BishopAccountability.org
	Thoughts on Forgiveness By Virginia Jones The Garden of Roses: Stories of Abuse and Healing June 11, 2010 http://web.me.com/virginiajones/Compsassionate_Gathering/The_Garden_of_Roses/Entries/2010/6/11_Thoughts_on_Forgiveness.html I perused the Abuse Tracker blog this morning as I do almost every morning. There were the multitude of stories on the Pope begging survivors of clergy abuse for forgiveness. I scanned them and saw not much to catch my eye except for that in celebrations for the Year of the Priest that Cardinal Sodano was at the Pope’s side. I’ve read all those other stories about Fr. Maciel Marcial giving out money liberally to church leaders. The pope, then Cardinal Ratzinger, appears not to have the money while Cardinal Sodano appears to have taken the money and consistently supported Fr. Maciel through his “trials.” Moreover, Cardinal Sodano made some stupid remarks during Easter. Having Cardinal Sodano next to me while I am begging for forgiveness for clergy abuse is not a move I would make if I were Pope. These actions are not sensitive to the needs and feelings of survivors. They do not show understanding or genuine repentance for harm. To show genuine repentance for harm, you have to change your ways of doing things and the person who has been harmed may need some retribution of some sort before they feel they have had justice and are able to move to forgiveness. I’ve written a blog on apology based on the work of Aaron Lazare, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts School of Medicine. Dr. Lazare studied apology for many years. They aren’t my original ideas. This is what he says. Maybe Cardinal Sodano should spend much time in soup kitchens serving the poor, and maybe he should give up his nice Vatican apartments. At least in my Franciscan Catholic parish they keep saying that if you want to get close to Jesus, you get close to the poor. And if Cardinal Sodano changed residences and jobs, I think lots of clergy abuse survivors would feel that maybe the Vatican was beginning to “get it.” From my Catholic Christian perspective, maybe the Cardinal should view such a change as a privilege. I worked as a volunteer in a restaurant that served the poor for free on Thanksgiving Day once. It was the best Thanksgiving I ever spent. I’ve worked Christmas Eve in a nursing home and in a psychiatric hospital when I was a Registered Nurse. At the time I did not have children. I worked on Christmas Eve so people with children could stay home with the children. Caring for people at the ends of their lives and people who were “poor in spirit” is very moving work. Unfortunately the profit motive doesn’t mix well with work in which you give care to the vulnerable. So I stopped working as a Registered Nurse. Putting money and buildings above the sick and the needy is not moving or uplifting. And that is what the health care system does today in the United States. Sounds like the Catholic Church. One of the most dynamic parishes I’ve ever been to was one without a building. The parish was formed just before the Archdiocese of Portland declared bankruptcy in 2004. So they spent years in rented church space and gyms. The priest who was the pastor said it was like living out of a suitcase, but that the parishioners who were there were really motivated to be there, and it was a pleasure being their pastor. Churches do not need buildings to be churches. A thousand years ago in Europe there were no churches in many villages. Mass was simply said by a cross in the village green. I was in a conference call recently with a wounded survivor who felt angry. He felt that the church leadership “got it” and still wouldn’t do the right thing. I disagree. I think church leadership doesn’t get it and what they don’t get is that they will be better off if they give up all material attachments to this world. Don’t worry about money or reputations. Worry about caring for the wounded. However, lawyers and the insurance companies will tell you to worry about the money and the buildings. What I feel is happening in the Catholic Church is that Church leadership keeps listening to lawyers and insurance companies and leaves the Bible on the bookshelf. Over and over Jesus says care for the wounded, the lost, the sick, the hungry.... Then there is the story where Jesus asks Simon Peter, “Do you love me.” Simon Peter answers, “Yes, Lord, you know I do.” Jesus replies, “Feed my sheep.” He says this not once, but three times. Caring for the flock is the most important thing the Church can do. But we are supposed to care for everyone, not just the people in the pews. Jesus tells in the Gospel of Matthew how he is going to separate those whose are going to heaven from those who are going to hell. If you want to go to heaven, you have to give to those who thirst, something to drink, to those who are hungry, something to eat, to those who are ill or in prison, you visit them and give them your love. People in the Church often say that they they need to care for money because they serve the community with hospitals and schools and Catholic Charities and the St. Vincent de Paul. These are all worthy ventures. These are all valuable contributions to the community, and I want the Church to be able to keep doing them. Perhaps the most apt parable is the one about the shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep in the barn to look for the one lost sheep. When he finds the lost sheep he wants to have a party. Jesus says over and over not to worry about this material world. Don’t store up your grain in your barn because it might burn down. Store your riches up in your acts because good acts never burn down. We Catholics have stored up a multitude of good acts, but we have much more work to do in caring for survivors for our barn to be full of good acts. There is a saint whose name I don’t remember who said, “When you do a bad thing that is pleasurable, the pleasure passes, but the badness remains.” I thought that is a good description of abuse. But the saint also said, “When you do a good thing wearily, the weariness passes, but the goodness remains.” What the leadership of the Catholic Church doesn’t get is they are terrified that if they let go of their riches, their buildings, their artwork, their cathedrals and churches and retreat centers and monasteries, that if they do this the Church will be destroyed. This is what you do if you follow lawyers rather than Jesus. Jesus makes it ever so plain. He said, “What does it profit you if you gain the whole world if you lose your soul?” Abuse and the cover up of abuse destroys the soul of those who perpetrate these crimes more surely than the abuse destroys the soul of the person who is abused. I am not a fan of prison. I prefer restorative justice to punishment. If I were Pope, I would put every single bishop and head of a religious order who protected an abuser in a position of service. They could work in an AIDS hospice or in a homeless shelter. They would have to give up nice residences and live in a one room, whether it is in a monastery or a rented apartment. They would spend the rest of their lives in service to others, living not in poverty but in genuine simplicity. I think that if the Church gave up worrying about the material world, they would inspire so many people that they would always have the resources to run hospitals and schools and homeless shelters as well as parishes. But this blog was supposed to be about forgiveness. I got side tracked. There is a book on forgiveness that I recommend on my reading list. It is The Sunflower” On the Possibilities and the Limits of Forgiveness by Simon Weisenthal. Simon Weisenthal was a Jewish concentration camp prisoner when a dying Nazi soldier asked for his forgiveness. As a Nazi soldier he had participated many human rights crimes against Jews but there was one crime that really haunted the man. In a Jewish village he and other German soldiers rounded up villagers, shut them into one house and then set fire to the house. The soldier watched as one family stood at a second floor window, their clothes on fire. The father picked up his son and jumped from the burning building followed by his wife and other Jews. They all died in agony. But it was the vision of this burning Jewish father holding his burning son that stayed in the mind of this German solider. The soldier lost his spirit for fighting after that and received the wound in combat that caused him the long slow death and the time in a hospital away from the front where he was able to beg a Jewish prisoner for forgiveness. Simon Weisenthal was unable to give this German soldier his forgiveness. The next day when he returned to the hospital to work, a nurse gave him a bag of belongings from the soldier. He had died during the night, and his last act was to give everything he had to a Jewish prisoner, so great was his guilt and his desire for forgiveness. That story alone is enough to end this blog with. If you have done wrong, you have to apologize with abject humility and offer up everything you own in restitution and that still may not be enough for the wronged person to forgive when the wrong is so horrible.... But that is is not end of the story. Simon Weisenthal remained so haunted by the situation that he spent the rest of his life seeking resolution. After the war was over he went to visit the mother of the dying soldier. She had lost her husband and son both during the war. She wanted to believe her son was a good man. Simon Weisenthal did not have the heart to break her heart by telling her about the evil her son had committed. He let her think her son had died a good man. Simon Weisenthal went on to dedicate his life to documenting the crimes of the Nazis. Eventually he became well known. The issue of forgiveness became an obsession with him. He wrote to religious and academic leaders around the world asking them for advice on forgiveness. The Christians and the Buddhists invariably told him that they would have forgiven the dying German soldiers, if they had been in his shoes. Among Jewish religious and academic leaders, the responses were much more nuanced. Many detected signs of remaining anti-Jewish bias in the German soldier’s story which I have not recounted in detail. Others said that only the Jews that the soldier had wronged could forgive him for his sins against them. One of the most holy day in Judaism is the Day of Atonement, when you are supposed to make right your wrongs to others. It is considered a joyous event, an opportunity for spiritual growth..... Oh, and Christianity was brought to us by that Jewish guy, Jesus. These are the words of that Christian Italian guy, St. Francis of Assisi -- Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; To be understood as to understand, To be loved as to love. For it is in giving, we receive......
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.