Tag: clericalism

The Pope’s response to Rupnik shows we’re still in the desert

Marko Rupnik, S.J., has been expelled from the Jesuits. I have written enough about sex abuse that I automatically started to type out “Disgraced former priest Marko Rupnik,” but guess what? He is still a priest (although his faculties are limited), and I am hard pressed to say that he has truly been disgraced, even now.

Father Rupnik is a voracious sexual predator who allegedly spent several decades manipulating and tormenting vulnerable women into acting out quasi-spiritual sexual fantasies for his gratification. He is also a popular sacred artist (his hollow-eyed figures haunt the missals at my parish, as well as the walls of prominent churches and shrines worldwide), and apparently he is also a charismatic and charming fellow. For over 30 years, nearly every time one of the victims reported him, his peers and superiors, including the pope, decided that even when he might need to be disciplined, he didn’t need to be stopped. Clericalism is bad, but Father Rupnik is different.

A formal investigation by the Jesuits confirmed that he had excommunicated himself when he absolved a woman of sexual sins that he himself had perpetrated upon her. But even while his excommunication had not been resolved, he was invited to substitute as the preacher of the annual Lenten retreat for the Roman Curia; later, his work was chosen as the logo for the World Meeting of Families. In January 2022, the pope met with him privately. When Rupnik’s excommunication was confirmed, that sanction was quickly lifted, and when Rupnik was later accused of decades-old crimes, the Vatican refused to waive the statute of limitations.

In January of this year, Pope Francis, who had supposedly been close with Rupnik, called the allegations against him “a surprise.” He strove to emphasize that he himself had nothing to do with this case beyond a small administrative decision. It wasn’t his fault. How could he have known? What could he have done? He is just the pope. He only met with the man. How was he supposed to make sure he didn’t keep abusing women?

When will this end?

When will the day come when we won’t see a headline about the Catholic Church reluctantly admitting that they have spent the last several decades protecting yet another predator and feeding yet more victims into the flames? When will it stop?

I don’t know the answer to that, but I know when it won’t stop: It won’t stop under this generation of bishops, appointed by Francis or Benedict XVI or John Paul II. Some of them are good and decent men. But all of them are tainted. And the purification that must happen in the church will not be completed until they have been replaced.

I am not thirsting for anyone’s death. I am looking to Scripture, and I am seeing how God’s slow hand works….Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine. 

Image of Pope Francis by  Christoph Wagener, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Be patient with priests, but not with clericalism

The National Catholic Reporter has published a strange story about what happens to a parish when arrogant, ultra-trad priests move in and start making the church over in their own image. I say it’s a strange story because it’s hard to tell exactly what happened. Some of the details seem damning — book burnings, secrecy around finances — but others sound like they might be innocuous (oh no, incense?) or even commendable.

The pastor, for instance, is accused of bringing the Eucharist to a sick parishioner rather than letting a lay minister do it. Maybe that was an example of the priest trying to control everything, or maybe it was an example of the priest trying to serve his flock because that’s his job.

Let’s assume for a moment that what the article describes really is part of the great traddening of the Church, wherein rigid hardliners bulldoze over their goodhearted congregation and drive out love and tolerance with inflexibility and retrograde thinking. That is a thing that happens; I’ve seen it.

I’m also old enough to remember priests doing something very similar to our local church. Only they weren’t ultraconservative; they were ultra liberal. In a very short time, they laid waste to building and to the liturgy, removing the ornate crucifix and replacing it with a modernist corpus sans cross dangling in midair. They had clown masses and balloon masses, and they taught frank heresy in the school, in marriage preparation, and from the pulpit.

They tore the tabernacle off the wall and reinstalled it somewhere out of sight. And — I remember this so clearly — there had been a lovely midnight blue half-dome wall decorated with golden stars behind the altar. This, they painted over, and made it flat beige.

I was only a little kid at the time. I knew my parents were upset about something or other at church, but most of the changes went over my head. But when they took away the golden stars, it felt unforgivable. Why would they do such a thing? Who would want that?

Someone must have wanted it, and the more profound changes it symbolized, but many more did not, and I was not the only one who felt dismayed and betrayed. My parents, fairly new Catholics themselves, did their best to push back against the most egregious changes that were so abruptly imposed, but after they were kicked off parish groups for the crime of adhering to basic doctrine, they eventually gave in and found a new place to worship, where things weren’t perfect, but at least they weren’t bonkers.

I wondered how many others did the same, but ended up outside the Catholic church — not so much because they didn’t like the way things were, but because the people making the decisions clearly didn’t care what they needed. They were there not to serve, but to exert control.

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

 
DAlanHirt, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons