Katie van Schaijik

tcronin, I am not sure I follow your distinction between ontological and natural. 
Nor can I agree with the notion that our uniqueness is derived from our relations as in the Holy Trinity.

I would rather say with Wojtyla and Newman and others, that our uniqueness is manifest in every aspect of our selfhood.  The more important and central an aspect, the more that uniqueness shows itself and counts, as it were.
Lots of people have a sense of humor.  Only my husband has his sense of humor.  That sense of humor generally shows up most clearly when he’s relating to others, but it wouldn’t be well-described as being defined by his relation to others, would it?
All the more his personality.
We share “traits” with others, but only in a limited sense.  My intelligence (such as it is) is mine, and unique.  No one else—not even those who have the same IQ—and not my twin sister (if I had a twin sister)—has mine.

You are touching on point rather central in personalism—a point that distinguishes our understanding from others’.

Do you (and Zizioulas) really mean to say that a person has no uniqueness in himself?

Dear notsofastplease,
Of course you are right that I brushed with strokes that are far too broad to comprehend each Legionaire’s experience.  But I think that the general point I made is supported by the findings of the Visitation, taken together with scads of anecdotal evidence.  Nor is it so facile as you think.  I have read dozens of articles and pages and pages of testimony from former LCers.  I have many friends who have either been involved or have avoided involvement because of what they saw and felt in the Legion.  I’ve been avidly reading and participating for well over a year in a blog dedicated to helping people get out and get free.  And what I find there closely mirrors what I found earlier with the dynamic in Covenant Communities, though the evil of Maciel surpasses their evil by orders of magnitude.

I certainly don’t hold that everything in the Legion was evil! I know many good, sincere, deeply faithful Catholics were ensnared.  I know, too, that because it involved the true faith, much true good was also done in and through it.

I very much agree with you that personalism has an important role to play in the solution.  We would like to help, and are at work on it, even now, behind the scenes.

I’m with you, Steve.  The question was a rhetorical one.

I’m surprised by your response, amator.  Mine was nearly opposite.  What struck me is that whereas 20 years ago it was normal for even Catholic husbands to think it was right and proper that they domineer over their wives, the Catholic men of my generation—on the whole—think and act very differently as husbands.  They know that marriage is mutual self-giving and mutual deference, and that they are meant to be companions, not authority figures to their wives.
The “JP II husbands” I know inspire me all the time by the way they not only put in full days at work, but come home with the idea of relieving their wives of the burdens of housework and childcare.  They’re also much more sensitive to and supportive of the fact that their wives may have interests and talents beyond the domestic realm that ought to be developed…

Let me add that between vicious priests and priest lacking great virtue and charisma there is also the category of nice, well-meaing priests who were so badly formed that they seem not to be able to distinguish the Christian gospel from the self-help and social-justice gospel popular in the ‘70s.  Or priests who seem to think that the main role of a priest is administrate and organization, while the main role of the laity is to contribute money and volunteer time.

We need real priests and real bishops.  Real faithful too.

Jesus, have mercy on us and the whole world.

“How many bishops actually encouraged people to be quiet?”

I wonder if there are any who did not.  Can you think of a single case before the scandal broke of a bishop expressing public solidarity with victims of priestly abuse and calling for other victims to speak up about what they had experienced?  I can’t.  Yet I have heard many stories among my own acquaintances of even priests and bishops of good repute taking the line of “handling this quietly, through proper channels, in order not to cause scandal.”

Again, I’m not trying to excuse anyone. Just trying to be objective. I think to be fair we have to consider each bishop on a case by case basis if we are going to be just in how we regard them.

Scott, you are being more speculative than objective when you paint a picture exonerating most bishops of wrongdoing. 

And in any case, your basic point would make sense only if I had been judging them individually.  I was judging them as a group.  Obviously some bishops were much worse than others.  Some are so implicated that it is a moral crime that they remain in office.  Some may have been entirely innocent (though that gets harder to believe).  As a whole, they failed miserably. 

And I wish you wouldn’t keep writing as if all this was back in the ‘70s.  The crimes against children, the rampant homosexual activity in seminaries and among groups of priests at least in some dioceses, not to mention religious orders, continued right up until the scandals broke.  The cover-ups were ongoing in virtually every diocese.

As much as we might want to be angry at a particular bishop, I don’t think we can do so justly without knowing with certainty that he personally mishandled sexual abuse cases and that he did so in a way that violated his own conscience.

This is completely beside my point.  I am not interested in playing God and judging consciences.  I am interested in renewing the Church.

My overall approach to this subject is highly colored by my years of personal experience around priests and seminarians. I honestly can say that of the seminarians I lived with for years and the many others that I met in other contexts, I saw truly good and decent men who are as revolted by priestly child abuse as any other decent member of society. And when I hear people refer to “wide and hideous corruption among the Catholic clergy,” it is something I just have not witnessed at all.

Dear Scott, if this is so, then consider whether it is you who have difficulty being objective in this situation.  Consider whether you are not projecting your own experience too much onto the whole Church.  And consider whether, in doing so, you are not tending to shut your ears to the cry of the poor—in this case the poor being those who have been defiled and defrauded by terrible priests and bishops—whether, rather than taking what they say at face value, you assume too quickly that they are being excessively negative and projecting their woundedness and so on.  (Remember that this was the mode of Legion defenders and Covenant Community defenders for decades.  Their experience was positive, therefore they assumed that the accusations were either false or isolated cases and that the detractors were either lying or exaggerating because they were wounded and bitter.)

I am thinking just now of two priests I am close to.  They are young, faith-filled, JP II priests.  One in a diocese with a great bishop.  At the beginning of the scandal he was confident that thanks to his great bishop, sexual perversion was a non-issue among priests in his diocese.  He’s since had a lot to learn, and changed his tune.  The other is in Boston.  Initially he, too, treated the whole scandal as a mainly media driven attack on the Church.  He scoffed at the idea that there were large numbers of homosexuals among priests.  Now he knows. 

Further, “wide corruption” does not imply total corruption.  I know many, many wonderful priests.  I know some good bishops, bearing their burdens with deep faith and Christlike humility.

And it goes without saying that while a particular priest even though he might not be a very good preacher, or may not seem to have the evangelical fire that we desire our priests to have, or to be a man of particularly great virtues, this does not make him a horrible person or someone to be presumed a probable child abuser.

Scott, you are friend and what I say I say in friendship, with truth (as always in Linde discussions) my aim: this is wretchedly patronizing.

Who thinks every priest is a probable child abuser?
Who is incapable of distinguishing in theory and in normal practice between lack of virtue and charisma and entrenched viciousness?

I was not speaking of imperfect priests, I was speaking of priests who by their unbelief and their vicious living undermine the Faith they are ordained to serve.  You seem to think these are rare cases.  Well, I personally have encountered many of them—priests whose homilies regularly insinuate unbelief and whose way of dealing with the faithful expresses an almost unbounded contempt for them, their Faith, and their moral values.

I mention this because I know of people who seem to expect the Church to do everything in regard to passing the faith on to their kids and yet they don’t even make Mass a priority for themselves. But then they will pile on the Church when the media does so, without themselves knowing any particulars or being able to tell the difference between misleading reports and accurate reports.

Then you are talking to people who are not here.

Speaking now not of victims, who are in their own category as those who should be listened to with special attention, but of others who have not personally been abused. . .

A final point before I get on with the day—
All of the faithful are victimized by vicious priests and weak, self-serving bishops.

I don’t mean to compare embezzlement with the evil of the sexual abuse of children.  I meant rather to point out the severe moral obtuseness and contempt for the laity expressed in his having been appointed—especially considering that that parish had already endured more than one arrested pastor.

Dear Scott, you are missing my point, and sounding patronizing (sorry!). 
The dismay and outrage that I and so many other faithful Catholic parents are feeling has to do with the absence of the due response on the part of the bishops to the discovery of deep and wide hideous corruption in the Catholic clergy.

Enacting policies that do a better job of screening candidates for the priesthood is well and good.  I’m all for it.  I just go nuts when I hear that touted as if the problem has been taken care of and no institution is safer for children now than the Catholic Church—especially considering there are bishops like Bishop McCormack and Cardinal Mahoney and others still heading dioceses across the country.  And there are priests still serving all over in the Church who knew about these things and didn’t take them seriously, while priests and others who DID were dismissed from seminaries or sent to the boondocks or hospitalized for “psychiatric evaluations.”

It is always possible to focus on a bad apple (and it is awful that you have to contend with this in the summer) and draw the wrong conclusion that nothing good is happening in the bigger picture.

Nonsense.  I never said nothing good is happening.  I say that the good that is happening is woefully short of what’s called for, and used NH as an example.  There are plenty of others.

My complaint regarding the Wisconsin priest had nothing to do with his correcting the bad reporting in the NYT.  It referred only to his claim (echoed by Weigel and you) that the Catholic Church is the safest place for children in America.  I find this an offensive claim.  It may be statistically defensible, but to view the matter statistically is to set aside the enormity of the evil present in the fact that the abuse was by priests, into whose hands parents entrust their children in a way that they entrust them to no other person or institution.  This is not simply a matter of priest being held to a higher standard, it is a matter of priests being able to inflict much more serious harm.  To be raped and molested by a priest or several priests, to then be disbelieved and calumniated as a pervert and a liar when you tried to tell parents or others; to have police decline to pursue the matter so as not to bring scandal on the Church; to have the bishop urge silence on you and your family; to find that these same priests were allowed to commit these same crimes against others for years and decades…is to be destroyed, defiled and defrauded in a way that bears no comparison to instance of abuse in a Scout leader or a teacher at a public school.

Sometimes the priest operated in rings—sharing methods and victims and covering for each other.  Bishops allowed it to happen.  And it was by no means a regional phenomenon.  See (besides Wisconson) Davenport, Iowa and St. Louis for mid-west epicenters of evil.

you can’t just throw out everyone who was less than appropriately enraged by the abuses.

I’d like to see at least a few priests and bishops especially who are appropriately enraged.  Can’t think of even one (though Benedict, bless him, comes closest.)

Why has only Cardinal Law been removed from office?

As a friend of mine put it the other day: “Just give us good priests.  I’d rather have to drive two hours to get to Mass and have a priest I could hold up for my children as a true witness to Christ.”

I believe with all my heart that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church.  I pray daily for the Pope who is battling powers and principalities.  I thank God that many good men still say yes to God and become priests.

And I wish God would act mightily to re-convert our hearts and bring about the renewal of His Holy Catholic Church.

I don’t get fund-raising appeals myself, but I’ve been following a blog for recovering LC/RCers for about a year now, and it’s full of stories of such.  Earlier on in the year, when there were still a lot of LC defenders commenting, many would mention (as an indication of the holiness and commitment of the Legionaires) that when they were in LC seminary in Cheshire or Thornwood or Rome, they had little to eat and were always cold.  Families were continually hit up for money to help with the expense of keeping them.
Blog is here: http://www.life-after-rc.com/