A Frock Does Not a Priest Make

A Frock Does Not a Priest Make


Roy Bourgeois is a former missionary, a Nobel Prize nominee, Vietnam vet with a Purple Heart, and a Maryknoll priest who founded and now presides over SOA Watch, a grass roots organization that is seeking to close down School of Americas/WHINSEC. WHINSEC (formerly "School of the Americas") is an academy for torture whose alumni include Manuel Noriega; many of Augusto Pinochet's generals; the leaders of the 2009 military coup in Honduras; and Roberto d'Aubuisson, the commander of El Salvador's notorious death squads -- the same death squads who executed tens of thousands of Salvadoran civilians, including three nuns and the church worker they raped before murdering. (Two of the nuns were friends of Father Bourgeois.) That same year SOA-trained assassins murdered Archbishop Romero. The name of the school has changed but the work of father Bourgeois and others continues to be consecrated to putting WHINSEC/SOA, which continues to train assassins, out of business.

Roy Bourgeois made the front page of this past Saturday's New York Times -- and I was glad for the good news at hand-- 157 priests signed a statement in support of Father Roy Bourgeois whom the Vatican has begun to defrock. The 157 have not necessarily signed on in favor of women's ordination -- but rather to protest the punishment of a priest for speaking out on a matter of conscience.

The Vatican began its crusade to defrock Father Bourgeois in November of 2008 with the threat of excommunication. (Read Bourgeois's response.) In April of this year, Father Bourgeois received his first"canonical warning" which was signed by Rev. Edward M. Dougherty, the Superior General of the Maryknoll order. The Maryknoll have a tradition of taking the Christ-like part of the priest's vocation seriously; therefore, we can assume that Vatican made Father Dougherty an offer he couldn't refuse.

Usually -- especially in recent years -- when we hear about the defrocking of a Roman Catholic priest, an accusation of sexual misconduct is involved. Not so in this case. Had Father Bourgeois raped an altar boy, he would not now be hanging on to his frock by a thread.

Father Bourgeois has been ordered by the Vatican to recant -- to formally, publicly, withdraw his support for women's ordination. If he refuses to cave, Bourgeois will be laicized by Ratzinger & Co. Father Bourgeois's transgression, as the Vatican sees it, is not merely that he is a proponent of women's ordination, but that he has been present at the ordination rites and liturgies.

According to the New York Times, Father Bourgeois explained why he can not recant in an interview this past week: 

"I see this very clearly as an issue of sexism, and like racism, it's a sin ... It cannot be justified, no matter how hard we priests and church leaders, beginning with the pope, might try to justify the exclusion of women as equals. It is not the way of God. It is the way of men."

I have been following (and writing about) the persecution of Father Bourgeois for a while, and it seems to me that the Vatican's determination to crack down on priests who support the ordination of women, when seen alongside its (relative) indifference to the plight of adults who were raped as children by Catholic clerics, looks self-serving and twisted. I think even the Knights of Columbus set are beginning to be troubled by this bizarre juxtaposition, and that more and more Catholics are beginning to see the pontiff and his team as a gang of mean, power-drunk perverts who aren't all that interested in God.

Sure, there are ultra-conservative, lockstep Roman Catholics who take a strict construction approach to embracing dogma and doctrine -- They'd follow the Borgia pope to the letter too. But most Catholics are not that, and even the most conservative of us, because we tend to agree that the current Vatican teaching which upholds the obligation of Catholics to discern is -- correct, are, to some degree, "pick and choose Catholics."

Even Catholics who oppose the ordination of women are beginning to notice that there's something not quite right about defrocking a missionary veteran with a Purple Heart as hundreds of bishops who pimped out children continue to minister amok, frocks intact.

The July 23rd Times piece quotes Christopher Ruddy, an associate professor of theology at the Catholic University of America as saying the following: 

"I don't think anything will come of it..."

Ruddy goes on to explain that church teaching on the "nonordination of women" may come under the heading of "infallible teaching." Maybe Professor Ruddy is right about the infallible teaching aspect.

But I think a lot has already "come of it." But 157 signatures is something. Something having "come of it."

157 Roman Catholic priests have publicly confirmed what people in parishes all over the world know, that there is widespread support among practicing Catholics for the ordination of women.

I sat beside a friend who is a Catholic priest this past weekend at a dinner party. We were talking about women's ordination. This remark (the priest's) shed a particular light:

"They {the Vatican} won't even talk about it."

We have all experienced some version of this kind of refusal to talk in our personal lives. An argument transpires. Logic falters, stubbornness sets it, fear of losing the argument takes over and the one losing the debate walks away.

That the Vatican won't ordain women might possibly be a matter of infallible doctrine. The refusal to engage, however, is not. The refusal to even engage is a sign of weakness. The refusal to engage is evidence of bigotry and fear.

The argument against women's ordination is a lousy one. Arbitrary and flimsy, it's a variation on "becasue we said so." The prohibition is a man-made "law" grounded in medieval, temporal politics. It's man-made policy based on broad interpretations and misinterpretations of select, ancient, translated, retranslated and mistranslated texts.  The argument against women's ordination is fueled by greed and a juvenile fear of the power, strength and sexuality of women.

In street terms: the pontiff and his boys -- they got nothin'.

The pontiff can take his shot at Bourgeois -- but he won't land a punch.

According to the Vatican's own doctrine, it is God who turns men into priests. "Defrocking" Father Roy Bourgeois will not render Father Bourgeois any less a priest. The dress does not make the man a priest.

So Ratzinger and his boys in lace will just have to be satisfied with the hope they might yet rob a 72 year-old Nobel Peace Prize nominee of his medical insurance and modest retirement plan.

And they probably will be -- because that's who they are. 

DiMarzio: The Schoolyard Bully Who Doesn't Want Your Lunch Money?

The Religious News Service reported on July 12th that Brooklyn monsignor Joseph Calise, the priest in charge at Our Lady of Mount Carmel School (in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY) returned a $50.00 donation made by Assemblyman Joseph Lento to honor a student at the school. Calise was acting in compliance with top bishop Nicholas DiMarzio's request that "all gifts received from politicians supporting same-sex marriage legislation be refused."  

The man whose own priests (who all decline to be identified) call him "a school yard bully" is sending a message. 

There are bishops in his diocese who have been loving and thoughtful in ministering to gay Catholics while remaining adherent to Vatican teaching. DiMarzio is not one of them. 

DiMarzio has muscled his way into parishes to deliver his 'homosexuals-are-disordered' message. DiMarzio took to the radio  airwaves to compare same-sex marriage to the pledging one's troth to a dog. He used the sacred occasion of a Chrism mass to demand that Catholics "besiege" his city's newspaper of record. Clerical abuse survivors groups claim that  DiMarzio has been callous, lax and self-serving in the contexts of both cases against predators and the suffering of victims. He brought the hammer down on an activist priest who ministered to the poor, while blowing on the dice of his favorite developer-pol. He has countenanced electioneering from the pulpit. He recorded robocalls on behalf of a politician. He used his column in The Tablet to come perilously close to endorsing a particular candidate in writing, and threatened to close parishes that failed to vote for his candidates of choice. According to a May 31, 2009 report that appeared in the New York Post, DiMarzio made the following threat in a room full of politicians: 

"If it passes, we will close a parish in each of your districts and we will tell your constituents that it was your fault."

"It" refers to A.4560B, the Child Victims Act</a>, which would extend the statute of limitations for reporting incidences of child sexual abuse. Assemblyman Vito Lopez opposed this bill in the assembly. Nicholas DiMarzio was grateful.  

"I was shocked," said one of the senators who was present. 

"I've never seen a threat like that made at any lobby meeting." A senator who asked not to be identified said: "The hair on the back of my head stood up. In my years of Catholic schooling, we were never taught to be so vindictive, and here's my bishop saying, 'I'll close a church in your district.'"

Vindictive is right. Just ask Father Jim O'Shea who lost his job at Our Lady of Monserrat in Bedford Stuyvesant (The diocese called in the NYPD to attend his farewell mass!) as a result of his choice to work as a tenants' rights organizer on behalf of the poor. Not long after removing Father O'Shea from his church in 2008, DiMarzio shut down the Bed-Stuy parish at which O'Shea ministered. Such work may seem to be exactly the kind of work in which a priest  does well to engage, but O'Shea's labors put him at odds with DiMarzio's fellow bird of a feather -- the scandal-dogged, Catholic, married, political kingpin Vito Lopez. The diocese denies that the removal of O'Shea was as a quid pro quo in return for Vito Lopez's help killing the Child Victims Act in the assembly, but Father O'Shea thinks otherwise. The tenants' rights group with which he worked challenged Vito Lopez and his Brooklyn Triangle project. 


Brooklyn Triangle is "a massive affordable housing project" controlled in part by Lopez's Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council, and though helping New Yorkers to find affordable housing in New York may indeed be "God's work," according to a September 23, 2010 New York Times report, Lopez has been under investigation by both the the State Attorney General and the FBI for a range of possible violations. The June 30, 2011 New York Daily News reported that Ridgewood Bushwick, which Lopez founded, is currently the subject of "two criminal corruption probes by the FBI and the city's Department of Investigation." 


The bishop's devotion to Vito Lopez might seem odd -- Lopez is not exactly a paragon of virtuous Roman Catholic conduct.  According to the Oct. 5, 2010 the New York Daily News, Lopez sleeps in a district other that that he represents with a woman who is not his wife and the woman rakes in more than $300,000 a year for running one of Lopez's operations. But like politicians, bishops sometimes make strange bedfellows and Lopez and the bishop have a lot in common. Both men like money, both like power, and neither is afraid to engage in questionable electioneering practices. 


An October 2010 New York Post story examined Lopez's relocation of election sites within his properties (for the possible purpose of manipulating voting among senior citizens residing therein).  The following vignette, which appeared in the Post piece, were it not so appalling, would be quite funny: 

A neighborhood priest told The Post that he asked an elderly resident at one of Lopez's assisted-living centers if she'd voted in a recent election and that she replied, "Don't worry, Father. Vito was here and told us how to vote."

Vito's friend DiMarzio is himself a "father" who thinks it proper to remind Catholics how to vote. On a Sunday in mid-August of 2009, about a month before the primary and local elections, DiMarzio's spokesman, Kieran Harrington, acting, one must assume, with the bishop's consent, made an unannounced visit to a parish in Brooklyn where he celebrated the noon mass, introduced Vito Lopez's former Chief of Staff -- Steve Levin -- then a candidate for City Council -- from the pulpit, and ended the service by reminding the assembled that "they" (Levin and Lopez) "have been very good to our church." The monsignor even managed to recruit a few parishioners to leaflet in front of the church as mass let out. Parishioners claimed other such politicking had taken place at the church a few months earlier during Easter. 


So much for keeping the Sabbath holy. 


I wasn't surprised when I read about the returning of Assemblyman Lento's $50 check a few days ago. Maybe DiMarzio truly believes it proper to return Lento's 50 bucks. Yet according to the Religious New Service story, the monsignor returning the check urged Lento to continue to drop his tainted tender into the basket on Sundays. A pastoral faux pas perhaps. 


DiMarzio's refusal to accept donations from politicians who support same-sex marriage appears punitive -- but there may be another analysis to put on it. Maybe the bishop will put his money where his mouth. Maybe the bishop is truly taking a moral stand. 


If Assemblyman Lento's money is somehow unholy -- so are all the dollars of every Catholic in the pews who supports same-sex marriage legislation.  If the bishop's demand (that such tributes as Lento's be refused) is one made in earnest, he will refuse all donations from every Catholic who supports same-sex marriage legislation. 


If Assemblyman Lento's money is no good when it's earmarked for honoring some hard-working Catholic school kid from Brooklyn, it obviously has no place in the basket at mass. 


But DiMarzio may have painted himself into a corner with the $50.00 check. If he is successful in discouraging all Catholics in his diocese who (like Assemblyman Joseph Lento) support same-sex marriage legislation from making gifts to the church, DiMarzio is sure to lose a lot of money. But if DiMarzio limits this restriction to politicians, he risks being regarded more as a foot-stomping toddler melting down on a supermarket checkout line than as a spiritual leader upholding moral principle. 


Bishop DiMarzio's rush to punish could land him between a rock and a hard place this time.  If DiMarzio insists on singling out politicians for punishment, he could compound the problem of his already risky behavior in the context of playing fast and loose with the tax-exempt status of his diocese.


Bishops like DiMarzio know the pews are filled with Catholics who care little about the Vatican's opinion on birth control, remarriage after divorce, gay marriage and the burgeoning woman's ordination movement. As the passing of same-sex marriage in New York revealed, Catholics are no longer afraid to publicly challenge doctrine and the Catholic hierarchy. Excommunication has lost its sting. The bishops are losing the same-sex marriage battle, and they are angry.  Many Catholics believe the hierarchs are getting sloppy as they grapple with the problem of their waning leverage. 


If bishops like DiMarzio don't figure out how to fight a little less "dirty," the money will soon run out.


And DiMarzio likes money. Like his pal Vito Lopez, the bishop thinks big.  


Less than a mile away from the beautiful St. James Basilica in downtown Brooklyn, not far from  Father O'Shea's old parish, a cathedral-sized church is being restored. The majestic structure is enveloped in shedding, netting and scaffolding. Stacks of bricks and parts of plinths lie in piles around its exterior. The colossal mess looks more like a cathedral being built than a neighborhood church being restored, but St. Joseph's parish is operational, and Nicholas DiMarzio's spokesman, Kieran Harrington, is its spiritual leader.  


Who is bankrolling this costly renovation? And why does the diocese need a second cathedral-sized church when its official cathedral, St. James Basilica, is less than a mile away? 


It's hard to know. A diocese insider (on the condition of anonymity) informs me that DiMarzio "thinks the cathedral {St. James} is too small. He wants a bigger church for ordinations."  


What is known is that in the past three years DiMarzio has closed at least a four parishes within a few-mile radius of the bishop's several-million dollar bricks and mortar baby.  And it is clear that having taken its cut out of the collections baskets of several now-shuttered parishes in poor areas, which the diocese claims were closed due to lack of financial self-sustainability, that somehow, the Brooklyn-Queens diocese has scraped together funding adequate to restore DiMarzio's 'if-we-build-it-they-will-come' dream quasi-cathedral. 


Render to DiMarzio what is Caesear and to DiMarzio what is Gods!  The bishop wants it all. 


As he presides over the renovation of St. Joseph's, the Brooklyn's bishop may be pinning his hopes on the possibility that its grandeur will attract affluent Catholics who are beginning to take occupancy nearby in the fast-burgeoning, luxury housing that abuts the nearby Atlantic Yards project (which pushed so many poor Catholics out of their homes). A bishop can dream, but chances are that many of those educated, prosperous Catholics support equal marriage legislation. 


I wonder what would happen if -- even for just the summer months -- every active Catholic in diocese of Brooklyn and Queens who does support same sex marriage were to redirect his or her offertory gifts to Roman Catholic groups like Equally Blessed, New Ways Ministry, Call to Action, Dignity and Fortunate Families? 


I plan to write "DiMarzio" on the memo line of my checks, so that my gifts to those groups will be in the bishop's honor.  

Justice? Peace? Can the Death Penalty Deliver Either?

  Humberto Leal García Jr., who was convicted in 1994 in San Antonio Texas of brutally raping and bludgeoning 16-year-old Adria Sauceda to death with a block of asphalt, is scheduled to die by injection today in Texas.


I have a 16 year-old daughter.  I can well imagine murdering Leal myself. I have prayed, today, for the soul of Adria Sauceda and for the consolation of those who love her.


The case is complicated --  and unique in that the convict scheduled for execution this evening is a Mexican national who has lived in the United States since he was a toddler.  Leal's attorney maintains that his rights under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations were violated. Many legal experts and others fear such a breach sets dangerous precedent for United States citizens arrested and charged with crimes in other nations.


In one sense, however, Leal's case is not unique. Leal is not the only convict on Death Row in Texas. Texas executed a man a little over a week ago, bringing the June total to three.  Five more inmates are scheduled for execution in Texas this summer.  Unless Leal is granted a stay today, he will be strapped to a table and put to death on the taxpayer's nickel with the help of pharmaceuticals no medical doctor can ever, in good faith, administer. Many people of faith will cheer.


While I find it almost impossible to sympathize with Leal's suffering, I believe, as a person of faith, it is unjust and immoral for any state in the United States to put this killer to death.


Though I pray for the soul of the the child Leal murdered, and for the solace of those who continue to mourn, I hold out hope today, that Leal will receive the stay of execution that will preserve his life.


Certainly "people of faith" so to speak have no monopoly on the kind of ethics and morality that drive the anti-death penalty argument. My hunch is that atheists probably excel (in my opinion, as in so much else, morally and ethically speaking) their "religious" counterparts when it comes to the truth about the death penalty. Still, perhaps because I am one, it vexes me to know that so many "Christians' zealously support the execution of criminals.


My fellow progressives in the Roman Catholic Church have a pretty good track record when it comes to opposing the death penalty -- and we are joined in this by Catholics of all stripes, some of whom see the death penalty as a "pro-life" issue.


On the other hand, some conservative "cafeteria Catholics" engage in mighty strenuous rationalizing when it comes to parsing vatican teaching in such a way as to make it possible to  wriggle free of the pontiff's teaching and arrive at a Christ-friendly rationale for killing inmates. For the doctrinally strict constructionist Roman Catholic, this is quite a push. Deft sophistry is needed, because both John Paul II and the current pontiff have argued in favor of the abolition of the death penalty in all but very rare cases.  Ironic, in the context of the Leal case, is that it was only a year ago that Benedict XVI praised Mexico for abolishing the death penalty.

It cannot be overemphasized that the right to life must be recognized in all its fullness... In this context, I joyfully welcome the initiative by which Mexico abolished the death penalty in 2005...

It was a little over a year ago that I had the privilege of hearing former prison warden Ron McAndrew speak on the subject of the death penalty.  McAndrew spoke of working his way up from the bottom rung of Florida's correctional system, spending 23 years as a warden, and presiding over executions (by both electric chair and lethal injection) in Florida.  He described how a botched execution (A chair malfunctioned, and the convict's head caught fire, and McAndrew gave the order to continue.) and the custom of faintly celebratory post-execution breakfasts led him to arrive at the firm belief that state execution was a grave, intolerable wrong.


Looking back, I wish I had never been involved in carrying out the death penalty. We have an alternative that doesn't lower us to the level of the killer: permanent imprisonment. It is cheaper, keeps society safe and offers swift justice to the victims.


Although I heard the Roman Catholic McAndrew recount his "conversion" (as he called it) while seated in a mostly Roman Catholic audience in a Catholic parish hall, I was struck by feeling that McAndrew had been "double-teamed"-- by secular ethics and God. (You can read McAndrew's story in his own words on Ron McAndrew.com) To hear McAndrews tell it, capital punishment not only debases the spirit of those who execute -- but also it (in a sense) lets the convict off easy:

Sentencing someone to life without the possibility of parole has to be the most horrible punishment on earth" ... Killing them is releasing them of being locked up in a little six foot by nine foot concrete and steel cell.

The death penalty does not reduce the incidence of murder; rather it contributes to a climate of murder.  It does not save money; it costs money.


So what is the upside?  Does the sweet, salty taste of bloody vengeance truly satisfy?


According to a report which appeared in the July 6th Atlantic "our [U.S.] league of capital punishment nations" puts us on a list with the following nations:

India, Japan, Nigeria, Uganda, Botswana, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Kuwait, Oman, Lebanon, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq...

The company we keep in refusing to abolish the death penalty in the United States reveals  much.


Were he to weigh in on the mater of the death penalty, what would Yeshua say?


I confess that as the mother of a 16 year-old daughter, I understand all too well the desire to see Humberto Leal García Jr. dead.  I understand too how his death might seem to promise a tiny measure of peace.


But my faith tells me that it's false hope and a promise destined to be broken.


Strapping Leal to a table tonight and stopping his heart will not un-break the hearts of those who mourn the Adria Sauceda. Nor will it bring anyone peace.