Catholics Have Been Sharing Deep Levels of Hope, Despair

Bill Barman and John McAndrew, two Roman Catholic priests who on Wednesday will perform public acts of penance, have asked Catholics to suggest acts of contrition they can perform to assist their scandal-plagued church. The priests surprised my wife and me by listing our private telephone number as the one to call with suggestions for the priests’ acts of penance.

The first call came in at 4:45 a.m., and we’ve now fielded more than 70. Most were from confused Catholics asking, “Why should these innocent priests do any penance whatsoever?” But we sensed no confusion at all regarding the perhaps unanswerable horror of how bishops could have ignored what was being done to innocent children.

Some of the callers are victims of sexual abuse by the clergy. They honored me by sharing their stories. Tentative at first, they would haltingly discover that I was not a priest but another kind of survivor. At that point, we would share deepening levels of hope and despair -- despair in the terrible acknowledgment of what we had lost, but in the end, a growing hope that these innocent and impetuous priests could spark a realization, a terrible epiphany for all of us.

Because of this priestly example of penance and the impact of these 70 conversations, I now know that these tragedies occurred because people like me and you too often ignored what some people are doing to other people’s children.

Some well-meaning bishop might respond, “You’re not responsible for those people or those children.” But Christ has commanded us to listen to priests, but not to do as they do, and above all, to love our neighbors as ourselves. He has a given us numerous warnings against limiting the size of our neighborhood, and that’s exactly what we would be doing if we listened to those intended words of consolation.

We also must do more than bishops who listened to psychiatric and legal experts whose entire spiritual legacy has everything to do with self-fulfillment and nothing to do with the fulfillment of Christ’s plan for humanity.

We are not consoled; our wounds are unbound. And not just as survivors, but as a people searching for God, and for ways to God. As a result, we have together built a place where the suffering of children, still a scandal, is also a source of redemption.

Here at the Catholic Worker, the children’s shelter where the priests’ penance is to take place, we help parents help their children. We help them to heal, to grow and to learn. And like these priests who have forsaken their upward mobility within the strangely unrepentant Roman Catholic hierarchy, we also sacrifice and do penance.

In order to invite victims into our hearts, and our homes, and back into our church, we must also suffer. We must likewise become “victims” of a personal sacrifice offered in restitution, and we must do this through service to other people’s victims: the victims of both this current scandal and the ongoing and even more enormous scandal of children abused, molested or neglected and then abandoned by all of us. Abandoned, sadly, as we raise our voices in a condemnation of the church that fuels both our denial and the scandal itself, and whose very fury derives from our complicity.

If we were caring each day for victims, we might have saving testimony to offer our bishops, and to our bishops’ victims. We might send it to them in the form of a public penance.

The redemption that these priests, and each one of us, can offer the victims of the church’s scandal, is to repent of our own abdication and allow the victims’ ongoing suffering to heal us in the same way we have let Christ’s suffering heal us.

Could there be any greater act of reconciliation than to let their wounds give us impetus to renew our search, and to spur us to merciful service to other people’s victims? To let our vanity crumble before their terrible injuries so their injuries need not be borne alone and in vain? I pray not, and I in turn ask for your prayers, victim and priest alike, that we might soon reunite in our search for a common path to God.