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Contents © 2002
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

SEPTEMBER 2002 CONFESSIONS

I'M BEGINNING TO WAVER

When I was fifteen or so, the bishop got up from his diocesan seat and came down to our little town to confirm me, along with a bunch of my fellow classmates from "church school." I don't remember his name. After the ceremony -- which didn't mean a great deal to me at the time, though I hadn't rejected the Faith -- the bishop came down again, this time into the basement of our church, there to eat cookies and drink coffee and have his picture taken with those newly sealed in the Spirit. There is a picture of me from this event, standing next to the bishop and giving him a terribly saucy look from under my shaggy adolescent mop of hair. In my hand is the bishop's crosier (!) I don't know how I ended up with it -- did I grab it from him? Did I say, "Hey, you know what would be funny? A picture of me holding your crosier, as if I'd just stolen it from you." Did I say, "You know, I'm thinking about the priesthood; maybe one day this crosier will be mine. Mind if I try it on for size?" I don't remember.

I think it's significant that I don't remember, and that I don't remember the bishop's name. He didn't signify much to me; his presence didn't mean much. I would never have pulled that kind of nonsense with Father Tom, our parish priest -- I knew him well enough. And I would never have pulled it with the Pope -- him I knew as well. But the bishop? Who was he?

This ignorance on my part could be attributed to poor formation at home or teenage obliviousness, but I don't think it's that simple. I suspect that the bishop was unknown to me because he was largely invisible. He wasn't running around his diocese the way the pope was running around the world. Nor was he issuing statements from headquarters, the way previous popes had done. Though I am sure he kept busy, he wasn't doing much that the flock could see. Out of sight, out of mind.

Recently, I have taken up correspondence with an old friend, a fellow who has the dubious honor of working for a diocesan newspaper. Even though he has the blessing of serving under a good bishop, he must daily traffic with all sorts of nonsense, including the nonsense coming from other bishops. The current scandal has not surprised him in the least. As he pointed out to me, it took the U.S. bishops some twenty-five years to make a statement about Roe v. Wade, but they had little trouble cranking out statements on economic justice and nuclear weapons. Twenty-five years to speak out against the slaughter of millions. People rail against Pius xii for not doing more to save the Jews during the Holocaust; what about these bishops?

And what of the other rampant practices listed as grave matter by the Catechism, things like fornication (sodomy and otherwise) and contraception? Rome thunders, but there is near-total silence from the pulpit (my own pastor being a happy exception.) The message has broken down somewhere along the line, and it's hard not to suspect that it's right around where some bishop sits and twiddles his thumbs. The old saying goes, "In order for evil to triumph, all that is necessary is that good men do nothing." But when your job is to act as shepherd of souls -- hang on to that crosier, Your Excellency -- doing nothing makes your status as a good man questionable at best. It feels backwards for the flock to cry out to the shepherd to lead, but these seem to be backward times.

I do not like conspiracy theories. I like a straight fight. (But of course, the devil cannot afford a straight fight; he must sneak about and twist and deceive and make evil look like good.) I have never paid much attention to the more wild talk about the dark side of the clergy -- secret Satanism, rampant homosexuality, ritual abuse, plots to undermine the Church from within. There was enough looniness out in the open. Now I'm beginning to waver. As my friend notes, there may not be enough to verify all the stories out there -- www.rcf.org; just for starters -- but there has to be some explanation for what increasingly looks like less like a crumbling edifice in the U.S. Catholic Church and more like a shifting foundation.

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