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Day of Renewal

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O'Malley's Best

The Un-Ideal Clergy

Probably at no time since the scandalous renaissance popes has the Church been more painfully aware of the imperfections of its priests-sins against children and abuse of authority that make the grandiose hypocrisy of these pharisees look laughably mild.. Yet I think it's not a bad idea to recall that unthinkable period from the 14th to the 16th centuries when the Church and churchmen were more readily comparable to the worst of the Roman emperors than to the carpenter of Nazareth. The popes themselves were not only debauched but murderous. At their behest, high churchmen preached the selling of Get Out of Hell and Purgatory Free Cards and options on choice lots in heaven to support bloody-minded Crusades as pious enterprises pleasing to a vindictive God. Bishops controlled the treasuries of dioceses into which they never intended to set foot. By endlessly devious means, illiterates managed to inherit or extort the benefices of parishes to support their wives and children when they were incapable even of reading the gospel at Mass. More than a few monasteries and convents were graduate schools for scandal.

I mention these lamentable facts only to show that, hateful as our most recent failures have been, matters have been far, far worse and far, far more widespread-even to the point where some could call the Church's faults virtually universal. It's a true miracle it survived.

The Church we have in our minds and even to some degree the Church embodied in the gospels and in the Acts of the Apostles is idealized-cleaned-up, bowdlerized, expurgated. We tend to forget that the first pope was an arrant coward who denied even knowing Jesus and then fled the scene-as did all the first bishops of the infant Church. In the early Church, there were a lot more scandalous factions and splinters than the ones we find in Acts. The closed-mindedness and resistance to different points of view that we find in many clerics today is not really a unique modern phenomenon.

When someone asked Gandhi what he thought of Christianity, he answered, "I think it's perfectly marvelous. I just wish someone would try it."

The basic reason is that the Ideal Church Jesus offered had to be embodied, physicalized, intruded into the world in concrete, accessible form by human beings. Any interplanetary travelers for whom this is their first weekend on earth will quickly become aware that human beings are-by definition and with only two reputed exceptions in 30,000 years-shot-through with imperfections. In fact, the foundational story of Judeao-Christian civilization focuses on a primal couple who had everything imaginable going for them but without much difficulty managed to screw up totally. That penchant is plentifully re-reported every morning in the daily newspapers. If you go in quest of a flawless human Church, you'll need a spaceship yourself.

But another reason is equally pervasive. Naughty stories are far more appealing than nice stories. It's what accounts for the stupefying sales of such organs as The National Enquirer, Star, People, and countless others. Eons ago when I was at Holy Cross and had to write a history term paper about the Church, it never flittered across my mind to write about the early Trinitarian controversies or the lives of heroically generous souls like St. Vincent de Paul or Dorothy Day. I chose Pope Alexander VI who fathered the notorious Lucretia and Cesare Borgia and held The Dance of the 50 Naked Courtesans in the Vatican-which sure beat the CYO affairs of my youth. Now there was a Church that was interesting!

Stories of heroic Christians are relegated to The Reader's Digest. The popes can preach till they're exhausted about the First World mercilessly gouging the Third World, but only their animadversions about sexuality will ever make it into The New York Times. Think about it. Can you imagine anything good a priest or nun could do that would be worth detailed reporting? The only way a nun would get any attention is if she were raped and murdered. Does any journal- even a Catholic one-write an article on why priests stay? Would the struggle to remain celibate focus anyone's attention as much as how much Father drinks or what kind of car he drives?

The average parish priest lives a pretty lonely life. He spends a great deal of his time justifying God when God seems pretty unjustifiable-the young father diagnosed with cancer, the girl incautiously pregnant, the abandoned mother. They attend a lot of meetings where otherwise neglected people have a chance to vent their frustrations. And along with an annual stipend of about $9,000, their room and board, car allowance, and benefits come to about $29,000 year. That's as much as a gypsy cab driver makes, less than an entry-level plumber, and barely half what he could make as a flight attendant. After at least five years of post-graduate studies.

Copyright © 2008, McQuaid Jesuit