When Pope Benedict observed, at the end of the Year for Priests, that the devil was on the warpath in an extraordinary way right now to sully the image of priests, I didn't say anything on this blog about that observation. I didn't blog about the remark because it just seemed to me beneath notice at the time.
First, there's the astounding assumption that anyone outside the Vatican cares much at all about the Year for Priests. I tend to think that the devil has more important business to attend to right now than disrupting a self-indulgent celebration of priests thrown for priests and by priests.
In addition, as I've noted in previous postings on this blog, (here, here, and here), the minute churchmen begin nattering on about how the devil is behind attempts to question their power and authority, I get itchy feet. I'm frankly embarrassed for their sake, embarrassed that they have no other theological weapons in their arsenal to defuse valid critiques of their abuse of power and authority. I'm embarrassed for their sake that they would imagine that resorting to the old mythic bugbear of Satan constitutes compelling theological argumentation.
As Eugene Kennedy notes in a recent essay at National Catholic Reporter, Benedict's rhetoric about the devil is part of a wider Satan-centric strategy of explanatory discourse on the part of key church figures today, in which we are seeing yet another attempt to shift blame for the cover-up of crimes of clerical sexual abuse away from the pastors of the church, and onto someone else's back.
Kennedy concludes,
Average people deserve better of their spiritual leaders than the trivialization of evil implicit in this return to these wild and, to them, apparently weirdly satisfying fantasies. Evil exists, but we will never overcome it unless we recognize that it is something for which we are responsible. It comes from within us and not until we come to terms with that truth can we overcome it.
And he's absolutely right. What baffles me about the freedom with which some hierarchical figures today are throwing around the devil-made-me-do-it excuse is that those pastoral leaders don't seem to recognize that recourse to the devil as an explanation is a telling indicator of their pastoral failure to convince us of the importance of God, and of God's salvific love, in the world in which we live.
When we need to natter on about the devil, what we're implicitly confessing is that we haven't done a very good job--we haven't done an adequate job at all--of transmitting to the culture around us the notion that God exists, is intently concerned with the world, and is always at work everywhere in the world to call the entire cosmos into God's loving embrace.
Where that insight abounds, and where people talk about and above all embody God's salvific love, there is not such an intent need to talk about the devil. The fixation of some Catholic leaders (and of the religious right in general) on devilolatry represents a subliminal admission that the take-no-prisoners approach to contemporary culture, in which the church and scriptures alone have all the answers and secular culture is full of darkness and devoid of the Spirit, has failed. It has failed to transmit to our culture the most central Christian affirmation of all: namely, that God is love and has made the world so that the world and all that is in it can be enfolded into the divine embrace.
It's God who ought to be in the center of the radar screen of Christian pastoral leaders. Not the Old Dickens.
