On the wonderful blog
romancatholicblog.com is an entry that is about a year and a half old that truly speaks to our current situation here in the Diocese of Camden. All due credit to the author, whose name isn't given but whose email is "Maximus." We just stumbled upon this entry today.
Click here to read the piece on his blog.
A
reader has suggested that it is sinful to speak ill of a priest or a
bishop and that rather than speak out against corruption within the
clergy, Catholics should pray and remain silent.
I couldn't disagree more.
Although I would caution Catholics against the sin of rash judgment, and remind people to be mindful of the requirements of the Eighth Commandment,
I firmly maintain that Catholics have a duty to rebuke the clergy when
they have gone astray and to warn others against such clerics so they
will not be confused by the errors wayward priests and/or bishops are
observed to be spreading.
There are provisions for rebuking clergy described in Sacred Scripture:
"Do not entertain an accusation against an elder unless it
is brought by two or three witnesses. Those who sin are to be rebuked
publicly, so that the others may take warning." (1 Timothy 5:19-20)
"If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he
listens to you, you have won your brother. But if he does not listen to
you, take one or two more with you, so that by the mouth of two or
three witnesses every fact may be confirmed. If he refuses to listen to
them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the
church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector." (Matthew 18:15-17)
There are also examples:
"And when Kephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face
because he clearly was wrong. For, until some people came from James,
he used to eat with the Gentiles; but when they came, he began to draw
back and separated himself, because he was afraid of the circumcised.
And the rest of the Jews (also) acted hypocritically along with him,
with the result that even Barnabas was carried away by their
hypocrisy. But when I saw that they were not on the right road in line
with the truth of the gospel, I said to Kephas in front of all, 'If
you, though a Jew, are living like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how
can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews ?'" (Galatians 2:11-14)
During the Arian heresy, approximately one third of the bishops in
the Church became Arian, along with countless priests and entire
dioceses. Yet if we are to believe, as apparently some Catholics do,
that priests and bishops may never be corrected, never challenged,
and/or never exposed, it was wrong to say that Arian priests and
bishops were teaching error.
The same would follow for countless other heretical sects that had their origins in heretical Catholic clergy.
Martin Luther was a Catholic priest. Can he not be criticized?
Saints were often critical of priests and religious:
St. Catherine of Siena made a pilgrimage to Avignon in Southern
France to persuade the Pontiff Pope Gregory XI to return from exile to
Rome where he belonged. After the death of Gregory XI on March 26,
1378, the Great Schism began when Pope Urban VI was selected as his
successor. Several of the dissident French cardinals objected and
elected their own at Fondi Robert of Geneva who became the antipope
Clement VII and set up his headquarters in Avignon. St. Catherine knew
Urban was the true Pope and did all in her power to secure support for
him and end the schism. While she was a staunch supporter of his
Primacy, she did not hesitate to rebuke him when she saw weakness or
knew he was wrong.
St. Catherine was also critical of priests in her Dialogue
(the work which was the primary reason she was made a Doctor of the
Church):
"Your miseries are not hid from you now, for the worm of
conscience sleeps no longer, but is gnawing you, the devils shout and
render to you the reward which they are accustomed to give their
servants, that is to say, confusion and condemnation; they wish to
bring you to despair, so that at the moment of death you may not escape
from their hands, and therefore they try to confuse you, so that
afterwards when you are with them they may render to you of the part
which is theirs. Oh, wretch! the dignity in which I placed you, you now
see shining as it really is, and you know to your shame that you have
held and used in such guilty darkness the substance of the holy Church,
that you see yourself to be a thief, a debtor, who ought to pay his
debt to the poor and the holy Church. Then your conscience represents
to you that you have spent the money on public harlots, and have
brought up your children and enriched your relations, and have thrown
it away on gluttony and on many silver vessels and other adornments for
your house. Whereas you should have lived in voluntary poverty."
"Your conscience represents to you the divine office which you
neglected, by which you fell into the guilt of mortal sin, and how even
when you recited it with your mouth your heart was far from Me.
Conscience also shows you your subjects, that is to say, the love and
hunger which you should have felt towards nourishing them in virtue,
giving them the example of your life and striking them with the hand of
mercy and the rod of justice, and because you did the contrary your
conscience and the horrible likeness of the Devil reproves you."
"And if as a prelate you have given prelacies or any charge of souls
unjustly to one of your subjects, that is, that you have not considered
to whom and how you were giving it, the Devil puts this also before
your conscience, because you ought to have given it, not on account of
pleasant words, nor in order to please creatures, nor for the sake of
gifts, but solely with regard to virtue, My honor and the salvation of
souls. And since you have not done so you are reproved, and for your
greater pain and confusion you have before your conscience and the
light of your intellect that which you have done and ought not to have
done, and that which you ought to have done and have not done."
The reforms of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross were
due to the laxity in their religious order. Both were openly critical
of such laxity and met with opposition because of their reforms.
The Norbertine Order was started because of the widespread laxity,
and even debauchery among priests in St. Norbert's day. St. Norbert
exhorted and even rebuked his fellow priests, and they responded by
attempting to assassinate him.
It is ludicrous to think that clerics are beyond correction, as if
infallible by virtue of their office. It is disturbing that such a
simplistic outlook exists after the egregious wrongdoing (and that is
putting things mildly) of so many priests and even bishops was exposed
because of the sex abuse scandal that rocked the Church in recent years.
The 1983 Code of Canon Law makes provisions for the laity to address their concerns about priests:
Canon 212:
§1. Conscious of their own responsibility, the
Christian faithful are bound to follow with Christian obedience those
things which the sacred pastors, inasmuch as they represent Christ,
declare as teachers of the faith or establish as rulers of the Church.
§2. The Christian faithful are free to make known
to the pastors of the Church their needs, especially spiritual ones,
and their desires.
§3. According to the knowledge, competence, and
prestige which they possess, they have the right and even at times the
duty to manifest to the sacred pastors their opinion on matters which
pertain to the good of the Church and to make their opinion known to
the rest of the Christian faithful, without prejudice to the integrity
of faith and morals, with reverence toward their pastors, and attentive
to common advantage and the dignity of persons.
I also include the following for consideration:
"When there is an imminent danger for the Faith, Prelates must be questioned, even publicly, by their subjects." ~ St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II, II, q. 33, a. 4
"It is better that scandals arise than the truth be suppressed." ~ Pope St. Gregory the Great
"When circumstances make it necessary, it is not prelates alone who have to watch over the integrity of the faith." ~ Pope Leo XIII
"The road to hell is paved with the skulls of erring priests, with bishops as their signposts."
~ St. John Chrysostom (347-407), Doctor of the Church, generally
considered the most prominent doctor of the Greek Church and the
greatest preacher ever heard in a Christian pulpit.
"The floor of hell is paved with the skulls of bishops." ~ St. Athanasius
"The road to hell is paved with the skulls of bishops." ~ Saint John Eudes
"But how, I ask, does it happen that the saints, who live only for
God, resist their ordination through a sense of their unworthiness, and
that some run blindly to the priesthood, and rest not until they attain
it by lawful or unlawful means? Ah. Unhappy men! Says St. Bernard, to
be registered among the priests of God shall be for them the same as to
be enrolled on the catalogue of the damned. And why? Because such
persons are generally called to the priesthood, not by God, but by
relatives, by interest, or ambition. Thus they enter the house of God,
not through the motive a priest should have, but through worldly
motives. Behold why the faithful are abandoned, the Church dishonored,
so many souls perish, and with them such priests are also damned." ~ St. Alphonsus de Liguori (1696-1787), Doctor of the Church (Moral Theology), Founder of the Redemptorist congregation
Saints were even critical of homosexual priests and/or religious:
"Any cleric or monk who seduces young men or boys, or who
is apprehended in kissing or in any shameful situation, shall be
publicly flogged and shall lose his clerical tonsure. Thus shorn, he
shall be disgraced by spitting into his face, bound in iron chains,
wasted by six months of close confinement, and for three days each week
put on barley bread given him toward evening. Following this period, he
shall spend a further six months living in a small segregated courtyard
in the custody of a spiritual elder, kept busy with manual labor and
prayer, subjected to vigils and prayers, forced to walk at all times in
the company of two spiritual brothers, never again allowed to associate
with young men for purposes of improper conversation or advice."
~ St. Basil the Great (329-379), Bishop of Caesarea, Father of the
Church, and one of the most distinguished Doctors of the Church.
"The befouling cancer of sodomy is, in fact, spreading so through
the clergy or rather, like a savage beast, is raging with such
shameless abandon through the flock of Christ, that for many of them it
would be more salutary to be burdened with service in the world than,
under the pretext of religion, to be enslaved so easily under the iron
rule of satanic tyranny. It would be better for them to perish alone as
laymen that, after having changed their attire but not their
disposition, to drag others with them to destruction, as Truth itself
testifies when It says, "But if anyone is a cause of stumbling to one
of these little ones, it would be better for him to be drowned in the
depths of the sea with a great millstone round his neck." Unless
immediate effort be exerted by the Apostolic See, there is little that,
even if one wished to curb this unbridled evil, he could not check the
momentum of its progress."
"Unquestionable, this vice, since it surpasses the enormity of all
others, is impossible to compare with any other vice. Without fail it
brings death of the body and destruction to the soul. It pollutes the
flesh, extinguishes the light of the mind, expels the Holy Spirit from
the temple of the human heart and gives entrance to the devil, the
stimulator of lust. It leads to error, totally removes truth from the
deluded mind, prepares a trap for the traveller and secures the pit and
makes it impossible for the victim to escape. It opens up Hell and
closes the gates Paradise, changes a citizen of the Heavenly Jerusalem
into an heir of infernal Babylon, and turns a Heavenly star into chaff
for eternal fire; it cuts off a member of the Church and hurls him into
the depths of the devouring flames of Hell." ~ St. Peter Damian (1007 -1072), Doctor of the Church, Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia
It seems to me that the clericalist attitude that priests and
bishops are beyond reproach is actually quite dangerous. The idea has a
pietistic veneer, and those who hold it may be sincere, but do they
realize that attitudes like that contributed to the mentality that
allowed the priestly abuse scandals to stay under the radar for so long?
Do they realize that Catholics have an obligation to lead others to the truth and away from error?
