Married Priests and Sex Abuse

On my sabbatical in 2018, I put the finishing touches to my newest book, Married Priests in the Catholic Church. 

But before doing that, I had also used the time to write a second book from start to finish: Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power. This latter book's final chapter focuses on the question of married clergy, including a married episcopate. Loathe though I was to include such a chapter, I felt I had to because of the grossly simplistic "thinking" one sometimes hears proffered to the effect that the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church today could be dramatically decreased by allowing priests to marry. The quickest way to disprove this claim is to look at every other Christian tradition with married clergy to see they too have problems with sexual abuse; so do married Jewish rabbis, Islamic imams, etc.

That said, what I did in the 2019 book was to look at how, in some limited and circumscribed ways, having a predominantly married presbyterate in the Catholic Church might help make it more difficult for abusive clergy to escape unnoticed (not least by their wives!) or to be shuffled around (shuffling married clergy can be a significantly more complicated task than with celibates, and requires wider discussion). I also noted, in raising the question of married bishops, that a man who has children of his own is, on average, going to be much more adverse to treating abused children in the bloodless, cold, ruthless way so many celibate bishops do today. In too many cases it seems an unspoken qualification for the episcopate is a complete lack of empathy for the most vulnerable human beings in the Church. Celibacy, then, can be deeply psychologically damaging to some people, especially when lived (as it should be) outside a monastic community of some depth. 

But a married clergy will not "solve" the abuse crisis, nor any other. It may help, but this has to be carefully considered. Thus the new book, Married Priests in the Catholic Church, aims in significant degree to de-romanticize, de-mythologize some of the idealistic notions people might have about this venerable tradition and its challenges. 

Ivan Illich and Erich Fromm on the Corrupt Church

I've started working on a long essay on what we still have not learned from Erich Fromm, the 40th anniversary of whose death we will shortly mark. I think, and hope to show, that he has much to teach Catholics in particular in the sex abuse crisis, about which I published my new book several months ago now. In that book, Everything Hidden Shall be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power, I drew on Fromm a little bit (and other psychoanalytic critics), but I want to expand that focus in this new essay.

Part of what has motivated me is finally being able to do a serious reading of Lawrence Friedman's magisterial biography, The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love's Prophet, where he notes that while Fromm wrote many books that sold millions of copies, and are still in print today, he has nonetheless been largely ignored by North American academics (those in other parts of the world are a different story).

As I've been discovering this is true, a fortiori, of academic theologians, especially Catholics and Orthodox theologians. (Fromm got some attention in the post-war period from Protestants, but most of that dried up long before he died.) This is all the stranger given how many books Fromm wrote on topics so obviously and overwhelmingly amenable to theology: love, hope, sin, freedom, illusion, idolatry, and much else.

His 1941 book Escape from Freedom is one I am also re-reading, and it has key insights also unassimilated by Catholics, but very much in need of being considered today as I shall show.

In going back to Fromm as I am doing, I realized I also have to go back to Ivan Illich, sometime Catholic priest and powerful critic of many social institutions, including churches and schools. I read his Deschooling Society in the 90s, and it has remained with me as a singular challenge.

I also spy a new collection of his writings that I'm looking forward to reading: The Powerless Church, just republished late last year. About this book the publisher tells us this:

Dalmatian-Austrian philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and radical cultural critic Ivan Illich is best known for polemical writings such as Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality, which decried Western institutions of the 1970s. This collection brings together Illich’s shorter writings from his early publications through the rise of his remarkable intellectual career, making available works that had fallen into undue obscurity.

A fervent critic of Western Catholicism, Illich also addressed contemporary practices in fields from education and medicine to labor and socioeconomic development. At the heart of his work is his opposition to the imperialistic nature of state- and Church-sponsored missionary activities. His deep understanding of Church history, particularly the institutions of the thirteenth century, lent a historian’s perspective to his critique of the Church and other twentieth-century institutions.

The Powerless Church and Other Selected Writings, 1955–1985 comprises some of Illich’s most salient and influential short works as well as a foreword by philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Featuring writings that had previously appeared in now-defunct publications, this volume is an indispensable resource for readers of Illich’s longer works and for scholars of philosophy, religion, and cultural critique.

What to Buy for all the Bishops in Your Life

If you are wondering what to get all the Catholic bishops and clergy in your life as Christmas bears down on us in exactly one month, why not try a copy of a new book which has the merit of being short and quite blunt, sparing them the time and effort of trying to figure out what the author really means? If you and they are frustrated by lack of concrete proposals for reform in the Church to deal with the endless sex abuse crisis, think about sending a crate of these books to every official in your chancery and parish office.

I refer, of course, to my own book, Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power. It comes with a slew of endorsements from bishops, theologians, and other scholars of Roman Catholic, Anglican, Eastern Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox backgrounds.

You can read about the genesis of the book here and here. You can also read about one of my major themes and interlocutors in the book here. If you want a short radio interview on the book, here I am on our local NPR affiliate.

And finally here is the publisher's blurb:

The most serious sex abuse crisis in Catholic history demands the most serious and far-reaching response. This book is a contribution to that response. Its proposed changes would revolutionize Catholic structures from the parish to the papacy. Unlike other revolutions, however, this one is anchored with great care in both history and theology, including that of the various Eastern Churches.

This book shows that the current monocausal explanations of abuse and cover-up (either “clericalism” or “homosexuality”) both overlook the structural issues of governance. The current centralized structures, which monopolize power in the hands of bishops and popes, must be reformed and in their place new structures of local accountability implemented, in order for the Church to move past the present crisis.

This is a radical book in the original sense of the word: a return to root practices that structured much of Catholic life for hundreds of years. It is thus a deeply “traditionalist” book rooted strongly in venerable Christian practices, but is also an openly “liberal” book that argues in favor of liberating the laics so they can resume with voice and vote their rightful role in the councils of governance.

Episcopal Hearts of Stone

The last, and arguably most "radical" chapter in my Everything Hidden Shall be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power concerns the episcopate. It was only very late in the process of writing and revising that I included the recommendations in there for major changes to the episcopate based on reading reports (especially in Pennsylvania and California) of how utterly--indeed, demonically--cold, callous, calculated, and uncaring bishops were and are in their responses to people whose lives have been destroyed by the abuse, leading not a few of them to death at their own hands, through drug overdoses, or by similar means. It's not for nothing that Leonard Shengold has called child sex abuse "soul murder."

It was bad enough that bishops moved abusers around and protected the Church's assets first and last. What was truly sickening was their complete refusal even to see the victims as fellow human beings. They were an abstract category--a problem to be made to go away as quickly and quietly as possible, with mendacious promises of reform preferably, a lean cheque if necessary, and a confidentiality agreement in either case.

In reflecting on this, I realized, as Claudia Rapp and others have shown, that bishops have functioned as a self-protecting elite insulated from real life for some 1500 years, and the most important, and most pathological, criteria for membership in this elite is disdain for normal sexual and more generally human intimacy. More recently this episcopal elitism (the nastiest strain of the disease Pope Francis has often criticized as "clericalism") is made infinitely worse by the system which processes and produces these developmentally arrested men, first by requiring celibacy of them, and second by sending them to seminaries at unhealthy ages. In some cases they are taken out of human relationships as early as adolescence, sent to a high-school seminary with all men, then a regular seminary with all men, and on to ordination in a male-only presbyterate.

All the while they are told never to have "particular friendships" or really even human feelings and regular relationships. In addition, they are coddled and catered to, swanning about in collars and cassocks even before ordination, expecting and receiving the "docility" of "pious laity" whom they will shortly be given license to boss about however they see fit. This is a sick system stripped of humanity, and one way (there are many others in the book) to begin an overdue reform is to return, as I argued, to a married episcopate so that these men who are made bishop come from in-tact families and themselves remain human beings molded, humbled, and humanized by having children of their own whose very presence will give hierarchs an otherwise missing element of basic sympathy when confronted with child sex abuse victims.

Along comes a new report confirming yet again the need for such reforms. This story concerns the East Coast. I happen to know a priest of the Archdiocese of New York (to which Egan was "promoted" because, hey, he was good with money and that's all these men really care about) who said of Cardinal Egan (and not a few of his predecessors) that one always and only met the cardinal-archbishop of New York: one never met a human being. That is true for virtually all bishops today.

One is here put in mind of Julia Marchmain's regretful comments (in Waugh's Brideshead Revisited) about the man she foolishly ended up marrying, Rex Mottram, when thinking of Egan and others: “He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory....He was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.” Mottram was solely concerned with money and reputation. He would make a perfect candidate for the episcopacy.

That is clearly confirmed in the report of Egan's handling of cases with open contempt and a total lack of humanity. If he has made it as far as purgatory, I hope he's there for a billion years repenting of this and begging the Lord to replace whatever blackened stone he had rattling around in his chest with a beating, human heart of flesh to experience the pain and suffering he inflicted, or allowed to happen, on all the victims in his several dioceses. In a Church concerned about justice, we should pray that the memories of the victims are indeed eternal, but that memories of Egan and his ilk be subject to damnatio memoriae. 

Preserving and Recreating the Institutions We Need

Over at The Catholic Thing I make my debut in its pages arguing in response to recent writings of Massimo Faggioli and Robert Barron about the sex abuse crisis. Both have good points to make, but neither goes far enough in contemplating the institutional reforms we need, including the recovery of long-lost synodal institutions at all levels with voice and vote to force parish clergy and diocesan bishops alike to be accountable in real, serious, permanent, and inescapable ways. Absent such enforced mechanisms of accountability, the crisis will never end.

The article, of course, is a bit of a précis of a book you should be reading and sending to 932910 of your closest friends: Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power.

But don't just take my recommendation: how about that of the Romanian Catholic Bishop John Michael Botean of the Eparchy of Canton, who said this about the book:

"Adam DeVille's vision is at once forward-thinking and eminently traditional. Without a doubt this is a book that can raise quite a stir. And I hope it will. It deserves serious, prayerful reading."

Or the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, widely regarded as one of the finest theological minds in any Christian tradition in the last four decades:

“This book eloquently and cogently pleads for the Roman Catholic Church to be released from the captivity of an over-centralized, over-individualized model of authority, arguing that this model is at the heart of many other dysfunctionalities. A sober, theologically informed, and very significant work.”

Or the always sober-minded Russell Shaw, who worked for the American episcopal conference for many years and has written his own book about changes needed in the Church. He said this of my book:

“Readers with open minds and generous hearts will find this a provocative, helpful contribution to the badly needed debate about reform in the Church at a moment when reform is so urgently needed.”

The other endorsements you can read here, or inside the front cover of the book, which you can order here.

Desiderata for Bishops and Dioceses

With the news that arguably the most abused diocese in the country is set to receive a new bishop, herewith some desiderata for the new bishop of Wheeling-Charleston to set an example for all the others:

First, if he wants to be taken seriously, he will begin by ensuring parish councils have power to decide with their pastors on an annual budget and then require an annual outside audit. Nothing above, say, $500 can be spent without signatures of both pastor and council.

Second, the same will be done at the diocesan level: the synod meets each year to pass a budget, and then the diocesan council, empowered by and representative of the synod, works out the budget with the bishop and they and he are accountable to each other and the wider diocese for all monies spent, and for ensuring an annual outside independent audit.

Third, the bishop and parish council are also mutually empowered and accountable for the selection and removal of clergy. When a new priest is to be introduced, the parish council first must see his entire personnel file and be told by the bishop under oath that he has no evidence of any abuse and is not hiding abusers by shuffling them around.

Absent these changes at a minimum no bishop anywhere can expect to recover one shred of credibility, authority, or trustworthiness. All this (and much more) is argued in more detail in my new book, Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power.

Magical Episcopal Thinking

Catholic apologists make much hay insisting that faith is not magic, and is compatible with reason. Catholics frequently talk about their own intellectual tradition as something very considerable, demonstrating a long tradition of thinking about big questions in a rigorous and serious way. And yet, when it comes to the ongoing abuse of sex, money, and power in the Church today, the default for virtually all bishops, and most others, is to magic up some spiritualized solution that will in fact solve nothing: just pray and fast more, little children! (The other, equally fatuous, approach is to scapegoat: if only we didn't have all these gays, or this "heretical" pope, or these bad bishops, or these "lavender mafias" then everything would be grand.)

There is no serious reasoning here. It is partial, ideological, and blind. One can cite, week after week, examples of this magical "thinking," this infantile exercise in wish fulfillment exactly as Freud demonstrated. It comes from those who identify as liberal, progressive, conservative, and traditional--and just about everyone in-between. This time it comes from Phoenix, whose bishop published his weekly column, ostensibly offering practical solutions for people to overcome these crises. While claiming that "problems and crises must not be over-spiritualized," he does exactly that by mindlessly rehearsing all the same old procedures in place for years now which have not prevented the crisis, and then by even more mindlessly exhorting people to just somehow believe more! believe harder! have stronger faith!

What is absent, of course, is any admission of what bishops should do, both immediately and by way of long-term reform. Instead, it's the usual pious guff designed to deflect from their own culpable wickedness and to inflict guilt on the people of God in the usually pathological way we have come to expect from hierarchs. (The Spanish Jesuit psychoanalyst Carlos Dominguez-Morano is the absolute best person here for diagnosing these psychopathological dynamics masquerading as piety.)

Thus the Latin ordinary of Phoenix claims: "Scandals are the manifestation of a crisis of faith. Therefore, scandals will be healed by strong faith, spiritual courage and heroic confidence in our Lord." This, as I argued here, is a tendentious and obvious twisting of the very meaning of "scandal," which today only means one thing: bad PR for the bishop.

And as I argued in Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power, drawing on Dominguez-Morano and others, the fetish for "spiritualized" solutions reflects a crypto-monophysite ecclesiology which will only continue to harm the Church.

Rather than indulging in this nonsense, what is needed is to begin to talk about power, about structures, and about the unhistorical and theologically unjustifiable monopoly on power held by hierarchs and clerics in the Church today.

My book, taking with deadly seriousness the Church's teaching on original sin, is guided by one adamantine principle: nobody, at any point and for any reason, in any organization--the Church or otherwise--should ever have a monopoly on power. The lure of libido dominandi (original sin's chief and perennially tempting manifestation) is too great, and ordination does nothing to lessen it (another form of magical thinking). The reforms we must begin to put in place in the Church today must ensure going forward that nobody ever again has a monopoly on decision-making power--whether over the appointment of parish clergy, the diocesan budget, or any other major matter.

Laics, clerics, and hierarchs must learn to hold each other accountable. Absent this, the abuse crisis will continue sine die.

Episcopal Elites and "Lay Involvement" in the Abuse Crisis

Perhaps some day the concept of "lay involvement" in ecclesial governance will not be treated as though it were a rare strand of plague needing special handling by men in hazmat suits trying their best to contain this contagion as much as possible. Certainly the grudging acknowledgement of "lay involvement" by the American bishops earlier this month is evidence of this, as is the fact that the motu proprio of the pope in May, which I discussed here, finding it insultingly inadequate (to put it mildly), has no "lay involvement" at all but fatuously continues to rely on bishops to police each other. It is clear that the involvement of laics--a term much to be preferred for all the reasons Nicholas Afanasiev gave--is feared by churchmen today not for any remotely theological, still less doctrinal, reasons, but merely because of prejudice, class snobbery, and a fear of loss of status.

As Claudia Rapp, Peter Brown, and others have shown, bishops have increasingly since the fourth century been part of the elites of empire and other societies in which they found themselves--and that is still true today. It is of course the nature of elites that they are exclusive and seek to police the boundaries of whom they permit to enter and whom they exclude. And elites with a monopoly on power are all the more fierce in protecting the same, as bishops undeniably have and do, especially if there is also money on the line--and as the recent news out of West Virginia makes clear, there is cash flowing about freely from one oleaginous hand to another. The episcopal sense of entitlement and privilege remains unabated even at this late hour. Who among us wouldn't fear the loss of constantly eating in the best restaurants, drinking the finest single malt, and having fresh flowers delivered every day--on someone else's dime?

Complicating matters in the "Catholic imaginary," as I call it in Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power (Angelico, 2019), is the role pseudo-memories play of certain high-profile examples of "lay involvement" in the Church--e.g., Henry VIII vs. Thomas More and the pope; or Henry IV and Gregory VII at Canossa; or Napoleon and Pius VII. These linger on today unconsciously to safeguard the future from any "lay involvement." As Adam Phillips says, "memories always have a certain future in mind." The Catholic, and certainly papal, imaginary since the nineteenth century has designed its power structures precisely with these paranoid pseudo-memories of power-mad tyrants in mind. But we have, thankfully, no German and French emperors or English kings to contend with today, and thus none of these are therefore remotely germane. These convenient bogeymen cannot be allowed to prevent the people of God from playing their rightful part in the careful ways I outline in the book.

Those proposals are not, as some ignorant fool who has not read the book claimed on Twitter, a proposal to make the Catholic Church Anglican--a specious suggestion I dealt with here. Precisely what the book does is to take what is good and useful in both Anglican and Armenian (and other Eastern Orthodox) structures and reconfigure them in a Catholic context. Nobody, least of all I, thinks having no serious primate with real power--as bedevils both Anglicanism and Orthodoxy--is a solution to anything.

Nor are these proposals modern. It is pathetic to see how even hierarchs (actually, it's not pathetic: nothing about these men surprises me any more) are totally ignorant of their own history, and thus scrambling after various "oversight boards" and "metropolitan models" that have all the substance and seriousness of diagrams doodled on the back of one of their cocktail napkins at the Waldorf Astoria. There is no need, dear leaders, to invent things from scratch: look at your own history and tradition to rediscover the role of synods at every level of the Church. If you need a reminder of what they are and how they function, then see Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed.

On Reforming Diocesan Boundaries and Structures

I was at the twenty-third Orientale Lumen conference in Washington this past week. Capably organized as ever by the indefatigable and ever-generous Jack Figel, its sessions were moderated this year by my friend Will Cohen, author of The Concept of Sister Churches in Orthodox-Catholic Relations Since Vatican II.

Fascinating papers were given by several people, including Anastacia Wooden, whose work on Afanasiev I noted here; by Hyacinthe Destivelle, whose book The Moscow Council has been widely read; and by my friend and co-editor Daniel Galadza, author of Liturgy and Byzantinization in Jerusalem, which is, he tells us, coming out in December in a much more affordable paperback edition.

I too gave a paper--this year's theme was on the old notion of "One Bishop to One City?"--and I drew on my new book Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power, in which my last chapter talks about restructuring dioceses, especially in the Latin Church, so that they are no longer huge corporations with archbishops, junior vice-presidents called "auxiliary bishops," and massive, dehumanized bureaucracy spending millions to hide abuse and abusers--and to hide the slush fund abusive bishops use for booze, flowers, and rent-boys.

It was, as ever, a good conference even if for many people today this whole ecumenical venture seems increasingly ignored by the vast majority of Christians. In my experience, dating back to 1991 in Australia, it has always been that way, alas.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Elsewhere you can read my thoughts on the new set of canonical norms recently proffered by the bishop of Rome as some kind of system to help deal with sex abuse in the Church. As I argue there, the system is fatally flawed by (quelle surprise!) concentrating everything in the hands of bishops, not one of whom is to be trusted on this issue.

Part of the long-term challenge is to assist the Church in moving away from the Catholic imaginary in which it is assumed the current system is the only possible one; worse, the current system is the only supposedly "orthodox" one. That is false and ignorant of history and theology alike, for all the reasons I argue at length in my Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power (Angelico, 2019).

Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Catholic Blurbers

Given their role in the on-going sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, I rather expect that most bishops, if they still perform a nightly examen after Compline, count it as a good day if they have managed to stay out of the headlines. Bishops are not generally known for sticking their mitred heads above parapets even in the most placid of circumstances. But today more than ever they say and do as little as possible to clean up the mess they have both created and presided over, giving clear evidence that whatever courage they might once have had has deserted almost the entire lot of them.

One noble and admirable exception to that is Bishop John Michael Botean, the only Romanian Catholic bishop on this continent. His courage was hugely on display in 2003 when he openly and fiercely opposed the Iraq War in a way that no other Christian leader on this continent did. His opposition was of course based on clear Catholic teaching, and has only been vindicated in view of the disasters which befell that country, and the wider region, in the last sixteen years, not least the virtual disappearance of one of the oldest indigenous Christian populations in the world.

I first met him at the Orientale Lumen conference in 2011, and shortly afterwards at a lecture I was invited to give in his cathedral in Canton, OH. In 2015 he came to the conference on the life and work of Dorothy Day that Lance Richey and I, with many others, put on at the University of Saint Francis. We edited and published the proceedings as Dorothy Day and the Church: Past, Present, and Future.

As I was wondering if any bishops would read, let alone endorse, my Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power (Angelico Press, 2019), his name immediately leapt to the top of the list of possible candidates. Even amidst his very heavy schedule and many burdens, he made time to read my book and then write an extremely gracious blurb about it:

“Not since reading John L. McKenzie’s Authority in the Church have I found myself so moved to challenge the quotidian assumptions regarding episcopal authority that have so easily worked their way into my own ministry. The sexual abuse crisis in the Church today is in many ways the result of the religiously-endorsed exercise of dominative power. The present work cannot be overlooked without the risk of perpetuating the same dynamic. We need not agree with every one of DeVille’s analyses or prescriptions—and I do not—to find in this book a roadmap toward recovery. His vision is at once forward-thinking and eminently traditional. Without a doubt this is a book that can raise quite a stir. And I hope it will. It deserves serious, prayerful reading.” —MOST REV. JOHN MICHAEL BOTEAN, Romanian Catholic Bishop of Canton, OH

The other person I sent the book to is the Archpriest Lawrence Cross of Melbourne, whom I have been working with on the question of married priests (he is himself a widower), and also on the advancement of the Russian Catholic Church throughout the world after a period of absolutely shameful neglect by Rome.

He has told me how valuable he found the vision I attempted to sketch out in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy, so I felt reasonably confident that he would be interested in Everything Hidden Shall be Revealed, as indeed he was when he sent us the following blurb:

“Searing and fearless, Adam DeVille humanizes the meaning of the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church and calls for a radical reconfiguration of the exercise of power. The demythologizing of clerics is beyond urgent, as is the rejection of church-distorting papal idolatry—both requiring retrieval of the best models of the Christian East, where the conciliar nature of the Orthodox and Eastern Catholic traditions has long recognized that authoritarian clerical oversight is a threat to the fundamental nature of the Church. Professor DeVille’s vision will frighten many a hierarch, because only a Church in which bishops, clergy, and laity share authority (in equal-but-different relationships) can rescue Catholicism from cultural and spiritual shipwreck.” —RT. REV. ARCHPRIEST LAWRENCE CROSS, St. Kilda East, Melbourne, Australia.

Cross and Botean are of course Eastern Catholics, so I wanted to make sure that Latin Catholics also gave me their views on what I wrote. Here, naturally, the challenges I posed were going to be a bigger hurdle than for those of us in the East to imagine. And that is, fairly enough, represented in the blurbs received from Russell Shaw, whose Nothing to Hide: Secrecy, Communication, and Communion in the Catholic Church I read with great profit when it first emerged in 2008. I remember clearly thinking that year that Shaw's book was very courageous. I did not expect a sometime officer of the American episcopal conference to be that outspoken, but he was. So I thought perhaps he might be interested in my book, and he was, saying of it:

“In Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed, Adam DeVille has written a book with something for everybody to hate and something to incline everybody (or almost everybody) to nod and say, ‘Yes, that’s exactly right.’ Either way, readers with open minds and generous hearts will find this a provocative, helpful contribution to the badly needed debate about reform in the Church at a moment when reform is so urgently needed.” —RUSSELL SHAW, former Secretary for Public Affairs of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops/United States Catholic Conference; author of Nothing to Hide: Secrecy, Communication, and Communion inthe Catholic Church

Another Latin Catholic, writing in a similar fashion about my book, is Christopher Ruddy of the Catholic University of America. He has written an important and useful book on Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, whom I have long found very profitable and insightful, and drew on in both my books for important ecclesiological insights. Ruddy's comment in some ways echoes Shaw's:

“Intelligent and provocative, this book is written out of a deep love for the Church. One needn’t agree with DeVille on every point to profit from his perceptive analysis of the present ecclesial situation and from his proposals for reform.” —CHRISTOPHER J. RUDDY, Associate Professor of Systematic Theology, Catholic University of America and author of The Local Church: Tillard and the Future of Catholic Ecclesiology and Tested in Every Way: The Catholic Priesthood in Today's Church.

Finally, returning Eastward, special mention goes to Michael Martin, who played several invaluable roles behind the scenes in getting the book into print. I have previously interviewed him on here about his work in sophiology, The Submerged Reality. About my book he was very generous in saying:

“In this timely, courageous, and, certainly, controversial book, theologian Adam DeVille examines the current (and seemingly perpetual) crisis in the Church and the culture and assumptions that allowed it to take root and flourish. Deploying exceptional knowledge of Church history and awareness of ecclesial structures both inside and outside the Catholic Church, DeVille deconstructs the ruling idols of the Catholic imaginary and cuts to the core of the rampant pathologies haunting the ecclesial psyche. Along the way he exposes the all too often warped and anachronistic practices that have contributed to Catholicism’s current predicament. Turning to Freud, DeVille follows the import of Christ’s directive to ‘call no man father’ (Matt. 23:9), then offers alternative structures that would steady the bark of the Church, broaching even the possibility not only of a married priesthood, but of married bishops. In Everything Hidden ShallBe Revealed, Adam DeVille summons the necessary courage to face this fateful moment with brutal honesty, but not without hope.” —MICHAEL MARTIN, author of Transfiguration: Notes Toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything.

Ratzinger's Guilty Conscience

I thought I'd wait until the immediate rush of commentary on Ratzinger's latest letter had passed in order to see how those comments have shaped up. There has, of course, been the predictable fawning over his letter from the usual crowd, who find in it confirmation of all their devoutly held ideological nostrums about sex and the 60s. I have said over the years that for some liberal Catholics, including many in my native Canada, it's always 1968; but what I didn't realize until now is that Ratzinger the supposed "conservative" and "traditionalist" is himself un soixante-huitard of the most intransigent sort.

"1968" is clearly for him what Vamik Volkan calls a "chosen trauma" conveniently invoked to justify all sorts of things--bad liturgy, bad moral theology, bad priests abusing kids--but nary a word about bad bishops or popes who were themselves abusers or participated in a cover-up, and who bear sole responsibility for advancing to the episcopate the men now resigned in disgrace, deposed from office, or jailed. Ratzinger's silence in this regard is deafening.

But there has also been some interesting commentary "across the aisle" as it were--or, perhaps better, commentary which is not playing to type in some of the things it both criticizes and praises. One of the most interesting things I have noted in the Church in the past year or so is the turning upside down of a lot of the politics. Thus we find Ratzinger's letter being criticized by people often labelled "conservative" and those often considered "liberal" are seen criticizing him in different ways--while both sides end up agreeing with each other in certain limited and unexpected ways. In witness of this, see Carl Olson's editorial on Ratzinger's letter, and Massimo Faggioli's column in Commonweal. But do not fail to consider Justin Tse's fascinatingly original essay which surfaces many of Ratzinger's caricatures while also considering the problems raised by being too much in thrall to von Balthasar's aesthetics.

Apart from Christopher Altieri's column in the Catholic Herald, every word of which deserves careful re-reading, virtually nobody looked at the problems of power and structures in Ratzinger's letter, which fairly drips with sneering condescension at those issues, an astonishingly adolescent reversal from a nonagenarian who, more than almost any other major Catholic leader of the 20th century, had written more extensively and more intelligently on such reforms, and done so going back at least to 1970. For him, at this very late hour, to pour scorn on the very concept of structural and political reform in the Church today can only be taken an an attempt to buffer his conscience from the slings and arrows of his super-ego, which is plainly rebuking him for his failures in this regard, leading to the acute expressions of guilt we find in the text.

But before I criticize him, let me note and underscore that what follows is written by someone who, until this week, ceded nothing to anybody in his respect for the writings of Joseph Ratzinger. I have been reading them since at least 1997, the year I was received into the Catholic Church when my sponsor gave me a copy of Ratzinger's Church, Ecumenism, and Politics: New Endeavors in Ecclesiology as a gift to commemorate my reception. After that I quickly devoured other Ratzinger books: The Feast of Faith, Called to Communion, Principles of Catholic Theology, Milestones, and The Spirit of the Liturgy. This latter, along with Feast of Faith, are two books I have assigned to students for more than a decade in courses on liturgy.

If you read my first book, Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy, you will see there my giving him credit for being a real pioneer in certain ecclesiological trajectories. I defended him publicly over the years from people--including those in Catholic theology faculties--who were content to slander him without ever having read a single book by him. (My book has one of my favourite pictures of him on the front cover.)

That picture conveys something of the very high hopes I had for his papacy. But my exuberance was misplaced for in the end his papacy did only two things of significance: the enormous good of Summorum Pontificum, liberating the liturgy for local communities to decide; and resigning his office, which as I said at the time and have ever after repeated was a wholly welcome burst of iconoclasm of the best sort: a smashing of the false image of the pope as some demiurge, some super-bishop, some sempiternal "father of princes and kings, the ruler of the world" (as the old coronation formula put it). Au contraire: if every other bishop in the world is expected to resign at 75 there is no theologically coherent reason for the bishop of Rome to be held to a different standard. Within all the absurd mewling in reaction to his resignation one found not a word of theology but only the emotional meltdown of an infantilized people.

The only way I can understand this letter is to see it as an attempted justification of his inaction from 2005 to 2013. He failed, as pope, to do many of the things he said should be done, above all in reforming the structures of the Church. For someone who had--starting at least as far back as 1971, and repeatedly in many places--written about the need for such reforms, the fact that he did nothing must be weighed against him. The closest he came to any action was in 2006 when he monkeyed about with the title "patriarch of the West" but then failed to follow up, leading to wholly unnecessary panic on the Orthodox side which I spent no little energy trying to tamp down in a number of articles and lectures--and again addressed in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy.

So he knew and plainly knows the need for structural reforms, and clearly has a guilty conscience in this regard. There is no other explanation for this new text's fatuous question, "Perhaps we should create another Church for things to work out? Well, that experiment has already been undertaken and has already failed." It is impossible to see this as anything other than a counsel of despair of the most cravenly self-justifying sort. Nobody is calling for the creation of another Church, and the desire to reform the one true Church given by Christ is not an "experiment," nor has it "failed": it has not yet been tried, but it must be, precisely to make her pure for Him who is her bridegroom.

Lest we miss the point, he later elaborates by using the standard tactic of people who inhabit a crypto-monophysite ecclesiological imaginary rather than a real Church. Thus he vaguely waves his hand fearfully in the direction of some supposedly sinister thing called "politics" by immediately trying to claim that calls for reform conceal some kind of "political" agenda:

Indeed, the Church today is widely regarded as just some kind of political apparatus. One speaks of it almost exclusively in political categories, and this applies even to bishops, who formulate their conception of the church of tomorrow almost exclusively in political terms.

Perhaps there are bishops who do this (can he name any of them, or cite their writings?). But serious proposals for reconceiving and reconfiguring the Church are not drawn from, say, German polities or American federalism, or the Westminster model of cabinet governance. (Even if they were, there's nothing wrong with such provenance necessarily. The Church has long despoiled the Egyptians in many ways. Does he not remember Dvornik's documenting how the very language and structures we still use--e.g., diocese, prefect, metropolia, province--are taken from the political structures of the Roman Empire?)

Rather, serious proposals for reform are drawn, as I do in Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power from within the Church's tradition fully conceived and broadly understood. They are first and last theological proposals drawn from within, not "secular" or "political" solutions imposed from without. It's time to let go of this bogus binary.

Ratzinger's letter continues: "the crisis, caused by the many cases of clerical abuse, urges us to regard the Church as something almost unacceptable, which we must now take into our own hands and redesign. But a self-made Church cannot constitute hope."

This is another tedious bogeyman. Nobody who is serious, least of all me, regards the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, the "pillar and bulwark of the truth" (I Tim. 3:15), as unacceptable. And nobody is proposing to replace it with a "self-made Church"--whatever that is. This is silliness on stilts.

But it cannot be denied by anybody that the present structures in the Church are plainly and fully unacceptable for they have aided and abetted the present crisis, and are retarding any serious reforms. Such unjustified and unjustifiable structures must be taken up by us, using our hands and minds and brains and gifts, all given by God, to find new forms, new structures, to prevent such abuses--which are always and everywhere abuses of power and sex simultaneously--from ever occurring again. Absent such structural reforms, all the appeals in the world from Ratzinger for better liturgy, for overcoming "atheism," and for "spiritual" reform in the Church will be grossly incomplete and inadequate at best.

Is this "self-made"? As opposed to what? Given his once-brilliant intellect, surely he cannot fondly imagine, like the "Nestorians" in Waugh's uproarious Black Mischief, that the Church, untouched by human hands and fully formed in every respect by God alone, just fell down from heaven during one Good Friday luncheon some years back? Given his ecclesiological self-awareness, he knows the role of humans shaping and re-shaping the structures of the Church--dioceses, conclaves, episcopal elections, parish councils, etc. He himself called for human beings to do more of that re-shaping in his writings going back to at least 1970.

If being "self-made" is bad, why would he call, e.g., for removing many responsibilities out of Rome and back to the regions in the decentralization he advocated in, e.g., God and the World? If "self-made" reforms are bad, then surely Summorum Pontificum should be retracted for it was his very self that made such reforms possible, along with others--e.g., the Anglican ordinariates. Should we retract those arrangements and pitch out former Anglicans?

Surely these and other reforms proffered by him must be reprobated (by the logic of ecclesiological crypto-monophysites) as "self-made"--or is that only a problem when performed by anyone other than a pope?

Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Orthodox Blurbers

It was really in the summer of 2001, which I spent teaching in Ukraine, that I realized, I suppose, the theme of all my subsequent academic work--which I then decided to begin the following year by enrolling in the doctoral program at the Sheptytsky Institute, which was then in Ottawa. That theme--dare I call it a vocation?--was the promise and problem of papal authority in the eyes of the Orthodox East.

Those who read my dissertation, which was finished in 2008 and published in 2011 as Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy, will know how much time I spent looking at structures of authority in the East and deriving therefrom important lessons for the Western Church, reforms to which I then proposed in light of Orthodox concerns about the modern papacy (which I date largely from Pius IX).

Those who pick up my new book, Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power, will see a similar approach, albeit much more focused at the local and regional levels rather than the universal level which occupied most of my first book. To the extent the pope features here, it is not the structures of his office that I focus on, but the pathological personality cult surrounding him which I challenge sharply. (For some further thoughts on this, see here.)

In both books, there is an especial focus on the Armenian Apostolic Church, a singular body from which Catholics have a very great deal to learn. But other Orthodox Churches--the OCA, the Greek, and the Antiochian among them--also feature in the book. It is, then, very gratifying that senior and internationally respected and prominent Orthodox scholars have said such kind things about the new book. (For somewhat of an overview of the book's approach and rationale, see here; for some thoughts on Anglican 'blurbers' see here.)

Given the focus on the Armenian Church, I was very glad when Vigen Guroian, whom I have been reading and learning from for twenty years now, agreed to read the book and write a blurb for it, saying:

Adam DeVille begins his book with the jolting pronouncement that ‘everything hidden must be revealed’ regarding the present sex-abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. But this is only the first step. Writing with exceptional passion, he turns next, in an unexpected (but welcome) way, to a serious consideration of Orthodox ecclesiology and existing Orthodox ecclesiastical arrangements in order to identify a path that might allow Roman Catholics to move past ‘the current papal-centric structure’ and toward a Church in which authority and decision-making power is more jointly shared by laity, clergy, and bishops. Orthodox may benefit from DeVille’s studied perspective on their own churches, which well illustrates how renewal and reform might be accomplished for them as well.” —VIGEN GUROIAN, Armenian Orthodox theologian, author of The Orthodox Reality: Culture, Theology, and Ethics in the Modern World.

The Orthodox Reality is his newest book. But I used one of his very early works--Incarnate Love --in a course on Eastern Christian ethics I designed more than a decade ago now.

More recently, in a course on biomedical ethics and the pastoral care of the dying, I especially appreciated being able to use his very insightful Life's Living toward Dying: A Theological and Medical-Ethical Study.

Guroian has also written some interesting books on gardening, which I praised in a long essay published elsewhere more than a decade ago. I did not expect to like the books as I have long been an avowed indoorsman, but Guroian forced me to reconsider this.

Apart from the Spanish Jesuit psychoanalyst Carlos Dominguez-Morano (discussed here, though I will be returning to him again in coming days), there is one other interlocutor to whom my book is most heavily indebted, a book edited by Michael Plekon, who says this of Everything Hidden:

In this provocative and serious book, Adam DeVille presents radical ways of transforming the Church through a return to synodal and conciliar structures rooted in the traditions of the ancient Church. If there is to be death and resurrection for the Church, a Paschal renewal, then this must be the return of the Church to what it is: the assembly, not just in principle but in practice, of the whole people of God. His is a strong, courageous challenge to an embattled and damaged Church. —THE V. REV. MICHAEL PLEKON, Professor Emeritus, City University of New York.

I have interviewed Plekon many times on here over the past decade. For the most recent such interview, go here and follow the links back to the others.

He has written many wonderful books, but the one I am most indebted to in Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed is the translation Plekon edited of Nicholas Afanasiev's Church of the Holy Spirit. That book is singular and rare in its clarity and boldness of vision, and its refusal to reduce the "laics" to a non-category of "lay" people, that is, people who lack something like ordination or professional standing. It was from Afanasiev (and both Armenian and Anglican experience) that I developed the argument of the necessity for the Catholic church to regard, in her counsels of governance, the laics, clerics, and hierarchs as three equal orders.

Finally I come to what Cyril Hovorun had to say about the book. His was perhaps the most overly generous blurb for the book, making me the most neurotic (but not ungrateful!):

Adam DeVille continues the line of great Catholic theologians who have asked uncomfortable questions and provided unconventional solutions to ecclesiological issues. DeVille takes the baton from the hands Congar, Rahner, Murray, and Küng, in serving the Church with both aggiornamento and ressourcement. But the true source of his inspiration is Eastern Christianity, in its Greek Catholic, Byzantine, and Oriental Orthodox forms, which provide serious challenges to the modern ways of exercising primacy and synodality in the Roman Catholic Church. Without this book, any serious ecumenical discussion between Westerners and Easterners on the church-dividing issues would be incomplete.” —ARCHIMANDRITE CYRIL HOVORUN, director of the Huffington Ecumenical Institute, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA.

I interviewed Hovorun here about his Scaffolds of the Church, an invaluable book that belongs on the reading list of every course in ecclesiology--Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant. I drew on it very much as I was writing Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed. Indeed, parts of Hovorun's book gave me a shot in the arm to argue things more clearly and forcefully than I was once inclined to do. His is a very brave and important book. I also commend to you his newest, Political Orthodoxies, as well as his earlier book Meta-Ecclesiology. 

Has the Pope been reading my Book?

In the newly released Christus Vivit I spy at least two places where the message overlaps with my new book Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power. These two sections would suggest that certain messages seem slowly to be getting through to certain bishops, including the incumbent of Rome, about the multiple problems we group together as the sex abuse crisis. Consider, e.g., this:

42. For example, a Church that is overly fearful and tied to its structures can be invariably critical of efforts to defend the rights of women, and constantly point out the risks and the potential errors of those demands.  Instead, a living Church can react by being attentive to the legitimate claims of those women who seek greater justice and equality.  A living Church can look back on history and acknowledge a fair share of male authoritarianism, domination, various forms of enslavement, abuse and sexist violence (my emphasis).  

I talked here about the fact that people who fatuously wants to reduce this crisis to one solely caused by "the gays" have to deal with the newly emerging data on the abuse of women by clerics in the Church.

Even more clearly the exhortation echoes what I have been saying about the undeniably intertwined crises of sex and power both being abused concomitantly (my emphasis):

98. “Abuse exists in various forms: the abuse of power, the abuse of conscience, sexual and financial abuse.  Clearly, the ways of exercising authority that make all this possible have to be eradicated, and the irresponsibility and lack of transparency with which so many cases have been handled have to be challenged.  The desire to dominate, lack of dialogue and transparency, forms of double life, spiritual emptiness, as well as psychological weaknesses, are the terrain on which corruption thrives”.[53]  Clericalism is a constant temptation on the part of priests who see “the ministry they have received as a power to be exercised, rather than a free and generous service to be offered.  It makes us think that we belong to a group that has all the answers and no longer needs to listen or has anything to learn”.[54]  Doubtless, such clericalism can make consecrated persons lose respect for the sacred and inalienable worth of each person and of his or her freedom.

I address power directly and at length in the book, including the psychology underlying both the "desire to dominate" on the part of clerics, and the equally disturbing desire to be dominated, which one can find in not a few Catholics today, who, like their predecessors going back to the nineteenth century, are only too happy to have the men in black tell them what to do. Both are forms of psychopathology, and the sooner they are rooted out the better. 

Wanted: A Theology of Disobedience

I was gratified to read this week of a French priest flatly insisting that people stop calling him 'father.' That accords with what I argued in Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power. 

I was told by friends/critics who read my book in draft that my calling for an abolition of the practice of automatically conferring the title "father" to clerics would be the hardest bit to swallow in an already challenging book. But here is one priest in France saying the same thing, and in the book I drew on another (Carlos Dominguez-Morano, about whom see below) who also laid out very solid psychological reasons (to say nothing of theology) for abolishing the title "father."

Morano is also extremely critical of notions, and especially practices, of "obedience." On this score, too, he has led me to change my mind. I now regard both notions--of "spiritual paternity" and "obedience as a virtue"--with far more skepticism than I once did.

Indeed, more than twenty years ago now when I was en route to becoming a Catholic, I discovered a facetious phrase in the writings of the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, who spoke about certain converts who “exult in the freedom to submit to authority with wild abandon.” I gladly saw myself as such, and went on to publish several articles extolling ecclesial obedience in the thought of the Jesuits Henri de Lubac and Walter Burghardt as well as John Henry Newman.

I cannot bring myself to read those now. Indeed, part of me wants to find old copies and burn them so that no child, no seminarian, no human being will ever think that he or she must submit to a clerical predator because obedience is a virtue—because he demands obedience “under pain of sin” or “in the name of God” or to receive some favor. These stories have led me increasingly to think that demands for obedience in any organization must always be regarded with suspicion—including, now, the Church.

Indeed, let me put it as strongly as possible: the Church should be held up to more suspicion than any other organization whenever it demands obedience in any matter beyond the strictly doctrinal as set down in, say, the universal catechism. I say this because the Church, unlike so-called secular organizations, is singularly vulnerable to abuses of obedience for two reasons: first, it often demands obedience in the name of God; and second, because it thus covers itself with a theological patina, it can more easily cower and frighten people (“disobeying me is disobeying God!”) who are conveniently bereft of any of the safeguards deliberately built into other organizations to prevent abuses of authority. (We have no “whistleblower” lines anonymously to call; we have no HR department to convene a hearing over sexual harassment.) In other words, in demanding obedience the Church has often, inexcusably, forgotten her own central doctrine of original sin which, as St. Augustine famously showed us, very often manifests itself via libido dominandi.

Augustine, of course, discusses that phrase in the City of God in reference to the Roman Empire and other non-Christian forces rampaging about the world. (John Rist's discussion of Augustine on this point is worth your time.) But the problem is that the Church has often uncritically and unconsciously adopted the language, practices, and structures of the empire and other polities since then. As I tell my students, structures we so commonly use today—e.g.,  “diocese” or “metropolitan” or “pontiff”—are all directly borrowed from the empire. So too our now universal practice of ordaining men in a cursus honorum, requiring them to process through a series of “lesser” offices en route to the greater, mirrors exactly how one advanced through the ranks of the Roman army. At one point the Church would ordain a man directly, not sequentially, to the priesthood or episcopate. But by adopting the Roman cursus we changed our practices of ordination (which I treat here).

We might be tempted to think these are harmless remnants of our Roman past, and perhaps they are. But far less harmless is the borrowing of the habits of hierarchical coercion and enforced obedience accompanied by serious (and sometimes lethal) threats one finds enacted by armies and empires, by modern nation-states—and by the Church. While the Church has not convened a court martial and then carried out a sentence of death on those who go astray, she has not been averse to handing such “offenders” over to the secular government, which shares no such scruples about, e.g., executing homosexuals on the Church’s behalf (as a recently published, and seemingly laudatory translation of a bull of Pope Pius V makes clear).

What we require today, more than ever, is a theology of disobedience that will begin to help the Church disentangle her life from that of imperial interlopers and begin to undo some of the damage causes by a perversion of obedience. This is a conclusion I came to after reading Carlos Dominguez-Morano, Belief After Freud: Religious Faith Through the Crucible of Psychoanalysis (trans. F.J. Montero [Routledge, 2018]). I finished it in a few days last August, but have hardly been able to write about it fully since then. It is a tour de force and deserves a very wide audience. (Its Spanish original is now in its fifth edition, and we can and should encourage such a popular dissemination among anglophone audiences.)

Part of my reticence in speaking about it comes from how many and how powerful are its challenges in some crucial areas not just of practice but of faith. My own thinking about Freud and the analytic traditions following from him--especially in Britain with, e.g., Winnicott, Bion, Klein, Coltart, Bollas, Fairbairn, Guntrip, Phillips and others--has generally inclined towards more "therapeutic" uses, whether in an individual-clinical setting, or in questions like, e.g., the healing of memories. I have not, in other words, thought Freud through in the context of, e.g., the father-son relationship between Jesus and His Father as expressed in the gospels. But Morano does this and more in ways that I have found nobody else comes close to doing. (To the extent that Catholic scholars have engaged Freudian and analytic thought seriously, it is the Jesuits who have done more than most, with Morano writing several books in Spanish over the last two decades on Christianity and psychoanalysis; and, in the anglophone world, the late Jesuit W.W. Meissner being similarly prolific.)

I must confess that when I received Morano's book in the mail in late August I was peeved and put out: for I was then on sabbatical and part of my plan was to write, if not finish, a book I have tentatively called “Theology After Freud,” a book I have been thinking about intermittently for nearly twenty-five years now since studying psychology in Canada, undergoing a classical psychoanalysis there, and ever after trying to integrate analytic thought into my work in ecclesiology, ecumenism, and the healing of memories, especially between Catholic and Orthodox Christians (the subject of my first book). But I quickly came, sincerely and modestly, to thank God that Carlos Dominguez-Morano wrote this book for it is far better and braver than anything I would have attempted.

That is nowhere more in evidence than his reflections on obedience. This book landed in my lap in this summer of endless revelations about sexual abuse, which is always also an abuse of power. And as we are hearing these tales, what is the default response of too many hierarchs to those wondering what can be done? Why, pray and fast, of course! But such seemingly pious exhortations can mask, this acutely perceptive psychoanalyst says, a sinister agenda: “religious power structures have never been indifferent to prayer and have so frequently manipulated it to their advantage…. Prayer finds in power a perfect ally and associate to help pursue certain goals, not always clear in their evangelical motivations.” Those goals, I would suggest, usually include the unspoken domination and enforced silence of the people instructed to pray, for such praying, it is confidently assumed, will be not to ask God to “scatter the proud in the imagination of their hearts” and to “put down the mighty from their [episcopal] thrones” (Luke 1:51-52). One must, therefore, question the motives of those exhorting us to prayer and expecting of us obedience to these and other exhortations and orders:

on these occasions when the subject finds himself in conflict and in disagreement with certain approaches from authority, it is frightening to hear that old ‘pray on it’ advice. Frightening because we are left doubting whether what is really wanted is that the matter is taken up with the God of Jesus of Nazareth or with the god of that figure in the unconscious, the superego.

Dominguez-Morano goes on to argue elsewhere in the book that one of the key lessons of the earthly life of Jesus vis-à-vis his parents, especially revealed in the incident where they find him teaching in the temple at the age of twelve, is that he shows us how to overcome the problem of earthly fathers and their claims to power over us: “Any type of paternal projection on other social figures must be overcome. Nobody on earth can claim paternal authority. Nobody can exert paternal power or protection functions in the Christian community.”

If we refuse such power and paternal functions, we do so, Dominguez-Morano reminds us, because Christ says “You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends” (John 15:14-15). Those who are called to be friends with God must learn to conceive him anew, moving past paternal projections onto priests, bishops, and popes, and all the problems inherent in those. Thus Dominguez-Morano can say that “the Christian should not nostalgically search and long for the father. The father figure dwelling in the psyche of the person must be buried.” Once the paternal image and authority is buried, Dominguez-Morano counsels, it must not be resurrected by us in the secret and perverse ways we so often do. For in the

Christian community, it has to be stated…, the place of the father should remain empty. Father, teacher, or director are not Christian words insofar as they are used to describe a type of interpersonal relationship inside the community. Only God can take that place. 

What does such a radical counsel do to relationships between seminarians and their rector? between priests and their bishop? between students and their professors such as I? How could a Jesuit—famously vowed not just to obedience, as all monastics are, but to special obedience directly to the “holy father” and pope (papa=father!) of Rome—of all people get away with recommending such a radical re-ordering of terminology and relationships within the Church? What would the Church look like—and in particular the Society of Jesus—and how would both operate if we attempted to put this into practice?

Here, precisely as both a good Jesuit and perhaps even more a good psychoanalyst (recall that Freud explicitly expected analysts to exercise what he called “abstinence,” refusing to give directions to patients on how to live their lives), Dominguez-Morano does not say, leaving it up to us to invoke here a perhaps even more famous charism of Ignatius’s society: discernment. In this season of never-ending crisis, we need more than ever to discern how relationships in seminaries and dioceses, in parishes and schools, and religious orders and across the entire Church, can be re-ordered to prevent the abuses that have so often been perpetuated in the name of obedience. As we discern these new structures, relationships, and lines of authority, we must, Dominguez-Morano rightly says, cease patterning ourselves on empires and any other “authoritarian system” in which “domination…fear, and feelings of guilt quite alien to Jesus of Nazareth’s message and to what his message should inspire” are rampant.

At the same time, however, Morano is quite right in saying (even if this needs more development) that he is not calling for an overthrow of the entire idea of obedience in the Church, for to do so can easily give rise to what he calls narcissistic tyranny. Without some order, including obedience to legitimate needs of the community, you can easily have individual egos run amok, creating anarchy and chaos, destroying the very possibility of a "common good" and a communal life, and thereby serving nobody well. Thus he is calling for a much more communal practice of obedience so that it is no longer just a superior and inferior in silence and secrecy making certain decisions without wide consultation and open and forthright discussion in freedom.

The need for such a reconfiguration today is, or should be, obvious to all. My own book Everything Hidden Shall be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power attempts to give several practices of communal discernment and decision-making involving the entire people of God who, once the decision has been made, then submit to it and obey it not because some hierarch feels entitled to demand they do so, but because, by the grace and light of the Holy Spirit, the mind of the entire Church has been moved to commit and obey the Spirit's leadership.