To the editors.

More to be said

In light of not "living a lie," I found both confusing and disturbing your editorial dissection ("'Trail of Pain' Continued," January 31, 2003) of the New York Times's January 12 study on the priestly sexual-abuse crisis. Some of your complaints sound similar to those of the people who criticize environmental rules to check global warming: we need precise and conclusive research before acting. Thus:

There is lots of vague talk of priestly psychosexual immaturity. I guess that renders the work of folks like Richard Sipe, Eugene Kennedy, et al. innocuous--all in one sentence!

The media perspective has been largely shaped by victims' attorneys. My daily look at the Internet coverage of this issue suggests generally sober reporting from a number of sources, the most damaging of which are episcopal depositions. These depositions, of course, were forced because media coverage dug beyond the stonewalling of the church leaders who were responsible.

The nature of clerical sexual abuse is not fully understood and discussion within the church is along the usual liberal vs. conservative lines. The problem with the Times study is that it focuses mainly on the sexual abuse of children. No mention is made there or in your editorial of the poor nuns who were abused (40 percent, according to a National Public Radio report) and no thought seems to be given to those adults who are abused in situations in which clergy have power over them (as counselors or confessors, for example.) Discussion of these matters seems to be divided more along the lines of those whose priority is to protect the clergy and institution and those who want all the facts out in the open.

We might have been better served if you had examined the questions:

Should church leaders act like CEOs elsewhere or does their role mean they must be different? For example, should bishops comply with their insurance companies that want to depose victims' therapists?

How forthcoming should church leaders be not only about what they will do but what they have done?

What standards of transparency and accountability should church leaders be held to in such matters?

ROBERT A. NUNZ
Los Alamos, N.Mex.

Welborn's basement

I was sorry to learn that the writings of past presidents of the Catholic Theological Society of America had been exiled to Amy Welborn's basement ("My Husband, the Priest," January 17, 2003). Her and her husband's theological sieve must be fine, indeed, to exclude the work of Avery Dulles, Elizabeth Johnson, David Tracy, Margaret Farley, Robert Schreiter, Lisa Sowle Cahill, and other past presidents. If she and her spouse would like to drive a few miles east to Cincinnati in a few months, I'd be glad to welcome them to our convention (June 5-8) and invite them to see what they're missing.

JON NILSON
Chicago, Ill.

The writer is president of the Catholic Theological Society of America.

True & false

Amy Welborn's article was saddening for me. Saddening, because it was by turns unfair, in error, angry, and true.

Unfair, because she argues that bishops who have kept evil priests in parishes should thereby feel constrained to support priests after legitimate laicization. Reprehensible as the action of the hierarchy has been regarding former priests, it does not bring about an obligation to provide support for them.

In error, because the sacerdos in aeternum (not aeternam, as was printed) clause, if it may be called that, contains no guarantee of indefinite support for priests (see Deuteronomy 10:9).

True, because there is indeed no easy way for most priests to find work after laicization. True, too, because in this country it became fatally easy during the middle of the last century for many priests to find a comfortable niche within the parish culture where they could "do well by doing good" and enjoy the perks of their profession.

And angry, because there is no place in the church for the talents and qualifications of Welborn's husband. In this, she and he have my deepest sympathy, because after more than fifty years as a priest, I am now seeing more and more the need for a married secular clergy in the United States.

I wish Welborn had written a more reflective and less angry article that might have touched more people. Still, I wish Welborn and her husband well in all things, and pray that the time will come when her husband can assume a new role in the church that he is well qualified for. I do not expect to see it during the few remaining years of my life. Pity. I should have loved to see it come 'round.

(REV.) G. F. WERNER
Edgewood, N.Mex.

Too personal

Although Amy Welborn's article is eloquent, it addresses a personal problem, not a major issue of church or society. Commonweal should be paying attention to serious problems like war and peace, economic justice, and immigration policy.

Those of us who were laicized made a decision. We should live with it. We will be given the same opportunities as other members of the church to give Christian witness in an unbelieving world. Talk about returning laicized priests to active ministry is just beating a dead horse. It won't happen!

Commonweal should devote its valuable pages to other causes.

E. THOMAS MCCARTHY
Berkeley, Calif.

Structural change

Thank you for Amy Welborn's fine essay, "My Husband, the Priest." It touched me and rang true to my own family experience.

I have a cousin who left the Blauvelt Dominicans after twenty-five years. She is now happily married to a man who had been a Benedictine priest for as long. Neither of them left their community to marry; each left out of personal dissatisfaction with the lives they were living--or trying to live--in community.

It is a gracious marriage: they are well suited to each other. The husband would readily offer the sacraments if he were permitted, or visit the sick or fulfill any other pastoral role. As he says, that is his charism. Both my cousin and her husband are as active through their parishes as they can be--though there is less unease attached to an "ex-nun" than to an "ex-priest."

How very wasteful it is for the church to squander gifts! Amy Welborn said as much and said it well. Such waste is a function of institutional investment in identifying doctrinal orthodoxy with the established juridical structure. But as Welborn states: "Structures come and structures go." That is something that needs to be said more often if the institution is to love the world ahead of itself.

MAUREEN MULLARKEY
Chappaqua, N.Y.

Enlightened dioceses

Kudos to Amy Welborn for her illuminating article. As I read it, I thought of my friend Jack Wilcox, dead for three years, a priest of the Boston Archdiocese for twenty-nine years until he resigned from the active ministry (shamefully?) to marry. Short of material resources, he turned to his former archbishop, ideally a father figure, for some kind of compensation.

Sorry, said Cardinal Bernard Law, already burdened with the support, legal, and familial, of his errant priests, but diocesan funds were available only to "priests in good standing."

How different was Cardinal Joseph Bernardin's 1987 decision "to provide a pension to resigned priests who had served the archdiocese [of Chicago] for twenty years or longer. It is a sign of our respect, our care, and our gratitude."

A few enlightened dioceses have done similarly, such as Seattle, San Diego, and Rochester, and so have some religious communities. Other ordinaries say they will respond only on the basis of individual need; thus, if such a resigned priest languishes in abject poverty or grovels fittingly, he may receive some reluctant beneficence.

E. LEO MCMANNUS
Venice, Fla.

Pope says no

Amy Welborn eloquently states her case that priests who left the priesthood to marry should be able to give their services and talents to the church. But bishops know that those of their brave brethren who have dared to importune this pope to be allowed to do so have been angrily rebuffed. He won't hear of it, and that's that.

CONCHITA COLLINS
Tucson, Ariz.

Prolife Democrat

John D. Hagen Jr.'s brilliant "Prolife Democrats" (January 17, 2003) was long overdue--especially for prolife Catholics who live in Massachusetts. I moved to this state ten years ago, and have since wondered why Catholic voters keep electing politicians whose Catholicity is so selective: solid on social justice but "tolerant" (read prochoice) on abortion. Even more disturbing is the absence of any strong reaction by the hierarchy and clergy to this political selectivity.

Several years ago I organized my parish's participation in one of the diocesan postcard campaigns in support of a ban against partial-birth abortion. Several of my friends observed that the campaign was probably a waste of time, since neither of our Massachusetts senators would even bother reading the postcards. Undeterred, I worked with a team of parishioners and secured more than 750 signatures. Following a post-Communion talk I gave, one parishioner remarked that she had waited more than twenty years to hear a prolife message from the pulpit.

Sadly, the clergy sexual-abuse scandal has diminished the credibility of the hierarchy and some of the clergy as well. With the issues of cloning and stem-cell research emerging on the political scene, Catholics need strong moral leadership on all of the life issues. We can look to Deuteronomy for inspiration: "I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live."

SUSAN EMILY JORDAN
Watertown, Mass.

Republican hypocrisy

In his "Prolife Democrats," John D. Hagen Jr. claims Paul Wellstone as his mentor, but Hagen sounds more like a student of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. He correctly denounces the Democratic National Committee's hysterical defense of partial-birth abortion as "Orwellian mendacity," but offers his own bit of doublespeak as he claims that "the Republicans at least know that life is sacred." He deliberately ignores the fact that the current Republican-in-chief has, as governor of Texas, been directly involved in the termination of over one hundred human lives through his enthusiastic support and implementation of the death penalty. The executed included some of society's most vulnerable: persons with cognitive disabilities or inadequate legal defense. A moral equivalent might be the Democrats offering an abortion doctor as their front person. Given that fact, there is no need to debate further whether the current administration's reckless disregard for the environment, its cynical taxation policies, or its unapologetic militarism are consistent with the reverence for life that Hagen attributes without ambivalence to the Republican Party. As a new subscriber, I certainly hope that such intellectual dishonesty isn't typical of your commentators--there is plenty of such partisan rhetoric available from the mass media.

RICHARD A. GRUCZA
Saint Louis, Mo.

Single-issue politics

Emblazoned with a cartoon featuring infants and with Roe v. Wade's thirtieth anniversary last month, my stomach sank when I read "Prolife Democrats." When did single-issue voting become the preferred method of democracy in this nation? John Hagen skewers Democrats for declaring "choice" as their highest value, but is he not, in return, declaring antichoice as a Republican's highest value? The "abortion-rights absolutism in the Democratic Party" is mirrored by the antichoice absolutism of the Republican Party. If tax cuts weren't given to the wealthy, as they are by the Republican's "Economic Stimulus Plan," perhaps there would be more money in social programs to promote health and sex education, thus attempting to solve the problem rather than police it. As for the sensationalism of Hagen's description of "partial-birth abortions" (and I use scare quotes because he uses scare tactics), 88 percent of abortions are performed in the first twelve weeks of pregnancy and 98 percent occur during the first twenty weeks. In other words, late-term abortions make up a slim fraction and are unrepresentative of most abortions performed. Legislation to outlaw these "partial-birth abortions" is broad and vaguely worded, leaving concerns that there will be further impingement regarding a woman's right to choose.

ELIZABETH K. LARSON
Minneapolis, Minn.

Politically homeless

We live, undoubtedly, in a world of contradictions. John Hagen is right; Democrats have taken prochoice ideology to the extreme. Yet a consistent ethic of life should help us recognize that "prolife Republicans" and "compassionate conservatism" are oxymorons too. President George W. Bush threatens to further erode traditional just-war constraints on the moral use of force through a highly nationalist and militarist foreign policy. Republican policies continually reward the wealthiest and most powerful interests to the detriment of the most vulnerable members of our society--so much so that many critics, including the Republican Kevin Phillips, now describe the United States as a plutocracy.

"Compassionate conservatism" has yet to address the root causes of poverty or challenge privileged citizens to place our wealth and power at the service of the poor. Moreover, the president and his party lack any minimally prudent and responsible national and global policy on the environment--citizens and corporations alike will not voluntarily reduce the disproportionate rate at which the United States burns fossil fuels and pollutes the global biosphere. Thinly veiled political rhetoric to the contrary, the last three Republican presidents have advanced public policies that have consistently contributed to what Pope John Paul II terms a "culture of death." I remain politically homeless as a Catholic pro-life democratic socialist. Political homelessness may not be a bad thing, except for all those who depend on us to live in ways that sustain and enhance all life, including the global biosphere.

ALEX MIKULICH
West Hartford, Conn.