In this post I want to discuss two news stories dated within a short time of each other. On February 20, 2016 the British Catholic journal The Tablet published an article and an editorial on a BBC broadcast about a long friendship of John Paul II with a Polish woman. On February 28, 2016, an Oscar was awarded to a documentary film, “Spotlight”, about an investigation by a journalistic team of The Boston Globe about cases of pedophilia by Catholic priests in the Archdiocese of Boston. These two cases of course have nothing to do with each other—one a story of at most an indiscretion, the other a story of crimes. But both are in the context of clerical celibacy and that raises some much broader questions about the future of the Roman Catholic Church.
John Paul II (1920-2005), the first ever Polish pope, was born with the name Karol Wojtyla. He was trained in philosophy, which he taught for many years. His career in the Church was steep. While still very young he was ordained a priest, became Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow, and then Pope. His episcopal career took place during the darkest years of the German occupation, when the worst Nazi horrors, including the Holocaust, occurred on Polish soil. At great risk to himself John Paul helped in hiding Jews and thus saving their lives, for which the Israeli government awarded him the title of “Righteous among the Nations”. He showed the same kind of courage during the Communist period, speaking out against the government and supporting its critics, notably the free labor movement Solidarity. Pope John Paul made a triumphal visit to Poland and enormously encouraged the anti-Communist resistance. Most historians agree that he played an important role in the rapid disintegration of the Soviet empire. That drama began in Poland. In later years he was influential in the spread of democracy wherever the Catholic Church was influential—throughout the Soviet sphere in eastern Europe, Latin America and the Philippines. His experience with Marxism made him critical of Liberation Theology and he weakened its allure. Arguably John Paul was one of the most important popes in modern history. He was proclaimed a saint by Pope Francis I in 2014, after an unusually brief period after his death.
In 1973 John Paul, while in charge of the Krakow diocese, met Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, a Polish-American married woman with three children, also a trained philosopher influenced by phenomenology. She visited him in Poland, later hosted him in America. She became his English translator and they collaborated as philosophers. The friendship between them was open and well known. She visited him on the day before his death. As far as I know, there was no great interest in the matter until very recently, when the National Library of Poland released a collection of letters from John Paul to Tymieniecka.
It is not possible to read the excerpts printed in The Tablet without getting the impression that there was a deep relationship between these two individuals. There are some puzzling comments, for example in a letter written in 1974: “There are issues that are just too difficult to write about”. Clearer but still puzzling (in 1976): “I knew, almost from the moment we met, that God gave you to me and made you my vocation”. It should be emphasized that nothing in the published material suggests a sexual relationship. But it has also been revealed that letters by Tymieniecka to John Paul are also in the National Library. (She sold his letters to it; how did hers get there? Interested parties in the Church must wonder with some anxiety what the unpublished letters might contain.)
The Tablet story was written by Edward Stourton, a journalist who worked on the research for the BBC broadcast—and a Catholic. He confesses to be torn by his Catholic and his journalistic loyalties; the latter evidently won out. The editorial in the same issues raises the question whether the Pope was aware of being on thin ice. The editorial also says that one should believe that he would have refrained from the sin of violating both his vow of celibacy and her vow of marriage. I have no problem agreeing that the episode humanizes John Paul and that his historic role is not thereby diminished. What more can I say about this? As I have often confessed, I am incurably Lutheran (with some reservations). Thus I don’t believe that Jesus intended the Bishop of Rome to be his Vicar on Earth, nor do I believe that anyone occupying such an office has the supernatural authority to certify that an individual is now in heaven and can perform miracles. I also have my doubts about Rome insisting that all priests must in effect be monks. (I think the Eastern Orthodox have a much better approach.)
Below I will discuss the practical problems arising from the celibacy rule. But before getting to this, I will look briefly at the other news story I mentioned. On Oscar night I was invited by neighbors to watch the event on TV. I never have before and I found it excruciatingly uninteresting: celebrities and wannabe celebrities one-upping each other in the Hollywood status game. But one thing caught my attention: The award of an Oscar to the documentary “Spotlight”. The documentary deals with a group of journalists investigating Catholic priests who abused children in Boston. Their report was eventually published in The Boston Globe, creating a huge scandal, not just about the dimensions of the abuse (the report counted eighty-six clerical abusers), but about the cover-up by the Church authorities. The affair forced the Archbishop, Cardinal Law, to resign. The Boston area, along with much of southern New England, is heavily Catholic. There was deep dismay and disaffection in the Catholic community.
Coincidentally I witnessed the impact of these events at close quarters. One of the arrested priests, an elderly man, had a sister who was a teacher of one of my sons. The man was convicted, jailed, and murdered in prison by a fellow convict. Apparently sexual predators are frequent victims of violence by other inmates. The man’s sister was devastated and died soon afterward. The Catholic ethnic communities in Boston are still closely knit and close to the Church. I never talked to the sister about the case (she had been very good with my son, and I did not want to intrude on her grief). So I don’t know what she thought about her brother’s guilt. But I can imagine how much she had been shattered, not only by the actions of her brother, as by the response of the Church that had been very much at the center of her life.
There can be no question about the sexual abuse of children being an odious crime. And I would think that many of the accused were guilty and justly convicted. But how many? During the ongoing scandals, a certain hysteria developed, and with this an eagerness to convict by prosecutors attuned to public opinion. One must consider how the age of consent is defined in different states. In Massachusetts the age of consent with a person over 21 is 18 for males and 16 for females. In the current scandals most of the victims were males: Stipulating the trauma of being assaulted by a trusted person of authority (as by a priest invariably over 21), it is implausible to equate an act against, say, a pre-adolescent with one against an 18-year old. One must also consider that many of the alleged acts took place many years ago and that the accusers have a powerful financial interest in going after institutions with “deep pockets”. There have been accounts of overly hasty reactions by Church authorities, disregarding the presumption of innocence, which is less clear in Roman canon law than in American common law. It is not inconceivable that some bishops hesitated to throw accused priests on the tender mercies of enraged prosecutors, motivated by pastoral concern for priests under their authority and not just for reasons of public relations. Finally, is it not so clear, as the Church has often said, that homosexuality is not a factor here. Are Catholic priests the only predators against young boys vulnerable to adults? Certainly not, but I would think that the distribution frequencies differ. It is also reasonable to expect that same-sex orientations flourish in a group of young men whose entire professional training takes place in same-sex institutions from which young women are generally excluded.
The Roman Catholic Church in most countries suffers from an acute shortage of vocations for the priesthood. There are several reasons for this. In Europe there is strong secularization, in the U.S. a general reluctance to identify with churches and their moral codes, in Latin America burgeoning competition from the Pentecostal explosion. But I assume that priestly celibacy is one important factor in young men making other professional choices and men at a more mature age leaving the priesthood. It would be a mistake to understand the burden of celibacy primarily as sexual frustration (of whatever orientation). I think that a more basic factor is loneliness, especially among diocesan priests without the strong social support of monastic communities.
It would also be a mistake to think that marriage in and of itself would solve this problem. Of course there are unhappy marriages. I recently attended a conference in Germany about the decline of the cultural role of the Lutheran parsonage, which was a center of intellectual and artistic activity—all the way back to the happy marriage of Martin Luther with the ex-nun Katherina von Bora. In the large collection of his letters the most moving are those he sent from his travels to his wife and children. The main recent cause was the change in the social role of women: Fewer of them are willing to play the traditional role of pastor’s unpaid assistant. Many of them now pursue independent careers, and some of them become pastors themselves. For a while Ireland and Poland remained the most Catholic countries in Europe, a rich reservoir of priestly vocations. No longer. The so-called acquis to the European Union has also opened the door for Eurosecularity.
Theoretically there might be two solutions to the problem of too few priests: Ordaining married men or ordaining women. This is what Catholic progressives hope for, but what I know about the Catholic Church makes either of these two options unlikely, even under the reform-minded Pope Francis (I would be delighted, but this is neither here nor there). Let me rather, using rather old-fashioned language, give some friendly ecumenical advice to the separated brothers and sisters of the Roman persuasion: Revive the diaconate! Unlike the above two options deacons are already possible without drastic changes in canon law. Deacons could do just about anything in a parish except administering the sacraments. They could conduct prayer services, preach, provide pastoral care, visit people at home or in hospitals. They could be women or men. They could marry, even each other, possibly share accomodations with priests and lay people. They would have some of the problems of monastic communities (a lot of bickering goes on there), but they would certainly not be lonely and there would be no shortage of baby sitters. (I suppose the little town of Wittenberg was something like that, but it need not be the only model. Come to think of it, though, I have not read any contemporary accounts of von Bora as Mutti.)