And yet it must…
~*~

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:

‘Get behind me, Satan!’
(Matt 16: 22,23)

• 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 horrified on 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 Church² Catechism 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, because no 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 want whatever 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.

Self-Consciousness – the Source of Status Anxiety

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.

Satan the Source of Our Status Anxiety

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:

‘Get behind me Satan!’

Satan Enters In

Why call Peter ‘Satan’?

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 power to 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 totally unreliable 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 eyes and 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.

Who Satan Is

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

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:

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 Peter for 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

1. Cur Deus Homo?, St Anselm of Canterbury, c.1098 CE
2. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1994, Article 615
3. Liber Gomorrhianus, St Peter Damian, c.1050 CE
4. How to Be a Missionary Church, Instrumentum Laboris for Second Session of Universal Synod of Synodality, Oct 2024, P.32, Article 73

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