The Roman Catholic Church appears to be in crisis with the continued outing of homosexual pedophile priests and revelations of abuse. The sad thing about this is that the abuse is not the crisis. Given that abuse has been happening since the days of St. Peter, one can hardly call the status quo a crisis. The only thing that qualifies as a crisis is the media treatment of the issue. A tabloid fascination with lurid details coupled with global dissemination of those details has produced a media nightmare for the Vatican. As a consequence, this Easter we have witnessed the bizarre spectacle of Easter homilies whose content is nothing more than damage control. Religion was never so shallow.
Within the media, we hear calls for the Pope’s resignation, demands for greater transparency, and predictions of the Roman Catholic Church’s demise. From Andrew Sullivan’s Sin Or Crime post we have the observation that the priesthood is populated by a disproportionate number of homosexual men who are trapped in an adolescent sexuality. Sullivan concludes with a call for the end of celibate priesthood, although he doesn’t mention the other obvious change which could alleviate the situation: admission of women to the priesthood. From some Catholic insiders we have allegations that people are merely using this crisis as an opportunity to foment anti-Catholic sentiment. There has even been a comparison to anti-Semitism, a view which Jews have been quick to challenge.
Two observations:
1) The governing metaphor of the Roman Catholic Church is the body. With words like incarnation, incorporation and embodiment, the Church is the body of Christ. At Easter, we are reminded that the body is a suffering body. Criticism is not suffering. The call for accountability is not suffering. It is the torture of the vulnerable by those who hold power over them which is the suffering. That is the body.
2) This is not a Roman Catholic issue. This is a human systems issue. The Canadian experience with residential schools is instructive. We learned that abuse can be perpetrated by Catholic, Protestant and secular institutions. Their members can be gay or straight. And the abuse they inflict can be sexual, physical, psychological, even cultural. The defining qualities of abuse are unrelated to the religious affiliation or sexuality of the perpetrators and have nothing to do with the particular nature of the abuse inflicted. What defines abuse is a dynamic in the relationship between perpetrator and victim characterized by an inequality of power: dependency of the victim and breach of trust by the perpetrator.
One of the criticisms leveled by Sullivan et al. at speech from the Vatican is that the focus has been on sin and forgiveness rather than crime and punishment. Talk of sin and forgiveness falls short because it benefits the priest/perpetrators and reveals a failure to appreciate the horror inflicted on the victims. I fail to see how a shift to crime and punishment would be more effective. While I agree that talk of sin and forgiveness allows the Vatican to evade responsibility for its victims, the talk of crime and punishment does no better. It keeps the focus on the handling of priest/perpetrators. The only satisfaction it offers to victims is that of retribution. While retribution gives victims the benefit of publicly naming their wrongs, that is only the beginning of healing. The mission of the Church is to bring healing to the body. Since the Church seems bent on damage control rather than on fulfilling its mission, healing has to happens by other paths.
A traditional path to healing is through story. One of the unfortunate ironies of the Vatican media circus is that online news feeds, even those from the Vatican, are called “stories.” But what do the victims get to call their narratives? If the “stories” of authority become cover-ups in the guise of fact then it cheapens the name we apply to a path which ought to support victims by offering opportunities for their voices to be heard. Maybe we should call it prophecy: speaking truth to power.
One prophetic voice is Cree novelist, Tomson Highway, who was born in northern Manitoba but was removed from his family and placed in a Catholic residential school in The Pas. His novel, Kiss of the Fur Queen, tells the story of two brothers, Champion and Ooneemeetoo Okimasis, who are placed in a Catholic residential school where they are sexually abused by a supervising priest. Deprived of family, community, culture, even deprived of their names, they have no supports to cope with the trauma of abuse. The older brother, Jeremiah, watches as his younger sibling, Gabriel, comes apart at the seams. Gabriel never comes to terms with his sexuality, engaging in extreme promiscuity, often for money, and ultimately dying of AIDS. Jeremiah copes by burying himself in piano studies with with hope of pursuing a career as a concert pianist. Chopin is about as far as one can get from the culture of the Cree in northern Manitoba and the reader can’t help but wonder if there isn’t as much violence in Jeremiah’s cultural whiplash as there is in Gabriel’s prostitution. Jeremiah wins a major piano competition and it appears that he will be able to realize his goal, but things begin to fall apart for him as well. Instead of sexual promiscuity, Jeremiah’s demon is alcohol. Jeremiah finds himself in an impossible situation. The piano has kept him away from the corrosive habits that are destroying his brother and peers, but the music he plays bears no relation to his identity. Without this false support, Jeremiah becomes like any other native man wandering on city streets hundreds of kilometers away from the land of his birth.
A striking feature of the novel is the shift in narrative voice which accompanies the shift in geography as the boys move from their nomadic life in the north to the urban community where they attend school. Tomson Highway is a musician, and there is music in his language, but this music becomes muted in the middle of the novel when the boys are removed from their home. Sandwiching this middle section is a musical language that reflects the oral storytelling culture of Highway’s birth. Characters are larger than life; landscapes are luminous, almost magical; and all of it is inhabited by spirits. It bears comparison to the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez. Although not as richly developed as Márquez, it still conveys that sense of things. So, for example, we have this passage anticipating the birth of Gabriel:
In the land of dreams, the child-about-to-be-born was fluttering through a forest lit in hues of mauve and pink and turquoise, the wings that had sprouted on his back, whirring soundlessly. He alighted on the occasional birch as the fancy tickled him, like a subarctic hummingbird. A distance off, he spied another flying creature, compressing and pulling at a funny corrugated box strapped to his scrawny chest; in response, the box produced an irritating, squeaky whine. The infant-not-yet-born and the itinerant musician were about to fly to each other for a better look when they were interrupted by a cry, half wail of lamentation and half shout of triumph. Suspecting the cry as his entrance cue, the infant-not-yet-born dove into the nearest mound of snow, images of the sour-tempered actor bear and the sweet-faced lyric-poet rabbit he had met minutes earlier flashing across his memory. He dove with such enthusiasm, however, that he was way below the permafrost before he remembered to turn around.
Like Márquez, Highway produces a kind of cultural syncretism that reflects the collision of European rationalism with half-remembered native mythologies, all tempered by a Catholic theology that only ever half takes hold.
Although this voice disappears while Jeremiah is in the city practising the piano five hours each day, it re-emerges when he begins to create his own music and mounts dance productions with his brother as the lead. In adulthood, he constructs for himself something new from the remnants of his native culture, the more concrete artifacts of his imposed culture, and the painful memories of the violence in between. In a way, it’s self-conscious and affected, but it has to be. Jeremiah can’t live like his ancestors, wholly integrated with his world. The best he can do is negotiate his way through a split identity and cobble together something whole from fragments of both worlds.
Without the voice of storytellers like Highway, we can have no idea what it means to suffer at the hands of institutionalized religion. We have no idea what it means to be stripped of our personal and cultural identities, nor do we know anything of the struggle which must follow to become whole again. To understand, we need such voices.
When presented against the enormity of the suffering, the Vatican’s media manipulations and the Pope’s silence on the matter are not simply reprehensible; they are evil. The body is suffering and it needs healing. This has been happening for generations. It’s time to demystify institutional authority wherever we find it and demand accountability.