Scandal 101: what I learned teaching the sexual-abuse crisis.

Toward the end of the first week of teaching my course "The Crisis in the Church," one of my more thoughtful students--let's call him Steve--came up to me after class. "What do you think you are doing?" Steve said, mustering as much respect in his tone as he could, trying to hide his anger. "How can you put students under such stress," he went on, referring to the widespread revelations concerning the sexual abuse of minors by priests, "pushing us to think about stuff that most of us don't know enough to handle?"

Steve wasn't asking me to make the course easier. He wasn't whining. His anger was understandable, and the implications of his challenge are clear. Undergraduates don't know enough or even perhaps have a sufficiently strong attachment to the church to handle all the negative feelings and harsh criticisms that emerge from thinking about the crimes committed by hundreds of priests and the cover-up of those crimes by bishops. Wouldn't it be better then, to limit teaching about the church, at least with this age cohort, to benign abstractions?

What was I doing in putting this sorry story before sixty undergraduates whose religious commitments were fragile at the best of times? Beyond the predictable mechanics of the course--books, class discussion, papers, and grades--there lay the vulnerable faith of a generation. Would that fragile faith be eroded by the rash decision of a professor to have them spend a semester learning about pedophiles like John Geoghan and Paul Shanley, seemingly Machiavellian bishops like Bernard Law and Edward Egan, passive pastors, dubious psychiatric "cures," avaricious lawyers, and overzealous, even anti-Catholic journalists?

And what about God, and grace, and the faith community? How did they fit into my "theology" course?

My reasons for teaching the class went something like this: At the academic level, the crisis provides an opportunity to explore several valuable lessons. In the first place, studying the sexual-abuse crisis teaches the fundamental commitment of the liberal arts: openness to the truth through a willingness to let the story tell itself. In studying such a painful subject, it is easy to be overwhelmed by prejudice. The liberal arts teach us to be more discerning. I wanted my students to learn that even what looks like an open-and-shut case reveals many complexities. Really listening to victims, and yes even the perpetrators, helps cultivate the habit of empathy.

Second, the church's shocking failure is a powerful case study of how closed societies, whether church, academy, or government, act when their own power and reputation are at stake. We learned not just something about the crisis, or even about the church, but something about how social structures work. Third, the crisis is not a simple clash of heroes and villains. There were other players involved. What about the rest of us? Priests, bishops, laity, the Vatican, attorneys, and the press--all are implicated in the scandal to some degree. Sorting out our feelings toward these different groups is an object lesson in the moral complexity of human life. Fourth, the crisis provides a superb example of the clash of conflicting interpretations. It is well known that how one explained the causes of the crisis often depended on what one thought about many other questions. Liberals tended to blame the church's sexual teachings and hierarchical structure. Conservatives blamed a "culture of dissent," "permissive sexual morality," and in some cases a "homosexual clerical subculture." My students learned, I hope, the importance of paying attention to detail and of challenging everyone's presuppositions.

Differing explanations of the crisis showed how prejudices and ideologies can distort the judgment of well-informed commentators. So we read Garry Wills's Why I Am a Catholic and Peter Steinfels's A People Adrift and George Weigel's The Courage to Be Catholic and--inevitably--Paul Lakeland's The Liberation of the Laity. We read bishops' documents from twenty years ago, and the Boston Globe for the whole of 2002. We pored over the financial statements of our home diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut. We scrutinized the fine print of the U.S. bishops' Charter for the Protection of Young People. And we parsed the comments of curial cardinals at Vatican press conferences. Our search for the "facts" and the "truth" was a worthwhile lesson in itself, and one that can be applied in other contexts. And finally, trying to make sense of the crisis made students see that thinking about the church--what theologians call ecclesiology--has real-world consequences, implying sometimes painful judgments, with real people and their tragedies at stake. Ecclesiology becomes--more than a term in a book--a recognizable reality and a practice. Still, whatever academic benefits my course may have provided, my student Steve's question remains: Is studying the crisis dangerous to the faith of undergraduate Catholics?

On Easter Saturday Bells Whacked the Air

Pet dogs help children. Spring after spring
two blaze-white Samoyedes sped me out
to my relief to run
into a new hush after the last noon clang
of church bells, rung ringing since dawn
to proclaim Easter Saturday--
              big bells, high up, and all of them
at once, let loose, a deafening glory

for my city of muted immigrants, plenty
of Catholics, bells just a few blocks apart,
Italy, Poland, Ireland, Germany, & Spain,
their metal tested, their cast full-voiced
non-liturgic, jubilee, wake up, hear this, look
out, resurrection, halleluia in yanked abandon
all morning--
              avenue traffic drowned out,
backyards & alleys humming in soundsurge,
and my breath a strong pulse
of everywhere hooray--no synchrony
no harmony no purity just hooray

just giant jubilee noise, dogs of course
not liking it, but for me utter
exultation rampant, though I loved my dogs
and took the run they gave me exulting
This is the day that the world hath made.
Rejoice and be glad therein.

--Marie Ponsot

First, it is important to describe that faith. In the undergraduate classroom in the kind of Catholic school where I teach, two worlds collide. Students, most of whom are not particularly attached to the practice of the religion in which they were raised, bring their half-formed assumptions and values to the table. One student may inveigh against the church's teaching on sex, while having only the haziest idea of what it may be. Another--and this is common--will proclaim "no problem" with fundamental theological truths like the Trinity or the Incarnation, but know even less about what these doctrines mean. On the other hand, students often have an almost infallible nose for those teachings that are, shall we say, hard to receive (in the last ten years I have heard no one defend the church's treatment of women or its attitude toward gays and lesbians). Here in a class on the sexual-abuse crisis, they encounter a distasteful subject of some complexity, about a church with which they are familiar, but which they are not old enough to have come to love and depend on the way many in older generations do. On the other hand, undergraduates offer a freshness and a lack of defensiveness about the institutional church that can help in taking a clear, hard look at a given problem. Confronting the scandal, the faith of these young people was on the table before it was even fully formed.

In this context, I'm reminded of the complaint I often hear from the grizzled veterans of Voice of the Faithful or Call to Action, when I have called for the slow, steady work of change at the parish level. "I'm over sixty, damn it!" shouted one exasperated man in Philadelphia a few months ago. "How long do you expect me to wait?!" Well, I want to say, If the Catholic tradition has given you anything it is usually a faith to fall back on when the church itself lets you down. Young people are not so lucky. The church has grievously failed them before they have acquired enough experience to know that it is hopefully through the church, but not always actually in the church, that we encounter the spirit of God. Those who have lived longer with their Catholicism often know better that while the tradition they cherish continues to nourish them, it may well be in spite of the actions of the institutional church.

Teaching theology and especially ecclesiology during a time of scandal brings into sharper focus the ever-present tension between the academic commitment to total honesty in the pursuit of truth, and the pastoral imperative not to do damage. There are two crucial pedagogical principles at stake here. First, no academic course can be legitimate if it leads students away from hopefulness toward either cynicism or despair. It is transparent that this would be a self-contradiction in teaching theology in a Catholic context, where such an endeavor is always a matter of "faith seeking understanding," though it may be a more generally applicable academic principle than one would at first imagine. Second, no academic pursuit can do anything but aim to tell the truth. The tension between honesty and edification is the fundamental dilemma of teaching theology. It is hard to be equally faithful to both principles in examining sexual abuse and the failure of leadership in the church. The truth cannot be told without giving a student reason for turning away from the church. Still, the alternative is more unpalatable: ignore the crisis and go on teaching that the church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, in blithe disregard of events that put these theological truths to the test.

For those who have grown up in the church of the past five to ten years, their living experience of the tradition can hardly be called edifying. The sexual-abuse scandal has, for many, challenged if not broken any fealty they might have had to the church as institution. Living in a church in crisis intensifies the threat to a creedal faith by immersing us in experiences so sordid or tragic that less or no ecclesial commitment is often the consequence. Unless, that is, we can find resources in our own experience to challenge or at least counter the vicarious experience of the scandal. Then, maybe something stronger may rise out of these ashes.

So I sympathize with Steve, but I don't concede his challenge. It is my impression that the experience of studying the crisis was extremely enlightening for many of the students. It certainly was for me. We learned a lot about the crisis, but far more important, we learned much more about what faith is and isn't. Studying the crisis taught us something about how faith is possessed, helped us distinguish between faith and its counterfeit forms. So, in the end, it may have put what faith we have on somewhat surer footing.

Faith, like other commitments, must be a matter of real (not merely notional) assent, but this does not become apparent until it is tested. Faith is most often tested in the existential crises of daily life. Does that mean it shouldn't be examined in the classroom? To be somewhat overly dramatic: If God is not immediately evident in the tragedy of sexual abuse and the poor ecclesiastical response to the crisis, maybe God is at work in the struggle of believers to deal with these facts. Thus, the course became a test of faith for many, a step in the struggle to believe, a process that was taking place in the classroom. Why did the perpetrators do it? Why did people keep silent for so long? Why did bishops not act more forcefully? These are questions that have to be addressed in the classroom. But hovering in the background were the big ones. Where is God here? Is God silenced in the despair of the victims? How is the grace, which we profess to be everywhere at work, apparent in these tragedies?

To twist a saying of Elie Wiesel's, you can be a Catholic with God, you can be a Catholic against God. You just can't be a Catholic without God. Those who would study the sexual-abuse scandal are likely in some kind of relationship with the church. So, what happened in the course really struck them on the level of their religious commitment. In a way, all theologians hope something like this is happening in every course we teach. But the study of the sexual-abuse crisis proved especially powerful in this regard. In this particular study, the real church trumped the church of the textbooks. The fact is: To be a believer today, faith is a daily struggle to maintain a sense of holiness within a sinful community. Believers cannot simply escape by contrasting the "real" church and the church of the crisis. The church of the crisis is the real church. We can neither hide in the historical fiction of an idealized "sinless" church, nor abandon the call to grace, to honest assessment.

While no single course can do everything, teaching the crisis brought some important religious truths into focus for me. Above all, it underscored how Catholics ought to maintain their faith and inhabit their church, namely, as adults. This is the one glaringly universal message of the crisis, and it is particularly relevant to the question of authority. My students, of course, are all what is too easily caricatured as "cafeteria" Catholics, but to some extent so are the rest of us. The challenge is to be discerning grazers, letting sound nutritional sense dictate which items on the buffet table we need for our health, and which to stay away from. These decisions are our own, though they must be educated decisions. In traditional terminology, an informed conscience must be employed, and theological education is very much about informing the conscience of the believer.

Beyond arguments about celibacy and seminary formation, we can probably agree that abusers show arrested sexual development, that bishops have too often had their heads in the sand, engaging in a childish refusal to face facts, and that priests and laypeople in their own ways preferred the easy path of an idealized vision to the harsh realities of a sinful church. Aristophanes called it "cloud-cuckoo land," and we have to realize that grown-ups don't live there. The crisis has awakened even young Catholics to the need to be adult, to accept the challenge of accountability. Very few students may be members of VOTF, but sixty signed up for my course. Adults live accountable lives, whether to their dependents, their families and partners, to the people they serve, or to their own consciences. As many have observed, clerical and especially episcopal accountability is a complex matter. The structures of clericalism militate against accountability, since clergy and hierarchy are for the most part accountable only to themselves. Moreover, in this one-way accountability, the church is clearly dysfunctional. Why don't bishops undergo periodic review by their clergy, and clergy by the people of the parish? What are we afraid of?

College students in their late teens and early twenties have usually cast off the certainties of childhood, though a long-term teacher will occasionally encounter charming remnants of a younger person lurking beneath the fragile sang-froid of the late adolescent. They no longer take Scripture literally, and, not knowing how to take it any other way, they turn away from it or--at best--mine it for its rational core. Paul Ricoeur suggested that our first naivete gives way to a stage of demythologization. Facing the sexual-abuse crisis, this might take the form of cynicism, which, as we all know, is a common form of self-protection. At the same time, the scandal requires us to look at real people and their church as they are, and this, it turns out, is the only healthy basis for a meaningful life within the faith community. As Peter Steinfels suggests in A People Adrift, we have to reinvent the American church in light of what Vatican II presaged, "the passage from clergy to laity." We must achieve this without throwing over the institution: "The Catholic Church can succeed as an institution while failing as a church. But it cannot succeed as a church while failing as an institution," says Steinfels.

Teaching the sexual-abuse crisis can also teach the church something about what college theology is about. The moral responsibility of the theologian as educator is to model a faithful critique of ecclesial reality in the service of an adult, accountable church. An adult faith must be realistic, clear-eyed and clearheaded, responsible, compassionate, and loving. Such a course must be loving of the church in all its moral ambiguity, loving of the students in their consternation and struggle with the church as it really is, and loving of the truth.

Telling the truth, finally, is all we have. Building faith on anything else is building on sand. Is it possible that the decline of faith in the church today is directly connected to too much focus on an idealized, ahistorical notion of the church, too much fear of looking directly at the more ambiguous historical reality? Perhaps it is time for us all to read or reread Georges Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest. There the poor Cure keeps his faith amid the grimy realities, the petty sinfulness, and the real evil of his rural care of souls. In many ways foolish himself, the Cure is nonetheless a figure of commitment to the search for God in the church as it really is, and his triumph lies in his final words: "Grace is everywhere."

Students are not the only ones who need remedial work. Teachers all know that we can be humbled at times by the moral sensitivity of our students or the acquaintance that some of them have with experiences of suffering that go beyond our own. Seeing them struggle with the harsh realities of a dysfunctional church that is still the standard-bearer of gospel truth helped make at least this theologian a little less jaded, and suggests a lesson for the whole church. The best way to deal with ecclesial dysfunction is not to pretend that it does not exist or that the crisis is over, but to shine a bright light into the darker corners of our churchly reality, so that we can try to sweep all the cobwebs out--knowing, of course, that we will never entirely succeed.

Paul Lakeland holds the Aloysius P. Kelley, SJ, Chair in Catholic Studies at Fairfield University.