{"id":1233,"date":"2011-02-16T13:34:44","date_gmt":"2011-02-16T13:34:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/theirbadmother\/2011\/02\/dear-god-on-the-catholic-church-and-abuse-and-evil-and-crises-of-faith.html"},"modified":"2011-02-16T13:34:44","modified_gmt":"2011-02-16T13:34:44","slug":"dear-god-on-the-catholic-church-and-abuse-and-evil-and-crises-of-faith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/2011\/02\/dear-god-on-the-catholic-church-and-abuse-and-evil-and-crises-of-faith.html","title":{"rendered":"Dear God (On The Catholic Church And Abuse And Evil And Crises Of Faith)"},"content":{"rendered":"

This weekend, I read an article in New York Times Magazine<\/a> about the crisis surrounding the Catholic Church in Ireland as new, horrible, stories emerge about sexual abuse of children and efforts by the Church to cover up those stories. It was a teensy bit upsetting. So I started to write a post about it – in the middle of the night, fueled by outrage and tea – and realized, a few paragraphs in, that I’d already written that post<\/a>. Like, last year, the last time that I was outraged about the Catholic Church. So I’m reposting it here, with the proviso that it should be read as articulating an outrage that increased by a factor of 10.<\/i><\/p>\n

When I was twelve years old, I was confirmed in the Catholic faith.
\nThe priest who  administered the rite of confirmation was a man that I –
\nin the manner of all judgmental twelve year olds who recoil at elders
\nwho seem weird and smell bad – did not like, although I did not, at the
\ntime, dislike him quite so much as I did the nun who led the weekly
\ncatechism classes for young members of the Church. Sister Anne was
\nelderly, and terrifying; she wore her black habit like a suit of armor
\nand carried with her a old wooden ruler, the kind with blade-like metal
\nembedded along the outer edge, and she would menace us with it,
\nsometimes cracking it down upon the side of a desk when some unfortunate
\nchild failed to list the Seven Sacraments on command. Sister Anne, my
\nclassmates and I decided, was not on the Right Side Of God.<\/p>\n

Nobody that frightening could be good, we told each other as we
\ncongregated outside during a class break. God wouldn’t stand for it.
\n“She’ll be punished some day,” someone said. “She’ll go to hell.” That
\nthought was somewhat reassuring.<\/p>\n

One of the boys disagreed. “God doesn’t seem to care all that much if
\nthe priests are scary, so why not the sisters? And the sisters don’t
\neven do anything, not like the priests. He lets them” – <\/em>he
\npractically spat the word – “be the bosses of the church.” A few of the
\nother boys nodded, and there was much shuffling of feet. Somebody
\nmurmured something about creepy<\/em> being worse<\/em> than mean,
\nand a couple of the boys moved away from the group. “God doesn’t really
\ncare about what those guys do. He just cares that we know the
\nsacraments,” he added. “It sucks.” I had no idea what he was talking
\nabout, but I knew that I really didn’t like the way church felt<\/em>
\nat this parish – a parish that my family had only recently joined,
\nafter relocating – at this parish, with this priest and this nun and
\nthese scared children, and it seemed to me that if anyone was to blame,
\nit was probably God, who was in charge of the whole business, as I
\nunderstood it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Years later, my mother asked me, in a telephone conversation, if I
\nremembered Immaculate Conception, the church where I’d been confirmed,
\nand the priest who’d administered those rites. “I remember the sister
\nwho taught my catechism more than him,” I said. “She was evil.”<\/p>\n

“Well, not as evil as him, apparently. He’s been accused of abusing
\nsome of the boys. You know”  – her voice dropped to a whisper –
\n“sexually.”<\/p>\n

And I thought: well. That explains a lot<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I was in my early twenties by then, and it had been a couple of years
\nsince I’d been to Mass. Religion was the opiate of the masses, Marx had
\ntaught me, and my mother had gone ahead and confirmed what he and
\nMachiavelli and Nietzsche and the kids in the parish of Immaculate
\nConception – and, we would someday learn, parishes everywhere – already
\nknew: that religion sometimes gives very bad people an opportunity to
\nvery bad things, and to get away with it. So I abandoned religion,
\nmostly entirely.<\/p>\n

By my early thirties, I was trying to get it back. Or, rather, I was trying to figure out whether I should<\/em>
\nget it back. I had loved God, and the Catholic Church, for a long time,
\nbefore the unpleasantness of Immaculate Conception, and, later, my
\nparents’ separation and divorce and mutual crisis of faith (another
\nstory entirely, although not one, perhaps, that is mine to tell). I
\nmissed them, sometimes. And I worried, sometimes, about how I would
\nnavigate the waters of faith once I had my own children; how I would
\nraise them to have faith, if I wasn’t – if we weren’t – at home in the
\nChurch. Because I knew that I wanted them to have faith<\/a>.
\nI just wasn’t sure how, and on what terms. I struggled to figure out
\nhow to renegotiate my relationship to God and to faith. And even though I
\ntold myself that I wanted to explore faith in all of its forms and consider all options<\/a>, I have, deep down, always assumed that if I returned to church it would be to return to the<\/em> Church, the Catholic Church.<\/p>\n

I had sort of thought – this year after my father’s death<\/a>, this year during which we need so much prayer for my nephew<\/a> – that I might, this year, return for Easter. But then the Catholic Church went ahead and screwed it up<\/a> and put me off religion, again.<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

Allegations of abuse within the Church are not new, of course. But
\nit’s not the allegations – the fact – that abuse occurred (horrifying as
\nthat is) that are destroying the remnants of my faith in the Church:
\nit’s the Church’s refusal to take responsibility for it<\/a>.
\nIt’s the Church’s refusal to admit that mistakes were made, that it
\nfailed to protect children. It’s the Church’s inability to be humble, to
\nacknowledge that the failure to protect children was a human failure,
\none made within the Church, by the Church, and that it let God down.
\nThat it let us<\/em> down – that it let the children down – is
\nobvious. That it claims now to have God on its side, that it claims to
\nbe on the side of what is good and right, and that it insists that all
\nthose who express horror at what it allowed to happen are agents of
\npersecution who are needling them – and by extension, God – with their
\nevil accusations and petty gossip is a travesty of such magnitude that I
\nhave trouble, in some moments, even believing that it’s happening. It
\nreads like the plot of a bad conspiracy-themed action novel, wherein
\nrobed men give booming speeches about Protecting God’s Church At All
\nCosts while minor henchmen destroy documents and arrange for naysayers
\nto be ‘disappeared.’  Somewhere, Dan Brown is taking notes, furiously.<\/p>\n

This is all so appalling, so terrible, because the Church’s refusal to take responsibility<\/a>
\nfor the horrors committed on its watch and its refusal to take
\nresponsibility for not addressing and eliminating those horrors when it
\ncould makes it seem as though, in the words of my young fellow
\ncatechumen, “God doesn’t really care about what those guys do.” When the
\nChurch insists that the reputation of the Church is more important than
\nthe well-being of innocents, when the Church puts the Church first and
\ninsists that this is what God wants it to do<\/em>, God is on its side, if you criticize it you criticize God and also Jesus and all the saints and probably your grandmother, too<\/em>,
\nwell, it sets itself up as the earthly representative of a God that no
\ngood person should want to follow. And in so doing, it destroys faith.
\nOr, at least, it shakes it really violently.<\/p>\n

The more reasonable explanation, of course (assuming, that is, that
\nyou believe in God), is that the Church is not representing God. Or that
\nthe men who are running the Church, and the men responsible for not
\npurging the Church of the sickness within it, are neither representing
\nGod nor the Church as it was meant to be, whatever that ‘meant to be’
\nwas supposed to be, or whatever. But for Catholics, no such distinction
\ncan be easily made. The men of the Church are<\/em> the Church; the
\nPope is its head and the direct line to God. And so if we accept, as the
\nChurch claims, that God is on their side, then we are left, again, with
\nthe lament of my young peer, a young man, a child<\/em>, who was almost certainly abused: “God doesn’t really care about what those guys do.”<\/em><\/p>\n

I refuse to believe that. I believe, instead, that the Church has
\nfailed, or, rather, that those who defend the institution of the Church
\nover and against its most vulnerable members have failed. I believe that
\nthis failure stands as evidence that this<\/em> Church, which is to say these<\/em> men, cannot speak for God. That no<\/em>
\nman – or woman – can speak for God. And that the only possible
\ndemonstration of faith in the face of everything that has happened is, I
\nthink, to turn away, to refuse to listen, to deny their authority to
\nspeak, to disavow belief in their claims about God, their God, and to
\nbelieve in another God entirely. One that makes sense. One that does<\/em> care about ‘what those guys do.’<\/p>\n

Who or what that God is, I don’t know. And I don’t expect that that
\nGod can make any of this better, or make any of this make sense, or do
\nanything to make the ugliness in the world – including the ugliness
\nbeing propagated by the Church, who would deny the depth and breadth of
\nthat ugliness as it pertains to them – anything less than what it is.
\nBut I need to believe in a better God, and in a better kind of faith,
\nwhatever that means.<\/p>\n

Postscript: I mean no offense to Catholics who are comfortable
\nremaining in the Church. I understand how it is possible to distinguish
\nbetween the Church – which, as one commenter has noted, might better be
\nidentified with the people of Catholic faith, rather than with the
\nVatican or with the men who claim to speak for God – and its
\nrepresentatives in the Vatican and elsewhere. I’m struggling with that,
\nbecause I know that the Church is full of good, good people. I just know
\nthat, so long as ‘the Church’ – which is to say, again, its
\nrepresentatives – disclaim the proven horrors as their responsibility,
\nand disdain the seriousness of what happened, I cannot imagine
\nsupporting it\/them in any way.<\/em><\/p>\n

Originally posted<\/a> at Her Bad Mother, 2010.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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