UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
It’s Holy Thursday, and so I’m thinking, of course, about Jesus’ command that his followers serve each other and not seek to lord it over others. As was typical in his ministry, he put this message into action by taking a basin and towel and washing his disciples’ feet, an action people considered “lower” than others — slaves and women — undertook in his culture.
Thinking about the significance of the gospel accounts on which Holy Thursday is based brings to mind another letter I wrote to the the-bishop of Charlotte, North Carolina, in September 1997. As with the letter I shared on Palm Sunday, I have spoken about this letter in a previous posting without sharing its entire text here. Now I’d like to share the letter in full.
Colleen responded to the letter I shared on Palm Sunday by noting that it struck her as amazing that I spoke out in 1997 in the way I did in that letter, when the abuse crisis had not yet taken place. She’s right about the fact that my 1997 letters predated the breaking open of the abuse crisis in the Catholic church. Later in the year in which I wrote the letter I shared on Palm Sunday, I began to have more and more inklings that something was looming on the horizon for the church — revelations about clerical sexual abuse. Already in 1997, as a lay theologian, I had begun to hear hints about this from priests, who usually carefully guarded their tongues when speaking about clerical secrets — hints of abuse cases and pay-offs to silence families filing such cases.
I heard discussions, in fact, between two former monks of Belmont Abbey about two cases in which there had been pay-offs to silence victims, about which they knew in a very direct way, and I believe they wanted me to overheard their conversation. One of these actually made the news when information about it reached the media.
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