Deliver Us from Evil

Last week, Bishop Thomas L. Dupre became the second Massachusetts bishop to resign since the beginning of the clergy sex abuse crisis. It remains unclear whether he will face prosecution from allegations of abuse made against him by two men, even though the district attorney from Springfield Massachusetts has encouraged them to press charges. It is also unclear why Bishop Dupre resigned. The public explanation was “health,” and the bishop does have a heart condition—but the Boston Globe reported Bishop Dupre had checked into the St. Luke Institute in Silver Spring, Maryland, which treats emotional, behavioral and psychological problems, but has no coronary care unit.

All this came less than a month after Bishop Dupre joined the other Massachusetts bishops in a special publication sent to all Catholics as part of their campaign against same-sex marriage. Beneath his picture, Bishop Dupre offered his own view:

“In one fell swoop, both democracy and the will of the people have been trampled upon and discarded. The wisdom of the four judges, a majority of one in a four-person court, outweighing the wisdom and will of millions of Massachusetts citizens and destroying in the process an institution that dates back to the very beginning of civilization.”

It now appears that Bishops Dupre’s sermonizing may have triggered the allegations, since his accusers were infuriated by what struck them as his “arrogance and hypocrisy.” “It is ironic,” their lawyer stated, “that, in his vociferous attack on gay marriage, Bishop Dupre may have in fact opened the door to the events that led to his resignation.”

It strikes me there is a much larger irony here, as two of our time’s most controversial issues—clergy sex abuse and gay marriage—cross paths. At the very moment when their moral credibility is lowest, the bishops are presenting themselves as arbiters of the entire history of marriage. The stakes are high, obviously, so they feel they must act. But the stakes are also high for the bishops themselves, if they come down on the wrong side of history.

Christians worship God as the director of all history; we view its unfolding as Divine Providence, the gradual revelation of His will for humanity. Such Providence is often clear in hindsight, but it is seldom predictable—and unfortunately, the Church has not always proved “expert” at discerning God’s will in history. It was wrong, for example, in pitting faith against Galileo’s science, and so John Paul II felt obliged to apologize 400 years later. The Church was often wrong as well about the Jewish people, and so the pope himself asked for forgiveness for centuries of Catholic anti-Semitism—but only after Vatican II had finally rejected the Church’s earlier mistakes.

Now, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has declared same-sex marriage a civil right, and the bishops have responded aggressively.

The bishops could have drawn a sharp line between “civil marriage” (which is much older than Christianity, and has varied from culture to culture and changed from age to age) and the “Sacrament of Matrimony” (which “baptized” marriage, re-defining it as a consecrated lifestyle, as a sign of grace, and as a symbol of Christ’s bond with his Church). Then they could have defended the unique meaning of Christian marriage against evolving, secular versions of civil marriage. This is the “Church as counter-culture” strategy.

Instead, the bishops chose to meet the court on its own turf, arguing that the good of society depends on denying same-sex couples, and lobbying against any broadening of civil marriage—which, even before the Supreme Court decision, was already established in Massachusetts law as a civil right. This is the “Church as the expert on humanity” strategy.

It is a high-risk strategy, for three reasons. First, the bishops’ ability to motivate even Catholic support has been radically weakened by the sex abuse crisis. Second, “civil rights” is a modern and secular notion, so the Church lacks a long record of teaching on civil rights comparable to, say, its teachings on war, or natural law, or even marriage itself. Third, all talk of “civil rights” in the US is rooted in the most shameful fact of American history—slavery. And on that issue, the Church was not the expert. IN fact, it spent centuries on the wrong side of history.

For fourteen centuries, Church law incorporated an approach to slavery first expressed at the Council of Gangra in 340, which condemned anyone who “teaches another man’s slave to despise his master, and to withdraw form his service, and not to serve his master.”

Pope Gregory I argued that, since “a hidden dispensation of providence arranged a hierarchy of merit and rulership,” slaves “should be told not to despise their masters and recognize that they are only slaves.” Indeed, canon law even authorized the enslavement of priests’ children and wives as a means of enforcing celibacy!

In 1839 Gregory XVI finally condemned the slave trade, but not slavery itself. In the Protestant-dominated US, of course, slavery continued until the end of the Civil War in 1865, but as late as 1866 the Vatican’s Holy Office was still resisting the clear rising tide of history:

“Slavery itself…is not at all contrary to the natural and divine laws…For the sort of ownership which a slave owner has over a slave is understood as nothing other than the perpetual right of disposing of the work of a slave for one’s own benefit—services which it is right for one human being to provide for one another.”

Only in 1888, in Pope Leo XII, did the Church find a leader ready to recognize the providential movement of history away from slavery, saying, “the institution of slavery should be abolished.” Leo’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum made the church’s new position official:

“The active force inherent in the person cannot be the property of anyone other than the person who exerts it, and it was given to him in the first place by nature for his own benefit.”

By the time of Vatican II (1962-1965), the Church had unequivocally condemned slavery in all forms. But the lesson of history is clear: The Church’s track record on “civil rights” is checkered, and on the very most basic civil rights issue—slavery—the record is shameful. For too long the Church claimed to be the expert, to know God’s will for humanity in advance, until history’s advance revealed the providential nature of human liberation. Then the Church followed the lead of secular society, belatedly and somewhat reluctantly. Instead of leading, the Church played catch up.

Now the bishops again present themselves as the experts on a question of “civil rights.” Catholics hope they can provide the kind of leadership that will inspire pride, not shame, in future generations. But only time will tell, as today’s crisis becomes tomorrow’s history, and God’s will becomes clear to all.

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