not harmful. Why, then, spread the use of energy production that is so dangerous to the integrity of the human race? Is it not an insult and a provocation of nature, which in turn then turns her back on human beings? From this our humble home, along with our prayers for the sorely tried people of the Land of the Rising Sun, we take the opportunity to make an appeal to States to reconsider their policy on nuclear energy.”
I met Dean, a Jesuit priest, at “the UCA” (University of Central America) in San Salvador in 2005. I was in El Salvador to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Archbishop Oscar Romero’s assassination. Brackley has been at the UCA since 1990, when he volunteered with others to step in when 6 Jesuit members of the faculty were murdered by the U.S.-funded Salvadoran military in 1989.
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — President Obama and his family spent a packed overnight March 22-23 here and took the place by storm. Reactions in this polarized society couldn’t help but be mixed, but many were positive. Obama surprised and pleased most people by his historic visit to the tomb of Archbishop Romero, the 31st anniversary of whose martyrdom we celebrate today.
Obama arrived under two clouds. His administration had been decisively instrumental in allowing an illegal coup to stand in Honduras a year-and-a-half ago and for the elections organized by the coup-masters to go unchallenged. And, of course, he arrived as U.S. cruise missiles were raining down on one more Arab country. While Salvadorans know tyranny of the Gaddafi stripe, they are also very sensitive to war.
Many probably sensed that Obama, like Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes, has mounted a horse he cannot fully control. He said as much when asked about helping “legalize” undocumented Salvadoran immigrants in the United States: The U.S. Congress is tying his hands. (Few drew attention to the 50-odd immigrants that the U.S. has been deporting by air to El Salvador each day for the last three years.)
The most dramatic moment of Obama’s stay was his visit to Romero’s tomb in the cathedal crypt. He listened to the current archbishop, José Luis Escobar, in silence, then closed his eyes, ostensibly in prayer. Before leaving the cathedral, the protestant president lit a candle at the rack near Romero’s tomb. The press, dominated by the right, spilled barrels of ink about Romero, about his life and ministry. (The main media had air-brushed Romero from Salvadoran history until 1999 when the Anglican Church mounted his statue, along with seven other martyrs, on the façade of Westminster Abbey.) (more…)
Today is the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C. The fragile blossoms are at their peak. Backlit by dawn, the flowers burst into flame. Tonight they will drop with the snow flurries. The festival is more subdued this year in keeping with the natural disasters and nuclear devastation through which Japan (and the world) are suffering.
The cover of the March 28, 2011 issue of The New Yorker is adorned by a “Dark Spring” in Japan. But before the artwork went to print, artist Christoph Niemann said he was suffering a creative dilemma. “I realized that there is no way a drawing that depicts the devastation, can come close to the heart-wrenching and bizarre photos I’ve seen everywhere,” Niemann reflected.
He blended his admiration for Japanese ink drawings, and came up with with the cover concept above. “The quiet beauty of plum blossoms mixed with the radiation symbol would make an eery and appropriate metaphor for the threat of a nuclear catastrophe.”
I decided to read a few of the elder Japanese poets in commemoration of the day. Here are a few tender lines from Matsuo Basho (1644-1694):
A village without bells–
how do they live?
spring dusk.
*
Early fall–
the sea and the rice fields
all one green.
*
The spring we don’t see–
on the back of a hand mirror
a plum tree in flower.
*
Not this human sadness,
cuckoo,
but your solitary cry.
*
More than ever I want to see
in these blossoms at dawn
the god’s face.
While many bishops and priests have closed ranks when faced with the extent of the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, Ireland, has consistently spoken clearly and directly.
I love Elizabeth Warren. She’s “kick-butt.” As special advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, she’s been hailed as one of the “new Sheriffs of Wall Street.”
Here are a few lines of encouragement from Thomas Merton’s essay “The Street is For Celebration.”
Louis Templeman was incarcerated in Florida and was released within the last year. He has written a number of essays and poetry about his experience. The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world.
Maryknoll Fr. Roy Bourgeois, the longtime peace activist and founder of the School of Americas Watch, has received a letter from his Maryknoll order that he has 15 days to publically recant his support for women’s ordination in the Catholic Church or he will be kicked out of the Maryknoll family and stripped of his priestly functions.
Today is the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C. The fragile blossoms are at their peak. Backlit by dawn, the flowers burst into flame. Tonight they will drop with the snow flurries. The festival is more subdued this year in keeping with the natural disasters and nuclear devastation through which Japan (and the world) are suffering.
Rose Marie Berger 