Weakness of Faith and the Irish Church Scandal

The Pope's meeting with the Irish bishops over the pedophilia scandal did not bring closure to the crisis.  Nor could it.  This is the long task for the Irish church as it is for the U.S.  From reports, the Pope pointed to a "weakening of faith" as the cause of this crisis.  This seemed abstract to many, even "shocking" to one victim advocate, as most are looking for more resignations and rules.  On the contrary, it is the incisive key not only to the past but to the future where the temptation to power lurks in so many forms.

Faith in Christ engenders the community where trust flowers as in the best of families.  Conversion as a life process is fostered in fellowship and with the sacraments.  Formalistic roles and rituals without the heart of faith resist the change that every human heart requires for healthy relationships.  John Waters, who has been following this crisis at ilsussidiario.net, describes this loss of the practice of faith in recent decades:

Irish Catholicism had long since ceased to offer a coherent version of Christianity to the generations it had itself educated out of poverty and ignorance. Despite the fervent shows of devotion at the time of Pope John Paul II’s visit in 1979, the writing was already on the wall. Although now speaking to one of the best-educated populations in the world, the Irish Catholic Church was still pushing the same limited and simplistic moralism it had promoted in the dark days of post-Famine Ireland, an essentially fear- and rule- based religiosity that achieved no productive engagement with the freedoms that had become available to the generations born after the middle of the 20th century. The scandals of the 1990s and after, therefore, provided the perfect alibi for those generations to reject the Church and all it stood for, exposing Irish Catholicism to charges of rank hypocrisy and enabling many of the formerly faithful to dismiss certain inconvenient elements of the Church’s teaching.

The victim's work is a challenging one.  There is the human need for acknowledgment and for some form of justice, something admittedly in short supply in the real world and even where it should first be found, among believers.  This is owed to those the Church is responsible for in her ministries.  Then there is the need to practice forgiveness, for the good of oneself as well as another, which particularly given the seriousness of the offense can hardly be done without the help of the innocent One who offered himself for every last one of our sins.  This can be a very long process which demands our patience and prayers.

But as Waters points out further on, a scandal is always most convenient for all those who would project all evil outside themselves.

 There are, of course, elements of disingenuousness about these responses. Reports of sexual abuse by priests have been deeply shocking for many people, but few can say that they were unaware of the picture outlined in last year’s Ryan Report, concerning physical abuse and maltreatment of children in church-run institutions over many decades. But, far from relieving the Church’s situation, this has made things worse, because the society now seeks to find ready scapegoats for a cultural phenomenon in which many more people – judges, policemen, social workers, child protection officers – are implicated than are now willing to admit to their roles. For as long as the church remains the centre of attention, the other guilty parties will be able to avoid the wrath of a culture seeking to purge its guilt and shame by expressing as much outrage as is humanly feasible.

The forms of violence that we practice today are not so easily recognized and reviled, but we will be called to account for them later and may not be found innocent.  Speaking of children alone, with abortion as the obvious and catastrophic pinnacle:  we also accept the severing of families as normal; we hand our young people over to "safe sex" practices, short-cutting the maturing process they need for lifelong bonds; we push and stress out and over-medicate kids to produce an image of ourselves that we could never be.  Without faith, which admits that not we but Christ is the answer to our wobbling hearts, we will do all this and more.

Photo: Crucifix, La Mercè Basilica, Barcelona

Review: What the World Should Be by Malcolm D. Magee

What the World Should Be: Woodrow Wilson and the Crafting of a Faith-Based Foreign Policy
by Malcolm D. Magee
Baylor University Press, 2008.

What is the impact of an individual's faith on public policy and the governance of a nation? Our modernist prejudices can cause us to underestimate the role of religion in our leaders. We tend to think that religion is at best an extra, a private motivation for pursuing or eschewing policies rooted in commonly held values; or, at worst a cynical move directed at selling these same values to a superstitious populace.

In his book, What the World Should Be, Malcolm Magee examines the religious beliefs of President Woodrow Wilson and demonstrates the pervasive affect that these beliefs had on Wilson's view of the world as it is and should be, how Wilson faced challenges in the political realm, and how these beliefs played out in history. John Maynard Keynes, the English economist and contemporary of Wilson wrote that:

"The President was like a nonconformist minister, perhaps a Presbyterian. His thought and his temperament were essentially theological not intellectual, with all the strength and the weakness of that manner of thought, feeling, and expression" (The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1920).

Taking this claim of Keynes seriously, Magee examines in detail the distinct Princeton Presbyterian tradition that Wilson inherited and Wilson's own substantial theological writings.

Magee's approach limits itself to Wilson's foreign policy, from the US's intervention in Veracruz, Mexico, through World War I, and culminating in the negotiations for the League of Nations. Wilson's policies led time and again to disappointment: like a Greek tragedy in which the protagonist never recognizes his tragic flaw. For Magee, this flaw is lack of personal humility, but to me it seems that Wilson's theology isolated him even from co-religionists and made it difficult to learn from experience and from others. Magee describes the key ideas of the theology in a clear and concise way for a non-specialist reader. He demonstrates lucidly how this theology pervades Wilson's policies. With this information, the reader is in a good place to evaluate the intersection of the political, the theological, and the personal.

The ancillary materials include "Christ's Army": A Religious Essay by Woodrow Wilson from 1876, Wilson's "Fourteen Points" Address to Congress, The Covenant of the League of Nations. and the 1876 Inaugural Address of Wilson's father, the Rev. Joseph R. Wilson, DD Delivered before the Board of Directors of the Southwestern Presbyterian University. These documents display a consistent theological point of view, well supporting Magee's thesis of the influence of Wilson's theology on his foreign policy.

John Waters at Meeting 2008, Rimini

[Journalist John Waters shared the panel with Magdi Allam at the meeting to offer his contribution to the theme: "Protagonists or Nobodies?" As with Allam, coming to the Meeting was decisive in changing his way of looking at the world and of relating to it, as he showed in a story about his daughter. The following are my notes from his talk.]

He said sometimes he imagines a new phenomenon of meeting Jesus, as Andrew and John did, and how it might happen to him. If he were having coffee with a friend, and there was a spare chair, and what if someone sat down there. What exceptionality would it take for him to understand that this is Christ. He wonders how Christ would surprise him and what he would look like. He said it could happen, he doesn't rule it out. But for him the necessity is for an encounter in a cultural moment which is difficulty for all of us.

Our culture has effects on us which are not obvious. We look at reality and think we understand it and how it affects us. But this is not true. The culture is like a jungle that we encounter in the dark. We touch something, and we're not sure if it's a snake or a creeper, whether it's harmless or dangerous. We crawl about looking for signs.

We use the word "secular" to describe society. The word "secular" is an example of the problem. We think we understand it, but it may have no meaning or may be vague. It doesn't express the reality of the phenomenon. We need new words. Waters offered a word: "de-absolutization". The problem is not the decline of the power of churches or of religiosity, but what happens to me. The nutrients I need to survive are removed from the culture.

The question of the Gospel last Sunday from Jesus was who do you say that I am? Before this question, another question has to precede it [for each of us]: Who do I say that I am? How can I describe myself in society? How do I express the yearnings of my heart in a culture that is hostile in ways I don't understand?

On his journey, he was raised as an intense Catholic. But at age 20 he turned his back. Two years ago, he called himself a refugee from a misconception of freedom. He now calls himself a lapsed agnostic. For 20 years he pursued desires in resisting the society he grew up in. The phenomenon of alcoholism for him was a metaphor of society's pursuit of desire, of finding the limits of desire. It was not just a metaphor; he was actually drunk. It was an experience he could describe not as an excess of enjoyment but of his spirit seeking to escape his body and reaching out to a substance and imagining it had the answer. He described it as his soul emerging from his head. [Waters has a dry wit, but self-deprecating jokes don't transcribe well. Come next year to hear him!]

It's important to name the reality of what happens. The culture can give different explanations that appear plausible, which we take for granted. For example, we'll say the problem is psychiatric or a matter of the wrong desires. Another question is that conception of society of man as a machine. It is vital to understand the anatomy of the process of observing how I take for granted things in society as uncontroversial, and how these conceptions are actually inside me too.

In the myth of Narcissus man sees a reflection of himself and is changed. He sees himself as an object outside himself. This mirror is technology. Man creates technology, and it steals his humanity, there is a constant necessity to create new forms of technology. We have gone from the shovel and spade to the plow, tractor, to sitting in a combine harvester and listening to the radio. We can sit and watch the machines we created to do our work for us. It's a strange paradox. His uncles were strong men who worked with their hands. Waters himself writes on a machine and grows weak. So we have to invent a new machine to get strong again. We think this way, so we wake up and instead of having wonder at our own hands, we think: I must get coffee in this machine.

There are many example of things we take for granted, in addition to techology and machines. For example, we take opinion polls. We imagine that if we get the opinions of 50 people we know what everybody in this room is thinking. Why? In the 1930s Gallup discovered something that was true, how we are already fashioned by the ideology of society. It would be more natural to have a million different opinions and to find out what you think: shouldn't we ask you?

The language we use is constructed in such a way that permits me to speak the things that are permitted. It carries a logic that is destroying me. A new phrase we use to abolish the future is "going forward". Not, "I hope things get better" but "going forward" which implies I make the future from my dominion of reality. So the unpredictability of reality is destroyed in language. There are many examples of this.

In the public square, I can say only what is acceptable to say. A colleague of his from the Irish Times recently died of cancer. She spoke of her despair, her fear of death, that death was the end. She was asked two questions. The first was: is there an afterlife. She answered no. The second was whether she believed in God. She said it was a different question. And she spoke of the beauty of creation, art, life, all she hated to leave. She retreated back to say there is nothing. People praised her courage and honesty. For Waters, he thought it wasn't courageous or honest; she was articulate about her despair. She described perfectly, when she had nothing to lose, the abyss the culture has created for us. We conjure this abyss from fatalistic presumption, a joyless perception of ourselves. In the mirror we see hopelessness. Society speaks of progress and happiness, but imagines the worst possible scenario at the end for ourselves.

Recovering from alcoholism, Waters said, "I was an egomaniac with an inferiority complex". This is a way to describe our culture. We believe we create everything, that we are all-powerful, but we have no hope. What is the point? He sees, not because he is a prophet, but he sees in the eyes of others a correspondence to his own desire. The technical arena, the public square is ten years behind the human heart. Only in moments of blurting out do we recognize the truth. We usually sing in the harmony society gives to us. But sometimes someone or you strikes a different note, says something you didn't intend, then people look at you, is this permitted?

Patrick Cavanaugh, a poet, says the nature of poetry is not the words but what happens between the words, a flash of the absolute. The words are the least important thing when the poem is spoken.

As a child, Waters loved a beautiful Jesus, but thought he was an alternative to freedom. He had a choice between the beautiful Jesus and his freedom. He chose his freedom and was regretful. He had no quarrel with Jesus, though maybe with those who spoke for Him. He was so beautiful. He thought himself unworthy, or this was an alibi for the corruption of freedom. When Jesus is gone, he will enjoy himself.

Ian McEwan, in his novel On Chesil Beach, offers a beautiful and terrible description of an argument. Two people say things which are more than they intended, the process accelerates and becomes toxic. They separate. You see this from the internal dialogue. This is what happened to him and Christ. He talked himself into it. Even language sets off an explosion.

Heinrich Boll spoke of Havel who talks of reality beyond the horizon but does not mention God. This is out of courtesy to God whose name has been trampled by politicians, and not for lack of belief. Language is contaminated. So Waters welcomes the proposal of Giussani, who asks no more than that he be honest with himself, to engage and observe his reality.

After twenty years of crawling through the culture, he has come into the clearing. Like in McCarthy's The Road, there is a moment of recognition. People look at him like he hasn't been looked at before. Not piously, which would frighten him away. He needs to make a journey, clearly, logically, to be sure of everything. It would be easy to say yes. He sees Jesus there. But he has to be clear, to see everything. These people look at him this way. Or they don't look at him but at something in him he doesn't know is there, he looks behind himself. Like the character in Taxi Driver: "Are you talking to me?" And they are. They tell him to look at his life, his desire and experience. What does it tell you? Are you happy? No. So they invite him on a journey. He's inclined to turn away, but things happen to them and so he keeps on coming back. They excite curiosity which is bigger than him. They teach him things.

For example, Waters spoke with his 12 year old daughter the other day who was worried about a friend who was moving away. He told her love doesn't end, and that sometimes it is for the better, and not to be overwhelmed. After going to the talk by Michael O'Brien, and hearing how O'Brien blessed his children in bed, as his father also did to Waters with holy water, he was touched. He remembered feeling the imprint of his father's fingernail a half hour later, even after the holy water had dried. Waters had never done this with his own children because of the impediments of the culture. Trying to kneel again, he found his knees wouldn't bend, as if the machine needed to be oiled. The most obvious thing he forgot to tell his daughter that morning and called her back. This is a 12 year old cosmologist who knows the stars well. He told her to speak to the One who knows all the stars. This is the Meeting, the only Meeting he knows of yet, He is there in his reality. He only has to open his eyes.

Magdi Cristiano Allam at Meeting 2008, Rimini

[The most dramatic talk for me so far was given this morning by journalist Magdi Cristiano Allam. You may recall he is the former Muslim who was baptized by the Pope this past Easter. He travels with bodyguards as he remains under a death threat as an apostate to Islam. As I was listening to his courageous speech, I was reminded of my visit to the Solzhenitsyn exhibit yesterday, and found Allam a fine successor to the Russian writer in his unflinching commitment to truth. The journalist John Waters (notes to follow) shared the panel with Allam. The following are my notes from Allam's portion of the panel titled, "Christianity is not a doctrine but an encounter: two journalists tell their stories". Pictures to follow.]

Allam told the crowd that they are the protagonists with their certainty of truth in Christ, strong in a solidarity of values and determination to act. He expressed gratitude for CL which he called "my house of values". Within this house, I have met authentic witnesses of faith."

From the time Allam was first invited to the Meeting in 2003 until what he called the most wonderful joy of his life, his baptism on March 22nd by Pope Benedict XVI, in what seemed at first a chance encounter, providence gave this opportunity to him to take or leave.

When he was four years old, his mother was very poor and was a babysitter for a rich Italian family in Cairo. The family sent him to a Catholic school, which was the beginning of Allam's journey. He had the chance to learn of Christianity and to share life experiences with real witnesses of the faith, people devoted to Christ who lived their faith with good deeds, in a totalizing way that envelops our humanity. All this created in him the ethical awareness of life values as the center of existence with the person as the starting point. This ethical basis included the non-negotiable values of Pope Benedict XVI, universal legitimate values such as the sacredness of life and the dignity of the human being as the foundation of civil coexistence, respect for freedom, especially freedom of religion as the core. Along this journey, he was comforted and supported by many witnesses. Christianity is a matter of encounters and the witness of faith through good deeds.

On this journey, at one moment, he said, his spirituality corresponded perfectly with faith in Jesus. Pope Benedict XVI confirmed this in insisting faith and reason cannot be separated. He gave the challenge that everything at the level of reason corresponds to humanity and is perfectly valued even in the Christian religion, the religion of truth, freedom and life.

This is why he became convinced to side with the Pope on many issues, particularly after the Pope's address at Regensburg in 2006 on faith and reason, denouncing violence perpetrated in the name of God. That Islam was spread thorugh the sword is an historical fact supported by Islamic texts. This was traumatic for Allam. After the Pope said this, a brutal and general condemnation ensued with some requesting apologies, others removing ambassadors, and with extremists calling for a death sentence. The Pope was isolated by many critics in the Western media and even from Christian churches and Catholic prelates who found this speech undesirable. This made him ponder, and he recognized that today the West fears looking at the truth. It does not recognize one truth, and it is convinced the truth must stay hidden within ourselves. We are afraid to criticize others so think it is better not to express the truth. The root of this cowardly attitude is the ideological disease of relativism which deprives us of the use of reason. We want to put all religions, cultures, values and knowledge at the same level.

The West is victim of another ideology which is political correctness. In our approach with Islam, we cannot say or do anything to hurt sensibilities. Western culture has another ideological disease, goodism. As long as we give everybody rights and freedoms, everybody is happy. Goodism is the opposite of the common good which is based on rights and duties. Only then will it become good for all.

This led him to reflect on his 56 years of experience as a lay, moderate, liberal Muslim committed to faith and reason. He had worked with great passion and results he was proud of on recognizing fundamental rights, non-negotiables among Muslims. In 2004, he was involved in assembling a delegation of moderate Muslims to make a statement against terrorism. He was involved in affirming faith and reason and democracy. He was condemned to death by extreme Islamists.

This led him to reflect, and he was obliged to study and understand better the theological roots of Islam. Christianity is a religion of God become man incarnated in Jesus. Islam was a religion of text; the Koran was created by and with God and could not be subjected to reason and analysis. There are many verses in the Koran which legitimize the ideology of hatred and of death. Mohammed, by historical documents which are accepted also by Muslims, was a warrior who fought and killed. Some passages testify that he personally participated in crimes, including in the year 627 the decapitation of 700 male adult Jews at the gates of Medina. Muslims do not deny these facts. But he could not be indifferent to facts. His conclusion was of the incompatibility of values he believed and had fought for.

This led him to abandon Islam once and for all. He is condemning Islam as a religion, but he wants to distinguish between the religion and those people who follow it. Individual Muslims must be valued, respected, loved per se. And he finds affinity especially with those who respect human rights and common values. One must work together to build a common civilization. We must do this in the certainty of truth, disenfranchising ourselves from relativism. We should assert the dignity of Christianity and not jeopardize the solidity of our faith. The ability to share values is linked to our ability to be fully ourselves, protagonists of our life, recognizing the truth, that the certainty of the truth is one of the root values in us. Then we can become protagonists in personal and collective action for humanity.

Everything Is Possible

On beginning the new book for our School of Community, Is It Possible to Live this Way? by Fr. Giussani, we are talking about the problem of trust. Fr. Giussani issues this challenge: "the more one is moral, the more one is capable of trusting; the less one is moral, the less one is capable of trusting, because immorality is like a schizophrenia or psychic dissociation." Marie and Suzanne have blogged on their impressions of this provocative question.

As far as trust goes, our natural reaction seems to be that it is a matter of being smart more than being moral. Of course, we don't want to be deceived. We would even risk missing out, rather than be duped. This is the problem set out in a wonderful little parable by Isaac Bashevis Singer, "Gimpel the Fool." "I am Gimpel the fool. I don't think myself a fool. On the contrary. But that's what folks call me."

Gimpel is a storyteller, and he tells the story of himself as the most gullible person in his village. He believed any story anyone would tell, or at least would consider it.

I like a golem believed everyone. In the first place, everything is possible, as it is written in the Wisdom of the Fathers. I've forgotten just how: Second, I had to believe when the whole town was down on me! .... "You want me to call everyone a liar?": What was I to do? I believed them, and I hope at least that did them some good.

For example, a yeshiva student came and announced: "[T]he Messiah has come. The dead have arisen." Foolish Gimpel asked why he didn't hear the ram's horn blow.

Like Hosea, Gimpel has the misfortune to have an unfaithful wife. As the schoolmaster told him, "There isn't a woman in the world who is not the granddaughter of Eve." Four months after their marriage, she is delivering the child of another father, and Gimpel does what he must when a wife is in labor. "The thing to do was to go to the House of Prayer to repeat Psalms, and that was what I did." Gimpel is the true realist. He says, "You can't live without errors." Besides, he loves the little boy.

For Gimpel, there's more at stake in believing than outing lies: "What's the good of not believing? Today it's your wife you don't believe; tomorrow it's God Himself you won't take stock in."

Time unravels everything. On her deathbed, his wife asks forgiveness. Gimpel quotes the rabbi: "Belief in itself is beneficial. It is written that a good man lived by his faith."

Now, Gimpel warns us that after his wife's death he leaves the town and becomes a storyteller, so take his "yarns" as you will. Or just accept his lesson on believing.

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world... When the time comes I will go joyfully. Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception. God be praised: there even Gimpel cannot be deceived.