A reflection on clerical crushes and expectations

On Tuesday, 24 January, as I was waiting for Ari to show up online, I idly flicked through Sky channels to see if there was anything worth watching, and stumbled onto The world against apartheid. Now, anyone who has known me for oh, any length of time, knows that all things South African trip over me. Seriously. I went to Orkney and the first sign I saw was in the travel agent's window: 'Fly to South Africa'. And that's just one of at least a thousand examples. I've been fascinated by South Africa since I first saw the song We are marching to Pretoria in my elementary school music book - they've had a while to accumulate.

So tripping over this excellent programme was about as much surprise as the pope being Catholic. I've been sucked into the first two parts, drinking in the oral and social history that I'd never had a chance to dive into before. After seeing Desmond Tutu appear at the end of the first part, I looked forward to the appearance of his colleague - my third clerical crush after JPI and Oscar Romero: the late Archbishop Denis Hurley.

I'd heard of Tutu first - of course, since he became a Nobel Laureate - and absolutely adored him, but somehow, it was Hurley who caught my imagination. It may have been tied to my early draw to the Catholic Church, or something pulled in I sensed in him that I didn't sense in the exuberant Tutu: a shyness, a reserve, a weight on his shoulders - something I wanted to draw out, to help carry, to support. (Yes, that tendency of mine began very young indeed.)

I was SQUEEing about the show and Archbishop Hurley to Ari - who, like the true friend she is, sent me a copy of Guardian of the Light by Paddy Kearney, which I've started reading. Of course, being one who reads character from photographs, I went straight to the 2 sets of photos in the book, and found myself completely arrested by this one:




Seriously hot is not the way one should describe a bishop in full vestments, so I shan't. (Yes, really.)

But look at that face. Look at the character. He was 31. 31, people. Today, most males in our society are still boys playing men at 31, desperate to be the eternal Peter Pan. Here, we see the face of a man - a young man with much destiny in front of him, but a man nonetheless. The character is there already: strong, firm, determined, not easily swayed - balanced with thoughtfulness, strong principle and the ability to listen. And he is aware: so aware of what has been placed on his shoulders, and in that face, one can also see the 'I'm not ready. Oh God.' But he will say 'yes', because 'yes' is what is needed. There is great power in this 31 year old - true power, not what often masquerades as power. It is this character, this true power, that makes him the two words that I said I wouldn't use about a bishop in full vestments.

The photo makes me want to weep, even as it fills me with hope - for one can sense the terrible aloneness. I find myself torn between inclining my head to acknowledge the true power present and the urge to throw my arms around his shoulders and tell him all will be well.

He, like JPI and Oscar Romero, holds such power and is so deeply human. The two are not unconnected: one can only hold true power if one is truly and fully human.

As I read, I am startled to discover that he had not always been so passionate about the equality between the races: he was once startled to see a white woman and an Indian woman speaking animatedly on the bus, not having realised that non-whites had the same needs/wants as whites. It wasn't till he came to Rome as a seminarian and counted two Sri Lankans amongst his closest friends that his views truly began to change. This surprises me (though it shouldn't, he would have been a product of his time) and I put down the book to think about how it makes me feel - on its own then, more specifically, about him.

I find, to my surprise, that I am absolutely fine with it. More than absolutely fine. Why? Because it means he was open to change. That he could be open to experience, think it through, and come to a fair conclusion. I don't need him to have been perfect: I need him to have been real; to be able to listen and care; to stand up for what he felt was right, whatever the risk to himself. What I would have found unconscionable was a resistance to growth; a need to believe he was always right, even in the face of evidence; a need for approval that meant that he said 'yes' to those above him no matter what.

What Denis Hurley did was grow up, to develop, to begin to unfold into who he really was. And that is as it should be.

These musings lead me to understand how my conversion to Catholicism was, in large part, due to these men: men of truth; men passionate about the same things I was; men who wielded the power of the organisation behind them to try to overcome corruption, oppression, injustice, no matter what it cost them. Because shepherding God's people was their vocation.

When I joined the Catholic Church, these were the men I thought were going to lead me, the men I thought I was going to be working alongside to make the whole world a better place, to serve all people, no matter what religion they identified with.

I soon learned just how special my trinity of clerical crushes were.

Thus began my inner - and outer - struggle with the Catholic clergy. On the one hand, I was drawn to many of them. On the other, I found myself wanting to slam so many clerical heads into the nearest concrete wall as I told them exactly what I thought of them. What was going on?

In part, I figured, I was playing out my relationship with my father in a place that was slightly more sane. That makes a lot of sense, and is certainly part of the truth. But it was Ari who really began to crack it a few months ago, as I vented my rage at a cleric who I felt had failed abysmally in his duty to offer some help I had asked for. It was an unexpected failure, and therefore, felt like a betrayal, though I'd given him no sign how I really felt.

Then, she said it:

You are constantly asking them [the clergy] for things you know they can't give you. You can't seriously be surprised when they fail you.

Me: I set men up to fail all the damn time, don't I?
Ari: Yes.
Me: and especially men in authority
Ari: Yes.
Me: Some part of me takes immense pleasure in that
Ari: Sometimes it's justified: you're the child with the naked emperor. But yes, a lot of it is unnecessary.

I knew, at the deepest level, that she - that WE -were absolutely right. As we unravelled it further, what became clear was that there were certain areas in which I expected perfection from Catholic priests. Or if not perfection, certainly an absolute commitment to developing the following to the best of their ability:

1. Living a life of integrity. For me, this is the biggie, because everything else flows from this. Be aware of your issues and work on sorting out your shit, rather than running to the priesthood to try to hide from your shit. Because let me tell you, a collar that gets you some kind of station, pretty vestments, obsessing about liturgy, thinking, 'Hey, I can turn wafer and wine into body and blood, I am so much better than non-clerics' and being able to promulgate your point of view to a captive audience every week may taste like ice cream - but if you're not working through your stuff and moving towards personal holiness, it's ice cream on top of shit. No matter how much you shift the ice cream, the taste of shit will always come through. Work from the inside, instead of adjusting the externals, and everything else will follow.

And no, just saying office doesn't count as personal holiness. Prayer is much more and much deeper than that. "Your daily life is your temple and your religion," remember? So how you act matters. Take responsibility for your life. For your emotions. If you truly have a vocation to the priesthood, you have a vocation to shepherd God's people. God's people have a vocation to support you - this is symbiosis, not a one way street. But what God's people do NOT have a vocation to is to contain your unconscious stuff/emotion that spills out on them, nor do they have a vocation to be your co-dependent and prop up your dysfunction or your fragile ego. That's YOUR job to sort out - through self-awareness, with God, maybe with a therapist. By the way, the stuff you're doing you think is secret? It ain't, trust me. For example, if you've been sniping about me behind my back to other clerics or laity, I know about it. Everything leaks. So don't do anything that shouldn't.

2. Think for yourself. Seriously, one more 'The Church says...and so it's right' and some dog collar wearing male is going to get kneed in the balls. THINK, man. Is IT? One of the things I love about Denis Hurley is that he called Pope Paul VI on Humanae Vitae - robustly, via written correspondence. There was NEVER any question of his loyalty to the Church or God's people - dissent is part of growth and development. But Hurley thought, came to a conclusion and spoke his truth. He didn't let anyone do his thinking for him. God gave you a mind of your own. Use it. What does your experience tell you? Your compassion? Does it make you uneasy? Then FACE IT and follow it through. Know what you TRULY believe and take it to God. Lather, rinse, repeat. See #1.

3. Grow up - eternal Peter Pans have no place in the clergy. I've seen far too many boys, particularly neocons, claim a vocation because they can't or don't want to face the real world - essentially, they want to continue living their university days around people who agree with them or will hold them in such high regard that they never have to do any real work. They can join groups that do absolutely no pastoral work whatsoever, prance about in pretty costumes and vestments, hold high ritual, swan off to various parts of the world for the rest of their lives, all supported by the Catholic laity and held up as examples by the hierarchy as 'an increase in vocations'. Sorry, boys - I'm afraid that's not what Our Lord had in mind for you. I'll tell you what I do, though - a year in the Democratic Republic of Congo, ministering to the people. You have a vocation, right?

4. Pastoral care above all else. Seriously, anyone who can follow instruction can learn to the say the mass. Not that hard, I could do it within months of becoming Catholic. And frankly, the same goes for the other rituals. Anybody can learn to say them, it's just that the Church holds that because your hands were anointed with oil, like He-Man, you have the power.

But genuine pastoral care? That's something else altogether. That requires the ability to be in genuine relationship with someone else. Now, if you can't be in relationship with yourself and with God, you can't do this (again, see #1). You're a shepherd - THIS is your raison d'etre. Your real work, your real vocation, is to be with the people. To be there when they are dying; when those they love are dying. To comfort, to hold, to witness. To be tender, yet firm, in the confessional, when people are most vulnerable. To forever hold the sanctuary and the space - and to perform the sacraments from this space, letting God work through you. To die in the middle of mass because you have spoken out for your people. To be ready to go to prison for your people. To protect your people no matter what it costs you.

God may not be calling you to martyrdom, or to pay a great price. But if He is calling you to the vocation, He is calling you to be broken - at the very least in the way Mary Oliver speaks of:

I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

That is your vocation - and not just yours, but everyone's. That is what this pilgrim church is about - witnessing to each other's lives and helping each other break wide open: to themselves, to God, and to the rest of the world. For if your heart isn't broken open, you cannot be what God means for you to be.

Do I have the right to expect this of my clerics? I firmly believe I do - and going back to the cleric I'd ranted about to Ari, even the initial response wasn't the problem - it became a problem when he showed no awareness around it. What I needed him to do was come back to me and say, 'Hey, look, I was in a bad place - let me try again.' That was all it would have taken. That is the mark of a man with true power - a Hurley, a Romero, a Mandela, a JPI. My genuine frustration and anger is with those who willfully use the clerical vocation, which I consider to be deeply holy, as a way to resist growth, to hide, to wield power so they can take out their conscious and unconscious pain on others. That, I have a right to be angry and speak up about.

What I DON'T have the right to expect is perfection, or even, as Ari pointed out to me, that priests be BETTER than me at all those things. I can insist that they be my equals, my partners on the journey to truth, awareness, authenticity and service - and we can help each other be that. I can call them on being false and hold up a mirror to them. But I cannot despise them for not being relentlessly good or for falling on their way. They too, are human.

After all, even Denis Hurley wasn't always the champion of equality he became.

Nor would I dream of denying them laughter and play along the way - even my clerical heroes took time out:



And look at that picture closely - who's in it? So often, much more is achieved through the intensity of playfulness than through the importance of being earnest.

A lesson my clerical friends and I could all come together to learn...

...Royal Oak, next week?

Why I walked out of yesterday's sermon

Yesterday, not 5 minutes into a sermon, I got up, exited my pew, and walked out the back door of the church. In my 12 years at this church, despite the many sermons that have made me want to backhand a cleric or ask them "WTF? If you hold the laity in such contempt, why the f*** did you decide to become a priest and not a lawyer or politician," yesterday was only the second time I have stood up and walked out.

Most people who go to the 11am mass that have interacted with me, clerical and lay, would have thought I found that easy; that for me, it was a throwaway gesture.

I did not and it never is. To walk out when someone is speaking is a way of saying, "I can no longer listen to you: there is now no room for communication, no room for discussion; I will no longer engage." It closes the door in a relationship, something that I am loathe to do, especially as an INFJ. It can, of course, be worked through and healed, but there are no two ways about it: to walk out on someone as they speak, to shut them out, is to perform a deliberate injury to a relationship. Even if you are going to attempt to heal it, even if you're betting on the relationship coming out stronger, that is NEVER an act undertaken lightly.

The priest who gave yesterday's sermon is one I hold in the greatest respect - one of the truly rare high liturgy priests who feels his religion, really believes in liturgy as a vehicle to God (rather than an end in itself & a disguise for avarice/need to dress up and feel important, which is what drives too many high liturgists) - whose mass you can feel. He is a man whose integrity I would never question, someone I like and trust immensely, despite the fact that our similar underlying values have driven us in opposite directions: him to almost extreme orthodoxy and rigidity; me to flexibility and what my friend John would refer to as 'liberality' - a generosity in application of principles rather than rules.

His sermons lean towards the overwhelmingly catechetical; they are always a densely packed lesson in what the Church teaches. Though I often disagree and find them a bit heavy, I have great sympathy and understanding for what he's trying to do: offer a firm foundation for the faith, one he feels isn't given the laity in this day and age. Here, his rigidity becomes an asset: for a foundation needs to be rigid, whilst the structure built on it must be flexible.

But. Yes, but. Sometimes, I wonder if he remembers that he is building that foundation with people, not bricks - and that people are vulnerable, their lives infinitely complex, and you can't handle them in the same way, that they need to be handled with care.

So. Yesterday's sermon. He began by noting that Pope Pius XII linked the infallible declaration of the Assumption to the horror of the Nazi concentration camps not a decade earlier, and that it was a deliberate link.

"Offensive," I thought. "But not YOUR fault, Padre. Where ARE you going with this?"

He moved on to how in the Garden of Eden, all was light, no shadows, no death, etc. etc.

I'm an unshakeable believer in the Life/Death/Rebirth cycle; Shiva and Kali together as Creator and Destroyer, that light and dark are inseparable. I'm always deeply uncomfortable with those who need to believe in a fall from a perfect beginning, a deathless world of all light and no change. I always wonder why they need to deny darkness and death, seeing light and eternal life as the ideal. I'm not sure changelessness is ideal; God created a dynamic, evolving universe - surely that says something about the nature of the Creator?

Then, on to how Adam and Eve had been given the gift of integrity in body and soul, that body and soul would come to God as a single unit.

"Ah, the origin of the Assumption. Ok."

Then he went on to speak about how, since death was not natural and was a consequence of the fall...

"There is no such thing as dignity in death. Or [and this was spat out with no little contempt and considerable venom] *dignitas*."

I inhaled sharply. For those of you who don't know the reference, Dignitas is a Swiss assisted-dying group. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dignitas_(euthanasia_group)]

"[Since death isn't natural/wasn't part of God's plan] Therefore, taking one's own life or assisting someone in taking their own life is always wrong."

I couldn't listen to another word.

I stood up, stepped out of my pew, and walked out. Fortunately, my friend's daughter was out there, playing with her pencil in the big pot of dirt outside the front door, helping me to calm down before I re-entered church after the sermon and faced the celebrant over the gifts.

Many of you will wonder why. After all, it is orthodox Catholic teaching; the orthodox teaching of most religions, in fact. Isn't one of the commandments, "Thou shalt not kill?"

Indeed. But that teaching can be offered with compassion. To state it so baldly, so forcefully, indicates an utter lack of compassion and awareness of the complexities of the issues surrounding euthanasia and suicide - a lack that doesn't exist in this pastor, but may well now be perceived to.

I once quoted what a friend suggested a truly traditional priest would say about suicide and mortal sin: "Grave matter? Yes. Full knowledge? I doubt it. Full consent? In that state of mind, no. Not a mortal sin."
THAT is teaching with compassion.

Had he so much as prefaced it with, "I understand how painful, complex and difficult these situations are - however..." I would have stayed. All it needed was an acknowledgment of the pain people face in these situations and that euthanasia has become a problem because we, as a society, are so desperate to live that we have forgotten how to let go when it is time and die. I have been both suicidal and the friend of someone who has committed suicide; it was of Lou I was thinking as I walked down that side aisle to the back.

Did he KNOW what the people in the congregation were going through? What he was saying to them - to the relatives and friends of those who in despair or in desiring not to be a burden through terminal illness, took their own lives? To those who might be struggling with someone who WANTS to die because they are so ill and in so much pain? How, after a statement so judgmental, can they even come and talk to him about what they're going through? What wounds did he unwittingly tear open? What fears did he implant: "OMG, my friend/child/parent/relati

ve committed suicide - from what he's saying, they're in hell."

Who, of those sitting there, will now believe his 'I'm so sorry,' when they tell him that a loved one has committed suicide? Won't they think, "Oh, he's judging them and/or us?" What about the classic clerical statement that someone has 'made a good death' (Lady, I HATE that phrase)? If there is no dignity in death, how can you make a good one? Who will trust him enough come to him over issues surrounding a terminally ill relative begging to be allowed to die?

The sad thing is, they could have done, because he is a good pastor. But now, because of yesterday's sermon, they may never know that.

As a good friend and astute cleric noted, "When you speak from the pulpit, it HAS to be absolute. You DON'T know what the people in the congregation have been through. Sensitive things like this are best dealt with in confession, one-to-one..."

Often, preachers would do best to remember that what is said cannot be unsaid, and that you don't know what pain, what grief, what darkness are hidden amongst those sitting in front of you. That doesn't mean you have to give a bland sermon or one that soft-pedals, but it does mean that you need to be aware of how what you're about to say is going to affect those you're preaching to - and that the authority you carry can make what's a throwaway comment to you feel like a freight train to an earnest, struggling Catholic in the pews. And it may mean that uncertain Catholic who might have approached one of you asking for help instead walks out of the forecourt, speaking to no one, suffering even more than they were when they first walked in.

And that would count as a sheep lost.

Am I sorry I walked? No. I couldn't have listened to any more, and I hoped that my act, if noticed, would make him think about what he was saying and what it sounded like. I also wanted to stand up for anyone who wanted to make the statement I was making but couldn't speak for themselves - for every friend and loved one of a suicide victim; for those struggling with the issue of 'just a little more morphine and...'; for those being begged by their dying loved ones to let them go...for those wondering if it's the right thing.

In walking, I stood by my integrity. In speaking, he kept his.

One day, I hope we'll be able to talk about it.

Thoughts on the priesthood

The year of priests began on Friday, and after a lovely, unfussy mass and an excellent sermon by Fr Daniel, I've spent the last few days reflecting on my complex feelings about the Catholic priesthood.

That reflection was further complicated by the discovery yesterday that someone whose behaviour shows him to be utterly unfit for the priesthood is a seminarian.

A story to illustrate the point: 18 months ago, I was having dinner with a friend. Seminarian X knew this; he'd been told. During the course of the evening, he rang my friend NO LESS than 7 times over the course of the evening to ask if he could come over or if my friend could come out. I wondered who the hell this person and his group were, and unfortunately, I later had occasion to find out as, even after having been told "NO, I HAVE A GUEST THIS EVENING," ad nauseam, Seminarian X showed up, sat down and promptly started eating the candy bar my host had just unwrapped.

The utter selfishness, violation of personal boundaries, lack of respect for others, immaturity and the lack of genuine friendship was...staggering. More trivially, since my host and I spent the rest of the evening trying to get away, it totally ruined what had been a lovely evening.

There is no way this was hidden in the interview or in any recommendations he received - he's too unaware of self to KNOW to hide it. No way he could have hidden the split between what he professes and how he behaves. But the seminary accepted him anyway.

The most likely reaction from the people at my church? A "So what?" and a limp wrist wave.

I'll tell you 'so what' - that boy will be dealing with people at their most vulnerable, from birth to death. He will be their SHEPHERD. This is NOT a LIVE ACTION ROLE PLAYING GAME (LARP) so he can ponce about in lace, pretty vestments, with a thurible. Nor is it a way to put off growing up and becoming responsible - something both religious communities and the training for the priesthood do far too often these days.

These are people's lives, hearts and souls on the line. So, yeah, I think character, maturity and people skills are important. Deal.

That doesn't make me anti-clerical. It makes me demanding; it makes me tough; it means I have high expectations from those of you shepherding God's flock.Yes, I allow for imperfection. But ONLY where you are committed to growth - emotional and spiritual. Where you can admit that you are wrong. Where you are committed to learning. But where you're using imperfection as an excuse to be lazy and not change, I will give no quarter.

This is where I step up and say: part of this is because I'm sick of cleaning up after the bad ones. I've lost count of the hours where I've sat down to talk down someone in tears because some boy said something in the confessional that made me cover my mouth in horror - things I wouldn't even say to the uncle who sexually abused me. We won't discuss the things that have been said outside the confessional, in the public domain, things priests thought were funny or clever, but were only passive-aggressive and hurtful. Let's not even go into the ways problems - big problems, obvious unhappiness, clear unsuitability - are ignored until it is way, way too late. And sometimes, that costs lives.

One instance I remember most sharply is where a cleric came to me one day, hugged me and just put his head on my shoulder. I let him be there and then we talked. Absolutely the simplest thing in the world. Later, one of his colleagues said, "I'm so glad he came to you. The rest of us didn't really know what to say."

Erm, what? Excuse me, BUT ISN'T THAT THE ESSENCE OF YOUR VOCATION?

He was lucky he didn't get what was on the tip of my tongue to say: "Well, God forbid any of you should have displayed some pastoral ability. Wouldn't want that."

I sound pretty unambivalent, don't I?

But I'm not. Because frankly, I lay a LOT of this at the door of their training. Those who should never be accepted ARE; those who should be weeded out in seminary are not; those who have the skills to be good priests aren't properly trained. I'm not sure I actually believe that seminary is much more than a place for Borg assimilation and some intellectual work, with the barest nod to real pastoral work or moral training. Essentially, you've put a young man in a group of people who look like him, who agree with him, who will apply peer pressure to think the accepted groupthink and don't require much responsibility or knock the corners off. Put them in a place where they're taught that they're 'special' or 'more important' or, in the one Vianney quote I don't like, 'everything' - and you lose the man, don't you? He becomes a boy again. To become a man - let's use the gender neutral adult - you need to be able to see other points of view without being threatened, you need to think through your speech and actions, you need to take responsibility - and you need to realise that you are not, and will never be, more special than any other of God's children.

You cannot call yourself a man if you live in ways, places or with people that are invested in keeping you a boy. And unfortunately, in its odd mix of attempting to hammer down the nail that sticks up yet inculcating a sense of 'specialness', of 'entitlement', priestly training does exactly that - creates a boy to do man's job, setting far too many up for failure.

Good priests only seem to happen by accident or grace, not by design of the Church. And that's just plain wrong.

There's the other reason I'm ambivalent - I know some absolutely amazing priests. The ones who make me want to hug them as they struggle their way out loud through a difficult pastoral situation and I can hear the emotion in their voice. The ones who can call situations 'tough and tragic' and apply orthodox teaching compassionately - and by orthodox teaching, I don't mean pretty liturgy. I mean the priests who can say that suicide is not a mortal sin because even though it is grave matter, full knowledge and consent can't have been present. The ones who call me on saying 'forgive but not forget' because they KNOW I really mean 'I don't forgive' - and make me admit and deal with it. THAT is true orthodoxy. The ones who choke up (and that DOES get a hug for as long as needed) when they talk about the gratefulness of the parents of a stillborn child after the funeral or any of the countless situations where they share, even as they try to comfort, someone's pain or darkness. The ones who undo the damage of their colleagues as only they can.

THEY are my many clerical friends. THEY are the good priests, the good men who, as one of them beautifully put it, pour their lives out as a libation. The WORLD, not just the Church, is a better place for them. (Though I think they ought to be able to marry, but that's another discussion.)

Those of you I know and those of you I don't - THANK YOU. THANK YOU.

They are, quite simply, God's vessels. But there aren't enough of them. They don't get nearly enough support - from the laity or the institution. And God knows, they certainly don't get the initial or continuing training they need. They get worn down by the disproportionate number of parishioners who come to them and by those who aren't priests in the true sense of the word. That balance needs to shift dramatically in the other direction. They need and deserve all the support they can get.

The Church needs to recognise, nurture and support them. The dead weight needs to go.

So where does this all lead us? To how Irim would set up and run a Catholic seminary, of course.

What was that sound? Oh, that would be the sound of my clerical friends groaning in despair ;-).
Sorry, boys, you'll have to wait for the next installment - I've got an essay to finish...but watch this space.

For God's sake, pt. 2

*Snort*

Why is it Catholic priests feel the need to put their feet in their mouths on a regular basis? Fr Rungi, founder of the 'nun beauty contest', had proposed putting pictures of nuns with 'profiles' on his blog and letting his readers decide the winner. Hair up or down, wimple or no, preferably naked...oh, sorry, no, he didn't say that.

I had to sit back, outraged yet amused, as I read his comments on 'inner beauty' with Sophia Loren as his prime example. Then, like Fr Voldemort halfway through a sermon, he torches his point by forgetting to place filter between brain and mouth and speaking the truth, rather than continuing to build up his false logic:

“Do you really think nuns are all wizened, funereal old ladies? Today it’s not like that any more, thanks to an injection of youth and vitality brought to our country by foreign girls.” He said there were nuns from Africa and Latin America who were “really very, very pretty. The Brazilian girls above all.”

Inner beauty, indeed, Father. You keep lying to yourself and everyone else, like so many of your colleagues.We all know what you're doing in the privacy of your bedroom when you think about those 'Brazilian girls' - or was that girls with Brazilians?

Mind you, a commenter at the Times made a very fair point:

"Makes a pleasant change to have a priest interested in the beauty of young women."
--Iain Rae, Tunbridge Wells

And despite the sexist pig nature of Rungi's idea, I have to agree. A Catholic priest interested in women who have attained the age of majority makes a refreshing change indeed.

Deeply ashamed...

Last week, the pope said the words Americans have been waiting to hear for over half a decade. From the Guardian:

Pope Benedict XVI today said he was "deeply ashamed" of the child sex abuse scandal that rocked the US Catholic church, just hours before he was to arrive on his first journey to the US as pontiff.

"It is a great suffering for the church in the United States and for the Church in general and for me personally that this could happen," Benedict said aboard a special Alitalia airliner, nicknamed Shepherd 1. "It is difficult for me to understand how it was possible that priests betray in this way their mission … to these children.

"I am deeply ashamed and we will do what is possible so this cannot happen again in the future," the 81-year-old pope said, pledging to keep paedophiles out of the priesthood.

FINALLY. And he used the right phrase: "keep *paedophiles* out of the priesthood". Not "keep *gays* out of the priesthood." They are NOT related - most paedos are married, heterosexual men. So why are most victims of Catholic priests boys? In part, opportunity - altar servers tend to be boys, especially in more conservative/orthodox parishes. Also, as both conservatives and liberals will agree, over half of all Catholic priests are gay: therefore, statistically, it's far more likely that a paedophile priest will be gay. It's just down to the composition of the pool.

So we have a promising beginning. But words are only that - a beginning. What actions will follow? Will those who covered up get punished, or will they just get moved to the Vatican like Bernard Law of Boston:

"Law was not only aware of egregious sexual misconduct among his subordinates but was apparently engaged in elaborate efforts to cover up incident after incident of child rape." To be specific, the cardinal admitted in a deposition that he knew that the Rev. John Geoghan had raped at least seven boys in 1984 before he approved Geoghan's transfer to another parish where other boys were at risk. Further disclosures revealed that the Rev. Paul Shanley, who at one point was facing trial for 10 counts of child rape and six counts of indecent assault and battery, had been moved from ministry to ministry in what amounted to an attempt to protect him. Law himself lied to a West Coast bishop about Shanley's history and certified in writing that another rapist priest, the Rev. Redmond Raux, had "nothing in his background" to make him "unsuitable to work with children." (Slate)

Again, conservative or liberal, Law's actions were beyond immoral, they were heinous. He violated the most fundamental premise of the priesthood: to protect the flock. That should have seen him - and those like him - defrocked immediately. Preferably publicly excommunicated. Instead, he's living in comfort in the Vatican, the heart of the Church.

You've taken responsibility, Your Holiness. Thank you. But what next? If you're not quite sure, allow me to offer a line from Jesus himself:

It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should cause one of these little ones to stumble. —Luke 17:2

In which case, you'd best start finding more than a few millstones...

I know I've been a bit tough...

on the Catholic Church, but not today. Hurrah for the Calendario Romano 2008, showing off some of the sexiest men in black: don't you just *love* a man in uniform?




As some of my readers are clerics, I'll spare their celibate sensibilities and keep them in the dark about exactly HOW bad a Catholic girl I'd like to be. But come on, ladies, surely you'd like to get him hot under the collar?

And who said receiving communion can't be sexy?



By God, if any of the (heterosexual - unfortunately, they're mostly [repressed] homosexuals) men who went to my church looked that good and displayed that kind of ease with their bodies/sexuality, I'd be back at Sunday mass in a heartbeat. Hell, I'd go to mass every damn day. I might even consider getting on my knees...

...or making him get on his. To quote U2:

"To touch is to heal,
To hurt is to steal -
If you want to kiss the sky,
Better learn how to kneel.
On your knees, boy"

Amen. Testify, brother.

And I am sooo going to be excommunicated tomorrow...but it will be so worth it.