At times of unease, of climate change and mass migration, could the normalisation of political lying have consequences no one foresees?
“That is not who we are,” said Simon Harris in August 2024, battling instigators of hatred and racism, and even riot, in Ireland.
“That is not who we are,” said Kamala Harris in October 2024, recalling the mayhem at the Capitol building on Jan 6th 2020 – as she battled Donald Trump in Washington DC.
Common to these assertions seems to be the ‘pitch’ that ‘we the nation’ can only ever be just one thing – that a personal or a national identity is truly a stable singularity – either fixed and ‘good’ or fixed and ‘bad’ – and if ‘we’ can agree to be good now we will be good forever.
Doppelganger
Naomi Klein’s 2023 book Doppelganger1Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World : Naomi Klein, Penguin, 2023 – a Christmas present – is for me a timely warning against overconfidence about that. Media confusion of herself with her politically opposed lookalike – the feminist Naomi Wolf – led this leftist Jewish author to become fascinated (even for a time maybe obsessed) with the rightward ‘flipping’ of that also-Jewish ‘doppelganger’.
Following Naomi Wolf’s rightward ‘transition’ closely – into fervent anti-vaccination conspiracy fiction and activism during the Covid pandemic, the author Naomi Klein became acutely aware of her own anxious attachment to a personal ‘brand’ – that of crusader against the corporate capitalism she sees as the primary source of all Internet conspiracy fiction. To become confused regularly with Wolf the conspiracy monger was for Klein to be threatened with a loss of that ‘identity’, that ‘brand’ – and those causes also maybe – but was she utterly powerless to prevent that? The deftness of the US ‘right’ – e.g. in claiming to be victims of the ‘leftist’ anti-white ‘racism’ of the New York Times, and even of climate activism – left her boggled.
However, Doppelganger is about far more than this personal problem. It is also a sustained reflection on the fragility and instability of human identity and ‘self’ – at a time when people such as Steve Bannon, and now the multi-billionaire Elon Musk, work daily and passionately at misdirecting millions. As parent of a neurodivergent child Klein’s account of the transition of the paediatrician Asperger (of ‘Asperger’s Syndrome’) from kindly doctor who cared for all children indiscriminately in pre-Nazi Vienna – into (allegedly) a willing collaborator in the ‘euthanasia’ of children deemed ‘unworthy of life’, after 1938 – is especially chilling. We realise that, swallowing up that one gifted intellectual then, an entire culture was ‘shape-shifting’. The dreams of millions – and the lives of millions of Jews too – were swallowed up in the same Nazi zeitgeist.
Naomi Klein
With an extended family that is, like many, divided on the questions of Israel and Palestine, Naomi Klein is herself anti-Zionist, sympathetic to the cause of the Palestinians and based usually in Canada. She cannot help but reflect and write on these questions, however. Towards the end of Doppelganger she recounts a 2009 visit to Gaza as an author and researcher. She was, she writes, kept waiting unnecessarily for hours at the return checkpoint into Israel by the IDF – to punish her temerity in allegedly risking kidnapping by Hamas and thereby obliging Israeli soldiers to come to her rescue. That so many of her own people could become this ‘very different version of themselves’ – by turning Gaza into ‘the world’s largest open prison’ – is her concluding conundrum in the book – and who now can look away?
Ireland
So what of ‘home’ in Ireland and its troubles in 2025 – and that question of ‘who we are’? How sure can we be, in a deepening geopolitical and climate crisis, that we will be forever welcoming and anti-racist – and multiculturally at peace? Have some not already ‘flipped’?
For me it was alarming enough to follow Klein’s up-close account of a once fervently anti-Trump JD Vance ‘flipping’ into Trumpist vice-presidential candidate – and now busy ‘disruptor’ and tormentor and vilifier of desperate immigrants – e.g. by endorsing Trump’s ‘they’re eating the dogs’.
René Girard
What alarms me even more is that Doppelganger underscores the instability of so many societies at this time, faced with so many problems – and that Naomi Klein’s account of ‘shape shifting’ at the level of the individual mirrors the very patterns that René Girard saw on the historical scale – in all pogroms and scapegoatings and lynchings, and also in the Gospels. That pattern of ‘flipping’ – into lies, accusation, vilification and ‘throwing out’ – is what Girard identifies with ‘the accuser’ of scripture, the adversary, Satan2I See Satan Fall like Lightning : René Girard, Orbis Books, New York, 2001.
In the Gospel, as today, there is no pantomime Satan, no physical visible apparition in horns and scarlet jumpsuit. Instead there was then, as told in the Gospels and in history – and ready to happen again today – a flipping of the crowd – from welcomers of a strange and maybe unfashionable ‘king’ from Galilee into crucifiers of innocence. Whatever that mysterious force is that can ‘flip’ us – to make us liars and entertainers of lies – and then unite us in accusation and even murder of the innocent – even when the holocaust is still in living memory – that force is, for René Girard, what Satan truly is.
Easter
So is it important now, especially at our Easter liturgies – in the renewal of baptismal promises – to become fully conscious of what we mean when we say that we renounce Satan – and ‘all his works, and all his empty show’? Are we simply then renouncing all lies against – and all hatred and dehumanisation of – anyone?
And should we pray fervently also for all who lie against the innocent, and even those who devastate and kill – because they may not truly know what they are doing?
10th February 2025
NOTES
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World : Naomi Klein, Penguin, 2023
I See Satan Fall like Lightning : René Girard, Orbis Books, New York, 2001
How the Easter story explains the continuing inability of Catholic bishops to be fully transparent about the cover up of clerical abuse of children.
First drafted in 2020 – on the brink of the coronavirus pandemic – this summary of my own understanding of what scripture is telling us about God’s reason for the Crucifixion of Jesus is now re-edited and published in 2024.
On the way to Jerusalem Peter the apostle proclaimed Jesus to be the Messiah, the great promised leader of the Jews, and the Son of God.
He was stunned when Jesus then told him that he expected to be crucified in Jerusalem – the cruel punishment meted out by Rome to intimidate and shame rebellious slaves.
Then, taking Jesus aside, Peter started to rebuke him. ‘Heaven preserve you, Lord,’ he said, ‘this must not happen to you.‘ (Matt 16:22)
This advice was itself instantly rejected by Jesus in the strongest possible terms:
• Q1. Do we understand fully why Peter was appalled by the prospect Jesus had just unfolded – of his own crucifixion? • Q2. Secondly, can we grasp why Jesus responded to Peter as he did – identifying the first person to call him ‘Son of God’ with the personification of all evil – ‘Satan’?
Believing that this passage in the Gospel is pivotal in helping us to understand the complex predicament of the Church at this time, I offer here a summary of the argument.
Q1. Why was Peter so anxious to persuade Jesus to turn away from Crucifixion?
That Peter was intent on saving Jesus from physical torture and death on the cross, and that Jesus was convinced that he must suffer that fate, is a familiar understanding of the passage.
Consider also, however, the probability that Peter was horrifiedon his own behalf.
Moments earlier Peter had proclaimed Jesus to be the son of God – the God who was bound by covenant to the cause of the salvation of Israel. For Peter that must surely involve freedom for the people of Israel, as we still tend to understand freedom – the expulsion of the hated occupying Roman legions and their flaunted eagle battle standards, the defeat of all Jewish collaborators with Rome (such as King Herod) and the recreation of the independent Kingdom of Israel.
The inexplicable disaster foreseen instead by Jesus – Rome’s humiliation of yet another Jewish rebel by crucifixion – would surely also now mean Peter’s own climactic public failure and disgrace.
Peter had not signed up for that.
Is Physical Suffering Our Greatest Fear?
By a process that is mysterious, the Gospel story has come to be read as though only physical suffering could have been at stake in crucifixion. Always unremarked is the human emotional dimension within which all high enterprises are conceived and evaluated – our acute worry about ‘what people will think’ – if, on the one hand things go well or, on the other, they do the very opposite.
To proclaim Jesus as Son of God was to bind oneself to the full consequences of ‘what people would think’ if this story was to end as Jesus had foretold – that Jesus was just another crazy ‘loser’, shamed and obliterated by Rome, and that Peter had been crazier still to follow him.
What About Shame?
This dramatic context of all vital decision-making is the never-absent issue of honour and shame. We ignore this dimension at our peril if we suppose it to be unimportant in the interpretation of scripture. Fear of shame is fear of ‘what everyone will think’ if something shameful happens to us. Aware that a multitude of others – gazing – will judge and jeer at us, we fear their scorn and contempt.
And crucifixion was designed by the rulers of Rome to be the most shameful possible death.
That Peter is constantly aware of this dimension is also revealed in that passage from the Gospel of Matthew. Those three words ‘taking him aside’ alert us to Peter’s realisation that to question Jesus’s judgement in the hearing of the rest of his closest followers would be to diminish him in the eyes of others, and that his own role should be that of respectful and unobtrusive adviser.
Peter obviously hopes that if he first takes Jesus aside this great leader – who has attracted the poorest in Galilee for his compassion and wisdom, and worked miracles to strengthen their faith – will rethink his dire prediction of crucifixion and announce a change of plan.
Must Not Jesus be Greater than David?
Peter must surely have thought that this Messiah could easily call on the wisdom and almighty power of the God of Israel – the power that – according to the Jewish scriptures – had drowned the entire army of Egypt, had helped Gideon to triumph over the Midianites with just three hundred men, and had guided the aim of David’s sling when faced with the giant Goliath.
Surely Jesus was simply testing his followers’ understanding of this history, and would appreciate Peter’s tactful hinting at it?
Obviously much more could be said on this by those with a more detailed understanding of what Peter’s own experience of Roman occupation could have been – including the Roman taxes that crippled people of his social class. For now I want to reflect on the rule that guides the plots of all superhero movies still today. How many would turn up to watch their chosen hero finally stripped naked, beaten flat and humiliated by his most terrifying adversary?
This must not happen!
Q2. Why did Jesus reject Peter’s advice so vehemently, and identify this very first person to recognise his stature in God’s eyes, with Satan – the source and instigator of all evil?
Most of us can have a shot at this question, I suspect, based upon the theological understanding that informed our own early education, an understanding shaped by St Anselm of Canterbury in the 1090s CE1Cur Deus Homo?, St Anselm of Canterbury, c.1098 CE. Jesus had to undergo crucifixion to undo the huge offence to his Father given by all of the sins of us humans throughout the past, present and future – because our own sufferings are insufficient to repay this enormous debt.
According to this theory, in trying to persuade Jesus to avoid crucifixion, Peter was unknowingly standing in the way of God’s forgiveness, and so serving Satan – the malignant power intent on frustrating God’s plan from the very beginning.
This understanding, first put into words by St Anselm of Canterbury c. 1098 CE, and still repeated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church2Catechism of the Catholic Church 1994, Article 615 can certainly be presented in a way that does some justice to the compassion and mercy of God.
Was God the Father Dissatisfied?
However, in my experience, it can also mislead us into thinking that the Father whom Jesus called Abba is a distant and disapproving parent, more concerned about his own dignity than to affirm the dignity of every single one of us, right now.
If we think of God the father as self-absorbed rather than bent upon releasing us from the power of evil right now, this is not the best of Good News – the news that the Kingdom of Heaven is still at hand for all of us, in this present moment.
Before even trying to make sense of St Anselm’s answer we must first of all remember what Jesus said: ‘Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14: 9) and… ‘the Father and I are one’ (John 10: 30), and ‘Anyone who loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make a home in him’. (John 14: 23)
The Father is Always Close
Any explanation of the crucifixion that separates God our Father from our brother Jesus who comes to us in our deepest pain, falls short of the Gospel. Led in by Jesus, the Trinity wait even now to make their home within us, if that is our dearest wish.
Moreover, to every one of us they offer a role in making themselves known, as family, to those who need them most. They wish to free all of us from the fear that we have lost that love, or could lose it.It is an urgent desire, becauseno one just now should be without a sense of the Father’s nearness, compassion and presence – or of their own importance in the story now unfolding.
We need above all to try to understand why we doubt our own value, and then tend to look in the wrong place for self-respect. And how scripture – the Old and New Testaments – is always the guide to home.
Where do doubt and shame come from?
Two stories from the Old Testament help greatly here.
I. Genesis and the Roots of Shame
‘Who told you that you were naked?’ the Lord asked. (Gen 3: 11)
Straight away what Christians came to call ‘original sin’ is linked in the Genesis allegory with sensitivity to shaming, to possible ridicule and loss of both the respect of any observer and then of self-respect also.
The storyteller is suggesting that earlier, in Paradise, Eve had not known shame, but somehow the idea has come to her that there is something wrong with her. She should not be just a ‘creature’, something ‘made’ by God, the maker of all things. She should be ‘like Gods’ – equal to God. She is held back, some voice has assured her, only by her obedience to God’s ban on the ‘forbidden fruit’.
Notice how close that is to the pitch of any car salesman when you have just turned up for a service and find yourself looking at the latest gleaming apparition from the design studios:
“Great choice, that model, Sir, the xf469. Heganu designed it to help them figure out the optimal settings for the dynamic twosome in the boggle transcender that gives the next model – the xf475 – 50% more power for 20% less fuel. You probably weren’t aware of that, so no matter – very few people would notice the difference. Funny, though, one of those xf475s came in this morning – just to show a very excited customer later today… You wouldn’t believe the inertial dampers!”
Our biggest human problem down the ages has been our uncertainty about our own value and judgement, our chronic fear that we are insufficient as we are – our status anxiety. It always tells us that we lack something important, and to wantwhatever that is.
Eve could not have been influenced by this voice if she had not already been vulnerable in her self-esteem, and ready to believe that she needed something she did not already have.
This is our ‘original weakness’, and – as we are human – it never completely leaves us.
How could we not be uncertain, coming to a uniquely human kind of consciousness at the dawn of time, tiny beings under the great dome of the stars, in a world that we ourselves have not made?
We call this vulnerability to shame ‘self-consciousness’, but it is not merely ‘consciousness of self’. It is our problematic awareness that others are aware of us – and our fear of the value judgements they will make about us.
Moreover, are we not surrounded from our birth by really important people whom many admire, while nobody is interested in us because we are nobodies? What must we do to become a somebody?
In the ancient world the greatest of all somebodies were the Gods. There just had to be far more powerful beings in charge of everything out there. Who wouldn’t want to be one of them?
That’s why we humans tend to be wannabes – until we discover that this is a serious mistake – that from the beginning nobody was a nobody.
Notice that this passage in Genesis is also insisting that our ‘maker’ is not the one who told Adam and Eve they were nobodies, by pointing in scorn at their nakedness. We have all been made, the text tells us, in God’s own image and He has already blessed us, naked.
This passage in Genesis is clear also on where our doubt about our own value comes from – not God, the source of all that is good, but Satan, the serpent, the source of all evil.
In saying ‘This must not Happen‘ – to Jesus – Peter is giving voice to the power that evokes fear of the judgement of others, the power that had also overwhelmed the greatest of Israel’s kings.
II. King David of Israel
“You have worked in secret, but I shall work this for all Israel to see, in broad daylight.”
This, delivered by the prophet Nathan, is God’s warning to King David, following the latter’s seduction of Bathsheba and his underhanded murder of her husband, Uriah – to avoid the scandal of Bathsheba’s pregnancy. (2 Samuel 11 & 12).
Far from denying this charge, David admits at once to grave sin. In doing so this heroic defender of Israel against the Philistine giant Goliath confesses to surrender to an even greater terror – his fear of shame – of ‘what people would think’ if they came to hear the full story of David, Bathsheba and Uriah.
That scene has been set in the account of David’s earlier triumphant return from the victory over the Philistines, when the women of Israel sang: ”Saul has killed his thousands, and David his tens of thousands”. (1 Samuel 18: 7)
This is the role of ‘fame’, ‘celebrity’, or ‘status’ in ramping up our fear of shame. Acclaim by a multitude, by the crowd, will inevitably turn to disgust on the part of that same multitude if David does not hide his disgraceful behaviour! It is his horror at this prospect that entraps David into something far worse than adultery.
That David – Israel’s greatest hero king – could not overcome his fear of shame is central to the story. So is the implication that it is Satan who ‘enters in’ to exploit that very fear: David’s attempt to hide his disgraceful behaviour is the equivalent of the ‘covering up’ to avoid shame by the first humans in Genesis. It had been Satan, not the God of Genesis, who had precipitated the problem of shame.
And that is why Jesus saw Peter as ‘channelling’ Satan when the former said ‘this must not happen’ on the road to Jerusalem. Faced with the prospect of crucifixion – of what would be seen as total failure and disgrace – and assured by Peter that he must not accept this denouement, he responds with:
Because, obedient to the Father and the Holy Spirit, it is Jesus’ intention to overthrow the power of Satan, the ‘prince of this world’, the powerto shame us. Peter does not know that he is simply repeating a human pattern of behaviour – the pattern that had overwhelmed David also – of giving in to fear of shame.
Peter is doing what David had done and what almost everybody does when faced with the possibility of public disgrace. He gives in to the fear of total condemnation and of the shaming that crucifixion symbolised for every subject people in the empire. Peter is sure that at all costs it must not be Jesus who is shamed. Someone else must suffer that fate – those opposing him – but Jesus knows that this is why violence almost always begets violence, and he and the Father are bent on teaching us this.
For Jesus and the Father there was no other way of taking all of us, as quickly as possible, to the realisation that it is those who do the shaming who are always in the wrong – and that no one can truly shame those who are innocent. By rejecting his offer of the kingdom of God they have proven to Jesus, and the Father, that the limits of human power must now be revealed.
What Easter Means – the Overcoming of the World
Here we can see why the event commemorated by Christians at Easter – Jesus’s determination not to be overwhelmed by fear of shame, and to submit, forgivingly, to the worst that we humans can physically do to one another, was the pivotal moment in human history. (John 16:33)
Reflect right now on your own uncertainty. If you are unsure of your own judgement, have you any good reason to rely on the judgement of others – especially when those others can see only what you see – appearances – and know nothing about your inner self?
This is to know that the judgement of the world – of the multitude we mistakenly tend to look to for reassurance of our own value, for ‘fame’ – is totallyunreliable and can never be trusted to pass a true verdict on ourselves.
At its worst it can lynch us, simply because in its blind anger and fear it often needs someone to blame and punish. Worse still, if we can find no reassurance from others that we have some worth, we may turn against ourselves, fatally.
To know why Jesus reprimanded Peter is to know also why the world can never shame you, or anyone else, in God’s eyesand in truth.
Jesus is Greater than David
Certainly Jesus knew that even Israel’s greatest hero king – David – had been defeated and disgraced by the temptation to let someone else die so that he, the Great King David, could avoid shame. He knew also that the first murder story told in the Jewish scriptures was of a competition between two brothers, Cain and Abel, for greater favour in the eyes of God. And he also knew that this theme of competition or rivalry between two men who want the same prize, leading to conflict between them, was an ever repeating pattern in the recorded history of his own people.
Jesus also knew well that the Roman Empire that held his own land captive had arisen from the same process of rivalry, beginning with Roman envy of the Greek hero Alexander the Great and followed by warlord rivalries and civil war under the Roman Republic. The assassination of Julius Caesar in BCE 44 had been caused by the same resentment of Caesar’s dictatorial power and was followed by the expansion of the Roman Empire by Caesar’s heir, Augustus, and his successors – the very tyranny that was holding Jesus’s own people, the Jews in captivity in his own time.
Satan is history’s name for the fear that can grip any of us, and can grip a multitude simultaneously, if we are in danger of being shamed by the dramatic crises of our own lives – scorned, derided and pushed out into the dark.
Especially vulnerable is anyone who has both an elevated position in society – and knowledge of any secret that could bring disgrace.
The Predicament of Catholic Bishops in the 1900s
Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, c. 2003
That was precisely the predicament of all bishops of the Catholic Church in the late 1900s CE. Once inducted into that office every bishop soon learned that among his most important duties was the keeping of a secret that had been kept for generations: solemn ordination to the priesthood had not prevented a significant minority of ordained clergy from abusing the trust placed in them by Catholic parents and children.
No one knew what people would think and do if everyone learned this secret. Possibly this would mean not only the disgracing of the abusive priests and every bishop who had shielded them – but the total dissolution of the church. For every individual bishop there was therefore the additional fear of being the first to ‘drop the ball’ – and therefore they all believed that …
This must not happen!
The Bishops’ Predicament in 2024
Almost four decades after the first widely publicised revelation of Catholic clerical child sex abuse (in Lousiana, USA, in 1985) the historical origins of the cover up of clerical child sexual abuse are still unknown in the detail that full transparency calls for. Jesus of Nazareth, the founder of all Christian churches, was far more clearly opposed to any adult abuse of a child than he was to his disciples marrying (Matt 18: 6) – so the protection of the reputation of professedly celibate priests never justified the keeping of a secret that endangered every Christian child.
Why and when was it first decided that any priest known to have sexually abused a child should retain his priestly status – and that such infractions should be dealt with in strict secrecy?
No one knows – even though this could quickly be discovered by historical investigation.
If St Peter Damian in the mid 11th century 3St Peter Damian, Liber Gomorrhianus, c. 1050 CEcould strongly condemn the secrecy maintained by some bishops over abusive sexual behaviours by priests under their jurisdiction, and could advise that abusive priests should be laicised – and have his efforts at reform praised by Pope Leo IX – why were these efforts apparently in vain by the late 1900s?
Why, finally, has the papacy made absolutely no effort to initiate a full discovery of the historical origin of the procedures that have so scandalised the church and now been discontinued – especially when it has initiated a process of synodal discussion that led to the following advice about the need for transparency in July 2024:
“A synodal Church requires both a culture and practice of transparency and accountability, which are essential to fostering the mutual trust necessary for walking together and exercising co-responsibility for the sake of the common mission.”4How to Be a Missionary Church, Instrumentum Laboris for Second Session of Universal Synod of Synodality, Oct 2024, P.32, Article 73
Defeating this call to transparency, continuing denial of the obvious need for full historical disclosure can suggest only one conclusion: it is thought by those who keep the church’s historical secrets that what is still unknown would cause even more trouble if it were known than what has so far been revealed – so that, yet again this must not happen!
The Expanding Church of Lost Sheep
The devastating impact of the abuse revelations upon churchgoing in Ireland, the USA and elsewhere conceals a vital truth: those revelations have been the most important learning experience for Catholic Christians since the 2nd Vatican Council of 1962-65.
And the most important lesson we have learned is that while some priests are indeed holy it is not ordination that has made them holy – for otherwise all priests would be holy.
Was it this truth above all that the bishops of the church wanted to keep from us? Did they think that belief that every priest is holy was the bedrock of our faith?
That we don’t know the answer to this question even yet is another mystery! No bishop anywhere has sat down with his flock – including the many living faithful departed – to explain, frankly, why he believes this secret was kept. And so we become, increasingly, lost sheep.
Yet this does not mean that we have forgotten Jesus, the one who told the parable of the lost sheep – or the assurance he gave:
“See that you never despise any of these little ones, for I tell you that their angels in heaven are continually in the presence of my Father in heaven. For the Son of Man has come to save what was lost. Tell me. Suppose a man has a hundred sheep and one of them strays; will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hillside and go in search of the stray? In truth I tell you, if he finds it, it gives him more joy than do the ninety-nine that did not stray at all. Similarly, it is never the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost.” (Matt 18:10-14)
Awakened to the weakness of the clerical church by both clerical abuse and the cover up of clerical abuse, those of us who become lost sheep are very well placed to experience the truth of this parable. Everyone reading this also knows that the Lord who goes in search of the lost sheep does not go in vain – for we, those who believe the Creed – in spite of the failures of bishops – are the lost sheep who have been found.
If you, the person reading this, have realised that you too are inexpressibly loved by the Lord of the Gospel, you are also well placed to explain to any bishop why the fear of shame was the fear of Peter in the beginning, and the root cause of the cover up that has devastated the church.
And, as Jesus forgave Peterfor abandoning him, He will forgive also the concealment of the truth that still continues – the cause of the very worst schism the church has experienced.
To understand why Jesus had to overcome his fear of the world – his fear of shame – is to overcome in that moment the same fear in ourselves.
Apparantly paralysed still by fear of shame in 2024, Catholic bishops need to realise that the truths of the Gospel are greater than all of us, and that they too need to overcome that fear, as Jesus did – to agree to a complete discovery of the roots of the catastrophe that has nearly overwhelmed us.
For the Trinity are as busy as ever rounding up the lost sheep, and need the help of every Christian to complete that task. It is time for all Catholic bishops to realise why complete honesty and transparency must now happen.
Notes
Cur Deus Homo?, St Anselm of Canterbury, c.1098 CE
Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1994, Article 615
Liber Gomorrhianus, St Peter Damian, c.1050 CE
How to Be a Missionary Church, Instrumentum Laboris for Second Session of 16th Synod of Bishops – on Synodality – Oct 2024, P.32, Article 73
While declaring transparency a requirement for a synodal church, the working document for the final session of the 2023-24 Vatican Synod on Synodality gives no promise of transparency around the historical origins of the standard procedure of concealing from Catholic parents the reality of clerical sexual abuse of children in the 20th century – a policy which spiritually traumatised countless Catholic children. How can the church become ‘missionary’ with such a background?
In Genesis we are told that for many years Jacob, son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham, did not know that his own most favoured son, Joseph, had not been killed by a wild animal but sold into slavery in Egypt by his other sons, out of jealousy. (Genesis 37-50)
In the Book of Kings we learn that Naboth of Jezreel did not know that when he refused the offer of an exchange of land with King Ahab of Israel, Ahab’s wife, Jezebel, would scheme to dispossess and kill him. (1 Kings 21)
Elsewhere we read that Esther, adoptive daughter of Mordecai and wife of Persian King Ahasuerus, was unaware initially that the powerful courtier Haman was plotting the extermination of her people, the Jews – because of Mordecai’s refusal to show due servility to Haman. (Esther)
Secure in her own garden, Susanna in Babylon was unaware that her beauty had enticed two elders among the Jews there to make a pact to threaten her with stoning to death for adultery if she did not give way to their lust. (Susanna and the Elders: Book ofDaniel)
Uriah the Hittite did not know why the men beside him suddenly abandoned him in the thick of his final battle. He was oblivious to betrayal by his commander-in-chief, King David of Israel – who had seduced and impregnated his wife Bathsheba and then given orders that would doom him, despite his own loyalty to the cause of David’s kingdom. (2 Samuel)
Those women who gave birth to sons in Bethlehem around the time of Jesus’s birth had no reason to suspect that King Herod would plot their murder soon after hearing of the latter event. (Matt 2:16-18)
A Biblical Focus on Conspiratorial Injustice
Scripture scholars may doubt that all of these tales are historical, but the pattern of literary focus is clear. The authors had a common interest in narratives of high-level scheming, injustice, concealment and victimisation. The reason for the concealment may often be implicit but always these plotters can be understood as having a common interest in preserving their reputations in the gaze of others.
That is, they all had a deducible interest in ‘saving face’, to use a phrase more often associated with Oriental culture.
And this heuristic may also be applied to the Gospel accounts of the parts played by Caiaphas, Judas, another Herod and Pilate in the arrest, trials, crucifixion and death of Jesus of Nazareth.
The Innocence of the Victims
As the anthropologist René Girard has observed there is another common aspect of these narratives. Their victims, or intended victims, were essentially innocent. Taken as sacred texts they all reveal the God of Israel, the claimed source of all scriptural inspiration, to be on the side of the intended victim or victims.
Preservation of reputation on the part of plotters is far from being a dated and antiquated fixation – as proven by the outrageous murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018, by agents of the Saudi government. That this is a western fixation also was most clearly revealed by the attempt of the Nixon administration to conceal the origins of the burglary of the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Office Building in Washington DC in 1972. High level financial ‘scams’ such as the Enron affair of 2001 and the Madoff ‘ponzi’ scandal of 2008 are apparently inevitable in Western capitalism. Jealousies, plots and betrayals are at the core of western fictional drama, up to and including the current TV series Succession. The tension of these dramas hangs always upon what is known and intended by ambitious or lustful characters and yet concealed, agonisingly, from others who will suffer the consequences.
Unwitting Victims of Reputational Fear
Until 1994 in Ireland Catholic parents generally did not know that the ordained status of men to whom they often entrusted their children did not always make those men incapable of severely harming those children, sexually, psychologically and spiritually. By now those families who suffered this fate probably know that this phenomenon had been known to church authorities from the end of the first century CE (as recorded in The Didache).
On December 9th 2009, following the publication of the Murphy report, the Irish Bishops Conference felt compelled to declare that:
“We are deeply shocked by the scale and depravity of abuse as described in the Report. We are shamed by the extent to which child sexual abuse was covered up in the Archdiocese of Dublin and recognise that this indicates a culture that was widespread in the Church. The avoidance of scandal, the preservation of the reputations of individuals and of the Church, took precedence over the safety and welfare of children. This should never have happened and must never be allowed to happen again. We humbly ask for forgiveness.”1Statement following the winter meeting of the Irish Bishops Conference, 9th December 2009
Since then the international scope of this ‘cover up’ has become more apparent, as has that motivation to ‘preserve the reputation of individuals and of the church’ – made even more poignant by the claim of Fr Gerhard Gruber in 2010 that as vicar general in the archdiocese of Munich he had been pressurised to take the blame for mistakes made decades earlier in the handling of a case of abuse – when Pope Benedict, then Joseph Ratzinger, had been archbishop of that diocese.2‘Law firm to publish report on handling of abuse in Munich Archdiocese’, CRUX, Catholic News Service, Jan 4, 2022
An Unreasonable Comparison?
Is it unreasonable to compare this ‘cover up’ by churchmen with the plots and plottings of scriptural archetypes such as David, Ahab, Jezebel, Haman, Caiaphas and the Herods? Were those who practised concealment of clerical sex abuse of children ever truly aware of the scale of suffering they were visiting upon the innocent? Did they ever intend that suffering? May they not even have had worthy motives and been oblivious of serious injustice or harm?
All of these questions are plausible – and yet some may be asked also of some of the scriptural plotters, if mitigation is our intent. For example, given King David’s symbolic importance to Israel, might he not have been justified in sacrificing one man, Uriah, to avoid demoralisation of the nation in time of war? And mightn’t Caiaphas, Herod and Pilate truly have had similar thoughts in the case of Jesus the Galilean troublemaker?
Why So Little Learned in Two Millennia?
Was a span of almost two millennia not truly sufficient to educate churchmen in the consequences to victims of childhood or adolescent sexual abuse? When it came to ending the cover up, did the church truly need to depend upon secular lawyers, police, courts, media? When it came to their ‘learning curve’ on the impact of sexual abuse on children should churchmen truly have needed the advice of secular psychology and psychiatry, when they had Jesus’s own stern warning to guide them? If so, why on earth condemn secularism and the Enlightenment?
However plausible may be the attempts at mitigation of the cover up of clerical child abuse, it will always remain true that many children globally suffered totally unexpected and unimaginable horrors from these abuses. That much of this could have been prevented if the episcopal magisterium had shown corporate wisdom, courage and transparency ab initio, rather than corporate dedication to the protection of its own reputation, will also always be true – and the people of God truly deserve an historical accounting for this failure.
The Cover Up of the Past
So far, instead, even after almost four decades of revelation, the cover up still extends backwards into the distant past. For example, no one knows why or when it was decided, with apparent unanimity by the magisterium, that Jesus’s own emphatic condemnation of the betrayal of childhood innocence (Matt 18:6) was irrelevant when considering whether ordained abusers of children could be retained in ministry after a first provable offence. Why was this most emphatic teaching of Jesus ignored, when the context of his only recommendation of celibacy (Matt 19:12) suggests that it was probably intended merely for those who could not contemplate life-long marital fidelity? This obvious reluctance on the part of the current magisterium to consult and reveal the full Vatican and wider church record is a barrier to the ‘reckoning’ on clerical abuse called for by the Irish national synodal synthesis of August 2022.
Administrators’ Dilemmas
Inevitably we must guess that it is still the situational dilemmas of administrators that delay a final reckoning. They need to reflect on that scriptural record, recalling where the Trinity’s sympathies always lie – as well as the prophecy of Simeon that the life of the child Jesus would reveal the hidden thoughts of many. When Christian historians of the future tell this story, will they not also be stressing the innocence of the victims and the reputational fears of the powerful ordained?
Apart from this need to ‘clear the air’ on the handling of clerical abuse there is another reason for urgent closure. The teaching authority of Catholic bishops everywhere – especially in regard to sexuality – has been rendered null for many by this disaster. Irish bishops have still not revealed the reason for their failure to sponsor and publish reliable research on the widespread failure of Irish Catholic schools to develop a practised liturgical faith among their alumni in recent decades3See Faith Formation and Fear of Shame, The Furrow, 2017. This too is an unnecessary mystery suggestive of fear of self-embarrassment via the likely results of any such research.
Lack of Clarity on Sin
The clarity of the church’s teaching on sin is another serious issue. No one who pays any attention can be unaware that serious differences exist between the understanding of sin as prioritised by Pope Francis or, for example, Cardinal Robert McElroy – and sin as seen by the pope’s highest-level opponents, for whom the ‘no parvity’ principle in regard to all sexual rule-breaking is apparently as true and unshakeable as the Creed.
“… the sins of the flesh are not the most serious. The gravest sins are those that are more angelic: pride, hatred. These are graver.”4‘Full text: Pope Francis’ in-flight press conference from Greece’, Catholic News Agency, Dec 6th 2021 So insisted Pope Francis in December 2021, when asked about the admission by a French archbishop of an affair with an adult woman. If the ‘angelic’ sin of pride is indeed graver than lust, what about ‘the preservation of the reputations of individuals and of the Church’ identified by Irish bishops as a cause of the cover-up of sexual abuse? Wasn’t it David’s pride that prevented him from owning up to his own affair with Bathsheba – and then led to the far greater sin of murder-by-proxy?
The Catechism is seriously lacking an extended and culturally relevant treatment of both pride and covetousness – even while the problem of clericalism has been identified by Pope Francis as that desire for superiority, attention and honour5‘5 Of the many times Pope Francis has warned against clericalism’, Kathleen N. Hattrup, Aleteia, 23rd August 2018 that the Catechism does identify as a feature of pride6Catechism of the Catholic Church, Glossary, ‘Pride’. Defining covetousness as ‘modelling your desires on what your neighbour has’ would also allow the magisterium to see and reject the desire for social superiority that fuels all social ambition, including the rampant desire for celebrity. Secularism sorely needs an explanation of inequality – and pride and covetousness are ready to hand.
Sin of Pride Embedded in Clericalism
Or at least they will be when the magisterium has clearly seen these sins as fundamental to the cover up of clerical sexual abuse, and confessed them frankly as embedded in clericalism and ecclesiastical ambition. Pope Francis’s courage in opening up this debate needs the support of all bishops in the pursuit of a ‘reckoning’ – a telling of the complete truth of the hierarchical church’s own sins.
When it happens this telling will involve a full exposure of the historical record, and the sooner the better. Scripture lauds the anointed King David while telling us the worst that he did. Jesus’s own mitigation of the offences of his persecutors – ‘they know not what they do’ – can be applied also to the cover up of clerical abuse but we need, urgently, the full story – whatever may still impend – if the church is to overcome this disaster in the time of any of the generations now living.
It took decades for Jacob to learn that his most favoured son was still alive, but at least he lived to see Joseph again, now greatly honoured, in Egypt. In knowing that Catholic churchmen at the highest level can visit the most appalling suffering upon innocent children, out of concern for the reputation of ‘the church’ – and can collaborate to hide this problem until exposed – don’t we Catholic people already know the worst?
As stated by the July 2024 Instrumentum Laboris for the final session of the Vatican Synod of Bishops on Synodality in October 2024:
“A synodal Church requires both a culture and practice of transparency and accountability, which are essential to fostering the mutual trust necessary for walking together and exercising co-responsibility for the sake of the common mission.”7How to Be a Missionary Church, Instrumentum Laboris for Second Session of Universal Synod of Synodality, Oct 2024, P.32, Article 73
Despite this statement of principle there is no sign whatever in the document of a realisation that continuing secrecy about the recent past is an insuperable barrier to trust – and so also to communion, participation and mission. How are we to take the call to transparency seriously if secrecy is still to be maintained around the greatest scandal the church has ever suffered?
Never in the long history of human shepherding have so many sheep been lost by so many shepherds – but apparently we are never to know why.
Notes
Statement following the winter meeting of the Irish Bishops Conference, 9th December 2009
‘Law firm to publish report on handling of abuse in Munich Archdiocese’, CRUX, Catholic News Service, Jan 4, 2022
‘Full text: Pope Francis’ in-flight press conference from Greece’, Catholic News Agency, Dec 6th 2021
‘5 Of the many times Pope Francis has warned against clericalism’, Kathleen N. Hattrup, Aleteia, 23rd August 2018
CCC, Glossary, ‘Pride’
How to Be a Missionary Church, Instrumentum Laboris for Second Session of Universal Synod of Synodality, Oct 2024, P.32, Article 73
(Author’s note: An earlier version of this article appeared in the Oct 2023 edition of The Furrow, under the title A ‘Reckoning’ on Clerical Abuse? Challenge and Opportunity.)
Aged fourteen then my youngest son had just told me:
“I don’t believe in all this Jesus stuff – and most of my class don’t either!”
As a vice principal and teacher of history and current affairs in that same school this hit me especially hard. I felt deeply that my son was making a huge mistake but could not even begin to explain why.
Our Irish Catholic church culture had mistakenly taught us lay people to leave all deep thinking about faith to clergy and teachers of religion – and that was not my school department. Effectively, I had not considered myself responsible for ‘passing on the faith’ to my own children. My older children had also already opted out of church-going so I realised at that moment that I was incapable of resisting this tide.
Simultaneously then I was suffering a crisis of confidence in the entire secular programme – the western project to use ‘reason’ alone to build a perfect world. In 1994 the early signs of Russia’s turn to extreme nationalism, and away from democracy, were beginning to show – and the likelihood of global environmental collapse from industrialisation was looming. What explained the failure to achieve true equality and social justice in the West – especially in the USA – and the growing indifference to the plight of children in the ‘undeveloped’ world?
Mere rationalism was certainly failing me, so I felt truly overwhelmed in the days that followed my youngest son’s revelation. So, at some point one evening I switched off my BBC ‘B’ PC and went to my room – and closed the door. Sitting on my bed I said:
“This is it for me, Father. I don’t understand the connection between the Gospel world and the history and current affairs I am teaching. Please help me to see!”
There was no voice from heaven in that moment, but in the days and weeks that followed I slowly became aware of the universe of honour and shame in which we humans have always lived – the dimension of fear of scorn that impels all of us to seek affirmation and respect from others – the need of the ego. Always bothered by this need we suffer from status anxiety – but not until 2004 did I describe it this way.
‘People climb!’ That was how I first summarised the pattern I was seeing – and this tendency had me too in its grip. Was I too not on a ladder of hopeful ascent within my own profession? Was that not the cause of the friction that always occurred in our school staff room whenever some post of promotion was on offer? Was that same thing – the need to be first – not at the root of decades of conflict in Northern Ireland, my own dear place?
People wanting to be first – even in the church – but there was someone in history who had done the opposite – the outstanding exception who highlighted and pinpointed exactly what is wrong with the world, always. It was He who most clearly explained the pyramids of power and injustice – the pyramids of esteem – that arise in all eras of history, including our own. The emerging icons of commercial power in my own time – the Titans of the digital economy – were merely the successors of the Caesars of the ancient world and the imperial adventurers and rulers who had led the West to global dominance after 1450.
It was this climbing – this need to be first – that lay at the root of all inequality and injustice – and now it was threatening even the climate that gave us the very air we breathe. This was what I now saw.
And Jesus of Nazareth was not just a figure from history, he was the only salvation for us all in our own time. Moreover, through the Holy Spirit, he was offering me guidance too – in everything I thought and wrote. My life was now on a different course – because I had said, at a moment of crisis, the prayer that described my own anguish.
But God will not forgive me if I do not speak the most important lesson of this experience. The Trinity can teach and lead every living person on the planet in the same way – especially at this time of world crisis. They are at everyone’s elbow – now and always – just waiting to be asked.
If the Catholic church is in crisis in 2024, so is the world.
When scientists tell us we are exhausting the key resources of our planet, and political leaders struggle to contain the violence that can erupt anywhere – and extremists invent conspiracies freely on the Internet to justify hatred and scapegoating – who can now share the 18th century optimism that Reason would create a perfect world, without Faith?
Instead, allied to science and technology, human covetousness has created an egregious overclass whose indifference to the suffering of a far larger underclass now threatens the world with dystopia, tyranny and cataclysm.
Not without optimism has every pope since Leo XIII predicted a New Pentecost. Pope Francis did that again in Dublin in 2018.
“Each new day in the life of our families, and each new generation, brings the promise of a new Pentecost, a domestic Pentecost, a fresh outpouring of the Spirit, the Paraclete, whom Jesus sends as our Advocate, our Consoler and indeed our Encourager.”
So what is it that faces us – New Pentecost as prayed for by popes, or Disaster – the Apocalypse as understood by popular media – the end of everything? When environmental scientists hesitate to beget children we are truly faced by a nightmare rather than the Utopia prophesied by the most naive at the 18th century dawn of secular liberalism.
And yet the word Apocalypse means not disaster but revelation, the breaking in of insight – exactly what is needed to precipitate a global sharing of the truth that was glimpsed in the pandemic of 2019-22. To the basic needs of food, clean water, clean air and shelter we need to add the realisation that we are all both interconnected and in need of peace and climatic safety – above all else.
Superyachts and Helicopters?
Who can sensibly be dreaming of superyachts and helicopters in such a time, or survival bunkers somewhere in New Zealand? That we tend to want what others want – choosing our own desires from the preferred options of the mega-rich – is now as obvious as the futility of doing just that. Everyone everywhere is threatened by the self-indulgence of those who can currently choose what they want from the conveyer belts of the 2024 global economy.
Who cannot see this choice as a turning point of human history – with salvation on offer only if we opt for simplicity, the Gospel of just enough?
Reason to be reasonable must now see what Faith has always taught: that there is no wisdom alternative to the Great Commandments. This is a most dangerous time – but also a time for confidence that, despite its obvious faults, our church has not led us astray.
It’s not a choice of Apocalypse OR New Pentecost that now faces us. In an intensifying global crisis radical rethinking is unavoidable, as well as prayer. Revelation and New Pentecost will come to us together. The leaders of tomorrow will be the first to experience this – the first to absorb the whole truth.
To rescue us from fear of the judgement of others – what Jesus calls ‘the world’ (John 16:33) – by overthrowing, without violence, the judgement of the world of his time, and all time. This fear of judgement, which comes not from God but from the Adversary, is the root of all status anxiety (fear of ‘what people think’), status seeking, inequality and violence.
So that we might follow him out of love rather than fear.
To teach us to forgive as He did.
To reveal to us the origin of all violence in status anxiety – and the Satanic historical pattern of the accusation and scapegoating of the innocent that arises from the status anxiety of those seeking or wielding punitive power.
To give us a limitless horizon – beyond mere consumption, sexual fixation and death.
To offer freedom from fear to those challenged to speak the truth to abusive power, the whistle-blowers who are needed even in the church.
To allow us always to review the history of the church and to lament the status anxiety that misled it too often into too close an alliance with state power (c.313 CE to c.1918 CE) under Christendom, and the many victimisations, enslavements and compromises with violence that followed – including the abuse of children by ordained clergy.
To take away even those sins when we have seen them, and properly atoned.
To clarify our understanding of sin as stemming from doubt of our own value, leading to the coveting of status in the positive regard of others – and all other unloving and unjust actions.
To make way for the Holy Spirit, close counsellor of everyone.
To bring us back to the Father our maker – and sender of Jesus our Rescuer and the Holy Spirit our counsellor.
To save the world in an always New Creation – through our conversion and our witness to the Blessed Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit – who accompany us always and forever.
If the earliest Christians were given new life by Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, and a vision of a new creation in a violent world now passing away, why should Christians of our time not always see this world of now as equally limited in judgement, and the Trinity as calling them always to a new and peaceful Kingdom of God, beyond all ambition and conflict? The medieval God seen by St Anselm of Canterbury as bent only on balancing the scales of an eternal justice is not the God of the apostles or of Irenaeus or the other early fathers, for whom it was God the Father who had burst their chains by sending them His Son.
Using the psychological and anthropological insights of Alain de Botton and René Girard it is time to return to the early church’s vision of Jesus of Nazareth as Christus Victor, who with the father’s help has overturned the verdict of the world, by exposing the real author of the lies that had condemned him. In the words of Gustav Aulén, interpreting Irenaeus:
“First, then, it must be emphasised that the work of atonement is regarded as carried through by God Himself; and this, not merely in the sense that God authorises, sanctions, and initiates the plan of salvation, but that He Himself is the effective agent in the redemptive work, from beginning to end. It is the Word of God incarnate who overcomes the tyrants which hold man in bondage; God Himself enters into the world of sin and death, that He may reconcile the world to Himself. Therefore Incarnation and Atonement stand in no sort of antithesis; rather, they belong inseparably together. It is God’s Love, the Divine agape, that removes the sentence that rested upon mankind, and creates a new relation between the human race and Himself, a relation which is altogether different from any sort of justification by legal righteousness. The whole dispensation is the work of grace.” [Gustav Aulén, Christus Victor, 1931. S.P.C.K. edition 1965, p 34.]
“…there is a crisis in transmission of faith … we are unsure about how to evangelise in the modern world…”
Clipped from the Irish national synodal synthesis of August 2022 this conclusion is obviously derived from the 26 diocesan synodal reports of that year – with 25 of those dioceses echoing an urgent need for adult faith formation – to address a critical problem of younger generational drift from Catholic faith practice.
My own diocese, Derry, in June 2022 reported that “There was a widespread desire among participants to learn more about their faith and many believed that adult faith formation should be available within, and between more parishes.” Further on we were told that “Plans for developing a programme of adult faith formation are already well underway in the diocese.“
Despite this assurance, Derry diocese was still without an ongoing programme for adult faith development in the spring of 2024 – when I attended a two-day course in synodal leadership led by members of Ireland’s Synodal Pathway steering group, in Drumalis House, Larne (March 14,15).
Alpha & Drumalis
Embarked already from early 2024 on an invigorating Alpha course in Coleraine, I found myself challenged on the Drumalis leadership course to discern a personal synodal mission. This soon focused upon the unresolved Derry faith formation issue, with the hope of simplifying the faith formation task by starting with something familiar – the Rosary prayers – and taking a new look at those. I thought that this focus could both complement the higher-tech inter-church Alpha programme by adding a specifically Catholic dimension to it, and provide a low-tech and easily portable tool to enable family and small group use.
(The Alpha programme requires considerable investment of effort by quite a large team, as well as video projection equipment and premises that will permit the provision of refreshment.)
Concerned above all to convey the truth that Catholic Christian core beliefs are portable by any young adult I aimed at verbal compression and simplicity – and gave the pages the title ‘The Lightest Burden ‘. If Jesus insists that ‘my yoke is easy and my burden is light’ should not every effort be made at verbal simplicity and brevity – and joy – when trying to encapsulate the faith – especially for young people?
The Creed as Celebration of Jesus’ Victory over Evil
Moreover, wasn’t the original Good News simply the news of Jesus’ resurrection and therefore also of the defeat of the Accuser, Satan, the father of lies – beginning with the lies told against Jesus at his trial?
What we call the Apostles Creed was centred on this core belief in the Resurrection as the downfall of Satan the Accuser (for our sake) – and yet the history of Christendom determined that this short summary of Catholic belief was in need of vast expansion into what is often referred to as the ‘deposit of faith’. That by c. 1100 this deposit had come to include a very different emphasis – God the Father’s supposed need for satisfaction for sin – is surely the core problem of Christian evangelisation and faith formation today.
The Rosary as Celebration
The Joyful mysteries of the Rosary surely centre on the promise of Jesus’ victory over Satan – the source of all evil. The Glorious mysteries celebrate, in turn, that same victory, then the coming of the Paraclete – the defender of the oppressed – and then the enthronement of the mother of God. In between the Sorrowful mysteries take us through the suffering that won the victory.
That the Rosary is potentially always a celebratory prayer is as obvious as the fact that all too often it is recited as a penance.
‘Satisfaction’?
Why did it happen that in the second Christian millennium the Father who sent Jesus to liberate the earliest Christians – consciously – from the pall of evil that overshadowed the ancient world became instead the demanding Father who had sent Jesus to satisfy the demands of his eternal justice – i.e. primarily for his own satisfaction?
That this theological development accompanied the maximal political empowerment of the church c. 1100 CE is surely suggestive of an answer. The church had by then itself a crucial political role: the support of nominally edifying Christian European rulers – so God the Father had by then supposedly no need to liberate the world. On the other hand a very distant God who needed satisfaction for sin was very like a distant medieval king who needed his people to be obedient above all, and therefore more than a little fearful as well.
Salvation as Liberation, Now
And this is surely why there has been an argument in our own time over liberation theology. History – the history of Christendom – has seriously confused our understanding of the Creed – and made us prefer to recite it quickly and then walk away – rather than seek a new clarity that meets our current dire need for Hope.
And yet, arrested unjustly for blasphemy, in e.g. Pakistan, any Christian today could recite the Creed internally with exactly the same purpose as a Christian under the Roman emperor Diocletian – to remind herself that the Father who has raised Jesus from the dead, and the Holy Spirit who is now her advocate, will not abandon her whatever happens.
And doesn’t every young person in the world today need to know that the same stern guardians of truth are at their elbow – if the very same Accuser and liar targets them on the Internet?
That even as yet our Catholic clergy cannot emphatically tell our younger generations this is part of the legacy of Christendom – the historical empowerment of the church that has confused its theology and made Christian faith formation still problematic.
Jesus diagnosed the central human problem long ago – our tendency to look for glory from one another, rather than from God. It is our fear of one another’s scorn that leads to the telling of lies – and the need for the One who would never bow to falsehood.
The Victory of Truth is Certain
It is surely high time to stop simply reciting the Creed as a series of disconnected verbal dogmas – to restore its power as inward reassurance that Christ’s victory – and the victory of truth itself – is certain. Jewish people sometimes actually dance to the ShemaIsrael (‘Hear O Israel’) – the recitation of the great commandments of Israel – the commandments of love (Deut 6:4-9). Someday surely we catholic Christians must have cause to dance to the Creed?
“We are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value.”
So wrote Alain de Botton, philosopher, in 2004. His name for this affliction – status anxiety – is the title of an accessible book on the subject.1Status Anxiety, A de Botton, Penguin 2005 Outlining its role in Victorian snobbery, class conflict, consumerism, the idea of ‘meritocracy’ and many other things he makes a persuasive case for status anxiety as a pernicious source of unhappiness in all eras and cultures – but especially in the West today.
De Botton suggests also that religion, especially Christianity, might be a cure. Could this offer insight into our ongoing hesitation over ‘mission’, and maybe much more than that?
Take, for example, the ‘shock’ expressed by the late Cardinal Bernardin Gantin in 1999, for the rampant ‘social climbing’ of bishops who had looked to him, as a Vatican official, for transfer to ‘more prestigious’ dioceses.2See Wikipedia article on Bernardin Gantin If other Vatican officials were not prone to the same affliction would there have been a ‘Vati-leaks’ affair in 2012, or a papal retirement the following year?
[It is, of course, untrue that Irish parishes and dioceses are ranked in much the same way by Irish clergy, and that transfer to the least prestigious (poorest) parish or diocese is regarded as demotion – even if scurrilous rumours of this persist!]
Take also the embarrassment suffered now by sincere clergy over the plethora of questionable clerical titles such as ‘Monsignor’ (My Lord) or ‘Canon’. Would so many of those have been invented if ordination was an instant cure for the yearning for higher status?
Take then something far more pernicious – the practice by Irish bishops until 1994 of secrecy on clerical child sex abuse. When the bishops of Ireland admitted in December 2009 that this had arisen out of a desire to preserve ‘the reputations of individuals and of the Church’ were they not also admitting to the role of clerical status anxiety in the deepest church scandal of our time?3Statement of the Winter 2009 Conference of Bishops in Ireland
The Crisis of Faith Formation
Why, finally, are Irish bishops so slow in getting to grips with what is now an existential problem for Irish Catholicism – described in the August 2022 national synodal report as ‘a crisis in the transmission of faith’?4Synthesis of the Consultation in Ireland for the Diocesan Stage of the Universal Synod 2021-23 Why the failure, over decades, to conduct and publish research on the effectiveness of school-dependent faith formation – to get to the root of the indifference of so many baptised teenagers while still at school? Are we to believe there is no fear of further embarrassment by Irish campaigners against faith schools, on foot of any such research?
Could it be also that although now committed – at least on paper – to permanent synodal ‘mission’ we lack even a clear view of the ‘salvation’ from the ‘evil’ and ‘sin’ that the ‘Good News’ promises? Are we Irish Catholics largely inarticulate about our faith simply because we have failed to recognise that our own national history of imperial conquest and occupation has made us especially inclined to doubt our own value – i.e. to suffer from status anxiety – and embarrassed even to admit this to be an ‘affliction’ in need of a spiritual cure?
If the sixth commandment was especially emphasised in the past by Irish clergy was that because we could not see the repeated ban on covetousness in commandments nine and ten as a warning against desire for the higher status that our wealthy neighbours, secular or religious, might ‘show off’ in their possessions or titles? Has our inability to categorise status seeking as a spiritual problem – and often also our uncritical embracing of a ‘meritocratic’ ethos in our schools – been a huge beam in our discerning eye – an inability to focus something deeply problematic that was always in plain sight?
Have we even yet fully absorbed the meaning of the Catholic social principle that all of us, as children of God, are already strictly equal in dignity – and St Peter’s own mature conclusion that ‘God has no favourites’ (Acts 10:34)?
Could it even be that status anxiety is at the root of the ongoing reluctance of many priests to engage in fully committed synodal discussion?
On Exodus?
‘We are a people on Exodus,’ said Bishop Donal McKeown of Derry in 2016.5‘Bishop Donal McKeown welcomes delegates to the European Laity Forum Study Assembly’ This reminder of the association of the God of Israel, and of Jesus, with ‘redemption’ – i.e. with liberation from enslavement – surely prompts a critical question for faith formation today: From what enslavement is the Gospel offering us – the people of Ireland and the world – liberation today?
‘From the power of evil’ is surely true, but also far too abstract to be helpful. In what visible, real phenomena do we see that power of evil begin to work?
If we find that question baffling, could that be the root of our problem with articulating the ‘Good News’ to younger generations?
That Jesus of Nazareth, though born in poverty, was entirely free of status anxiety is a dominant theme of the Gospels. ‘Master, we know that you are an honest man and teach the way of God in all honesty, and that you are not afraid of anyone, because human rank means nothing to you,’ say those seeking to entrap him in political opposition to Rome (Matt 22:16). ‘Why do you eat with sinners?‘ is another frequent complaint (e.g. Luke 5:30).
‘Why do you worry about what you wear?’ Jesus asks in return (Matt 6:28). Berating the tendency of religious hypocrites to dress up to impress others was he not identifying their status anxiety as their core problem? (Matt 23:5)
Before the crisis of the crucifixion the apostles were also clearly trapped in deference to the honour pyramids of their world. ‘An argument also began between them about who should be reckoned the greatest.’ (Luke 22:28) James and John, the sons of Zebedee, looked for a promise of the highest places in Jesus’s future kingdom (Mark 10:35-45) – pointing to what lies at the root of all conflict. Then finally Jesus’ forecast of his own crucifixion – the fate of a rebellious slave – was for Peter an impossible prospect (Matt 16:22). As Jesus’ first lieutenant, how could he himself now escape ultimate social disaster?
So when Peter told Jesus that his crucifixion ‘must not happen’, and Jesus called him ‘Satan’, are we being told to look to Peter’s fear of shame – to his status anxiety – as the wellspring of all evil?
Overthrowing the Judgement of the World
“Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among. “
This for Alain de Botton is the self-imprisoning consequence of status anxiety. All seeking of the positive regard of others can follow only from the mistake of attributing to those others the authority to evaluate ourselves. Who can justly claim such authority?
When Jesus asked his critics why they looked only to one another for glory was he not nailing a mistake we all tend to make? When he assured his more attentive listeners that some Galileans recently slaughtered by Pilate were not worse sinners than anyone else was he not revealing that Jews of that time were drawing exactly that conclusion from Roman occupation and brutality – that this was a ‘thumbs down’ from their own God as well? (Luke 13:1-4)
‘Do not judge,’ insisted Jesus. The religious elites of his time, the pharisees and scribes, were inclined to do exactly that. An ability to memorise and deploy any of the 613 laws of Leviticus led naturally to hypocrisy and judgementalism – and therefore also to extreme status anxiety on the part of the poor and illiterate. Is not that what it was to be ‘poor in spirit’?
‘I have overcome the world,’ said Jesus in response to his own impending judgement (John 16:33). Did he not obviously mean that he had overcome the human tendency to internalise the criticism and judgement of others – including those at the summit of the honour pyramids of his own time, in both ‘church’ and state?
Saying this, has he not told us also the purpose of the crucifixion: to subvert our tendency to fear the judgement of others, a tendency that empowers all who are ready to exploit it – from schoolroom and workplace and media trolls to religious charlatans, globalising entrepreneurs, racist agitators and scandal-hungry journalists?
How could Jesus have challenged us to face, and to overcome, in prayer, our own fear of shame if he had not faced that same challenge?
That Jesus’ resurrection was for the first Christians liberation from the fear of being looked down upon, especially by Rome and by their own religious elites, is altogether plain in the detail and conviction of the New Testament texts. What else could St Paul have meant when he wrote of a ‘new creation’? (2 Cor 5:17)
And was not status anxiety – this human tendency to doubt our own value as we are – also the original human frailty attributed to Adam and Eve in the Genesis allegory? Do we need seriously to rethink what we mean by original sin?
Lying at the root of all social ambition was it not status anxiety that drove Alexander the Great, the Pharaohs and the Caesars? Is it not the wellspring of all modern imperialism, inequality, oppression and conflict – and now of the rampant desire to be media icons?
Deployed now by social media as a core strategy for making digital addicts even of children, is not the fostering of status anxiety – via the lottery of ‘going viral’ and ‘celebrity’ and ‘influence’ – the most pernicious of global plagues?
Is the Gospel truly irrelevant there, especially for the victims of all ages?
Salvation?
Jesus insisted: ‘whoever sees me sees the one who sent me‘ (John 12:45). Why then is Christianity, and Catholicism – and faith formation – still vexed by the medieval notion that the crucifixion of Jesus was demanded by a heavenly father who needed ‘satisfaction’ for the offence caused to him by sin? Why this attribution to God the Father of the same affliction of status anxiety that Adam and Eve – and medieval monarchs – had, when Jesus had no such problem?
The earliest Christians made no such charge. They clearly understood the passion and resurrection of Jesus in a totally different way: as liberation for themselves – by the Father – from fear of judgement and humiliation by the ‘principalities and powers’ of their own time (e.g. Rom 8:38).
Why should we not believe that the challenging and healing of status anxiety – essentially fear of shame from the negative judgement of others – was from the beginning the purpose of the Incarnation, the intention of the Trinity? When we say in the Creed that we believe in Jesus as final judge of ‘the living and the dead’ have we ‘relativised’ all other judges?
As for the Eucharist don’t we need to restore its meaning as a celebration of release from fear of the judgementalism of our own time, if we are to be joyfully ‘on Exodus’?
From what do we think we have we been liberated when we say:
‘Lord, by your cross and resurrection you have set us free.’ ?
As for the marginalised and the self-harming and the lonely – all those who are supposedly in need of our ‘mission’ – from what do they need liberation most of all? If we do not already know, why is that?
Front page of the Irish National Vocations Office website in January 2024
“Is God Calling You to be a Diocesan Priest? Come and See. Take the Risk for Christ.” This is what faces you when you click https://vocations.ie/ the website of Ireland’s Catholic “National Vocations Office”.
Asked by Ardal O’Hanlon on his RTE documentary what risk was involved in opting for the celibate priestly vocation today, the National Vocations Coordinator, Fr Willie Purcell, responded:
“Anyone who is presenting himself for priesthood nowadays is really being counter-cultural. It really is a radical decision. The risk really is giving yourself completely to Christ that others might come to know him through you. There really is a lot of humility involved in it, of self-sacrifice involved in it, but most important of all a vocation is a selfless decision, to give yourself to Christ and then to give yourself to others.”
Yet again we are being asked here to ignore what the Gospel clearly tells us about Jesus, viz.:
That he was never a member of the priestly religious institution of his own time and place;
That his definitive role in ‘salvation’ was not sacramental or liturgical (i.e. symbolic) but the direct prophetic challenging of a religious system he saw as both exploitative and hypocritical, to the danger of his own life;
That it was therefore his integrity, not his celibacy, that constitutes the central sacrifice that he did indeed ask us to repeat in memory of him;
That the definitive Christian calling to ‘follow’ him was therefore NOT to males only to join an exclusively male religious institution but to the same self-giving and integrity in whatever social role we baptised Catholic Christians find ourselves – whatever our gender, age or occupation.
Why does the National Vocations Office see only the risk to clergy?
Why is it not obvious to the Irish National Vocations Office that any social role, in any society, can and does involve these challenges to integrity – and that risk can attach to any of these?
It isn’t only the lives and trials of outstanding Irish individuals such as Veronica Guerin, Maurice McCabe and Martin Ridge that demonstrate this. Public service, especially for women, has become notably more risky and challenging for anyone who approaches it with integrity in the age of the Internet. With Pope Francis now calling all of us, even teenagers, to ‘mission’ today – and with Irish Garda, nurses, firefighters and paramedics at risk on every callout in certain locales in Ireland – why was this not obvious to whoever dreamt up the slogan ‘Take the risk for Christ’ – implying that the risk of Christian witness attaches solely to the male celibate sacramental calling?
Isn’t even any Irish teenager who stands in school against sexual harassment or homophobic bullying – or online trolling of a friend – at risk, and is not this the risk that attaches to the common priesthood of the people of God, the risk that comes to all who affirm their Baptism?
Why does Fr Purcell imply that only the diocesan priest has the responsibility to bring the message of Christ to others, when the key message of synodality is that this responsibility comes to all of us with Baptism?
What a shame that Ardal O’Hanlon did not think to ask if that was indeed the ‘risk’ that the National Vocations Office has in mind!
Child Safeguarding and Risk
And if he had asked that question, would Fr Purcell have recalled that we have never yet had an open conversation on the role and obligation of private conscience when faced with an abuse of authority in the church, as could happen, for example, to any of the child safeguarding personnel we now depend upon?
With synodality far from firmly embedded in our Catholic culture, and canon law still a mess, the risks for every servant of the church that are still posed by the church itself are far from merely notional or historic. Does Ireland’s National Vocations Office truly serve the church by apparently forgetting all of that?
Why in 2024 can we not instead have a properly balanced understanding of ‘vocation’ that does not associate counter-cultural Christian self-sacrifice and ‘humility’ solely with the male celibate sacramental priestly role or imply that for all lay people the risk of Christian witness must be secondary?
Is it not to this clericalist talking-up of the sacramental role alone – and the consequent forgetting of the priestly and prophetic calling of all of us – that we must ascribe the incomprehension of so many young people about the Christian call to themselves?
Baptism the Primary Sacrament of the Priestly People of God
Finally, given the paramount importance of communicating the meaning of our common priesthood, why is the restoration of the primacy of Baptism still lagging totally in Ireland? Is that no concern of the National Vocations Office, or of the Irish Bishops Conference?
In its singular concern for the survival of the sacramental Catholic priesthood in Ireland the Irish National Vocations Office has presented us yet again with an understanding of the Christian vocation that is stridently and essentially clericalist. This can only undermine the central message of synodality and delay the emergence of the co-responsible church we so badly need.
Without official rejection of a mistaken medieval understanding of ‘redemption’ the call to mission is futile.
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‘Rather than saying that the Church has a mission, we affirm that Church ‘is’ mission.‘
Those are just two of 110 occurrences of the word mission in the Synthesis Report of the October 2023 16th Synod of Bishops in Rome.
Nowhere is there a convincing manifesto for this mission. With the Irish national synodal synthesis of 2022 saying that ‘we are unsure about how to evangelise in the modern world‘ there is no help with that problem in the forty-one pages of the report.
So far also the two Irish bishop representatives at the synod – Brendan Leahy of Limerick and Alan McGuckian of Raphoe – are also unhelpful. All Catholic bishops are still imprisoned by a medieval theology of atonement and redemption that no missionary in Ireland today could offer as ‘Good News’?
Blaming the Father
Originating with St Anselm of Canterbury in the late 11th century this theology proposes that the crucifixion of Jesus was demanded by the Father who sent him – to give ‘satisfaction’ for the ‘dishonour’ caused to the Father by all of our sins – by dying an excruciating death in ‘substitution’ for ourselves. (CCC 615)
God the Father was Liberator for the early church.
This was not the theology of the early church. The very idea of ‘redemption’ derives from the ‘buying back’ of the freedom of a slave. It was to God the Father that the first Christians attributed their own liberation from fear of the condemnation of their own Roman world. The greatest power of that time had been proven powerless to overwhelm an ever-living truth – by Jesus’ Resurrection.
What exactly do Irish bishops believe: that the Father of the mission we are now to embark upon is bent upon our liberation from the source of all oppression and fear in our present world – or that he is still, as he was for St Anselm in 1098 CE – in the business of calling in debts?
This theology never even liberated any bishop. No Catholic bishop anywhere in the world is known to have warned his flock about the possibility of clerical sex abuse of children – before victims of that abuse or their families took secular legal action themselves. In December 2009 the Irish Conference of Catholic bishops named the fear that had paralysed them: of a loss of ‘reputation’ if the truth was known.
The Root of All Evil?
An overbearing concern for ‘reputation’ now has a name – status anxiety – given in 2004 by the philosopher Alain de Botton. If our bishops cannot see this same affliction in every aspect of the evils that surround us – from manic consumerism, absurd inequality and climate change to compulsive cosmetic plastic surgery, stalking and mass shootings – and even invasive imperialism in Ukraine and violence in the Holy Land – how are we to convince anyone that Jesus has anything to do with overthrowing the power of evil? If they cannot see it also in the problem of clericalism, how are we to overcome that?
Status anxiety is essentially fear of scorn – of being ‘cast out’ – the fear that stalks our dreams. It also drives the pursuit of ‘likes’, admiration, influence, celebrity – and power. This explains the absorption of younger generations with digital media. A globalized personal ‘brand’ can now be created, via a handheld device, even by children.
Meanwhile our prisons and psychiatric hospitals and addiction centres struggle to cope with the depression, self-harm, trolling, addiction and criminality that results from the lack of status – even the shame – that the victims of the digital age must feel.
Jesus the Whistle-Blower
Is not status anxiety also the source of the fear that attacks would-be whistle-blowers everywhere? Is that not what Jesus was – a whistle-blower against all injustice, who stood firm – without violence – against the merciless judgement of that ancient world? Did he not name his own mission, when he said, just before his own judgement, that he had ‘overcome the world’ – the fear of that judgement? Did he not by his crucifixion and resurrection dissolve the same fear in his earliest followers, who then took up their own crosses – and changed an empire?
We Catholic Christians urgently need official recognition that the first person of the Trinity, far from being himself trapped in medieval status anxiety, is still bent – with the Son and the Holy Spirit – on rescuing us from that affliction. Until that happens the mission ahead will be ‘mission on pause’.
First published on the website of the Association of Catholic Priests of Ireland – Nov 21st 2023.
