The Sins Of Authority: A Sunday Tirade

     It seems my news reading is insufficiently broad, as yesterday evening I missed a story of considerable importance:

     The Marianist order has suspended a former longtime president of Chaminade High School from functioning as a priest after allegations of sexual abuse involving a former student were found to be “credible,” the order said.

     The Rev. James Williams, who resigned in 2011 after 12 years as president of the prestigious all-boys Catholic institution in Mineola, has “completely denied” the allegations, but a “vigorous, thorough and comprehensive investigation” conducted by the order “deemed them to be credible,” the group said in a statement posted Friday on Chaminade’s website.

     The Marianists said they have contacted the Nassau County district attorney’s office and the Diocese of Rockville Centre about the allegations.

     Every case of this sort fills me with both fury and fear. The allegations might not be true; Reverend Williams has denied them, and at this point no rigorous proceeding to determine their validity has yet taken place. However, that an investigation by Reverend Williams’s own order finds them “credible” suffices to evoke many terrible thoughts, of several terrible consequences.

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     Nearly every other kind of evil pales in comparison to the abuse of a child. Yet the abuse of a child by one in a position of moral and practical authority over him plumbs still deeper into the depths of villainy. The authority finds it all too easy to convince the child that the sin and the guilt belong to the victim rather than the offender. It’s an offense capable of warping all but the strongest souls...and very few minors are spiritually strong enough to withstand its effects.

     The scandal over the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests has harmed the Church even more than did the Renaissance popes and their orgiastic indulgences. Never mind that the frequency of such abuses is just as high among Protestant ministers and lay teachers. Catholic priests are a special breed: men sworn to complete celibacy in the service of Christ. Those who’ve been entrusted with the care of the souls of the youngest and most impressionable of their flock have a responsibility weightier than any other:

     “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me. But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” [Matthew 18:3-6]

     Yet when the Most Reverend William Francis Murphy, the presiding bishop of the Diocese of Rockville Center, called a convocation of the priests of the diocese to hear presentations about this terrible evil, the featured speaker, a bishop from another diocese, styled such offenses “inappropriate behavior.” A steady procession of the clerical listeners thanked him for that speech.

     “Inappropriate behavior!” As Father Edward Kealty has said, that’s a phrase to describe “picking up the wrong fork at dinner.” Father Ed got into a lot of trouble with the diocese for saying that to the convocation. It might be the reason he was forced into retirement against his will and the pleas of his parishioners.

     But this, too, is characteristic of sinful authorities.

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     Authorities of many kinds are prone to taking credit for good developments and foisting the blame for bad ones onto others’ shoulders. They’re also the life form most susceptible to mincing words, especially when they’re confronted with failures and crimes of their own. It’s one of the reasons for the overall decline of mutual trust in recent years. It’s also one of the reasons for what Samuel Johnson called “the general degradation of human testimony:”

     “To doubt whether a man of eminence has told the truth about his own birth is, in appearance, to be very deficient in candour; yet nobody can live long without knowing that falsehoods of convenience or vanity, falsehoods from which no evil immediately visible ensues, except the general degradation of human testimony, are very lightly uttered, and once uttered are sullenly supported.”

     I submit that recategorizing the rape of a minor as “inappropriate behavior” is far worse than a “falsehood of convenience or vanity.” When a person in authority does it, the blot covers more than his individual escutcheon. It taints the credibility and probity of all those of his stature who by their silence concur with his statement.

     Priests, ministers, and rabbis lack coercive authority. Theirs is of a much higher plane: that on which the most critical distinctions of all, those between right and wrong, are found. If these be found unworthy of trust, where do we stand? To what station do we apply for judgment of our own morals and ethics?

     Time was, it was only the moral authority of the Church that bounded the actions of nobles and kings. The nobility of Christendom didn’t need to fear an army of priests with crucifixes and censers. The flock enraged to action was a far different matter – and such flocks, though armed with nothing but the tools of their various trades, removed the crowns and scepters from the heads and hands of many who regarded themselves as above judgment.

     They who think a restoration of justice must begin with changes to the State and its policies may have been looking in the wrong direction all this time.

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     Today is the great Feast of Pentecost, which commemorates the day the Holy Spirit descended upon Christ’s eleven chief disciples. The Paraclete opened their minds to complete understanding of His teachings and equipped them with the gift of tongues, that they might be understood by all who heard them. Thus enlightened and amplified, they went out to do as He had commanded:

     “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.” [Matthew 28:19-20]

     Teaching is possible only under commonality of language. When the student understands the teacher’s words, it becomes possible for the teacher to impart new information and understanding to the student. This is why teachers enlarge their students’ vocabularies incrementally, and couch their other lessons in language their students are able to grasp. But when authorities tear words from their public meanings, such that language itself becomes a maze of Humpty-Dumpty eccentricities that forbids anyone to be certain of the speaker’s meaning, teaching – indeed, communication of any sort – becomes impossible.

     Deception – the cloaking of crimes of every magnitude behind dense curtains of words no longer penetrable by the light of common understanding – is all that remains.

     Confucius told us that “What is necessary [is] to rectify names.” What’s happening to communication in our day is the exact reverse – and it’s authorities of every sort, lay and clerical, determined to conceal their villainy from the common folk, who are the perpetrators.

     May God have mercy on their souls, for I doubt that we lesser ones will stay our hands for much longer.

Silencing The Conscience

     Christians believe conscience to be God speaking to us through our natures. H. L. Mencken called it “the still, small voice that reminds us that someone might be watching.” Materialists and secularists refuse to discuss it at all.

     As is often the case, there are many theories. As is always the case, there is only one answer, and we the living cannot know it. But we can and do know this: it is real. It has effects upon our thoughts, words, and deeds. They that lack it, or have succeeded in silencing it, though they are few, consistently make the front page above the fold.

     We also know this: rare is the man who will openly speak of its effect on him personally. Thus it is an event of significance to note this occasion:

     I used to be heavily pro-choice. I've been rethinking my views for the last few years, and this just made me 100% Pro-Freakin'-Life. And if you really don't see the problem with harvesting the organs of purposely murdered babies, you are seriously disturbed.

     The fact that the organs are readily identifiable, marks these as partial-birth abortions, not just 'disposing of a clump of tissue.' And don't start throwing exceptions at me -- the vast majority of abortions are NOT to save the mother's life, nor the result of rape. They're for convenience. They're done so that women can let themselves be used carelessly without being 'punished' with the creation of a new human life.

     The social conservatives warned us that legalizing abortion would lead to things like this. They were right, and I was wrong.

     I got nothing else coherent -- I'm just trying not to completely lose my shit over the fact that so many people really don't seem to see anything wrong with this. God help us.

     God help us, indeed. But will He?

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     If the citation above is representative, the Planned Parenthood baby-parts-sale scandal will accomplish what even Kermit Gosnell’s House of Horrors could not: it will awaken thousands, perhaps millions of Americans to the commodification of human life. Yet it won’t have told us anything we couldn’t have figured out for ourselves.

     Ace raps us in the teeth with it:

     Planned Parenthood, if they were being honest, would probably say something like this about their videos:

     "Yes, babies' bodies are torn apart in abortions. What were you morons expecting? Most of you want us to supply the conscience-easing, intellectual slop that these are just "clumps of cells," and so we provide you morons with this obviously-dishonest claim. But if you idiots bothered to think about it, you'd realize that of course abortions result in torn apart bodies.

     "But you don't like thinking. You prefer someone else do your thinking for you, and then tell you what you think. Well, we've done that, and now you dare question the manner in which we've done that?

     "The babies were ripped apart, obviously, and we spared you this truth, which you did not wish to confront; and now that we have dead baby organs on our hands, which are, sorry to discomfort you non-thinking two-legged animals again, valuable to biotech corporations, what should we do? Just burn them? Well, America is about making a buck, and we're not making our salaries based on giving out free cancer screening, idiots.

     "All of this would have been obvious to you if you just bothered to think about it, but you didn't want to, so we protected you from ugly reality.

     "You should be thanking us for trying to insulate you from the realities of the world, not questioning us as to why, in this instance, we failed to fully do so."

     So that's their honest answer. But they can't say that, because if they did, people might do some of that thinking that people typically don't like doing. People hate thinking, but they may try it when all other options have been closed to them.

     Gentle Reader, it cannot be put better.

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     We have become adepts at temporary, utilitarian silencings of our consciences. We’ve learned to tolerate the intolerable, as long as it brings us something we value. Yet the intolerable must eventually confront us with its evil too baldly to be wished away.

     What has abortion on demand brought us that we value? That’s easy: freedom from sexual responsibility, plus the mollification of a number of special interests. The evil involved – the extinction of helpless innocent lives simply to spare us the consequences of our negligence – has been window-dressed with phrases such as “a woman’s right to choose” and “just a clump of cells.” No doubt those who have contrived to profit from the silencing of our consciences have hoped that they could keep us from pondering the consequences of legal – indeed, government-funded and protected! – prenatal infanticide. Perhaps they could have...if one of their number hadn’t dared to talk out of turn.

     But someone always talks out of turn sooner or later. And if “Wraith,” my Web colleague cited above, is representative, consciences successfully silenced for many years are at last demanding to be heard.

     What will follow? No one can say. What should follow? That, Gentle Reader, is the point of this essay.

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     Catholics have a sacrament called Confession or Reconciliation. It involves the honest disclosure of one’s sins to a priest, who then prescribes penance and offers absolution. The underlying doctrine is that only an act of contrition for one’s sins, performed before a living vicar of the Redeemer, can remove the burden of one’s sins from his soul. This distinguishes us from most other religious creeds.

     Confession is a good thing, a necessary thing, and not just for one’s prospects of eternal life in the nearness of God. When it’s at last awakened, a conscience successfully silenced to allow one to commit grievous deeds for his profit or gratification will scream at a volume and a pitch that can destroy him from within. I have no doubt that such a suddenly awakened conscience is the cause of many suicides: persons who cannot bring themselves to confess, or have no one to whom they can confess. Perhaps they know no one who can or will prescribe a plausible and appropriate penance. Thus, they can find no avenue toward absolution. The irony should be lost on no one.

     Clerically prescribed penance more often than not takes the form of prayer. This is a relatively recent practice in historical terms; not that long ago, a Catholic who confessed to some trespass against others would be required to make some form of restitution. Were we to return to that earlier standard, how could we make restitution for abortion on demand? How could we “make it up” to the millions upon millions of unborn children whose lives were snatched away from them before they could draw their first breaths?

     Perhaps prayer is all that remains to us. I hope it’s sufficient.

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     Not long ago, I wrote of an encounter with a young colleague who was unexpectedly and unhappily pregnant:

     "I can't make up my mind," she said.
     I nodded. "I can only imagine how hard it must be."
     "I want to know something," she said. "Did you always hold your current opinions?"
     "About abortion, you mean? No, I didn't. They started to change about twenty years ago."
     "Why?" she said.
     I thought about it for a moment.
     "If I were to say that it was a conclusion logically arrived at, I'd be lying to you. I think my current convictions are logically defensible, but only on the strength of a premise a lot of people reject."
     She frowned. "What premise?"
     "That conception produces a unique human being with a right to life."
     "Oh." She smirked. "That's really the issue, isn't it?"
     "Of course. People don't get worked up over demonstrable facts. They quarrel over things that can't be proved or disproved. When was the last time you saw a public demonstration about the Sun rising in the East?"
     Her mouth fell open. I got that little thrill that says you've opened a new avenue of thought for someone else.
     "Well," she said, "what about clones?"
     I chuckled. "Let's wait until someone succeeds in cloning a human being to tackle that one."
     "Okay," she said. "But I still can't make up my mind. Wait." She held up a hand. "You said you didn't arrive at your opinions that way."
     I nodded.
     "Well? How did you get there?"
     I shrugged. "Conscience. The still, small voice."
     "Oh." She sat back, looking satisfied. "Religion."
     I shook my head. "No, conscience. Everyone has one. Perhaps our ability to hear them differs. But I imagine that you're thinking that my Catholicism has more to do with it."
     "Doesn't it?" she said.
     "Only in this sense," I said. "When I came to believe that abortion is morally wrong was when I first became qualified to become a Catholic. The order is important."
     "Oh." She grimaced. "I'm not religious."
     I did not reply.
     Presently she said, "What's the point of it, anyway?"
     "Of religion, or being a Catholic?"
     "Either or both."
     "That's a very long conversation, dear. If you're really interested, we should have it outside of work. Care to join me for lunch? My treat."
     "Uh, not today. Next week sometime, maybe?"
     I smiled. "Just let me know."

     As I told my young colleague, I’d had my awakening of conscience some years before. To call it a brutal event, utterly reaving and humbling of one who’d preened himself for far too long about the “rightness” of his opinions, would do it scant justice. It leveled me. I needed all my powers of body, mind, and soul to recover, to rise and bear the weight from my conscious recognition of what I’d supported.

     You might think I’d refrain from wishing such a painful event upon others, even upon others I dislike. You’d be wrong. Americans need it desperately. We must accept the agony and recover before the weight grows any greater. If we delay much longer, we could become incapable of ever repenting.

     Perhaps we’ll have it now.

Very Quickies: Beware Suddenly Breaking Dietary Training!

     Yes, it’s that early. Yes, I’m writing already.

     If you and I are alike in our sporadic, largely unsuccessful efforts to “lose those last ten pounds” (in truth, it’s closer to fifteen) you’ll be familiar with the sort of “breaking training” at the dinner table that’s justified by such emissions as “It’s a special day,” “It's too small to save but too big to throw away,” and “But it would spoil otherwise.” The first of those struck yesterday evening.

     The menu was marinated filet mignon, half a baked potato with butter, and a large portion of five-day spinach (the CSO’s variation), with Warwick Valley Harvest Moon white table wine and chocolate-dipped biscotti for dessert.

     To make the story shorter (and to spare you the less appetizing details) I’ll cut to the chase: The consequences got me out of bed at 11:45 PM and have had me reeling ever since.

     The moral should be clear. But...what’s this? The CSO’s ex’s birthday is today! Looks like we’ll be digging in to the leftovers tonight.