Several years ago, during the question period following a talk I had given, I was asked a series of questions about morality, sin, confession, and forgiveness. I began my response with a few distinctions calculated to show how complex these questions were and was moving on to the next step, an attempt to give some answers, when one man present lost both his patience and his temper. He challenged me angrily:

“Father, why are you fudging around in answering this? You know the answer, every Catholic does! Sex outside of marriage, missing Mass on Sundays, these are mortal sins…and no theological or psychological distinctions can change that! You know too, only too well, that the Catholic Church teaches clearly, and has defined at the Council of Trent, that there is only one way to have serious sin forgiven, confession to a priest. To not say that clearly is to soft-peddle the truth!”

I was searching for a response to this challenge when a lady stood up and, shaking and nearly overcome with emotion, spoke for me: “This is not soft-peddling the truth. I believe that Father is saying…and I’ll tell you why. I had a 19-years-old daughter who was killed in a car accident two years ago. She hadn’t been going to church for over a year before that and she was living with her boyfriend. But she was a good girl, with a good heart, and nobody is going to tell me that she went to hell!”

Recently, at a diocesan conference on the sacrament of reconciliation, I had been explaining how reconciliation, like all sacraments, was a touching of the body of Christ and how, consequently, one could have one’s sins forgiven through touching Christ’s body within Christian community and within Eucharist. I went on to say that I consider the practice of confession a beautiful and important sacrament, one used by the mature….and how I consider the fact that many Christians today no longer practice it a bad sign. However, despite the value and importance of private confession, radically we can, and do, have our sins forgiven through living and worshipping within Christian community and especially through receiving the Eucharist.

Again, I was accused of soft-peddling the truth. The Catholic tradition, I was passionately informed, is that all serious sin can only be forgiven through explicit confession to a priest. I’ve been around long enough to know that this statement is generally perceived as, in fact, being the Catholic tradition on reconciliation and so I have had to think long and hard about this: Am I soft-peddling the truth? Doesn’t the Council of Trent clearly demand private confession as the condition for the forgiveness of serious sin? Is a certain theology of the Incarnation (upon which I base the belief that when one goes to Eucharist or participates otherwise in Christian community one is touching the hem of Christ’s garment and is thus being reconciled) faulty? Am I being influenced by some liberal consensus which, blind to all except its own ideological concerns, is trying to be a surrogate for truth?

These are valid questions, questions all religious teachers who know Christ’s warning about scandalizing little ones had better ask themselves fairly regularly. There are penalties for playing loose with the truth. But there are also dangers the other way, one can dangerously reduce truth. One can also soft-peddle the incarnation. Just as one can lack the courage to affirm hard truths because they demand things which go against the grain, one can just as easily lack the courage to affirm how incredible and far-reaching are the tentacles of the incarnation and how lavish is the mercy of God that is revealed in it. I doubt that any Christian who takes seriously what Jesus taught us about God would want to challenge the lady who claimed that, despite her daughter’s wanderings and her dying without explicit confession, her daughter was surely not in hell.

So what do courage and truth demand we say? That there is no forgiveness for serious sin outside of the explicit sacrament of reconciliation….or that Christian community and the Eucharist are the body of Christ on earth and that when we touch them with even a modicum of sincerity we are healed?

Do courage and truth demand that we take Trent’s statement on private confession to mean that outside of explicit private confession there can be, for any Catholic, no other means of reconciliation….or, do they demand that we take Trent’s statement in its proper context and with all its qualifications and affirm, in the name of Trent, that there are ways outside of explicit confession to have sins forgiven?

Do courage and truth demand that we teach that only Jesus can forgive sin and that, today, that forgiveness is dispensed only through private confession…or do courage and truth demand that we affirm, as does Scripture, that we do not replace the body of Christ, that we are not like his body, nor even that we are his mystical body, but that we are his body, flesh, blood, tangible, in history, the on-going incarnation, and that consequently when we forgive, Christ forgives; when we bind, Christ binds; when we console, Christ consoles; and when that woman loved and forgave her wandering daughter, Christ loved and forgave that wandering daughter?

In what does the greater danger lie…in soft-peddling confession or in soft peddling and reducing the incredible love and forgiveness that are revealed in the incarnation?

This article will, I fear, upset a number of people. Something needs to be said, but, given the levels of hurt, disillusionment, bitterness, anticlerical glee, vicarious over-identification, and just simple gossip that surrounds this issue, nothing meaningful can be said which will not, I fear, deeply offend somebody. There is a lot of hyper and raw nerves around, yet the greater danger lies in remaining silent.

The issue is one which has been prominent in the news in recent months, namely, that of priests and religious brothers being arrested and charged with pedophilia. Every day the list of accusations, revelations, and arrests grows and, with that, every day, pain, confusion, suspicion, and bitterness grow as well. Everyone, save those who feast of gossip and misfortune, has been deeply pained by this. It’s an open sore within the community, especially among Roman Catholics, who, until recently, had a tendency to place their priests on a pedestal. How does one make the adjustment from seeing someone as another Christ to seeing him arrested for sexual assault?

There is, understandably, a lot of paranoia and suspicion around: How far-reaching is this thing? What is the church covering up? Whom can we trust? Are our kids safe around rectories and sacristies?

Beyond this, these events have made clerical celibacy, itself, the object of suspicion. Omnipresent now is the idea that priests are prone to this type of perversity because they are celibate. Thus, for example, in the suburbs where I live, the local newspaper polled a number of Catholics at a local supermarket. Without a single exception, each one felt that clerical celibacy was at the root of this.

What’s to be said in the face of all this? There’s over-reaction and there’s under-reaction. We have too much of both. What’s a proper reaction?

All reactions should begin with compassion for the victims. They, after all, have been most hurt. This compassion must be very concrete, not just ideological. There must be real compensation and real help given, psychological, spiritual and financial. Part of this reaction must also be the recognition of the seriousness of the crime. Something has been wounded inside of these persons which, this side of the resurrection, can never be fully put right again. Any trivialization of that is not just an under-reaction, but is itself criminal.

However, such compassion must be sharply distinguished from something else which looks very similar but which is itself another form of victimization, namely, the tendency some people have to vicariously and neurotically over-identify themselves with these victims. This parades itself as a compassion and crusade. It is only the latter, not the former. Real compassion manifests itself by actual and concrete outreach towards a victim and not in the claiming of that victim for one’s own ideological or curriculum vitae purposes. Genuine compassion aids the healing process. Vicarious over-identification, for all its fervor and good intention, is counterproductive in that, in its further sowing of hatred and polarization, like swelling around a wound, it delays and positively hinders healing.

Secondly, we must see these revelations as a knife lancing a wound. The truth sets us free. A wound open to light and air can heal. The church and the priesthood will survive. In the long run, both will be healthier. Moreover, the adverse publicity and the civil lawsuits will force us to screen clerical candidates more carefully as well as take more seriously any kind of sexual deviance among priests. Bishops, religious provincials, seminary rectors, and parish councils are all learning, under fire, some valuable lessons. Things will be better in the future.

Thirdly, something needs saying which most newspaper reports and other commentaries, radio and television, have not always brought out. For whatever reasons, these have been reluctant to state that pedophilia is not proportionately higher among Roman Catholic priests than it is among other professions. In fact, statistically, it is slightly lower among Roman Catholic clergy than among the male population at large. Moreover, it is not higher among celibates than among married men. Translated, all this means that your kids, statistically, run no higher risk around priests and religious brothers than around anyone else, including their own fathers.

Pedophilia is a disease, and a very complex one at the. Like alcoholism it plays no favorites but ravages priests and laity, celibates and non-celibates, alike. Celibacy, whatever its other merits or dysfunctions, is not the culprit. Like many other factors it can be complicitous, but of itself it is not the issue.

Finally, we may not withhold compassion from the victimizers themselves. Despite their crime, there is, I’m sure, more than one good thief among them. Christ died among, and for, people like them, and us. The gravity of their offense must, with a certain brutality, rule out all trivialization of the crime, but to withhold compassion and understanding from them is, on our part, the sign of a small mind and of even a smaller heart. We are dealing here with an illness, a disease, not with maliciousness. Moreover, many of these men were themselves, as children, victims of abuse. Further, few persons have ever had to endure as public and as humiliating a crucifixion as they have suffered. Any heart not overly preoccupied with its own hurts and narcissisms will have a compassion that, at some point, embraces these men as well.

Morris West once said: sin, sex, and suffering form perhaps the most constant trinity within human experience. How true that is!

The final word must be the word prayer. When so many are hurt and hurting, our hearts must move towards prayer…for the victims, the victimizers, the community, and for forgiveness and healing so that, eventually, for all, there may be a new day.

A new word recently entered the English vocabulary – yuppies. The term may not sound very serious, but the reality it connotes and describes is one of the significant social and moral developments within recent times. What is a yuppie?

At a simple level, the word abbreviates the phrase, young urban professional (with the implied connotation of being upwardly mobile). But that is more of an etymology than a definition. What really is a yuppie? We guide our lives more by unconscious mythology and inchoate feelings than we do by rationality and conscious philosophy, and so I will define the term by a series of slogans: quality of life, upward mobility, the pursuit of excellence, material comfort, and the movement towards privacy and individualism.

Since the appeal here is to understand through feeling, I will not try to expatiate on these slogans.

Suffice to say that the unconscious, and in many cases the conscious, ideal that moves people today is that of success, of moving up the ladder, of being rich, of having a beautiful body, of being well-dressed, of having prestige, of luxuriating in material comfort, of achieving optimally (but in comfort) everything that is potentially attainable within our limits. In many cases, this brings with it unashamed ambition and the expressed desire to leave the pack behind. Central to being a yuppie is to set oneself, through excellence, above others. This, most naturally, brings with it an excessive need for individualism and privacy. The yuppie ideal is to have the optimum of both of these.

Obviously, not all of these things are bad, or novel. People have always wanted these things and the myths of the past (rags to riches, work hard and get ahead) hardly seem different. Further, there is nothing immoral in these things in themselves, nor is the emphasis on excellence something that should be prophetically challenged. What is novel, and less moral, about the yuppie phenomenon is that the pursuit of excellence and the hankering after an ever-higher quality of life is tied to an explicit philosophy of life within which unbridled individualism, selfishness, and idiosyncratic development are unabashedly held up as virtue.

Salvation lies in self-development, pure and simple. Everything…family, community, church, morality, service to others, sacrifice…. Takes its place, makes sense, and has value only insofar as it enhances idiosyncratic development. In Greek, the word IDIOS means “a movement towards one’s own.” What the yuppie espouses and nurtures, both inside of self and within society, is precisely the idiosyncratic, the movement towards self. Self-development is pursued with all the gravity and asceticism that was formerly reserved for religion because, for the yuppie, self-development is salvation, it is the religious project.

How deeply we are influenced by this ideal is evident in a variety of ways. Among other things, we see it by looking at what we read and by looking at what attracts us. When we survey the best-seller lists for non-fiction books in recent years, we see that virtually every one of these books has to do with achievement, the lure of success, the price of success, the quality of our lifestyles, and the pursuit of excellence: e.g., Iacocco, Jane Fonda’s Workout Book, In Pursuit of Excellence, From Backyard to NHL.

We also see this in the proclivity we have for the rich and the famous. Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, describes the 1983 commencement exercises at Yale University. Several honorary degrees were awarded, including one to Mother Teresa. As she and the others, each in turn, received their degrees, the audience applauded appropriately, but with, as Postman says, a slight hint of reserve and impatience, “for it wished to give its heart to the final recipient who waited shyly in the wings.” As the details of her achievements were read, many of the audience left their seats and surged towards the stage. Finally, when the name of the final recipient was announced, Meryl Streep, the audience “unleashed a sonic boom of affection, enough to wake the New Haven dead.” I have nothing against Meryl Streep. She is a great actress, and, for all I know, perhaps a great human being as well. The point of recounting this is the audience’s response. In the end, their applause represents a religious response, the new ET CUM SPIRITUM TUUM.

There is a new Lord stalking western culture and that audience just acknowledged his spirit. The yuppie phenomenon, despite the fluffy superficial sound of the term itself, is a major event in our time. The change is not for the better. As long as we make a religion out of the quality of life, material comfort, the pursuit of excellence, and individualism, we can forget about genuine community, any sense of the corporate, social justice, the preferential option of the poor, and any ideal, religious or otherwise, that takes us beyond ourselves.

When the most-read periodical within our society is People Magazine, when Dallas is the most watched TV show in the world, and when we are impatient to move along Mother Teresa so that we can get to the real event, Meryl Streep, then the lives and the ideals of the rich and famous have indeed replaced the life of Christ as our religious ideal. Some of my friends do not think that the yuppie phenomenon is very serious. After all, hippies, yuppies, beatniks, whatever, we’ve always had our fringe groups! They are not very important, life will go on as before!

Again, I quote Postman: “The last time a similar conclusion was drawn was when the director of the American Association of Blacksmiths remarked that he had read about the automobile but that he was convinced it would have no consequences for the future of his organization.”

“It is better that one man should die for the people.” Why does that line have so haunting a sound? Why does it sound like the refrain of a litany?

It haunts, not because of any particular poetic merit, but because it expresses a perverse truth that invariably fascinates. In caption, it rationalizes death, deals death, and justifies it. Caiaphas, the high priest, first used this phrase to justify Christ’s death. Christ’s person and message were upsetting things, upsetting the way life had been, upsetting a delicate balance of inter-relationships that had built up, like a complex ecology, over many years.

Caiaphas and the other leaders at that time did not, in fact, have a lot of personal things against Christ. They were just scared. There was more fear than malevolence present when Christ was condemned. It was fear that prompted Caiaphas to utter this phrase and so justify his acquiescence to an innocent death.

That fear, and that phrase, have always been the great rationalization for death and have justified our acquiescence to countless deaths; so much so that it is possible to construct a litany for death with this phrase as its refrain:

• When we favor capital punishment and support the idea that some persons, irrespective of what kind of lives they are leading, should be put to death, we are saying…better that one person should die for the people.
• When there is abortion, when an unborn child’s life is taken, our society is saying…better that one person should die for the people.
• When we refuse to properly care for the poor in our society, when we say we cannot afford welfare, Medicare, daycare, free education, and the support of mothers home with small children, when we let the poor fall through the cracks rather than upset our standard of living, we are saying…better that one person should die for the people.
• When someone is slandered in conversation and we, because of fear, say nothing, we are saying…better that one person should die for the people.
• When our countries bomb their neighbors to insure their own security, when our countries use unjustifiable amounts of money, talent, and resources to build up weapons of defense, we are saying…better that one person should die for the people.
• When our countries do not take in refugees because we fear that they will take some of our jobs and have an adverse effect on our standard of living, we are saying…better that one person should die for the people
• When our countries refuse to admit that so much of the discontent and terrorism of our age is the natural byproduct of a way of life, a system, wherein the rich benefit from the poor, when we do nothing about this because it would mean some very upsetting changes, we are saying…better that one person should die for the people.
• When, because of the pressures of our lifestyles, we draw too excessively upon the world’s resources, when, for the same reason, we cannot properly respect nature and by exorbitant consumption and its concomitant pollution we destroy the environment for future generations, we are saying…better that one person should die for the people.
• When a youth gang in Montreal brutally murders a homosexual man with AIDS on a subway, when in the mid-1960s, 38 people in New York City watch a woman being murdered in Central Park and, because of fear, refuse to intervene, both the aggressors and the bystanders (for different reasons) are saying….better that one person should die for the people.
• When Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Oscar Romero, Jerzy Popieluszko, Stan Rather, Michael Rodrigo, and Anne Frank are killed, when the KKK murder three civil rights workers in Mississippi in the early 1960s, when oppressive regimes around the world intimidate people and make them disappear, someone is saying…better that one person should die for the people.

Death’s great litany, echoing through the centuries, from Caiaphas to us…better that one person should die for the people, better this death than that our lives should be so upset, better this than that we should have to change!

Cardinal Jaime Sin of the Philippines once commented upon the place of courage within the spectrum of virtue:

Strength without compassion is violence

Compassion without justice is sentiment

Justice without love is Marxism

And…love without justice is baloney!

We all need greater courage. We need to pray for that. We need to pray to be less intimidated by our own weaknesses and fears, to be more courageous in moving beyond the comforts of affluence, privilege, and good name, to be less timid, less small, less petty, and more willing to sacrifice and perhaps even to die rather than to acquiesce to the death of an innocent person by uttering, however unreflectively and unconsciously, the phrase….better that one person should die for the people.

“God, what’s it all coming to? Sometimes I wonder where the world and the church are going! Who would have ever thought it would turn out this way? Whatever happened to make it turn out like this?

“The church I grew up in, the church of my youth, of my family, the church in which I took my vows….it’s dead, gone, gone away; it’s not just changed, it’s dead. I guess since I am an old-fashioned fogey, I can still use some old-fashioned language: that is what Thomas Aquinas called substantial change. This is a new ball game.

“Vatican II, Vatican II! You can change anything and simply call it the spirit of Vatican II.

“I don’t know, it’s supposed to be better, a new church, a church renewed, a church with its windows opened, as Pope John XXIII said. The Holy Spirit, as SHE is now called, is supposed to be in this same place. Somehow I find it hard to believe. Less people are going to church, nobody is following the church’s commandments on marriage and sex any more, there’s a lot of talk about social justice and commitment to the poor, but, like most everything else, it’s a lot of talk. I don’t see anyone living all that poorly.

“When I was a kid, the church was poor! We didn’t need to talk about poverty, we were poor! Now we hold conferences on social justice, which is a sure sign that we aren’t poor. You know, I went to a workshop last year on social justice and poverty, you know where it was held? At the Holiday Inn! That’s the new church for you! No more church basements with the Catholic Women’s League cooking. Oh, no, we’re too sophisticated for all that!

“Yeah, I’m supposed to believe that the Holy Spirit is in all of this. Over half my classmates have left religious life, and three of those are now divorced. I don’t know whatever happened to sacrifice and commitment. We sure don’t talk about them any more. It’s not in the spirit of Vatican II.

“Jesus, that expression bugs me! As do a bunch of other clap-trap clichés that I have to swallow every day like stale coffee…visioning, birthing, enabling, empowering, commissioning, and, of course, sharing. Oh, yes, sharing, everything is sharing….’I want to share this with you!’

“No wonder nobody goes to church any more, we can’t even tell a noun from a verb! Birthing, visioning…let’s call it crapping, if we’re into turning nouns into verbs!

“….I fought, God, I’ve fought, fought for the church of my youth, fought for the church that sustained my parents through hard times, fought for the church that used to challenge the world, that didn’t have morality by Gallup polls, that was different from the world. I fought…at all those endless meetings, where nothing ever was accomplished, but, of course, the process was worthwhile!

“I fought, but now it’s over. I’m tired. Yogi Berra once said, ‘it ain’t over until it’s over!’ Well…it’s over! The church has shifted. There is no sense arguing anymore. I feel like a damned antique!

“It’s all gone….daily Mass; First Fridays; the Baltimore Catechism; special months for Mary, for St. Joseph, for the Sacred Heart; the Angelus at noon; Corpus Christi parades; the old religious habits…antiques!

“It’s hard to believe. All that sweat, blood, sacrifice, life, all those institutions and all that tradition – the beauty of the Gregorian chant, the universality of the old catechisms – all of it gone, gone, dead, died, relegated to the museums.

“I gave my life for all of those and, in 20 years, it’s all swept away. I don’t know, it’s hard to believe that it’s for the better, but, what’s for sure is that it’s forever different. It’s a new way now, we’ll never have the old church back again!

“Jesus, God, it’s death, death to have sunk so much into something, to have believed in something so much, and to see it all thrown away like yesterday’s newspapers! I want to cling to what was, but it’s gone. I can’t fight this any more. Let me accept what has to be accepted….give me some heart, some spirit, for this!”

Even after the resurrection, until they received the new spirit of Christ at Pentecost, the disciples doubted that something good had taken place. They longed instead to have their old Jesus back, the pre-Good Friday one. Depressed, unable to understand and imagine Jesus in a new mode, they, in their discouragement, returned to their old way of life, fishing and the sea.

The pre-Vatican II church, like the earthly body of Jesus, was a sure enfleshed presence of God on earth. But, like Jesus, it suffered a painful Good Friday….and a subsequent incredible resurrection. The church lives…pruned, new, marvelously raised up, given new life beyond its former imagination. But, like the beautiful prayer of the nun I just quoted, we, each of us, must pray to receive its new spirit.

In a recent interview in the National Catholic Reporter, Richard McBrien suggests that the Roman Catholic Church ought to change its law regarding priestly celibacy. His argument is as straightforward as it is convincing: “I mean, healthy people are sexually active people. That’s normal. So why do we make priests behave as if they’re not healthy and normal?” (NCR, Jan.20, 1989)

The functions and dysfunctions of priestly celibacy might be debated, as might McBrien’s argument. What has implications in that statement for issues far beyond clerical celibacy is the appeal to normalcy as the criterion for health and rightness….“That’s normal. So why are we acting otherwise?” That’s very persuasive and powerful. What’s healthy is what’s normal. To deviate from that imperative is to risk sickness. One must act as do normal people.

There’s much truth in that. There are serious risks in thinking one can be healthy and yet live differently than do normal persons.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and as McBrien goes on to point out, celibacy does in fact take its toll upon the lives of many priests who do end up unhealthy…succumbing to alcohol, a rationalized double life, gadgetry, compensating consumption, or repressed sexuality that frequently then manifests itself in the abuse of power. What is true here for celibacy is also true for many other areas wherein religions, or anything else, asks one to live what most others aren’t living.

For example, in monasticism (as well as more recently in social justice circles) one sees a dark side among some….weirdness, repression of need, elitist self-righteousness, neuroses and anger paraded as sanctity, and, as in clerical celibacy gone sour, the misuse of power. One takes a very serious risk in not letting what is more normal adjudicate health.

However, with that being admitted, Goethe might aptly be quoted: “The risks of life are many, and safety lies among them.” The Gospel asks of us risk, to put out into the deep waters. This demand, if followed, will precisely displace us from what we would like to live as normal life. Let me explain. The word church comes from the word ecclesia, which itself comes from the Greek, ek kaleo (Ek – out of; kaleo – to call). To be a member of the church is to be called out of something. What are we called out of? Precisely, normal life, as unchallenged human propensity would like to define it.

Outside of a challenge from something beyond us we automatically identify what is normal with what most people are living at a given time. Normalcy by popular consensus. Health and sanctity defined by Gallup poll. When this happens then invariably normalcy identifies itself with idiosyncratic preference, the good life…a good job, a good romance, a good house, good vacations, good sex, a good body, and enough money, freedom, and leisure to enjoy it all. That’s what all of us, normal people, in fact, want.

Baptism into Christian life is meant to be a displacement from that. It is meant, precisely, to call us out of that normalcy. It is meant to derail us, to put a belt around us and lead us where we would rather not go. Entry into church is, to use an older phase, a consecration. That word, too, like church, means displacement, derailment.

For most of us the word consecration is a pious sacristy word. It speaks of consecrated chalices, altars, churches. Of itself, that is not an improper use of the word. To consecrate something is to displace it from normal use: an ordinary cup is set aside to become a chalice, an ordinary table is set aside to become an altar, or an ordinary building is set aside to become a church. However, when we think of consecration in that sense it generally takes on such connotations of piety and separateness that it means little to us in ordinary life.

Let me attempt another way of explaining this: To be consecrated is to be displaced from normalcy. Imagine yourself setting out to go on vacation. You’ve planned your trip in detail and are eagerly looking forward to enjoying this well-deserved rest. You pack the car and set out. On the way you come upon a serious traffic accident. Some people are hurt and dying. There’s no one else around. At that moment you become consecrated. Your vacation plans must be, for the moment, set aside, displaced, with the rest of normal life. A very legitimate agenda must be set aside.

Christian life displaces in the same way. It sets aside what we would, without baptism, define as normal life. A friend of mine who is deeply committed to family, church, and social issues, is, when overwhelmed and frustrated, fond of saying: “If there is re-incarnation, in my next life, I am coming back as a yuppie. I’ll have nothing to do with having kids, church, or the poor. I’ll have season’s tickets to everything, go on a lot of ski trips, and let God take care of his own world.” There’s as much wisdom as self-pity in that remark. It speaks of a genuine baptism, of a life that has been consecrated in that the needs of the kingdom have derailed plans for a more selfish fulfillment.

The human instinct is to define the normal by idiosyncratic preference and social consensus. We need to challenge this if religion is to have an agenda that includes celibacy, social justice, or anything else which goes against what most people are, in fact, living.

The passion and death of Christ is a timeless mystery, throwing redemption backwards and forwards in time. It is timeless, too, in that it is ongoing. It is still being lived out. Christ is still dying, in multifarious fashion, within our sufferings. We all have our passion narratives, our Good Friday stories at whose centre lies the cross, with all its bitter shame and real death.

Recently a lady shared with me her passion narrative. With her permission, I share it with you, verbatim, uncensored, earthy, tragic… It’s the passion of our Lord, Jesus Christ, according to one of millions of contemporary evangelists, God’s poor, who in their bodies and hearts taste the gall of Good Friday: “When people look at me all they see is my anger. I guess I am an angry person since I don’t have a whole lot of friends right now. Everyone likes bouncy people….with their big smiles and their bouncy personalities. I lost my bounce years ago. It’s taken me all these years to really understand why.

“Father, you should read this book. It’s Mary Gordon’s, Temporary Shelter. In it she has an essay on violation. I wish I had read it 25 years ago. The years of frustration it might have saved me. She tells her story, how she was, twice, raped – once by her own uncle. Funny, how hearing someone else’s story doesn’t make your own sound so bad.

“Well, my story is bad. Sexually abused by my own dad at 9. Something inside of me died then. It’s 40 years later and, really, I’m still in shock. My whole life really ended then. I remember once reading in a book by Joyce Carol Oates, and she simply said: ‘and the spirit went out of the man!’ That’s what happened to me…the spirit left me at 9. I’ve had no enthusiasm, really, for life ever since.

“I went through some times when I was able to bury it, to leave it behind, to pretend, to go on with life, to act normal, like everyone else. Yeah, I went through the motions – I fell in love (kind of), I got married, had three kids – and for a while I even thought it was behind me. I was even able to forgive my dad (kind of). I remember coming home for his funeral, seeing him there in his coffin in the funeral home. His face looked peaceful (more peaceful than I’d ever remembered him in life). The tension and anger that were always there seemed to have drained away with his life. He looked peaceful. I kissed him. I made my peace. He was dead and I wanted to let him and it go! But it didn’t die. It didn’t go.

“It started with my reading feminist books, but I know that it would have come out anyways, in a different way. I read those books and it put me in touch with my wound. I understood a lot. And I got angrier: if only, if only… if only my father hadn’t been so sick, if only society was fairer, if only women had equal rights and power, if only men weren’t so damn macho! If only…Well, I got angrier and angrier. I froze up inside like an iceberg. I was hardest on my family – my husband, my kids, and then on those around me, the parish, my friends, everyone! God, I fought – and I was right too! It is unfair. It is a damned shame that lives, especially women’s lives, can be forever ruined so easily. It is unfair to live in a world that isn’t fair to us.

“Yeah, my anger ruined my marriage, it ruined my relationship to a church I once loved and respected; it ruined my happiness. But something else ruined me long before that! I wish somebody understood that.

“Sometimes I think that’s true, even of God! I’ve grown tired of praying. For a while I was taken with the idea of God as woman. But, in the end, God, father or mother, who gives a damn?

“I’ve such mixed feelings. Sometimes, I don’t even want ever to be healed or happy. I just want to cling, cling like hell to this god-awful death that wasn’t my fault, that isn’t fair!

“But something else inside of me wants to let go. I want some life back, some joy back, some love back. I wasn’t born this angry, I don’t want to die this angry! I don’t want to be this angry!

“Funny how through all this, the anger, the bitterness, my leaving the church and all, what’s come through to me is the cross. I don’t know how to explain it, even to myself, but somehow that symbol gives me the hope that, somewhere does understand….”

The next few years will be decisive regarding the question of abortion. The battle will be definitively lost or won. Bottom line, we have had, in the Western world, abortion on demand for more than a decade. However, this has never sat easy. There has been, even as the movement towards abortion on demand ploughed irresistibly and seemingly irrevocably forward, a massive growth of resistance. Now that resistance has ripened just at a time when governments, for a variety of reasons, are being forced to re-examine the laws that have given us abortion on demand.

During the next few years, certainly in North America, new laws will be brought in or old laws will be upheld which will, I fear, cement the issue into one mold or the other for a long time to come. Consequently the next few years are critical for pro-life. People tend to accept as okay whatever they’ve gotten used to. Practice becomes custom, custom becomes law, legality is seen as morality. Our culture is getting used to abortion on demand. The longer this perdures the more irrevocable it becomes.

Given this situation and the present political state, there is a chance, a last chance perhaps for a long time, to again instill in our political system the will to protect the unborn. But we must act quickly and massively. Many of us are not used to acting regarding this question. We are pro-life, but in a rather anti-septic way.

Pro-life is part of our curriculum vitae: we are officially pro-life; we offer it moral support; we write articles and make statements about its place within the wider spectrum of social justice, but we are entirely absent from the picket lines and from any direct lobbying or confrontational process. I have been an antiseptic pro-lifer. I’ve written an article a year against abortion, spoke out against it in my classrooms, and even addressed pro-life groups, but I haven’t walked a picket line, written or phoned a government member, or realistically confronted anyone on this issue for 15 years.

Given this background, I was deeply cut, cut as one is when a truly prophetic word is heard, by an editorial, “An Open Letter to Socially Concerned Catholics: Resist Abortion Now!” in Catholic New Times, June 25, 1988. Since there are out there, I suspect, many other antiseptic pro-lifers like myself, I share with you, by way of brief précis, some of the salient points of that very prophetic editorial:

One of the most unfortunate developments within the church and within society at large, is the phenomenon wherein both conservative and liberal Christians both tend to lack a consistent approach to pro-life. Liberals, while clamoring loudly for social justice in the areas of economics, racial and sexual discrimination, immigration laws, housing, and Third World concerns, have been simply tolerant of and silent about abortion.

Conservatives, on the other hand, have championed the fight against abortion, but have frequently reduced the concern for life to a simple anti-abortion focus. Thus, while speaking clearly in favor of life on one front, they have been noisily in favor of capital punishment, nuclear arms, and the system of liberal capitalism (which sees society as a system of competing individual rights which must be legally bartered). As well, they have been less fully for life in their views regarding women.

However, with that being said, the editorial goes on to praise the conservatives’ pro-life efforts:

Pro-life groups, despite being single-issue focused and inconsistent in the support of life, have nonetheless “borne the political heat of the day on the issues of abortion. And they have born it with courage”. Their passion is a welcome challenge. Tolerant liberals, who often find pro-life tactics distasteful, would do well to examine themselves and see whether they are backing off from the abortion issue because of the current sense of what is socially acceptable.

The editorial goes on to say that the social virtues of tolerance may never be invoked “to legitimate the decertification of the unborn as human beings.” The work of justice, it asserts, is “totally lacking in integrity if, by omission or commission, we participate in the bartering away of the rights of the smallest and weakest members of our society.” Moreover, we may not believe “that the rights of a woman, or of any other group, will be served as long as the rights of one group, the unborn, can be negotiated out of existence. A society which assumes the divine right of deciding when life begins will all too easily move on to decide when it should end and for whom.” Such a clear stand on abortion does not, the article rightly asserts, diminish the sincerity and admirable social commitment of many pro-choice persons. Nor does it withhold compassion for or judge those who have had abortions. It simply offers a consistent ethic for life and, prophetically, stands up for those who have the least voice.

Finally, and importantly, it calls upon all of us antiseptic pro-lifers to do something, to actually act: ‘In the name of God, do something: Go to the phone and call your Member of Parliament. Walk a picket line. Commit civil disobedience. Wear a button. Start or join an action group. This is politics and pressure is now what counts. Pressure the Members of Parliament. May they not rest in peace!”