Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Recovery: Something Difficult
The bishops are feeling the heat. NPR gives us a story on Levada from his Portland days that dogs him still. Apparently, diocesan lawyers tried to blame the mother of a seminarian's love child because she didn't practice contraception. It is whispered that Cardinal Rigali got a dressing down from his clergy last night, including a moral theologian.
I googled this site, which naturally focuses on other people, mostly laity, who have lost their sense of sin. It is society's "sin of the century," and that may well be true. Recently on the home front, our diocesan vicar general mentioned the "loss of a sense of sin." He strikes me as wise enough to see it all around, not just manifesting itself as logs in lay eyes.
Rock reported:
"You seem to stress intention. You try to claim there was never a wrong intention," the priest reportedly told Rigali. But from a Catholic moral perspective, he said, the "horrific" outcomes of Krol's and Bevilacqua's cover-up vastly outweigh their efforts to protect the archdiocese from scandal. "The people are not interested in intentions," he told the cardinal.
Some clergy seem to have the notion that a sense of sin is as utilitarian as a bottle opener. It's there, fully formed and ready to go; just fetch it from the kitchen drawer. "You open your beer with your teeth? No wonder your dentist loves you. Why don't you get your opener from the kitchen?" Like most people actually ever had a sense of sin developed to the point where they can just open the drawer, get it out, and use it ... like a tool.
AA has it right, in the core of the Twelve Steps, the best non-Catholic plan for Reconciliation ever devised:
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
If the bishops have misplaced their drawer, these steps to recover it might be well advised. One makes a fearless moral inventory with the expectation of finding something. That's why it's called a search. Rigali's priests are right. The hierarchy should make a moral inventory with the intent that something will be found. And once it's found, it should be confessed. And then there are still five more steps to go, based on the assumption that people find it somewhat harder to change than they find opening a bottle: get ready to be changed, ask to change, make a list, make amends, then repeat steps four through nine as necessary.
As a parent, I worry about teaching my daughter an appropriate sense of sin. When I do something wrong to a family member, I apologize. I have apologized to my daughter for losing my temper, for yelling, for forgetting something important to her ... things she can understand. When she has done something wrong, I believe the sincerity of her words, "I'm sorry, Dad," because I think (and hope) she appreciates the sincerity I attempt when I have wronged her. I don't have any better way of getting the message across; I hope it's enough.
I don't enjoy seeing the bishops squirm. But they have to set an example above reproach. We need to see an example from them that is difficult and demanding. An example that most people might be unable, or at least leery of following.
The inventory they conduct should run on the assumption that there is something to find in church bureaucracy that demands reform, repentance, and renewal. And if there is a sense of sin to be recovered, somebody has to do more than tell us what to do. The role of the bishop is to show us how to do it.
