Commentary about the New ProPublica Database of Catholic Priests Across the U.S. "Credibly Accused" of Sexual Abuse

Ultimately @SNAPNetwork suggests that every diocese lists be made as complete as possible to protect children & give account towards healing of all affected by this ongoing travesty
Ideally lists should be cross referenced to include any visiting priest.https://t.co/Rx4w6ZxJxD

— William Beaulieu (@William08640111) January 27, 2020

Some commentary for you about the new ProPublica database of Catholic priests across the U.S. "credibly accused" of sexual abuse or misconduct, which is searchable online:

It's Still Going on — Cover-Up of Abuse Is Still Going on — and Catholics Know This, Do not Trust Their Bishops, and Are Withholding Money

Since some of us recently had a discussion here about Catholics withholding donations to parishes and Catholic institutions because many Catholics see their money put to uses that disgust them, including covering up clerical abuse of minors, I thought I'd draw your attention to this recent article by Brian Fraga. As he reports, Catholic donations to parishes and Catholic institutions in the U.S. are dropping because many Catholics believe their donations have been abused, in particular, to cover up clerical sexual abuse of minors. Fraga writes,

Abuse of Vulnerable People and Churches: Recent Reports, from Baptists to Nuns Raped by Bishops and Priests to Jesuits to a German Princess Saving the Church

This is a collection of reports on the abuse situation as it is unfolding in various churches now. These are all recent statements, and not by any means a representative report on all that is happening on the sexual abuse front in religious groups right now. Stories are breaking on that front fast and furious — this is only my own selection of reports that have drawn my attention recently, for reasons that will be apparent as you read:

German Catholic Bishops on Abuse: Church Is at "Point of No Return" and Has Been Exposed as "Perpetrator Organization" — What Now?

Christa Pongratz-Lippitt, "Bishops must open archives to 'independent experts'":

A Story of Two Jesuits, with Commentary on the Current State of the Catholic Church (Especially re: LGBTQ People)

This is a story of two Jesuits. I'm telling it now primarily because news I read about one of the two this week gave me a shock, and, after having read that story, I've been mulling over my years as a student at Loyola University in New Orleans from 1968-1972. Because what I say about these two men involves personal judgments and neither is around to defend or explain himself, I'm not going to name them — though I'm perfectly aware that anyone with access to the internet, who knows how to dig for information, can fairly easily identify both men.

In the News: Wendy Vitter Refuses to Affirm Support for Brown v. Board in Federal Judgeship Hearing; Americans Display Appalling Ignorance of History of Evangelicals Vis-a-Vis Slavery

Two stories in today's news I'd like to share with you, both showing the effects of religious thinking and influence on the political and cultural life of the U.S. The first has to do with federal judge nominee Wendy Vitter of Louisiana, the second with recent findings about how little of the real history of American evangelicals and their relationship to slavery even well-educated and liberal Americans actually know.

Katrina: The Obligation to Remember — "Hurricane Katrina Exposed Our Nation's Amazing Tolerance for Black Pain" (Jamelle Bouie)

Rebecca Solnit on why we need to get what happened in New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina right: 

Remembering a Friend on His Birthday: Holiness in Ordinary

I didn't actually say I wouldn't post this weekend, did I? :)

What prompts me to do so today is that today's the birthday (in 1916) of a remarkable person who, along with his wife, had a great deal of influence on Steve's and my life over many years, and I feel prompted to share with you some memories of these friends. Two nights ago, I dreamt of them, and yesterday when I thought about the dream, I did a bit of googling and discovered that today is my friend's birthday. Abner died in 2003 and his wife in 2005, not long after she and the other elderly residents of the care home in which she was living were evacuated from New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. 

On Archbishop Aymond's Apology for the Catholic Response to Victims of UpStairs Lounge Fire: Conflicting Viewpoints

I didn't mention this earlier in the week, but some impulse (which may turn out to be one of the lesser angels of my nature) impels me to point it out now:

On This Day in 1973, "The Largest Killing of Gay People in U.S. History": UpStairs Lounge Fire in New Orleans

Today is the day on which the UpStairs Lounge fire about which I wrote last week took place (here and here, and don't forget Kittredge Cherry's article that sparked my interest in remembering this tragedy). Both Kathy Hughes and Chris Morley have noted in comments here that Time did an article on the UpStairs Lounge fire this week. The article, by Elizabeth Dias and Jim Downs, is behind a paywall. Here's Time's editorial summary of the article, which states,

Julia Moskin on New Orleans's Love Affair with Sugar: Don't Forget Bread Pudding!

I think Julia Moskin is probably right when she characterizes New Orleans as a city drenched in sugar, and when she attributes the city's love affair with sweet things to the sugar-plantation economy that brought it such wealth in the first half of the 19th century. My alma mater, Loyola University, came into being due to the riches the Jesuits gathered from operating their sugarcane plantations with slave labor. The money they brought to their coffers through those plantations also enabled them to buy prime real estate in the center of New Orleans that is now fabulously valuable.

I Remember John Paul II: The New Orleans Visit

Have I ever shared my encounter--loosely speaking--with John Paul II?  I don't think so.  Since it may offer comic relief to any reader who may, like me, be struggling with the announcement of the impending beatification of the previous pope, I'll do so now.

Tom Roberts on Archbishop Tomasi's "Indefensible Defense": Abuse Crisis Is about Clerical Privilege

More follow-up to the story about Archbishop Tomasi, the Vatican’s U.N. observer, who stated this week that the problem of abuse of minors by religious authority figures is just as great in other faith communities as in the Catholic church, and that in the Catholic church, it’s largely a matter of gay priests preying on young adolescent boys.

Tom Roberts has a noteworthy statement about Tomasi’s claims at National Catholic Reporter now. It’s entitled “Archbishop Tomasi’s Indefensible Defense.”

Roberts wishes that before folks like Archbishop Tomasi pronounce indignantly on this subject, they’d first read the huge volume of documents produced so far to track the abuse crisis. Many of these are anguished first-hand testimonies of those abused by Catholic religious authority figures when they were children. It is impossible to read these statement without being troubled to the core of one’s soul by what has happened for many years within the church, and has been covered up by Catholic pastors.

As Australian bishop Geoffrey Robinson maintains in his superb book, Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus (Dublin: Columba, 2007), “If a better church one day emerges from this crisis, it is they [i.e., courageous survivors who have spoken out] alone who must take the credit for creating it” (p. 225). Robinson says that listening to victims of clerical sexual abuse is the most profound spiritual gift he has received in the last 25 years.

Roberts’s conclusion:

While the church has taken admirable steps to deal with the symptoms of the crisis -- making training mandatory and doing background checks and the like -- the much deeper issue, the question of how the institution reached the point where it could protect such crimes for so long while ignoring the pleas of victims, is yet to be answered. It is a question that gets at the heart of our community life and the trust that should exist between laity and clergy. It is a question that demands a deep examination of the clerical, especially hierarchical, culture, its sense of privilege and how, in the future, it might be held accountable.

And the deep, deep problems continue, despite the intense spotlight of publicity that has been shone on these problems for almost a decade now. Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) reported yesterday (and here) that the diocese of Austin, Texas, “continues to respond to proven, admitted and credibly accused pedophile priest cases in a timid, passive, irresponsible way.”

Five months ago, SNAP challenged then bishop Gregory Aymond, who has since been elevated to the position of Archbishop of New Orleans, to seek out anyone who may have been abused in the Austin diocese by Fr. Gregory Patejko, who was transferred to Austin from North Dakota in 1981 after having molested a boy in North Dakota. SNAP’s requests fell on deaf ears.

SNAP has now learned that more than a dozen civil child sex abuse claims have been settled over the past six years against Fr. Rocco Perone, who ministered in Austin from 1957 until 1988, after having been transferred from Oregon to Texas. SNAP notes that, to the best of the organization’s knowledge, Perone is “the most prolific child molesting cleric to have ever worked in this [i.e., Austin] diocese.”

As with Fr. Patejko, SNAP is calling on Austin diocesan officials to track down any possible survivors of abuse by Fr. Perone in the Austin diocese, and to offer these survivors—if they are out there—support. SNAP’s press release about this notes that when an Episcopal priest, Fr. James L. Tucker, was found to have abused children at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School in Austin, the local Episcopal bishop publicized the allegations, causing five more victims to come forward.

The Episcopal pastoral leader’s response to abuse of children in one of his institutions stands in marked contrast to that of former Bishop Aymond, according to SNAP. The SNAP press release notes that SNAP repeatedly asked Bishop Aymond, when he headed the Austin diocese, to release a full list of proven, admitted and credibly accused pedophile priests. Bishop Aymond refused to do so.

And then he was made Archbishop of New Orleans.

I happen to know Greg Aymond. Before he was made bishop, he once had dinner at my house, sat at my table and ate a meal I cooked.

When I read in the Dallas Morning News in 2004 that he was among the two-thirds of bishops proven to have sheltered one or more clerics who abuse minors, I wrote to tell him how disappointed I was to learn this. By this point, Aymond had been made bishop of Austin.

Bishop Aymond wrote back to tell me that my letter to him had displeased him, and that the media distort stories about clerical sexual abuse of children and bishops who deal with this situation. Bishop Aymond told me that I owed him an apology for being disrespectful to him and voicing my disappointment at learning of his history of having protected a known clerical abuser of minors.

That’s the last time I’ve heard from Bishop Aymond. And now he has been made an archbishop. And the abuse situation in the Catholic church seems no closer to being resolved than it ever has been.

And as Tom Roberts says, it won’t be resolved without “deep examination of the clerical, especially hierarchical, culture, its sense of privilege and how, in the future, it might be held accountable.” And from where I stand, that is simply not happening.

Hurricane Katrina, Triage, and the Memorial Hospital Story: Ethical Implications for American Health Care

I have a number of reflections after reading Sheri Fink’s account in the New York Times yesterday of what happened at Memorial Hospital in New Orleans during hurricane Katrina. Fink revives questions about whether a medical team there led by Dr. Mary Pou actively euthanized terminally ill patients as the evacuation process was put off interminably, and as the medical staff in the hospital sought desperately to provide care for patients when the electricity shut down and temperatures inside the hospital reached well over 100 degrees.

Readers will remember that there were reports from all over New Orleans during the hurricane period that care facilities were running out of food, water, and medical supplies, and that those providing care in these facilities were trying to work around the clock while dehydrated and pushed beyond the limits of endurance. Fink’s account of what happened at Memorial Hospital suggests that there is increasing evidence that a team of doctors and nurses injected terminally ill patients with morphine and other sedatives, hastening their death during these gruesome days.

Here are some random thoughts that struck me as I read the story:

▪ Fink defines triage as a sorting procedure “used in accidents and disasters when the number of injured exceeds available resources.” She thinks that “there is no consensus on how best to do this.” She suggests that criteria such as trying to effect the greatest good for the greatest number of people often underlie the sorting process, but that there is no consensus about what the “greatest good” means.

I’m struck by the narrowness of Fink’s definition of triage, and her lack of attention to how triage is used on an everyday, ongoing basis in the American health care system. Our entire health care system is based on constant, implicit triage. A minority of citizens have access to the best health care possible in our nation on a continuous basis—for any and all medical (or cosmetic) needs (or wishes) they might have.

A sizable proportion of citizens have access to at least basic health care on a continuous basis for most of their medical needs, though not always for elective procedures. And in the case of most of these citizens, the health insurance industry constantly sorts who will be permitted even necessary treatment and who will be blocked.

A significant group of citizens have access to health care only in cases of dire need or emergency. They are very likely to experience triage in the emergency rooms to which they have to resort, as their level of need is assessed and decisions are made about whom to treat, when to treat, and whether to do follow-up.

The central norm in this system of ongoing, continuous triage is money. We dispense health care in the United States—and we practice continuous triage as we do so—based on people’s ability to pay.

To talk about triage in the narrow sense of sorting patients in an emergency situation without paying attention to the broader sense in which we are always doing triage in our medical system is to lose sight of the conditions that produce the excruciating decisions that have to be made during events like hurricane Katrina. And it’s also to lose sight of why there is difficulty deciding how to sort patients according to the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

Making a moral judgment of that sort is very difficult in our system due to the sheer weight of financial considerations as we dispense medical treatment to our population. In an emergency, just as in everyday life, we do not make those decisions in a vacuum. We always make them against the backdrop of financial factors that weigh far less in any other industrialized nation in the world than they do in the American health care system.

▪ Fink’s article does not make crystal clear another point that readers need to keep in mind as they think about what happened at Memorial Hospital during Katrina. This is that the kind of end-of-life decision making the article describes takes place on a daily basis in all of our hospitals and care facilities. Decisions about withholding treatment, permitting patients to die, and, yes, about using palliatives that hasten death even as they relieve suffering, are made daily throughout this country.

What the team at Memorial Hospital did is not unique. And it’s not extraordinary. It goes on all the time. It has to go on all the time, because difficult end-of-life medical decisions happen all the time, not merely at times of emergency.

For years, I taught medical ethics as a component of introductory courses in ethics. In my classes, I frequently had students who were medical professionals—including Catholic religious. These students almost always told the class that they routinely made decisions in collaboration with medical ethical teams and family members, about withholding treatment and nutrition at the end of life when a patient was actively dying. They also told the class that they routinely made decisions about the use of palliatives such as morphine that, they well knew, would hasten the death of patients in extremis.

These stories did not shock most of the classes I taught, because the students in those classes were familiar with important norms that used to be routine in Catholic ethical thinking about end-of-life issues, but which are now under assault by the political and religious right. Those norms include 1) the distinction between active and passive killing, and 2) the principle of double effect.

The Catholic ethical tradition has always been clear about the fact that taking an innocent human life directly and intentionally is morally wrong. But the tradition has also recognized that there is a difference between allowing someone to die—in the case of the terminally ill, allowing the dying process to occur naturally without use of extraordinary means to prolong it—and actively killing someone.

That distinction has been muddied in recent years, as the religious and political right do everything possible to depict as active killing the withholding of medical treatment (and nutrition) in cases in which there is no hope of recovery. And the deliberate muddying of that distinction is unfortunate, indeed, at a time in which our ability to keep people “alive” even when their brains have died continues to develop.

We now have extraordinary ability to prolong life in situations in which our ancestors would have died naturally. What we now end up doing in many cases is prolonging the dying process (and the suffering) of those who are dying.

The principle of double effect maintains that, in pursuit of a good end, we can sometimes make ethically justifiable decisions that will have effects we do not will as the primary end of our decision, but which we recognize as necessary if unintended effects of our pursuit of our primary goal. Giving palliatives to a dying patient to ease his or her pain has the unintended effect of shutting down the vital organs and hastening death. The principle of double effect enables us to administer such palliatives with the primary end of relieving the pain of a person in extremis, even when we know that the treatment we are using will also speed the dying process.

▪ Finally, as we assess what happened at Memorial Hospital in New Orleans, it strikes me as important to keep in mind that people are forced to make hard, well-nigh impossible ethical decisions in times of emergency, which they might not make in quite the same way when they have the leisure to reflect about those decisions. And perhaps those of us who have not lived through the situation of extreme stress should not be quick to make judgments about the intent of those who make decisions in such circumstances, and about the decisions they make.

A fundamental principle of the moral life is that we should live each day in such a way that, faced with situations of soul-bending challenge, we tend to move “naturally” towards the right and away from the wrong. As we think about the parameters of the moral decisions medical personnel made during Katrina, I think we ought to keep that principle in mind.

Which means, we need to construct the kind of society in which it becomes easier in both routine and extraordinary circumstances to make good decisions about end-of-life care and harder to make bad decisions. As our system is now constructed, it is often difficult everyday—and not just in times of emergency—to make the best decisions possible about medical care for indigent and dying patients.

It was even more difficult during the days of Katrina in New Orleans because of the conspicuous failure of religious and political leaders who like to talk louder than anyone else about respect for life to assist people dealing with gruesome decisions about sustaining life and caring for the dying under horrific conditions. Those who want to shift the blame for moral failure in our system of health care delivery to a handful of medical professionals working around the clock while making decisions unimaginable to most of us are missing an important point.

The point is that the blame for the moral failings of our health care system lies at our own feet—at the feet of an American public content to continue permitting medical treatment to depend on one’s ability to pay. And the blame lies at the feet of leaders who do nothing to challenge this immoral way of approaching medical care.

And it lies at the feet of those in the political and religious right who scream slogans about the sanctity of life even as they resist attempts to create a health care system that would, we hope, make it easier for us to recognize the value of every human life. And would help prevent the kind of impossible choices those working to care for terminally ill people in Katrina were forced to make under the direst possible circumstances.

For a close-up view of the graphic at the head of this posting, click the picture.

"Charity in Truth": Some Preliminary Reflections on Benedict's Encyclical

In case readers are wondering, I’m not ignoring the pope’s recent encyclical Caritas in veritate. I was out of the country when it came out, and without a reliable internet connection as I traveled.

So I didn’t begin reading it in earnest until my return to the U.S. last week, when I was able to download a copy of it. Since I happened to be in Germany at the time, I did read interesting summaries and analysis of it in the German press when it appeared, summaries far more intellectually challenging than anything I have yet to read in the American press.

I should be perfectly honest and state from the outset—as a preface to anything I might later write about the encyclical—that encyclicals just don’t do it for me. I read them; I study them and have taught them. I value what they have to say, within certain limits that have everything to do with the historical conditioning of any church document.

Like many American theologians, I have wondered about the obliviousness of most American Catholics to the venerable social teaching of the Catholic church, as this has been articulated in encyclicals and pastoral letters. I have been amazed, in particular, by the refusal of those American Catholics who have set themselves up as the chief guardians of orthodoxy in recent decades to listen to this social teaching, at the same time that they loudly profess themselves to be more Catholic and more Roman than the rest of us.

But encyclicals just don’t do it for me. If I’m seeking spiritual enrichment—and I often am, when I turn to a theological text, more than I’m seeking intellectual stimulation—I’d far rather read Meister Eckhart or Teresa of Avila, Johann Baptist Metz or John Dominic Crossan, or for that matter, Audre Lorde or Mary Oliver. And the gospels.

Encyclicals don’t convey transformative truth to me, and that’s the kind of truth I hunger for when I read theological or spiritual texts (or politically transformative ones or soul-changing literary works). And that presents something of a problem for anyone reading a text that calls itself “Charity in Truth,” with its many self-conscious echoes of John Paul II’s encyclical “Splendor of Truth.”

I’m finding Caritas in veritate particularly hard slogging, because the text is, frankly, such a mess. It’s a compendium of just about every theological aperçu Benedict has had, in a long, distinguished career as a theologian and Vatican official. As a compendium, it never moves in a straight, clean line, but moves in circles, back and forth, engaging over and over some of the movements and tendencies in church and society that have preoccupied Benedict for decades now.

It’s a rough beast slouching somewhere to be born, then—and I do not intend to belittle the document in making that observation, but to note the hermeneutical problems that anyone who tries to take the document seriously will encounter from the outset, if she or he reads it with due attention, particularly to the manifold context(s) it’s seeking to engage.

It’s a valuable document, because it sets the record straight about an issue that many American Catholics (and the mainstream American media) simply refused to face during the pontificate of John Paul II: this is the critique of unbridled capitalism that runs very strongly through the thinking of John Paul II and his successor. It is simplistic and dishonest to reduce the work of these complex thinkers to a single anti-modern, anti-communist reflex. The American media sought consistently to do that with John Paul, and got away with it, because the text of the pope’s defeat of communism which dominated American media discourse about John Paul II, a text that consciously and deliberately obliterates his critique of capitalism, outshone any other aspect of his papal reign.

With Benedict, it’s going to be harder to ignore the critique of unbridled capitalism, for a variety of reasons. One is historical: the neo-conservative moment has been eclipsed by something else now struggling to be born in Western history, something rightly critical of the excesses of a “conservatism” that was not ever conservative at all, but which basked in warm, fuzzy, hypnotic and totally false nostalgia while it enabled one of the most a-traditional, anti-conservative periods of ruthless economic rapacity in world history.

Another reason I think Benedict’s critique of unbridled capitalism will receive more of a hearing than John Paul II’s similar critique did is that Benedict has, unfortunately, failed to dazzle people either inside or outside the church, as the charismatic John Paul II dazzled. And that lack of dazzle may well work to Benedict’s advantage, when it comes to this encyclical.

Let’s face it: there hasn’t been much of a narrative line to Benedict’s papacy, thus far, other than one of constant resistance to this and that. Fairly or unfairly, the media have been adroit about depicting Benedict as a constant naysayer, and, for whatever reason, he and the coterie of Vatican advisors with whom he’s chosen to surround himself have not been conspicuously successful at countering that media narrative. Indeed, they’ve acted again and again in ways that lend credence to this simplistic narrative.

So when Benedict does say something that’s not merely no and again no, and when he says it substantively and brilliantly, I believe people are inclined to listen. They want to find some hook on which to hang this papacy, which otherwise has the feel of an interim papacy everyone's merely enduring until a dazzling successor to John Paul II comes along. I suspect that Caritas in veritate may well turn out to be that hook, the defining moment of Benedict’s papacy.

One other very surface, top-of-the-head impression—and I reserve the right to change my mind about this as I read further in the text: it strikes me that Benedict’s choice to focus on the theme of love in truth is an indirect but quite deliberate attempt to correct an impulse in the church that he himself played a huge role in setting into motion. This is the impulse represented by John Paul II’s Veritatis splendor —or, more precisely, by how “Splendor of Truth” came to be used and read in many Catholic circles, notably in the United States.

I remember when Veritatis splendor came out. I remember the effect it had on the life of the church, in theological circles, on my own life. I have blogged about that. As I noted in a previous posting about this topic, in the latter part of the 1980s, I was asked by a graduate program in lay ministry at a Catholic university to write a textbook in ethics for this program.

The program was the Institute for Ministry at my alma mater, Loyola of New Orleans. I wrote an introduction to Catholic ethical theory for this program in the late 1980s, and when it was finished, was told by LIM’s director that he had sent it to bishops across the nation, and had gotten glowing reports about it back from almost all dioceses.

When Veritatis splendor came out, however, this introduction to Catholic ethics, which had just been reviewed by bishops across the nation and found to be solid and orthodox, suddenly became problematic. I was asked to re-write the text, incorporating huge chunks of Veritatis splendor as much as possible.

I did so. I labored hard on the revision. This request came just after a Catholic college in North Carolina has just given me a one-year terminal contract, while refusing to disclose why I was being given a terminal contract after I had just had an extremely positive annual evaluation. When that college's leaders lied to me after I appealed for the reason for my terminal contract and when the abbot of the monastery that owned the college colluded in the stone-walling, I resigned.

So I needed the money I would make by revising this ethics text, frankly. And I needed even more desperately some assurance that I still had a place somewhere in the church, that my vocation as a theologian still counted for somebody somewhere in the Catholic church.

The experience of receiving the terminal contract just as Veritatis splendor was coming down the pike, and of being asked to revise an introduction to ethics that I had written only a few years ago, because it was suddenly problematic in light of Veritatis splendor, was a watershed experience for me as a theologian. In fact, after these experiences, I never again found any place at all in the Catholic church to follow my vocation as a theologian. Nor did Steve.

One door after another began to shut—to slam—in our faces, and we found ourselves on the outside looking in, first as theologians and then as Catholics. Loyola's Institute for Ministry chose not to hire me to teach in its program any longer, though I had previously been an academic advisor to the program, had written one of its textbooks, and, exceedingly hurtful, was an alumnus of Loyola.

The message that Steve and I began receiving persistently from every Catholic institution with which we came into contact at this moment of our vocational lives, the message that we were not welcome anywhere, had everything in the world to do with Veritatis splendor, and with its rubric of truth.

Truth as weapon. Truth as a sword to cleave the faithful from the unfaithful, to drive the unwashed and impure out of the community of the washed and pure. Whatever John Paul II (and Ratzinger) intended with this encyclical, the practical effect for many Catholics—for many Catholic theologians, particularly those writing about ethical issues—was devastating. This encyclical was used as a blunt instrument to bludgeon people into submission, and if we failed to submit, to drive us out of communion.

I did revise my ethics text, but it appeared that even my alma mater now found my work as a theologian—my Catholicity itself—lacking. To the best of my knowledge, the revised text was ditched and not used in the program after I labored hard to produce it. As I labored for months at the revisions, I found that one chapter alone, the chapter on sexual ethics, was suddenly problematic above all—an ironic finding, when I had been assured only four or five years ago that the text had passed the muster of almost all bishops in the country, as a sound and faithful introduction to Catholic ethics.

And the sticking point now, with the promulgation of Veritatis splendor was, above all, the question of homosexuality. I revised. I labored. I dumped huge sections of Veritatis splendor into the revised text. But nothing sufficed. Though I had written the previous text as theologians normally write texts nowadays, depending on the community of my peers to help me evaluate and critique the text, this time around, I was appointed a censor, a Jesuit whose field was not even moral theology.

Every chapter in my revised text pleased him, except the chapter on sexual morality—and the section of that chapter that could not receive his imprimatur was the chapter on homosexuality. Every time I tried to produce a revision to this chapter that sought to hold in tension the venerable Catholic teaching about the primacy of conscience and the magisterium’s condemnation of homosexual acts, I received page after page of single-spaced notes that essentially commanded me to do what in conscience I could not do: write a chapter which told students the Catholic church condemns homosexuality, and leave it at that. No nonsense about conscience, and no hermeneutical questions about the scriptures that forbid homosexuality.

The point I want to make with this story is simple: John Paul II’s teaching about truth, behind which Ratzinger stood always in the background, has translated, in American Catholicism, into something that is not adequately Catholic. It has translated into witch hunts and the reduction of a fine, complex, ancient tradition, particularly in the area of ethics, into an anti-intellectual set of formulas that are used not to provoke thought or to invite discourse designed to help us fathom and internalize the tradition. These simplistic, anti-intellectual formulas are not intended to help us immerse ourselves in the transformative Truth Who is God. They are intended to separate the saved from the unsaved.

The truth we’ve ended up with is not transformative at all. It’s nothing like the biblical notion of truth—of God as the ultimate truth, Whom we must encounter in transformative love, and with Whom we must grapple in the darkness of faith. It has no adequately Catholic sense that religious truth operates on a complex variety of levels, and that not every formula is equally central to the life of faith. It completely overlooks the hierarchy of truths, placing all "truths" in the church at the same level, trying to impose all of them on everyone, as if all are revealed, infallible truth necessary for salvation.

The notion of truth that has come to prevail in American Catholicism following Spendor veritatis is formulaic, simplistic, catechetical in the worst, most mindless, sense of that term. It convinces no one. It cannot convince, because it is not designed, as religious truth must be, to reach the heart. It betrays the tradition. It is a weapon used to make the church less, rather than more, catholic.

And I believe Benedict now sees this, and wants to address what happened when he and John Paul II put that particular weapon into the hands of uneducated bishops and layfolks who welcomed the weapon to mount a vicious purge in the church, a purge all about trying to force everyone possible to dance to their political and ideological tunes. I think the pope is now trying to reconnect what ought never to have been separated, if we want to call ourselves Catholic and orthodox: love and truth.

And I suspect that this move comes too late, for many of us . . . .

Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

Steve and I went to the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival with friends on Saturday, and saw an outstanding film that continues to haunt me. As the subtitle of “Faubourg Tremé” indicates, it’s an exploration of the untold story of black New Orleans (www.tremedoc.com).

I’m trying to think through what so captivated me at a visceral level in this documentary. Part of it is that we once lived in Tremé. We bought a house there in 1986 and lived in it until our move to North Carolina in 1991. The house was an 1884 shotgun that had been partially renovated by its previous owners. We (as in Steve) completed the renovation process, turning it into a single dwelling that a colleague at Xavier once characterized as an paramount example of “simple elegance.”

But there’s more to why “Faubourg Tremé” so powerfully grabbed me. We have not been back to New Orleans since Katrina. I have not wanted to go back. We know from Steve’s cousin that our house is now “gone.” The shell of it stands, but it appears to be unrecoverable after the flooding.

In fact, it had already been cannibalized before the flood, we’d been told: the beautiful finials on the wrought-iron fence forged for the 1884 world’s fair were stolen, the shutters on the house (many of which we’d replaced, buying them from vendors of antique architectural details) were also carted off. Apparently the people to whom we sold the house defaulted on loans and lost it to the bank, and it was empty and boarded up even before the hurricane.

Both the sadness of that house, which for generations sheltered prosperous middle-class black Créole families, and the destruction caused by Katrina, have deterred me from returning. My bond with the city runs deep, so deep that I had a series of dreams about the flooding of New Orleans prior to Katrina. Pictures I saw on the news when the city flooded were familiar to me: they replicate what I had seen saw in those prescient montages of a horror that baffled me, as I saw it dreamt about it in several memorable dreams prior to the hurricane.

Indeed, the few vivid future-foreseeing dreams I have ever had in my life have almost always centered on New Orleans and its environs. My soul is linked to that magical, mystical place near the mouth of the Mississippi.

I went to college there, after all. My parents honeymooned in New Orleans, and we spent many vacations in the city as I grew up. I can remember my parents taking us to the booth of a cartoon artist outside St. Louis Cathedral on one vacation. I must have been about twelve at the time.

They did not like how the artist fussed over me. He told them that I was not, well, I can’t avoid saying it, though it sounds immodest (I want to write truth on this blog): he told them I wasn’t ordinary.

They didn’t like hearing that. I can remember my mother doing that Southern-lady freeze-out thing, drawing herself up stiffly and looking down her nose at the artist as if he were not quite her sort of people. My father grumbled, something about paying the artist to do sketches of his children and not prophesy.

At some level, I knew even at that early age that what caused the reaction was, in part, their parental fear that a gay man might recognize something in me and take advantage of it. But it was more than that: he told them—he instructed them—to pay attention to my needs for intellectual and emotional nourishment.

They did not like that. They did not intend to comply. Children should not be made to feel special, should not be fussed over—especially not a boy who refused to embrace “the” male role.

The artist drew little symbolic tokens in each of our ears. For my brother Simpson, there were dollar signs. And the prophecy turned out to be accurate. As alcoholism took his life, my mother spent a fortune trying to keep him alive, most everything she had saved for her old age. What she didn’t spend, he carted off when she was away from the house and sold to buy liquor.

Philip had a tic-tac-toe game in his ear. I’m not sure if even he knows why the artist chose to mark him with that token. Perhaps it was a recognition that, as the youngest of three rambunctious boys, Philip had to learn early on to evade, hide, outsmart, in order to survive.

In my ear, the artist put crosses.

New Orleans is the lodestone of my spiritual life. Not only was I educated there, it was in New Orleans that I met Steve. He had dropped out of St. John University in Minnesota to hitchhike south, with a vague plan to make his way to a mission in Mexico where a Benedictine relative of his was pastor.

We met at a prayer meeting sponsored by Loyola campus ministry. We soon moved in together, and have been together ever since. I persuaded Steve to return to school and complete his degree in philosophy. He did so at Loyola.

So it was in New Orleans that we began to come to terms with being gay, a long, drawn-out process that took many years and was not complete until we lived in the Tremé house. It was in New Orleans that I went to confession and had a priest hiss at me so loudly other penitents could hear, as he told me I had committed the sin that draws God’s wrath down on the world.

It was at the Jesuit church on Baronne St. in New Orleans that a priest who had taught me math at Loyola tried to spot me through the confessional grate, as he warned me that if I didn’t repent, a bus could run me down when I was not in a state of grace and send me directly to hell.

It was also in New Orleans that a Jesuit chaplain told me that God does not bully or lust to damn us, and that sexuality is a gift of God to bring us into communion with God and others. It was there that the pastor of our parish church told me in confession that he had just spent some time hearing confessions in the Rio Grande valley of Texas, and heard many German farmers tell him of sleeping with Mexican women whom they coerced into relationships. They did not feel guilty for a sin that broke their marriage vows (or for the coercion), the priest said. Why was I so weighed down by guilt at my transgressions?

New Orleans kept drawing me back. As I’ve noted previously on this blog, when I was finishing my dissertation, I was offered a good job at a prestigious “white” university, and a much more modestly paid (and demanding) position at Xavier University, an historically black university.

The choice was obvious to me: my life journey, my struggle to understand and address the racism inculcated in me from the time I was tiny, my commitment as a theologian to give voice to those on the margins, my history as a white Southerner whose ancestors owned slaves: all of these pointed me to Xavier. Xavier was a calling, an opportunity to serve. It was a place to learn, to continue learning even as I taught.

This vocational decision—this blessing of being called to serve—was confirmed when, the following year, Steve was offered a job at the Catholic seminary in New Orleans. That was what led to our buying the house in Tremé in 1986. I was 36 at the time, Steve 35. We had never been homeowners.

In fact, we didn’t have the resources to buy a house, after years of graduate studies and work in a “poor ministry” sponsored by Loyola’s chaplain’s office, which paid us only our living expenses. Steve’s aunts, Benedictine sisters, had inherited some money from their parents’ estate, which their community generously allowed them to lend to family members. They loaned us the down-payment for the house.

At the time we moved there, Tremé was well over 90% African American. Historically, it had always, from its beginnings at the end of the 18th century, been a majority black neighborhood, dominated by Créole free people of color, many of them descended from white men and their mixed-blood mistresses in the New Orleans system of plaçage, which encouraged young French and Spanish men to choose a mistress of color prior to marriage.

By the time we moved into Tremé, the Créole population had largely dispersed to suburbs on the east side of New Orleans. The neighborhood was in deep trouble by the 1980s, full of crime and drugs. In the years we lived there, we came home twice to find our house ransacked. In the second robbery, the vandals broke a hole through the floorboards and entered the house that way.

We had a beer bottle thrown through our window at night, our car windows smashed. I was once writing at my desk facing the street and looked out to see an elderly neighbor being held up at gunpoint. A teen was shot and killed half a block from our house; the teens who shot him wanted his tennis shoes. Our neighbors, a Créole Catholic family, lost their son first to drugs and then to a gunshot wound in a drug deal.

The house across from us was a crack house. It was owned by a white gay man who lived outside the neighborhood. When almost every house in the block was robbed after the occupants of that house moved in, the police told us that everywhere the group settled, this happened. We, all of us in the block, contacted the owner. He laughed. As long as he was paid his rent, what did he care?

Our neighbors on one side were also a gay couple, equally disdainful. They lived as though in a fortress, interacting with no one, walking each Sunday to Mass at the parish church a few blocks away. They were the meanest, stingiest human beings I have ever had the misfortune to live beside.

Even with all the struggles, we suffered when we finally decided to leave that house of simple elegance. What tipped the scales was my brother’s death in 1991. I could see as though it were a fortune written in capital letters on a wall that I would soon end up needing to provide care for my mother. I knew that doing this in a troubled marginal neighborhood would be doubly difficult.

When a Catholic college in North Carolina announced two jobs in its theology department, and when, even more miraculously, the college told Steve and me that our applications were far and away the best they had gotten from some hundred applicants and they wanted to hire us, we left. The community there was more like the one in which my mother had grown up. I knew she’d find it easier to live there than in Tremé as her mind slipped away.

Homophobia definitely played a role in all of this—a big one. Part of that journey to self-acceptance—the spiritual journey on which New Orleans placed us—was learning how vicious and how entrenched homophobia was in the academy.

When I went to New Orleans to apply for the job at Xavier, a priest in the seminary who had taught me when I took classes there prior to heading to Toronto to do the Ph.D. did all he could to out me to the Xavier hiring committee, in the nastiest way possible. This was a priest who, whenever a gay rights ordinance came before the city council, would beg the archbishop to be permitted to go and speak against it. He touted himself as the archbishop’s personal theologian.

When the seminary rector unilaterally denied Steve tenure (ignoring the recommendation of faculty and students), homophobia played a key role, we knew and were told. Later, when a permanent position opened at Xavier and one of my colleagues blocked Steve’s hire, I came face to face with homophobia all over again. This was a former nun married to a former priest. They had both had their educations paid for by the church, while Steve and I struggled extremely hard as lay students to scrape together funds to get through graduate school. When she left the convent and he the priesthood, doors opened immediately for both to get jobs at Catholic universities.

Despite this, my colleague was fond of saying the church persecuted married people like her and her husband while it protected and defended gays. When Steve was ditched by the seminary and applied for an opening at Xavier, she made certain he would not get the job—precipitating our need to move if we could find jobs outside New Orleans.

“Faubourg Tremé” provided me with a context in which to understand these spiritual struggles. The documentary does an outstanding job of uncovering the rich black history of the neighborhood—its association with Plessy v. Ferguson, its importance as one of the largest and first free black communities in the nation, its seminal role in the development of jazz. The film shows how the citizens of Tremé have repeatedly worked against the odds to build lives (and a marvelous culture) full of dignity, self-respect, intelligence, and creativity.

In the final analysis, watching “Faubourg Tremé” moved me because the film encapsulated key aspects of my own spiritual journey: the struggle against the odds for dignity; the call to give voice to those on the margins and to learn from marginal communities. The decisive and painful homophobic experiences through which Steve and I lived in New Orleans did not go away as we left New Orleans for first North Carolina, then Little Rock, then Florida.

In fact, we encountered them in a particularly brutal way all over again in an African-American churched community in Florida, and the film opened unhealed wounds we both have after those experiences. We certainly never expected the journey to be easy, both when we came out of the closet and also when we committed ourselves to work in marginal communities.

We also did not expect the cruelty practiced against us by an African-American Christian leader at a university in Florida. We did not expect to be repaid for years of gifts and sacrificial work at HBCUs, as well as loyalty to and sacrifice for that leader, with the deceptive byzantine maneuvers this African-American leader, who had previously called us friends and who knew how to hurt in the deepest way possible, used against us—the way in which she assaulted our dignity at the soul-shattering level only a former friend can touch, if she or he chooses to assault you.

Curiously enough, though, even when the film opened wounds I still bear from those experiences, watching “Faubourg Tremé” restores my faith in the African-American community that has called me to itself throughout my spiritual journey. Even when some tender part of me now wants to repudiate an entire community after the cruel treatment we experienced in Florida, I refuse to do so, and the film helps me to understand why.

After our experiences in Florida, I struggle as I struggled when our house was broken into in New Orleans by African-American neighbors, and after African-American teens broke our car windows and threw a beer bottle through our window. It would be so easy to give up, to pass judgment on an entire group of people on the basis of the shoddy behavior of a few—just as it would be easy for someone observing the behavior of our gay neighbors in Tremé or the gay man who owned the crack house across the street to conclude that all gay people are debased.

But observing the dignity, the creativity, the humanity of the citizens of Tremé—through monumental historic struggles that have gone on for centuries—reaffirms my belief in the rightness of keeping on keeping on. If a people who have been beaten, lynched, lied to and lied about, deprived of basic rights, can continue to struggle for dignity, who am I to give up? Even when members of a group that contains such magnificent representatives of humanity happen to be the ones oppressing me and assaulting my dignity, I refuse to allow those experiences to deter me from seeking solidarity with that group as it continues to struggle for freedom.

What African Americans have learned as they have sojourned in this land and sought to craft decent lives under the most inhumane conditions imaginable has the potential to teach all of us about the amazing resilience of the human spirit. This is what makes "Faubourg Tremé" such an important documentary to watch, such a valuable contribution to the study of our nation's history.

Respect for Life: The Tragedy in New Orleans

As the current elections revive the increasingly enervating discussion of the pro-life principles that should guide people of faith as they make political decisions, I want to post on this blog I piece I posted elsewhere on 6 September 2006. This statement appeared on the blog of the National Catholic Reporter website at http://ncrcafe.org/node/429, where there's a fairly lengthy thread discussing it. I wrote the piece in September 2005.

My statement about Katrina and Catholic pro-life principles is as follows:

I’ll admit it: I’m biased. New Orleans is the lodestone of my adult life, the gravitational force always pulling me back. I began my college teaching career there, reveling in the generosity of seasoned teacher-mentors at Xavier University, who patiently taught me how to identify and use my gifts as a teacher. The jewel-like experiences I have had in that magical, maddening city near the river’s mouth have enriched my life in ways so profound that I will never get over New Orleans. Nor do I wish to do so.

I studied at both Loyola and Tulane. In my undergraduate education, what the Jesuits at Loyola taught me about God’s determination to lift up the downtrodden has forever stamped me. The Jesuits compelled me into ministry, overturning my well-laid plans to sequester myself in an ivory tower with my beloved Greek and Latin texts. Those crafty men who would not cease nattering about the importance of living for others turned my life upside down. I came to them a callow middle-class youth from a small Southern town. I left them with blinders forever stripped from my eyes. After what I learned in my years of ministry to the needy in New Orleans, I had no option except to head off to study theology, to get my mind around what my heart had learned about how systems of neglect and oppression affect the poor.

In my forays into ministry in New Orleans, I brought books, literacy training, food, and housing assistance to the needy. I approached these expeditions cavalierly: I was the one bearing gifts, after all, the one with the answers. But I quickly discovered that those to whom I reached out offered me far more than I could ever bring them. They taught me more than I could ever begin to teach them.

With these connections, I am shaken to the core of my soul by the scenes I have watched unfold in New Orleans day after day this week. I feel a frustration akin to battering my head against prison walls as I watch people pleading for food and water, even dying from lack of elemental nutrition or simple medication. I watch these scenes in helpless rage, in a comfortable house well-stocked with food and pure water. As I sit glued to my television set, I shout questions at it: how is it possible that we live in an advanced nation in which technology allows us to see people die of hunger, and yet our nation’s leaders seem incapable of delivering food to these suffering people we can see in front of us? I ask the television if we are in truth a developing nation, incapable of meeting the simplest nutritional and healthcare needs of our populace when disaster strikes.

As I worry the well-paced rug of questions in my head, I flash back to the last presidential election, when so many of our religious leaders twisted our arms as they informed us that voting for any but the pro-life candidates would be wicked in the extreme. I recall some of my own Catholic bishops compelling their flocks to vote pro-life, spelling out the “right” candidates and the “wrong” ones. I recall bishops who were willing to break with longstanding Catholic tradition and to use the Eucharist as a political whip to coerce errant believers into submission to their episcopal will.

I am also flashing back now to those grim scenes outside the facility in which Terri Schiavo died, when pro-life religious leaders held daily vigil as hydration was removed from the brain-dead woman lying inside. Where are those advocates for life now, I keep crying out to my television? Where are they as babies cry for water in the grueling heat of New Orleans summer days? Where are they, while corpses collect unburied, blankets draped over them, on the sidewalks of New Orleans?

The scenes we are seeing show us people dying precisely as Terri Schiavo died, from lack of nutrition and hydration. And yet those now dying on the streets of New Orleans are not brain-dead. They have the potential to live vibrant lives. Where are the buses of protesters now, shouting about how our nation has lost all respect for life? For that matter, where are the bishops who sought to bully us into voting pro-life in the last election? I have yet to hear the voice of a single one of my episcopal leaders, as human beings plead for food and water in New Orleans.

And the pro-life leaders the bishops told us to elect: what is their response to the agonizing scenes we see anytime we care to turn on our television sets? They are as absent as our bishops. As the grim scenes in New Orleans unfold before us, a number of bishops (along with their political allies) are engrossed in planning Eucharistic events, huge religious parties to celebrate the bread of life. Are those planning these parties recalling, I wonder, that the symbolism of the Lord’s Supper centers on a table, on bread, on wine, on food offered to the hungry? There is continuity between the dinner table at which we break our daily bread and the Eucharistic table at which the church offers bread to all hearts hungry for God.

When the church fails to do all it can to defend those who lack daily bread, it undermines everything that it proclaims about the holy bread of life. A church that neglects those hungry for daily bread cannot convincingly announce God’s invitation to hungry hearts everywhere to come to the table of living bread. Where are the bishops who teach this as the very heart and soul of Christian faith, while people lie dying in the streets in New Orleans, in this land of plenty, and no bread arrives?

Perhaps those bishops need to re-think their support for “pro-life” politicians who, to all appearances, seem shockingly callous in face of the need of poor, hungry human beings trapped like rats in a bowl in a major American city now lying largely underwater. Perhaps, as they prepare for their big Eucharistic shindigs, they should be pondering the core significance of what they profess about the bread of life. At the very least, perhaps they should be adding to their roster of speakers some who will remind us of the connections between providing daily bread to the hungry and inviting the spiritually hungry to the table of the Lord.

If they don’t do these things, it’s entirely possible that, one day, the bishops will give a party and no one will come. Or that they’ll shake their big sticks to compel the faithful to vote the “right” way, and no one will cower anymore. It’s possible that, having seen how our pro-life leaders have responded to the needs of the people of New Orleans, we will re-think what it means to vote pro-life in future elections, no matter what our bishops tell us.