DALLAS (TX)
Dallas News
August 17, 2018
By Joshua J. Whitfield
Writing demands courage, otherwise it’s advertising.
Sometimes a writer doesn’t choose the subject; sometimes it’s shoved in one’s face. Sometimes, one either writes at one’s own risk or makes oneself comfortable with cowardice. Sometimes there’s no choice. Sometimes morality is clear.
As a priest, I appreciate the privilege of writing beyond my normal ecclesial ken. It’s why I write, because I believe both people like me and people unlike me should each have a voice. It’s where my earthly hope originates these days, from the idea that we can still talk to one another and listen.
Which is why I must write about the sex abuse scandals of my church, of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick as well as the damning revelations out of Pennsylvania. It was the eccentric Frenchman, Paul Claudel, who said (echoing Jesus) that, “It is not the mote from one’s neighbor’s eye that that house of God can be built, but with the beams one takes out of one’s own.” If I am to write and if you are to read, and if that’s ever to be meaningful, then clearly I must speak up here. Otherwise, as I said, I should become a comfortable coward and write nothing else.
Hence I confess my dizzying anger, my morose, almost morbid sadness about the whole damn thing. Not tainted, in that rhetorical self-serving way, with me playing the victim: I’m sad for the genuine victims, the uncountable innocents we’ve slaughtered. I’m angry for an incompetent church, incompetent leadership, for unvetted evil. It’s like the fourth circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno: seeing so many tonsured heads, he asks an unsurprised Virgil, “Are all these clerics?” It’s an evil and an incompetence hard to exaggerate, which only the siloed and the foolish deny.
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