Priestly Pugilist placed on Index of Forbidden Blogs

The Priestly Pugilist ^ | 2/11/2009 | Priestly Pugilist

[Balt]

I have been informed by a reliable source that access to Priestly Pugilist has been specifically blocked on the computers of a facility of a major Metropolitan Archdiocese of the Latin Church. I couldn't be more proud!

The fact that the Archbishop of this particular place has been a favorite PP target by worrying more about his "rep" in the editorial pages of liberal newspapers than about whether the souls entrusted to his care know and live the Catholic Faith may have something to do with it. In all fairness, though, we have to recognize that, to bishops of this sort, hand-wringing over the Church's image in the secular press is in the greater interest of the cause of Christ; and it has a lot to do with the generation from which this bishop comes. Here's how the reasoning works:

1. A prominent Catholic living or working in the diocese makes a public statement or publically supports an action which is contrary to Divinely revealed Catholic teaching.

2. The bishop begins to weigh in his mind the conflict between obfuscating scandal to the souls entrusted to his care by the bad example given by the person, against the public relations damage that would result by speaking out against or disciplining the individual in question. On the one hand, the bishop is mindful of his responsibility to "confirm the faith" of the souls entrusted to his care, conscious that failure to speak out in a forceful way could lead many of the faithful to conclude that the onerous opinion being expressed is acceptable or, at least, not that important; on the other hand, the bishop comes from a generation of priests who were taught that the cause of Christ is best served when the Church is not in the headlines, and that controversy of any kind is always bad.

3. Unable to resolve the conflict in himself, the bishop decides that the best course is to find a way to make the whole situation someone else's responsibility; so, he regretfully laments that the individual in question is not really a subject of his diocese (even though the offense occured there), and that he is powerless to do anything without clear instructions from his brother bishop—knowing, of course, that his brother bishop is of the same generation and mind-set as he is, and that this reasoning process will be repeated "over there," hopefully drawn out long enough until the news cycle has run it's course and the matter is no longer "front page" material.

The end result of all this is that the whole problem just fades away with time, and everyone can get back to pretending that all is sweetness and light—at least that's what the two bishops would like to believe, with an "off screen" nod and wink between them.

To a priest of my generation, this is all perfectly horrific, and explains a whole host of things, including the sex abuse crisis and the poor response of the bishops in general to it. To a priest of the Archbishop's generation, it's priests like me and my generation which are the problem, because we don't undertand the absolute necessity of playing the game of projecting the Home-on-the-Range image of the Catholic Church to the outside world: "...where never is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day."

The problem really is generational; and, for proof of that, visit your PP's alma mater, St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, New York. It's one of the oldest in the country (see the biography of Msgr. Smith below for some background). As soon as you walk into the main corridor of the ancient building, take a left and walk to the end. Take another left, past the room labled "Small Theology." On the right hand wall begins the group portraits of the classes, beginning in 1873 and stretching all along the wall down to the opposite end of the building. The portraits of those early classes—some with as few as five or six priests in them—are inspiring. There they all sit, in hopelessly wrinkled cassocks and unkempt hair, with fire in their eyes. These, after all, were the men who would have to "create" the Catholic Church in this country—a country which, for the most part, believed that Catholics were worshipers of Satan. They were trained to resist persecution, defend the faith against all manner of attack, work independently without contact with higher authority, and support an immigrant faithful which was mistrusted and persecuted themselves. They had to be men! Thay had to be fighters! They had to stand out from the crowd! And you can tell they were all that and more just by looking at their pictures.

Now, stroll down to the other end of the building, to around 1950 or so and continuing through the 60's and 70's. There are portraits here, too. The classes here are much larger, some with as many as thirty priests in them; but there is no fire in their eyes. Sometimes it's hard to even distinguish between the men in them: all the same hair cut; all the same style of perfectly pressed suit and collar; all the same dull, blank, expressionless stare. Here you have found the Archbishop's generation, all with spine neatly and surgically removed. They, after all, were not ordained to defend the faith, but make it seem harmless to the non-Catholic world. They, after all, were not intended to help an immigrant community survive a vicious persecution, but rather to help the Catholic Church in America "blend in;" and, to that end, they were formed and trained to blend in themselves. If there were originally any "characters" and strong personalities among them, they were weeded out in the formation process by the new tool of psychological evaluation. Their weakness of self-determination, it was thought, was necessary to ensure their obedience; their ability to blend in and not stand out from the crowd was thought necessary to ensure that the Catholic Church was not perceived by anyone as a threat to respectable society.

And the Church got exactly what she wanted. This latter generation, with their sexuality thoroughly repressed, their emotional development frozen somewhere in adolescence, their "fighting Irish" spirit burned out of them, and their blind obedience to authority thoroughly ensured, were unleashed into a society which, within a few decades, would turn against the Church again—a Church which would look to her priests to fight for her—but there was no fight in them. Humanae Vitae came and went, and the number of priests and bishops willing and able to stand up and defend the doctrine could be counted on one hand. The repression of their psycho-sexual development exploded in a flurry of imporper and horrific abuses of young boys; and the ones charged with protecting the young and restoring order had not the strenghth of character—or the ability to even see the need—to take the bull by the horns and deal with it. Instead they chose to try and "smooth it over" by cryptic transfers to other assignments, hoping it would all go away. Then, when all else failed, they placed the whole problem in the hands of a lay review board, to which they would submit their Divine commission, inventing slogans like "Promise to Protect, Pledge to Heal," actually believing that marketing and image were part of the solution. They convinced the Holy See to sign on to a policy of "norms" that would allow them to rid themselves of any priest who embararssed them, while protecting themselves from any liability. And when a Catholic politician openly supports policies which are abhorrent to fundamental Catholic dogma, they pass the buck. I can't imagine why!

Back when your PP was a seminarian, the formation program was different than it is today. Your summers were your own, so long as you did something within the Church. I spent one summer living and working in the cathedral parish of a Roman Rite diocese down in Louisiana. The rector of the cathedral was the Vicar General of the diocese, one of the most brilliant, talented and strangest men I ever knew: a musician, a scholar, a veteran who had served in two wars (and, on and off, in every single branch of America's military before becoming a priest), and with the colorful vocabulary of a drunken sailor. Once at dinner he told me about his first assignment as a priest in a parish in the bayou, and about his pastor who used to sit at the dinner table with a revolver by his plate. In the middle of his story he stopped and let out a deep sigh; then, after a pause he said in sad voice, "There are no more characters in the priesthood."

Indeed there aren't. And it seems that the Catholic Church in this country—and the Catholic Faith itself—will be suffering from this deficiency for many generations to come. Where will we find the priests who will be needed to rebuild the Catholic Church in America? The men in those early portraits are all dead, and the generation currently running the show doesn't want anyone like them ordained any time soon. Yes, there's my generation; but we're already in our 50's and 60's, and will be practically dead ourselves before the Archbishop and his generation let the reigns slip through their hands. To be sure, the Pope is a good man; but I haven't seen him make any moves to tell any bishop in this country to "excommunicate that politician or you're out of a job." How do you correct the leadership gap in the Catholic Church today? Do we emulate the previous generation and just hope it all blows over after the news cycle turns? I choose to blog under an assumed name. How about you?

In the mean time, welcome to the Index of Forbidden Blogs.

[Thorin]

Looks like a great blog. Thanks for posting.

[markomalley]

Catholic ping for your lists!!!