Sins of Omission
I met Fr. Andrew Greeley once. It was at the wedding of a friend and former colleague of mine, the lead female anchor at a television station where I worked. She was bright, popular, energetic, sharp as a tack, and the ratings showed it. Her name before she married was Kate Shannon.
In The Priestly Sins, Greeley’s new novel about the causes and consequences of the sexual abuse scandal in the Church, the main female character bears the name and description of my friend. The circumstances of her life are quite different from the namesake character, though my friend’s personality is clearly recognizable. It was intriguing for me to read Greeley’s fictionalized version of someone I know and respect.
In fact, my personal connection with one of the main characters may be what kept me most interested in the book. Because of the author’s fame and the timeliness of the subject matter, this novel might outsell all the new nonfiction books on the scandal combined. Unfortunately, the merits of the work itself are few.
The main character is Hugo Herman Hoffman, the second son of Volga Deutsche farmers on the flat prairies of Illinois. Greeley, a sociologist, indulges in a romantic portrayal of the “Russian German” culture of the deeply Catholic people whom Catherine the Great invited to cultivate the Russian steppes and who later brought the same sod-busting talents to the American plains. His portrayal of the lively, musical, beer-hoisting ways of these cultured “bumpkins” is warm and engaging.
The main character himself is also a likeable fellow, one who grows up to be a priest most of us would be glad to call pastor. Unfortunately, he shares Greeley’s disdain for Humanae Vitae and, in a strong example of the author’s dismissiveness, says that abortion is what priests preach about “when they can’t think of anything else to say.”
Hoffman’s best childhood friend is Kathleen Quinlan, who will become Kate Shannon when she is grown and married. This relationship is the most engaging aspect of the novel. Kate and Herman are the only two fully developed characters. The rest—especially the “bad guys” in the chancery—are caricatures.
Kate and Herman’s relationship gets at a question fundamental to the novel and to the debate over the root of sexual abuse in the Church: priestly celibacy. They grow up to have a torrid affair as college students. Herman manages to leave this behind as he becomes a priest. The implication is that if we are to have sexually mature priests, they probably need a sexual past. Never mind the experience of the centuries that, if one is to live celibacy successfully, it is best never to give in to the temptation.
Greeley adopts the position advocated by former priest Eugene Kennedy, who says the abuse problem arises not from the disorder of same-sex attraction but because of “sexually immature priests.” With upwards of 90 percent of abusive priests’ victims being teenage males, the Greeley-Kennedy position seems to ignore the elephant in the living room.
Homosexuals get a sympathetic treatment in the book, though Greeley does not hide the fact that they perpetrate the vast preponderance of abuse. Perhaps his most shocking argument is that, because these men are acting out of sexual immaturity, they are not really responsible for their own actions. Egad! The Church, of course, does have a delicately nuanced understanding of moral culpability, but it is downright weird to see perpetrators of abuse portrayed as a kind of misunderstood victim class. Such odd conclusions arise when contemporary psychology and sociology are allowed to trump sound moral theology.
Worst of all, the archbishop and his cronies in the chancery are portrayed as greedy, drunken, sadistic fools. The vast majority of the diocese’s priests are interested only in hushing up their fellow priests’ wrongdoing. Fr. Herman Hoffman becomes the bad guy because he reports the abuse of a fellow priest.
Another key issue Greeley treats dismissively is the question of how to understand and live Vatican II. In The Priestly Sins, there are only two options: You’re either a pro-contraceptive, pro-abortion, pro-gay Catholic or one who wants to turn back the clock and wipe out the entire Vatican II reform. There is no middle ground. Anyone who does not think as Fr. Hoffman (or Fr. Greeley) is an “idiot.” There is no debate over what the Council Fathers actually said or the “spirit” of Vatican II. This is a serious sin of omission. There’s no doubt where Greeley stands on this issue, but for him to treat in so shallow a manner such a fundamental concern for the Church in our time is a colossal waste of the opportunity afforded by this book.
There is one thing Greeley advocates that is not of a piece with his agenda: Through Fr. Hoffman he defends the celibate priesthood as the proper and necessary circumstance for serving the people of God. It is a refreshing presentation, but the thin gruel of what surrounds it leaves the reader hungry for a much fuller serving of what life in today’s Catholic Church is really like.
—Jay Dunlap
The Priestly Sins
By Andrew M. Greeley
Forge
304 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 0-765-310-52X
Strawmen Galore
The latest installment on atheism from Prometheus Books is The Impossibility of God, a collection of essays from various authors published mostly in scholarly journals over the last several decades. Whereas most atheistic arguments are simply critiques of theistic ones, the essays in this volume go on the offensive, attempting to show that the very concept of God is incoherent.
Not surprisingly, a large portion of the book is devoted to the problem of evil. The remainder attempts to demonstrate that some of the qualities we attribute to God either conflict with each other or are illogical in themselves.
From a structural standpoint, the book has problems. It is filled with formal logic and technical language, which can be intimidating. Much of the argumentation is based on the authors’ misunderstandings of the various divine attributes, and much more consists of the authors’ speculations about how theists might respond to their arguments, but these speculations, of course, miss the mark. Thus, at least two-thirds of the book consists of strawman arguments.
But while most of the articles can be dismissed out of hand, a few require a little more reflection. For instance, Anthony Kenny makes the argument that if God is omniscient, then he always knows what time it is, but since time is changing constantly, God’s knowledge must be changing constantly also. Therefore, if God is omniscient, he is not immutable. “Once, God knew that Christ was yet to be born (nasciturus), because Christ is no longer yet to be born. Therefore, God does not now know all that he once knew. And thus his knowledge seems to be changeable” (214).
What this fails to take into account is that since God is eternal, his knowledge is not subject to time. Saying “Once, God knew” and “God does not now know” brings God into the realm of time, making him a temporal being. It would be correct to say that God knows that before Christ was born, he was yet to be born, and he knows that after he was born, he had been born. Or, God knows that in 2004 it is 2004 and not 2005, and he knows that in 2005 it is 2005 and not 2004.
In another essay, David Blumenfeld argues that omniscience and omnipotence are incompatible. He says that, in order for a being to be omniscient, he must have the fullest knowledge possible of all existing things. But some things require direct experience in order to be known fully. For example, one cannot have a true appreciation of fear unless he has experienced fear himself. Thus, if God is omniscient, he must have firsthand experience of fear. But in order to fear, one must be aware that he is not all-powerful, for it would be irrational for an all-powerful being to be fearful. Therefore, God cannot be both omniscient and omnipotent.
It took me a while to figure out that fear is a privation of courage and, thus, strictly speaking, does not exist. Fear exists in the same way that darkness exists: not as a thing in itself but as an absence of something. Therefore, it is actually a statement of God’s perfection that he has no experience of fear, but is incorrect to say that this disproves his omniscience, because it is impossible to know something that does not exist.
Another argument I found interesting is J. L. Cowan’s attack on divine omnipotence: “There is a perfectly simple, straightforward, entirely non-self-contradictory task which I, who am fairly skillful at making things but not much on muscles, can do. I can make something too heavy for the maker to lift. Our friend Smith, on the other hand, who is quite strong but incredibly inept at making things, can perform another, equally straightforward and non-self-contradictory task. He can lift anything the lifter can make. But no one, not even God, can do both what I can do and what Smith can do. To ask God, or anyone else, to be able so to do would be to ask for something self-contradictory and thus vacuous, a pseudosomething. So either Smith or I, although we cannot by logic alone say which, can do something even God cannot do. Thus God cannot be omnipotent” (335).
Cowan’s mistake is that if you can make something you cannot lift, that is a statement not of your building prowess but your lack of lifting ability. Likewise, if there is nothing you can make that you cannot lift, that is not so much a knock on your ability to lift things as it is of your ineptitude at making things. But these limitations do not apply to God, who is perfect in every way. He can lift anything he can make and he can make anything he can lift.
The Impossibility of God makes for fun reading for those who enjoy being challenged, even though they’ll have to wade through the arguments that are easily dismissible.
—James Kidd
The Impossibility of God
Edited by Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier
Prometheus Books
425 pages
$32.00
ISBN: 1-591-021-200
Ending at the Beginning
Lonni Collins Pratt has written a memoir of her return to Catholicism that is both petulant and poignant. Spiritual whispers from a nearby Benedictine community floated across Pratt’s path prompting a return “over the fence.” After stints at a Bible college as a Protestant youth minister and as a Protestant pastor’s wife, Pratt’s midlife epiphany brought her home just as the clergy scandal erupted in America. She sympathized with the confusion her decision caused friends who wondered, “How can a thinking person remain Catholic in times like these?” Pratt’s reply is the 128 breezy pages of It’s My Church and I’ll Stay If I Want To: Affirming Catholicism.
Pratt, an accomplished writer in the world of Evangelical publishing, invites readers into this “reversion” story with early revelations of her passion for books and authors as well as her sensitive, nurturing personality. Who would not be captured by this promise: “Discovering that my soul remained primitively and permanently Catholic did not happen overnight. That story is woven into these pages.” But beware her winsome tone: Pratt’s return is to the anti-hierarchical church of Joan Chittister, Hans Küng, and Richard Rohr, noted and noisy dissidents. She writes that what is wrong with the Church is “too much power . . . too many men, not enough women.”
And yet cradle Catholics in particular will smile at some of her reminiscences of growing up Catholic. Memories of the blessing of throats on the feast of St. Blaise meant to the Catholic child that “God cared about my throat, not just my health, but what I said, what I sang, what I yelled, what I ate and drank.” Most Catholics will identify with confessions such as, “I admit it. I like statues, organ music, and breathtaking art. I like incense and vigil candles . . . Latin sprinkled here and there.” And all will relate to the relief found in confession, “I need a human hand to hold mine, a human tear that is shed over my pain, a human smile that affirms all is well. There is power in the priest who absolves as an icon of God—and who is a human being.”
More serious is the author’s recognition after twenty-four years of sacramental poverty as a Protestant that “God gives life to us in the sacraments. They are not symbols of grace, they are the givers of grace.” And “The body of Christ is broken, the blood spilled. It is scandalous how literally we Catholics take this Eucharist of ours.” More, “Catholicism is unabashedly positive about humanity. This conviction emerges from a sacramental mind.”
Tucked into every few pages are nuggets of truth seen afresh in the eyes of a returning Catholic. Insights are often Benedictine-flavored, at once puffery and profound: “For Catholic spirituality, attentiveness is the holy challenge, and the holy effort—to locate God in the sacred happenings of daily living . . . in all the glorious average things we do. Clip your coupons, drink your coffee, go bowling—it will not keep you from God. Better, yet, expect to find God.”
Then a turn of the page brings a clenched jaw: “We are blessed to have Kenneth Untener as bishop. He was one of the first American bishops to publicly discuss the ordination of women.” Here and there a smug tone seeps in, most often accompanying a presumed victory over ancient teaching, “Our first experience of widespread dissent and the one that changed everything was the U.S. Catholic laity’s response to Humanae Vitae. . . . We dissented in huge numbers, with ease of conscience because the encyclical did not resound of divine truth . . . the hierarchy did not understand married love. They were badly informed.”
Pratt nails a truth that is causing heartburn in the Church as it digests our era’s dissident theologians, professors, and bishops: “We are the generation who learned something from Vatican II. We learned that we can disagree, fight, even dissent, and guess what? No one is going to throw us out of the Church. There are no Catholic bouncers.” Despite the subtitle, Affirming Catholicism, Pratt is unable to affirm some fundamental Catholic teachings.
By mid-book one is almost irritated enough with the author’s conditional reversion (It’s my Church and I’ll change it if I want to) to flip it into the recycle bin. It is not a book to recommend for anyone with wobbly faith. (The majority of listed resources at the conclusion are dissident books and web sites.) Yet for well-grounded Catholics there is in this story something endearing—like a beautiful, though still gangly, girl trying to figure out how to walk in her first ball gown. Despite her clumsy dissent, Pratt displays real promise: “On one of those nights when sleep won’t come and the heart has forgotten how to pray because noise and foolishness have taken it captive, you can wrap your fingers around that rosary and peace will get you.”
—Mary Jo Anderson
It’s My Church and I’ll Stay If I Want To: Affirming Catholicism
By Lonni Collins Pratt
Ligouri/Triumph
128 pages
$19.95
ISBN: 0-764-810-960
The Passion according to Mystics
It is no accident that Queenship has released the book The Passion of the Christ and His Mother in 2004, the year many Christians will identify with the release of Mel Gibson’s ambitious cinematic work, The Passion of the Christ. Indeed, Professor Courtenay Bartholomew makes mention of the film on the back cover and in the introduction of this brief treatise but is unable to make accurate comparisons to the film from what he found in his own research on the Passion.
At ninety-six pages, The Passion is a short book, aptly so considering biblical accounts of Christ’s Passion are condensed. Much of Bartholomew’s research in reconstructing Christ’s walk to Calvary is culled from writings of various mystics. Among those quoted are the Venerable Anne Catherine Emmerich (whose visions reportedly shaped Gibson’s vision of his film), the Venerable Mary of Agreda, and Maria Valtorta, author of the controversial Poem of the Man-God (see Fr. Mitch Pacwa’s review at www.ewtn.com/library/scriptur/valtorta.txt). A fourth, Janie Garza, who allegedly has received messages from the Blessed Virgin, also figures in the book, though her locutions are not specified.
Chapter by chapter, Bartholomew recounts the hours leading up to the Crucifixion, but not before offering a prelude to this history. The first chapter, “On Suffering,” details the importance of suffering in Christian life. Suffering “strengthens character, fosters conversion, and leads us to recognize and accept our dependence on God,” Bartholomew writes. Following chapters detail (via the works of the aforementioned mystics) accounts of the fall of Lucifer and his followers, the original sin and Adam and Eve, and the prophecy of Mary as the New Eve as interpreted in Genesis 3:15.
Bartholomew’s depiction of the Passion story begins in chapter five and progresses through chapter twelve, which ends with Mary sinking into grief over her lost Son. The Last Supper, Christ’s anguished prayers at Gethsemane, and every minor event leading up to his death is detailed (mainly paraphrased from the aforementioned mystics) vividly and in a straightforward manner. Latter chapters touch upon the meaning of the Crucifixion as prophesied in Isaiah and the Psalms, the science and medical analysis of crucifixion as a method of death, and a brief history on the Shroud of Turin and the question of its authenticity.
Mary’s suffering for her Son closes the book, with the author borrowing heavily from Valtorta in describing what likely transpired as well as making reference to the visions of another early twentieth-century visionary, Berthe Petit.
For as much detail as The Passion of the Christ and His Mother provides in so few pages, the book seems almost superfluous for a reader well-versed in the story of the Passion and the writings of Emmerich and Mary of Agreda. A non-Christian or a Christian coming to understand Catholicism and Mary’s role in our salvation may be more inclined to find value in this book and enjoy it as a supplement to the Gospels.
—Kathryn Lively
The Passion of the Christ and His Mother
By Courtenay Bartholomew
Queenship Publishing
96 pages
$8.95
ISBN: 1-579-182-496