As Catholic Dioceses Release Lists of Priests Credibly Accused of Abuse of Minors, Important Things to Watch for: The Case of Arkansas

As more and more U.S. Catholic dioceses — but not the diocese of Charlotte, North Carolina, which remains "one of the least transparent" dioceses in the nation — release names of priests credibly accused of sexual abuse of minors, I am following those lists to see if I spot names of priests with connections to my diocese of Little Rock, Arkansas. I'm doing this, in part, because I think it's important that we inform ourselves of what's happening in our own back yard as we talk about bigger problems that manifest themselves in more than one place in the world. I also want to note that others who are monitoring these lists have been very generous in pointing me to important Arkansas-themed information in them: this is not a project I'm undertaking all on my own, but a collaborative one.

Update on Churches of Main Street USA: Better Angels of Our Nature?

I talked and talked yesterday (and then talked some more). I’m tired of hearing my own voice, and I feel sure many of you must be, too.

Today, I want to shift gears and provide some tidbits from recent news stories that follow through on items about which I’ve previously posted on this blog.

One of my primary points in what I wrote yesterday is that, whether we like it or not, we are living through a civil war today, regarding where (or whether) to fit gay and lesbian human beings into our world. Into our social and our ecclesial worlds.

The right has made this an issue, and the battle is underway. As with any civil war, there is no option of standing on the sidelines and refusing to take a stand. Neutrality is an illusion, which benefits those with most power in the social or ecclesial worlds we inhabit.

Neutrality benefits those who want to target gay people, to use our lives as pawns in political games we cannot control. Church people who profess love while doing nothing and saying nothing to stop the spiritual violence being enacted by both many social and many ecclesial forces today are aiding, abetting, siding with, and doing the dirty work of those targeting gay human beings.

As the American Civil War began, Abraham Lincoln appealed to us to decide whether we want to listen to the better angels of nature, or to other angels that would continue pandering to the lowest instincts of humanity. In civil wars such as the one underway now in church and society about where (or whether) to fit gay human beings in, we can listen either to those better angels or to the others—to those who want to continue savage structures of demonization and exclusion of gay brothers and sisters, and of spiritual and physical violence towards gay human persons.

In the stories that follow, I leave it up to you to decide which angels are being heard by those who appear in the stories, and the churches they represent. The better angels of our nature? Or the other ones?

Following Up on The United Methodist Church Story

The following two stories are from the latest newsletter of the Reconciling Ministries Network (RMN) (www.rmnetwork.org/Flashnet_show.asp?FlashnetID=171#5).

The first story excerpts comments of Helen King, winner of this year’s RMN Hilton award, which is given annually to members of the RMN parents’ network for exemplary service to the RMN mission of inclusion. The award is given in honor of Rev. Bruce and Rev. Virginia Hilton, UMC ministers who worked for years (Rev. Bruce Hilton died this year) on behalf of justice and against racial, gender-based, and homophobic discrimination.

Helen King’s words are poignant. I hope the churches can hear these words, since they are words that thousands and thousands of churched family members of LGBT persons might say today. They are words both of pain and of hope—a hope that cannot be fulfilled until the churches first hear the pain and choose to stop inflicting it. In her acceptance speech at the Hilton banquet, Helen King stated:

I am a native of North Carolina and a life long Methodist raised in the Wesleyan culture of love, acceptance, nurture of faith that began in the cradle. I married the son of a Methodist minister and our son is a United Methodist minister. However, when our daughter came out to us 15 years ago, I knew instinctively that the United Methodist Church would be the last place that I could go for understanding. So for a year and a half, after a lifetime of active service in the church, my husband and I stopped attending church.

I knew instinctively that the United Methodist Church would be the last place that I could go for understanding. What a profound indictment of any church.

These are words that might be said about many churches today, in how they and their members treat gay and lesbian human beings and those who stand in solidarity with us.

Is this the future we want to build together, in church and society? Better angels? Or the other ones?

Helen King’s words are echoed by a Methodist minister in Texas, who also spoke at the RMN Hilton banquet this year. Like Helen King, Rev. Bill Taylor has found his life turned upside down due to his refusal to repudiate a gay son.

And those turning his life upside down are fellow Christians, those who kneel at the communion rail with him, who read scripture with him, who pray for an increase of charity right beside him in church. In his address to the Hilton banquet, Rev. Taylor noted his joy and his wife’s when they were sent by the United Methodist Church to minister in Conroe, Texas, after he had served on the Bishop’s Cabinet.

His ministry was successful beyond all his dreams: the church grew in membership; numbers of those attending church leapt; the church’s budget doubled and its debt dwindled.

And then, Rev. Taylor notes, “the wheels came off.” His oldest child, Dawson, told his parents that he is gay. On hearing this announcement, Rev. Dawson followed time-honored Wesleyan tradition: he took the matter to God in fervent prayer:

For a year I prayed fervently that God would change Dawson and make him “normal” – a heterosexual like his parents – or I asked God to change me to be fully accepting of him, his sexuality, and his life. My prayers were answered. Slowly, not even realizing that I was changing, I began to be accepting, not only of Dawson, but of all who are a part of the LGBT community.

And then things began to fall apart. Rev. Taylor and his wife began to taste the cup prepared for gay and lesbian persons by many Christians today. Rumors circulated in his congregation that he did not believe the bible. Gatherings at which he spoke became occasions for some church members to spy on him, to twist and circulate his words in malicious ways among his congregation.

As a result, he has experienced severe health problems and has asked for a sabbatical. But his hope and courage remain undaunted. As Rev. Taylor informs the RMN audience, “They may destroy my career, but not my soul. And the truth must be told. So it’s in that spirit that I share with you some of our story.”

Is this the future we want to build together, in church and society? Better angels? Or the other ones?

Following Up on the Catholic Church Story

As I noted in a previous posting, plans are underway to exhume John Henry Cardinal Newman from the grave he shares with his lifelong companion and fellow priest, Ambrose St. John. The ostensible reason the Vatican has given for this exhumation is to facilitate veneration of Newman as his cause of canonization is being considered by Rome.

Some advocates of gay and lesbian rights see a murkier motive in this action, however. As Bess Twiston Davies reported in the Times (London) this week, Peter Tatchell has accused the Vatican of engaging in “an act of moral vandalism” in overturning Newman’s explicitly stated final wishes, and separating him in death from St. John (www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article4566639.ece). In Tatchell’s view, “The re-burial has only one aim in mind: to cover up Newman's homosexuality and to disavow his love for another man. It is an act of shameless dishonesty and personal betrayal by the gay-hating Catholic Church.”

A spokesperson for Catholic Action UK responds to Tatchell’s charges by stating that Tatchell’s position represents a typical “trick of homosexual activists.” Catholic Action UK is a right-wing political activist group that purports to represent “the” Catholic position on issues moral and political. Like its counterparts in the United States, it issues so-called Catholic voters’ guides urging Catholics to vote solely on the basis of a handful of “non-negotiable” issues including gay marriage and abortion. It has called for boycotts of the largest Catholic charity in the UK, Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, and of Amnesty International. According to groups monitoring its political activities (including Catholics for a Free Choice), the organization has been less than forthcoming about its funding sources (see www.catholicsforchoice.org/topics/international/documents/2005catholicactiongroupfactsheet.pdf).

Where are the better angels in the preceding story, I wonder? Those of us who continue to claim some connection to the Catholic church—despite its clearly demonstrated record of spiritual violence towards its gay children at this point in history—have no choice except to try to discern, and to choose where we stand.

In another posting recently, I noted that the Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men’s organization, recently came perilously close to endorsing the Republican presidential candidate at the international meeting of this organization in Québec. A news story that broke yesterday is that the Knights of Columbus have donated $1 million to groups supporting Proposition 8 in California—the proposition intended to overturn gay marriage in that state (http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2008/08/prop-8-post.html).

To which angels of our nature are the good Knights appealing, I wonder? I have serious doubts about whether it's to the better angels.

Following Up on the Story of the Anglican Communion

In a number of postings, I have noted the adroit use by the right of the tactic of race-baiting in the Anglican communion, to try to drive a wedge between people of color in worldwide Anglicanism and supporters of LGBT human beings. Because this tactic has been highly successful in drumming up resistance to gay persons among some African Anglicans, I was heartened to read Daniel Burke’s “Raising Issues of Race in Anglican Rift” recently in the Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/08/AR2008080803256.htmla report).

Burke notes that eight African-American Episcopal bishops attended the recent Lambeth Conference, and spoke out eloquently against the attempt of right-wing groups to drive a racial wedge within the Anglican communion in order to further an anti-gay agenda. As Bishop Eugene T. Sutton of Maryland notes, it is ironic in the extreme that American Episcopalians now turning to Africa as a bulwark against gay rights have historically had almost no connection to African Americans in the U.S.: "It's something that I like to point out, the historical anomaly of dioceses that have nothing to do with the black community going all the way to Africa to make these relationships.”

Sutton notes that Episcopal groups in the U.S. turning to Africa to demonstrate their diversity, while working to exclude gay people from Episcopal churches, are “looking for black faces to give them legitimacy because they can't find them at home.” The African-American bishops at Lambeth also note that the abuse of Scripture by some Episcopalians to bash gay people brings to mind the use of the bible in previous eras to support slavery and racism.

Who stands with the better angels of our nature in the Anglican communion today?

Following Up on the Presbyterian Church Story

I blogged some time ago about the decision of Presbyterian General Assembly this past June to overturn that church’s ban against the ordination of openly gay ministry candidates. This decision must be ratified by two-thirds of the nation’s presbyteries, and various indicators suggest that it will not receive sufficient votes to be enacted—particularly among presbyteries of the South.

Meanwhile, I would like to share some heartening news from my own community. I’ve noted the protest by Westboro Baptist church at the funeral of Bill Gwatney this week. This funeral took place at Pulaski Heights Methodist church, near which I live.

On the day of Bill Gwatney’s funeral, as I drove in the direction of that church, I passed another church that also has the name Pulaski Heights—Pulaski Heights Presbyterian church. This is a church about which I know little, though its church hall is my voting precinct and a cousin of mine was once a member of this church.

When I passed the church, I noted a new banner across the columns that form the church’s porch. It stated in huge letters that the church is welcoming and affirming.

As every church should be, no questions asked, if it hopes to be any kind of church at all—any kind of church that can appeal to Jesus as its originator. Since this story is right in my own back yard, I’ll answer the question about which angels I believe this church is reflecting: the church’s decision to advertise itself as a welcoming and affirming church reflects the better angels of its congregation’s nature, and of the churches of Main Street USA in general.

And at a very personal level, I'd like to add the following observation. Vis-a-vis the churches, we in America are all consumers. We choose our church communities based on their ability to meet our needs, just as consumers of material goods shop among various purveyors of those goods to find the most effective suppliers. Key among those needs when we look for a church home are affirmation, acceptance, support, community, and access to spiritual resources. These are what church is all about, when it truly acts as church.

I grew up, as it were, between the Methodist and the Presbyterian church in question. Both are a block from my grandmother's house, which was the center of my life from infancy up to the death of the last family member who lived in that house, a few years ago.

I know the Methodist church particularly well, because it has a vibrant community that was very helpful to Steve and me as we provided care for my mother in the final years of her life. The church sponsors an eldercare respite program.

Given the choice today, however, I would not ever attend a service in that Methodist church willingly, though I have been encouraged by friends who go there to accompany them. Why?

The answer is starkly simple. It's one churches need to hear, if they want to attract religious "consumers."

For me, the "brand" of Methodism will now forever be tainted by Steve's and my horrific experiences at a United Methodist university in Florida, under the pastoral supervision of Bishop Timothy Whitaker. What we experienced there was outright discrimination of the most vicious sort, discrimination premised on our sexual orientation.

Bishop Whitaker has strong reason to know this. The United Methodist ministers who sit on the board of the university in question have strong reason to know this.

Yet, to my knowledge, not a single one of these men of the cloth has raised any critical question about the violation of United Methodist principles in how Steve and I were treated. The president of the university in question has strong ties to the United Methodist church, at an institutional level. (S)he has been allowed to represent herself/himself as the better angel of this ugly story, and Steve and me as fallen angels--though the facts demonstrate otherwise. (S)he has even been rewarded by the church through an honorific appointment after what (s)he did to us. What this president did was done with the active complicity of an ordained Methodist minister who is a retired president* of a seminary.

I have seen nothing, heard nothing, which indicates that any minister on the board of the university in question has challenged that minister's extremely unethical and savage behavior to two employees of a Methodist university with which he is associated, who were vilified solely due to their sexual orientation.

I hope that the churches of Main Street USA can understand: this is how it is. Kick people in the teeth, and you will not attract them to your church. Treat them like human refuse, and never apologize or ask forgiveness, and you will not convince them to listen to your preaching. How can they hear, when they are kicked to the gutter and treated as garbage?

I am now as alienated from the Methodist church by my experiences at this university in Florida as I am from my own Catholic church, due to my very similar experiences with my church.

But I will definitely consider going to the Presbyterian church I have identified. I will definitely send donations to it. I have friends who have been inviting me to their Presbyterian churches, and I intend to show my gratitude to the church near me for its courageous action, by attending its services in the future.

No church is perfect. I do not expect perfection from any church. What I do expect is simple, mere humanity, mere honesty, just treatment, bread rather than stones. That is what anyone expects from any church that seeks to appeal to the better angels of our natures. Just as I would not return to a restaurant or a shop in which I receive discourteous or disrespectful treatment, unless the establishment in question addressed my critical concerns and apologized for its lack of service, I will not go to churches that preach about better angels but do not live the message they preach.

I know of and am deeply impressed by many Methodists, and I do not wish to do these good people an injustice. Even so, given Steve's and my experiences at a Methodist institution--and, above all, the total lack of any Methodist pastoral response to us in and following those responses--I completely understand lifelong Methodist Helen King's statement, I knew instinctively that the United Methodist Church would be the last place that I could go for understanding.

Yes. That is my judgment, too, based on my experiences with the Methodist church, just as it is my judgment about my own Catholic church based on my eerily similar experiences with my own church.

We are ineluctably affected, by better or for worse, by our experiences with any community, whether it be a workplace or a church. And we choose to affiliate with that community based on those experiences. It's as simple as that, in the consumer society we inhabit . . . .

*In several previous postings, I have referred to this gentleman as the retired dean of a seminary. I was incorrect in doing so. My research has led me to realize that he was president of the seminary from which he retired.

The Limits of Crozier Shaking

My attempt to engage members of my own religious communion in dialogue about LGBT issues continues on the blog threads of National Catholic Reporter.

And I must admit, I’m growing weary.

I’m growing weary of hearing the churches talk about homosexual sin, rather than gay people.

Sin, not people.

No church that claims to be motivated by pastoral concern talks about sin before people. No church that professes pastoral intent reduces a group of human beings to some nifty, disposable stereotype—like notorious sinner (one of the labels used by a blogger at the NCR threads), or intrinsically disordered human beings, or the homosexuals with their sinful lifestyle.

In reducing gay human beings to a tagged and stigmatized mass, the churches undercut all of their claims to be motivated by pastoral concern for homosexual sinners. This is not about pastoral concern: it’s about using a group of people for base political purposes. Pure and simple.

It’s despicable. It’s as despicable as the church’s use of the Jews throughout history—the dirty, devious, child-killing Jews who infect pure, clean, honest, child-loving Christian cultures, in order to undermine and destroy.

The churches have rightly been resoundingly criticized for the anti-semitism that led them to be largely silent about the evils of Nazism in the first half of the 20^th century, all over Europe. There will come a time in which they are similarly resoundingly criticized for the homophobia that leads them to be largely silent about violence towards LGBT people at this point in history.

Is it any wonder that Europeans have increasingly refused to affiliate themselves with—or participate in the liturgical life of—the churches after World War II? And is it any surprise that, according to the latest Pew report, a third of American Catholics have now dropped their Catholic identity? Catholicism would be dying on the vine in the U.S. now, if immigrants weren’t filling the pews being vacated by millions of Catholic who have grown weary of the sound and fury that signifies nothing.

Sound and fury, as in a constant clerical bleating about abortion and homosexuality as though these are the sole moral issues demanding attention at this point in history—at this point, when the United States is in an end-game war in the Middle East, which we entered on the basis of government lies; at this point, when many of our citizens cannot afford healthcare; at this point, when the tiny minority of our citizens who own most of our resources have enriched themselves even more grossly in the last decade.

Sound and fury: I have grown weary of hearing my church talk about abortion and homosexuality as the most pressing ethical issues about which I should think, when the same church officials talking to me about those issues have not cleaned their own houses following revelations of widespread clerical abuse of minors. It is no secret that Catholic officials have routinely and systematically covered up this abuse for decades, have paid out millions of dollars given to them by unsuspecting layfolks to silence families that have experienced this abuse, have lied, destroyed evidence, and obstructed justice.

It is no secret that the cover-up goes right to the Vatican.

And yet we’re still expected to listen, when the pope and bishops shake their croziers at us and command us to vote solely on the basis of candidates’ positions re: gay marriage and abortion?

What’s clear to me is that these issues aren’t primarily about morality, in the real mind of church officials, in the mind that informs their political calculations. They are primarily about political utility. They’re useful galvanizing issues to call the faithful to stand in solidarity—in solidarity against, rather than for; in opposition to rather than in support of efforts to build a more humane culture. These are issues that are supposed to stop all questions, to cut off all critical discourse and critical thinking. Abortion = killing babies = unthinkable evil = stop asking pesky questions.

The intent interest the Vatican has recently taken in the political life of both Italy and Spain suggests this utilitarian political intent to me. In Italy, the Vatican has helped bring down the center-left government by colluding with some very disreputable political characters whose hands are far from clean. The ostensible concern of the church has been the previous government’s intent to sanction gay unions, and its liberal position on abortion.

In Spain, the Vatican and many Spanish bishops continue to try to herd the faithful to the polls to vote against the current Socialist government in the upcoming March 9 election. There again, the abortion and gay marriage issues loom large in Catholic rhetoric. As I reported in a previous posting, the Vatican and the bishops organized a mass pro-family demonstration at the end of last year to fire a warning shot against the current government. In both countries, an American-style politics of religious-right opposition is being tested, with the abortion and gay-marriage issues as the centerpoint of the opposition.

Never mind that the current abortion policy in Spain pre-existed the Socialist government, and that abortion does not have the political traction in Europe that it does in America. Gay marriage is a new phenomenon, however, and it appears that the mindset of the Vatican in using both issues as rallying points for right-wing Catholic opposition is to use the gay issue (which is to say, gay persons) as its primary wedge issue in the European context, with the abortion issue tagged onto that issue to galvanize rich American Catholics, who are helping to fund these right-wing movements in European Catholicism.

One suspects that the real heart of all this political action—the heart of darkness—is a growing sense on the part of the Vatican that it is losing control. To be specific, there is a growing sense that it is losing control of the political life of the West—a control that it held more securely in a period of Republican dominance of the White House.

There is a growing sense of alarm at the inability of the church to use abortion, in particular, as the rallying point for oppositional right-wing politics in the U.S. In the current American elections, the religious right is in total disarray. All the old shibboleths, all the well-tried rallying cries, are falling on deaf ears. Too many revelations in the past several years have shown Americans that the leaders of the religious right do not have their own moral houses in order.

Conservatives are not very good at generating new ideas. When pressed, they quite commonly resort to the same old same old, the same tried and true tactics that have worked in the past. When those fail, the reflex action of the right is then to remove the velvet glove and show the iron fist: to try to coerce where it cannot cajole.

This, I fear, is what the Vatican hopes to do now, both in Europe and in North America. There is a hardening of the lines everywhere in American Catholicism in particular, as the old oppositional politics fails to yield the same predictable results.

In my home diocese of Little Rock, the diocesan administrator Msgr. Hebert has just announced that Catholics may not participate in this year’s Race for the Cure, on the ground that this anti-breast cancer event supports Planned Parenthood (in some places, but not in Arkansas), that it supports stem-cell research (not true), and that it refuses to publicize that abortion causes breast cancer (not even worthy of comment). Never mind that Komen for the Cure donates lavishly to Catholic hospitals in Arkansas. On this, see today’s Arkansas Times blog at www.arktimes.com.

In a similar move, tiny Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina has recently announced that it has canceled healthcare benefits that provide for abortions, sterilization, and contraception for faculty and staff. Eight faculty members are threatening a lawsuit. The decision to cancel these provisions of their healthcare plan were made unilaterally by the college president Dr. Thierfelder and the abbot of the monastery that owns the college, Abbot Solari.

These gentlemen claim that consultation is not incumbent on them, when Catholic moral teaching is at stake. The faculty threatening suit reply that the majority of faculty and staff are not Catholic and should not be expected to abide by peculiar Catholic moral teachings. They also note that the college receives state and federal funding, and that in doing so, it is required not to engage in religious discrimination.

Evidently Belmont Abbey is intent on keeping this funding in place, while maintaining its right to cancel provisions for contraception in its healthcare plan, without consulting those affected by the decision. In Spain, similarly, the bishops have resoundingly rejected a suggestion of the Socialist government that, if the church wants to go on the warpath against the current government, it should forego the ample state support it now receives.

All of this is sound and fury. All of this signifies nothing. It represents a desperate attempt of the Catholic hierarchy to use these political wedge issues (and gay human beings) to deflect attention from its own egregious wrongdoing in the sexual abuse crisis. At the heart of the current political offensive emanating from the Vatican is the fear that if the political makeup of the American government changes significantly, the pope and bishops will not be granted the immunity from prosecution they enjoy under the current administration.

There is a tremendous fear that, if legal action forces dioceses to open their files, the ugly story of the church’s obstruction of justice, misuse of funds, and protection of pedophile priests will be made public. There is also an overriding concern not to permit disclosures of the central role that the Vatican has played in the obstruction of justice.

For further information on the Spanish situation, see the Clerical Whispers blog at www.clericalwhispers.blogspot.com. In a posting last week entitled “Church-vs.-State: Militant Catholics Try to Sway Spanish Elections," this outstanding Irish blog notes that militant ultra-right Catholic groups with strong ties to the Vatican have organized themselves and are trying to sway the upcoming elections, using abortion and gay marriage as their wedge issues.

That excellent blog also has several postings about the Belmont Abbey situation. Others by yours truly are to be found on the blog of the National Catholic Reporter at http://ncrcafe.org/node/944. Note there the collusion of church officials with well-heeled right-wing political groups in the U.S. The same collusion is evident in the political activities of the church in Spain and Italy. The interest of these groups in the Spanish election is evident, for instance, in a recent editorial of the Wall Street Journal attacking the Spanish government: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120354690556281099.html?mod=googlenews_wsj.

If it’s not ultimately about money, why else would Wall Street be taking an interest in this election (and implicitly supporting the Vatican-endorsed attempt of ultra-right Catholic groups to topple the Spanish government)?

It’s about money. Open those files re: clerical abuse, and the money will stop pouring in. The faithful are continuing to give only because they remain uninformed about the full parameters of the abuse story.

This is the church at its worst: protecting clerical sexual abusers, meddling in the political life of nations trying to build healthy pluralistic societies that respect the civil liberty and full humanity of all citizens. This is the church at its worst, caring more about money, power, and privilege than human beings, particularly human beings experiencing oppression.

This the church at its worst, bashing gay human beings to score political points, to deflect attention from its leaders’ dirty secrets.

Is it any wonder that a third of American Catholics are now walking away, shaking their heads, shaking the dust from their feet? And will this trend diminish, in the next generation, if the hierarchy remains obdurate?

And as a final footnote, I wonder as I think through all these issues why an African-American educational leader I know and once respected, a woman who heads a church-based university and who professes support for gay persons, is willing to dirty her hands by playing political games with people who represent such malice to the LGBT community. This is a question I ponder repeatedly these days, as the campaign of Mr. Obama lifts to national attention questions about homophobia in the black community.

Do people who rise to positions of power and influence inevitably sell out? Does power truly always corrupt? And does it corrupt the more absolutely, the more absolute its claims become? Do people with such power inevitably decide that it really is, in the final analysis, all about the money?

I hope that if Mr. Obama is elected, we will not find that to be the case with him. We desperately need the change about which he keeps talking, if we are to safeguard a future worth living for the next generation.