[Dialogue] {Spam?} Sings of a dying Roman Church, and a question about God

[KroegerD at aol.com]

December 5, 2007  
A Voice Within the Catholic  Hierarchy Finally Speaks Out  

"The Pope has too much power. The Pope is finally answerable to the Church."  
"The Catholic Church has a problem with credibility."  
"The Church's teaching on sex needs to be reviewed."  
"Seminaries are not healthy places."  
"A few phrases in the Nicene Creed need to be revisited"  
"There are homosexual priests in the Catholic Church - a significant number  
probably higher than the percentage (of homosexual persons) in the general  
population."  
These quotations are not lifted from the writings of some anti-Catholic  
Protestant reformer. It was no modern day Martin Luther or John Calvin who said  
these things; it was not even some Catholic-baiting Irish preacher like Ian  
Paisley. They are rather the words of a highly respected Roman Catholic Bishop  
in Sydney, Australia, who was such a significant leader in the Church that he  
was the one to whom the Catholic Church turned to investigate the sex abuse  
scandal involving priests in Australia and to issue that Church's national  
response to that tragedy. His name is The Most Reverend Geoffrey Robinson. His  
official title at the time of his recent retirement was The Auxiliary Bishop 
of  Sydney. He was by any measure Australia's best known and most admired 
member in  the Catholic hierarchy. When the previous archbishop tendered his 
resignation to  the Pope, Geoffrey Robinson was the clear favourite of the 
Australian people to  be his successor. Sydney's archbishop is always the leader of the 
Roman Catholic  Church in that entire land which makes him an immediate 
candidate to be a  cardinal. With Joseph Ratzinger handling such appointments for 
Pope John Paul  11, however, there was no way that Geoffrey Robinson would be 
chosen for that  post. Instead the appointment went to George Pell, Melbourne's 
 ultra-conservative and highly homophobic archbishop, whose inner circle of  
priestly advisors was known as "The Spice Girls" by many Australians. Bishop  
Robinson, feeling incapable either of working with or even of supporting this  
appointee as one of his assistants, decided that the best step for him to 
take  was to retire. His work heading the commission on clergy sexual abuse had 
also  disillusioned him with his church and had tempered his desire to continue 
any  longer in what he felt was a losing battle. As his disillusionment grew 
other  questions that he had long kept suppressed, not only about the way his 
church  acted but also about what the church said must be believed, could be 
suppressed  no longer. In his retirement he has broken his silence by writing a 
book  entitled Confronting Sex and Power in the Catholic Church: Reclaiming  
the Spirit of Jesus. Published in 2007 in Australia by John Garrett  
Publishers, it has quickly rocketed to the top of the best selling charts in  Australia 
and is inevitably now being attacked and vigorously debated on the  Internet. 
In conservative Catholic circles the response has been vitriolic with  Bishop 
Robinson's character being assassinated by his former colleagues.  Australian 
television commentators have named that response: "Poison from the  Catholic 
Right." The UK's liberal Catholic publication, "The Tablet," made this  book a 
front page story. Since the book's publication Bishop Robinson has been a  
featured and frequent guest on Australian radio and television programs. Most of 
 the quotations with which this column began were lifted out of the 
transcripts  of those media interviews.  
This kind of criticism is rare inside the Roman Catholic Church, which prides 
 itself on keeping all conflict behind closed doors, with only the face of 
unity  confronting the world. After a hotly contested papal election, the 
cardinals  tell the world and the press that the person chosen was clearly the best  
possible choice for the papal task and in a public ceremony pledge their 
loyalty  to the new Pope. Cardinals, archbishops, bishops and priests must take 
public  vows to obey their superiors and to protect the church so that its 
reputation as  "the holder of ultimate truth" never falls into public dispute. It 
was this  mentality that collided with massive evidence and subsequent public 
charges of  the rampant sexual abuse of minors carried out by ordained Catholic 
clergy that  produced the crisis that ultimately drove Bishop Robinson to 
write his book.  
Looking at Australia primarily and feeling his Church's refusal to provide  
full disclosure on these crimes, Bishop Robinson began to state publicly what  
everyone who followed the Catholic Church's investigatory process clearly 
knew.  "I am not happy," he said, "with the level of support I am getting from 
Rome.  Had the Pope responded (to this crisis) it would have been a totally 
different  story. Instead we got silence. I regret saying this. It gives me no joy 
at all.  I was one trying to work at this problem and with only silence 
coming, the  Church fractured." He went on to say that the Church now has a massive 
problem  with credibility: "We might say all sorts of beautiful things on 
other subjects,  but with the great danger that no one is listening. We have not 
controlled or  yet eradicated this problem within the church." Later he came 
back to this theme  of credibility by saying that "vast numbers of people have 
left the Church, and  they are the very people that, if they had stayed might 
have been able to change  the Church." In a public radio interview he stated 
what everyone outside the  hierarchy of the Church believes to be factually 
true. "If one asks: 'Are you  satisfied that the Catholic Church has done 
everything possible to study sexual  abuse in the church and has eradicated everything 
that needs to be eradicated?'  I don't see how anyone can answer and say 
yes." It is one thing to get to the  core of a crisis, expose it and clear the 
Church's good name; it is quite  another to manage the crises, to seek to 
minimize institutional guilt by  pretending to purge when what you are really doing 
is covering up. That is  clearly what the Roman Catholic Church has done across 
the world. When an  international organisation acts in every country in a 
similar manner, what  becomes obvious is that this strategy is being dictated 
from on high. The sad  truth is that this duplicity and cover up will not work 
for several reasons.  First, the power of religion in general and of the 
Catholic Church in particular  is not today anywhere near what it used to be in the 
western world. Europe, once  a Catholic stronghold now has the lowest birth 
rate in the world, indicating  that Europeans do not listen to the Vatican's 
condemnation of birth control. The  nation of Ireland, whose deepest identity once 
reflected the influence of the  Roman Catholic tradition, is now moving to 
legalize abortion. Catholic couples  get divorced in the West in about the same 
percentages as do non-catholic  couples. This is not the 13th century and some 
Catholic hierarchical figures  appear not to recognize that fact. Second, the 
spread of information today makes  institutional secrets fair game for full 
exposure. Ecclesiastical closets will  not remain closed. Corruption and 
criminal behaviour are not conditional on  whether the perpetrator is a priest, a 
bishop an archbishop or a cardinal. Yet  we witnessed Cardinal Bernard Law of 
Boston not being prosecuted despite massive  evidence of his guilt of being an 
accomplice in crimes against thousands of  minors. Instead of jail, he was 
promoted to a Vatican post in the Papal States  where he is immune from 
prosecution and will never have to answer questions  under oath or release the records 
which would prove his complicity. Instead of  being forgotten he has become 
today nothing less than the public face of that  Church's corruption. The Roman 
Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles just this  past fall agreed to pay 
$696,000,000, on the day before the trial was to begin  to settle the class action 
suit brought by the victims of priestly abuse. This  last minute settlement 
represented resistance and cover-up, not co-operation in  the face of criminal 
judgement, and let them off from the task of testifying  publicly under oath. This 
fine was of such magnitude, that the imagination is  stunned to embrace the 
depth of guilt that it revealed. Los Angeles Cardinal,  Roger Mahoney, said, 
"we have now put this behind us," but he will discover that  un-investigated 
evil is not cauterized by legal settlements that do not admit  guilt. The details 
will continue to seep out. The disillusionment will continue  to grow. People 
know that there was no real co-operation with the investigation.  Catholic 
hierarchical figures have done little more than damage control, placing  the 
well-being of the Catholic Church far ahead of the well-being of the victims  of 
the Catholic Clergy. A genuine reform is clearly not forthcoming at this  
time.  
Geoffrey Robinson offers a way to begin that necessary act of reformation. He 
 believes a first step is to restore power to the bishops, which he argues 
has in  recent years been drained from them into the upper echelons of the 
hierarchy and  especially to the Pope. If nothing changes, those bishops who raise 
questions  publicly in this Church will be silenced and marginalized in the 
same way that  their creative, but questioning theologians were handled over the 
last thirty or  so years. Remember this is the same church that removed Hans 
King from his  position as Catholic Theologian at Tubingen University, 
harassed Dutch New  Testament Scholar Edward Schillebeeckx until he was drained of 
both his time and  energy, dismissed tenured professor Charles Curran from the 
faculty of Catholic  University in Washington, D.C., silenced Matthew Fox when 
he developed his new  spirituality based on original blessing rather than 
original sin until he  finally resigned his priesthood and became an Anglican in 
California, and then  drove the Latin American theologian, Leonardo Boff, into 
his decision to be  laicized. It was Joseph Ratzinger, serving as the Cardinal 
Inquisitor for Pope  John Paul II, who was responsible for these actions. Now 
as Pope Benedict XVI,  does anyone think it will be different if any bishop 
does not toe the line on  all doctrinal, ethical and ecclesiastical issues? 
Creative change never arises  from within when truth is suppressed and new ideas 
are never entertained.  Geoffrey Robinson's great contribution is that he has 
broken the silence. He has  called for the development of some mechanism that 
would make the Church  accountable to the people. He believes that the 19th 
century dogma of papal  infallibility should be revisited, that the church's 
whole attitude toward  sexuality ought to be reviewed, and that Catholic 
scholarship needs to engage  contemporary knowledge that it has not done since before 
the days of Galileo. My  hope is that other bishops, who will inevitably hear 
about and read this  powerful book, will recognize the truth and accuracy of 
Geoffrey Robinson's  insights, that these issues will then be raised and 
examined inside that  church's gathering of bishops, and that steps at reforming 
this church will be  allowed to begin. My fear is that this Church, like so much 
of Christianity. is  blind to its own incompetence and its fortress morality, 
which means that it  will fail to see that these troubling symptoms are 
nothing less than the signs  of death encircling this once great Church.  
John Shelby Spong  
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Larry J. Kluth from Mesa, Arizona, writes:  
Where was the Christian God before he appeared to Moses and declared that the 
 Israelis were his chosen people? Why didn't the great civilizations of the  
world, prior to this appearance, know about this God?  
Dear Larry,  
I'm tempted to follow the old adage attributed to Augustine of Hippo, who,  
when asked what was God doing before he created the world, responded, "God was  
creating hell for people who ask questions like that." I shall, however, 
avoid  that temptation.  
The Christian God, as you describe this deity, did not appear to Moses. That  
would be the God of the Jews. The idea that any people are God's specially  
chosen is a tribal idea that is shared by all tribal entities. We tend to  
associate that idea with the Jews because Christians have incorporated the  Jewish 
God into the Christian story by proclaiming that we have encountered this  
God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses in a new way in the person of Jesus of  
Nazareth.  
However, it is not God who is ever changing. It is the human perception of  
God. Of course, God was present among the ancient people of the world. God was  
called by different names, endowed with different qualities and understood in 
 different ways. Some of these aspects of God are seen as immoral by people  
living today, such as child sacrifice, the purging of anyone who thought 
outside  the box and the divine blessing of violence.  
The human God consciousness is always growing. This is true even in the  
Judeo-Christian faith story. There is an enormous difference between the God of  
Moses, who was perceived as sending plagues on Israel's enemies, the Egyptians, 
 the last of which was the murder of the firstborn son in every Egyptian  
household; the God of Joshua, who was perceived as stopping the sun in the sky  
to facilitate the slaughter of the Ammonites by Joshua's army; or the God of  
Samuel, who ordered King Saul to commit genocide on the Amalekites; when that  
God is compared to the God of Jesus, who said, "Love your enemies."  
Please remember that while the experience of God may be a universal  
experience, the explanation of the God experience is always a human creation  shaped 
by the perceptions of people living in history. Every God explanation,  every 
sacred text and every creedal formula is always time bound and time  warped. 
That is why literalizing religious formulas is so destructive. It is  
literalized formulas that cause us to believe our limited view of God is the  same as 
God. Out of that view come questions like yours that reveal the  absurdity of so 
many popular religious claims and therefore I thank you for your  question.  
John Shelby Spong 



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