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Daily Scripture

In You, O Lord, Justice and Mercy Meet

Today’s gospel reading triggered off in my memory the number of times I have jumped the gun by passing judgment on someone before knowing all the facts — the soft data as well as the hard data. It’s clear to me now that prejudice and bias covered up by pride have a great deal to do with this jump; our comrades can do no wrong; our foes can do no right! Of course, it’s easy to meet out mercy to those we like and easier to meet out justice to those we don’t like.

The words of Isaiah introduce the theme of mercy and pave the way for the encounter of Jesus with the adulterous woman recorded in the gospel of John. The people of Israel had prostituted themselves if not in truth, at least metaphorically. God had espoused himself to them, for better or worse for richer or poorer forever. It was an irrevocable covenant that remains to this day. The people of Israel to whom Isaiah addressed these words abandoned their God and aligned themselves with foreign powers for political and economic gain. In effect, they entered an adulterous alliance and were literally carried away to a foreign land by their greed and lust for power.

In the name of their God, a disciple of Isaiah writing in his name and style reminds them of the great exodus when God led the people out of Egypt through the Red Sea into the Land of Canaan, the land they called home for centuries. In words similar to these, the prophet declares, “You think that was great? Forget about it; you ain’t seen noth’in yet! I’m about to do something even more spectacular. I’ll pave a way through the wilderness and bring you home again. I will forgive your unfaithfulness and forget your affair. Your misery will meet mercy and you will be saved.”

It has been said that pride is the worst of all sins because it distorts the truth of who we are. In fact, pride is a lie. But more than this it is a distortion of who God is. Recall that the sin of Adam and Eve was not that they wanted to be like God but that they did not recognize that they were already like God — made in God’s image and likeness.

There was another encounter taking place in John’s story beyond that of the meeting between Jesus and the woman. It was between Jesus and the woman’s accusers. In was in this encounter that justice was enjoined to the ‘trial’. “Let the one who is without sin be the first to cast the stone!” Their pride blinded them to their own sins. Jesus exposed their hypocrisy as his mercy engulfed the sinful woman.

Was he being soft on sin? Hardly. “Go now”, he said to the woman “and avoid this sin.” Might we not rightly assume that this initiative of mercy effected a dramatic change in her life? God’s saving grace was fully manifested in Jesus. Oddly enough, the same mercy resulted in the hardening of her accusers. They drifted away one by one from the eldest to the youngest but they sought another opportunity to trick him into mercy mending.

John’s story about the woman caught in the act of adultery revealed the depth to which Jesus extended himself to the sinner. “In you, O Lord, justice and mercy meet! [Psalm 85] or in the words of St. Augustine, “Misery meets mercy” in the person of Jesus.

Lent is about opening ourselves up to the saving grace of God but repentance is not something we do. It is allowing the forgiving power of God to touch our life, indeed, to engulf us and point us in a new direction. It’s about God empowering us to goodness and about our initiating a new pattern of life.

Lent is also about dropping stones and the acceptance of the humanity of others, despite their sins and failures. It is about entrusting others and ourselves to the tender mercy of God. More than that, it is about allowing ourselves to become conduits of God’s mercy and saving grace—helping others to find their way out of the wilderness of failure, sin and rejection.

“To err is human; to forgive is divine.”

At the same time, to forgive is not so much an act of the will as a disposition of the heart and in many situations, the conclusion of a very long process. We dare not be presumptuous or simplistic about it.

Forgiveness does not absolve the sinner from taking responsibility for the sin or from its consequences. Thus the mantra, “There is no forgiveness without justice, no justice without truth, no truth without full accountability.”

Here is the story that a rabbi colleague shared with me many years ago. A man went into the temple for the observance of Yom Kippur, which is the Jewish observance of atonement. As he entered the Temple, he noticed all his sins were listed on the board at the entrance. He tried to erase them but he was unable to do so. Then he went inside to participate in the penitential service. As he left the temple, he attempted once more to erase his sins but again was unable to do so. He departed and set about making amends for his sins and then returned to the temple. Lo and behold, his sins had disappeared.

This story is akin to the teaching of Jesus, “When you are bringing your gift to the altar and recall that your brother or sister has something against you, go first to be reconciled and then return with your gift.”

The Scriptures set the tone not only for our Lenten journey but also for our life long journey. Our destiny is not Jerusalem the earthly city but Jerusalem the heavenly city. Mercy is our mission but we must first pass through the gateway of justice and truth. In you O Lord, justice and mercy meet and when they do, reconciliation is complete.

Respect for truth, a rare commodity...

Friday March 30, 2007

On Tuesday, March 20th, I attended a lecture by noted investigative reporter and author, David France, at Rutgers University Student Center. David is the author of “Our Fathers,” a record of the criminal cover-up of clergy sex abuse in Boston [Broadway Books, New York, 2004]. David’s talk was entitled, “Clergy Sex Abuse, Then and Now.”

Though reports of clergy abuse have diminished, the system which protected abusive priests has not changed. If anything, church officials have redoubled their efforts to maintain a climate of secrecy surrounding past cases and reports of the sexual abuse of vulnerable adults.

Despite defensive claims that allegations involving priests are treated in the same manner as those involving lay church employees, nothing could be further from the truth. Lay people who would send nude photos of themselves in cyberspace or who engage in immoral acts ranging from sex to stealing, are fired (asked to resign). Priests who are accused of the same are either not investigated or the investigation is limited in scope yielding what is called ‘in the business’ a “teflon” report. It exposes misconduct but is limited in scope in order to protect those who knew or should have known. Sounds like White House politics deja vu all over again except that it is chicanery, er I mean, chancery politics.

Another defensive response from officials claims the right of privacy for priests but in the case of sexual misconduct, parishioners have a right to know. But when it comes to abortion rights, the Church doesn’t recognize the right to privacy because the unborn child has rights. However, when the child is born and adopted, the rights of the mother take precedence and the Church will fight the right of adopted children to locate their mothers. Catch 22! Go figure it!

O, and by the way, it appears that bishops are a bit nervous about the fact that some of these adopted children searching for their parents were ‘fathered’ by priests, many of who remain still, to quote the bishop, “priests in good standing.” One priest now deceased fathered three children as we went about his routine ministry.

And this from an astute attorney:

As a corporate lawyer one spends a great deal of time on the subject of “mental reservation” when dealing with any type of corporate disclosure or other statement of any kind to the public. Our Congress and SEC actually got it right in 1934, and our courts have relentlessly and uncompromisingly enforced it over these last 70 years.

Corporate America is serious, it hires attorneys to monitor disclosures, to teach employees about the necessity of compliance and to ensure that they understand that it’s good business to do so. Not that it stops untruth, but the requirement for truth is institutionalized, embedded, and the cause of great expense and effort.

Would that the Church would be as aggressive in the pursuit and protection of truth:

“It shall be unlawful for any person, directly or indirectly, by the use of any means or instrumentality of interstate commerce, or of the mails or of any facility of any national securities exchange,

(a) To employ any device, scheme, or artifice to defraud,
(b) To make any untrue statement of a material fact or to omit to state a material fact necessary in order to make the statements made, in the light of the circumstances under which they were made, not misleading, or
(c) To engage in any act, practice, or course of business which operates or would operate as a fraud or deceit upon any person, in connection with the purchase or sale of any security.”

Sorry, folks. We’re not there yet!

It’s time for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth to be told. Denial is not disclosure. And eighteen year old victims are not consenting adults despite what the bishop may assume to the contrary!

It’s all in the ‘Harvey Interviews’ beginning with Harvey Interview #3, but Harvey Poscript is quite revealing.

Read on…

Lawyers grapple with Catholic doctrine

In questioning clergy over sex abuse cases, some encounter ‘mental reservation,’ in which avoiding truth to protect the church is justified.

By John Spano
Times Staff Writer

March 26, 2007

An elderly nun, under questioning by a lawyer, recently said she could remember almost nothing about his client, a child who had been sexually molested by a Roman Catholic priest.


Lawyer Irwin Zalkin was puzzled because church records showed she had heard several complaints about the San Diego priest, and the file noted that she had reported them to higher authority.


Finally, Zalkin asked whether she was familiar with “mental reservation” — a 700-year-old doctrine by which clerics may avoid telling the truth to protect the Catholic Church.


“She explained in her own way that it is ‘to protect the church from scandal.’ She said she subscribed to the doctrine,” Zalkin said. “What are you going to do?”


Mental reservation is not sanctioned in canon law, experts say, and is infrequently invoked.

But in litigation arising from clergy sex abuse cases in the Los Angeles Archdiocese, at least half a dozen lawyers representing victims report having encountered it.


The idea goes back to times when there were two separate court systems: ecclesiastical, or church courts, and civil courts run by the state. Today, all disputes are settled in civil courts.

The doctrine has been used in modern times to “claim that it is morally justifiable to lie in order to protect the reputation of the institutional church,” said Thomas P. Doyle, a Virginia priest who is an expert in canon law and has been widely consulted by lawyers for people who say they were victims of abuse.


It has been misused “to justify lying,” Doyle said last week. The doctrine is “not accepted church teaching” but has been widely discussed by scholars and moral theologians, Doyle said.


Zalkin’s experience was unusual but not unique.

A lawyer preparing one of the more than 500 claims of abuse against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles asked a priest giving a sworn statement the same question earlier this month. His lawyer quickly intervened, telling the priest not to answer.


Cardinal Roger M. Mahony in Los Angeles and Bishop Robert H. Brom in San Diego were asked about it while giving sworn statements.


In Boston, where the national scandal broke in 2002 and forced the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law the following year, the doctrine of mental reservation was “a major concern,” lawyer Jeffrey A. Newman said. “Our concern was that there might have been an internal usage of the doctrine and an understanding of how it would be applied, and we would not be able to decipher it,” said Newman, the lead attorney representing a group of 500 claims against 120 priests that was settled three years ago in Boston.


Newman questioned Law under oath before the cardinal resigned and said that Law downplayed the doctrine. Newman said he had received calls from many lawyers seeking consultation about the effect of the doctrine on clergy cases nationwide.

In Northern California, where the claims of 180 people against eight dioceses were settled for about $200 million, the doctrine rarely appeared, said Rick Simons, the Hayward lawyer in charge of litigation for the victims.


”But there were a lot of [priests] up here who did believe they don’t answer to the civil authorities, that no one but the church has the power to discipline priests.


”Whether they lie because they think it is a constitutional right, whether they lie because they think it is church doctrine, or whether they lie because they think they’ll be prosecuted — I don’t care,” Simons said.

When Mahony made a sworn statement under questioning several years ago, he was asked by Irvine lawyer John Manly whether he was testifying under the doctrine. Church lawyers refused to allow Mahony to answer.


”Cardinal Mahony has always insisted and will always insist that honesty always prevails in giving testimony under oath,” his spokesman, Tod Tamberg, said Friday. Tamberg said asking the question was “insulting and unprofessional” because it suggested that Mahony wasn’t being honest.


Brom, the San Diego bishop whose diocese filed for bankruptcy protection Feb. 27, used a hypothetical to explain the doctrine during his deposition. About 140 claims of abuse are pending in San Diego, and the bankruptcy filing was designed to give the church time to settle those cases.

According to Zalkin, Brom said, “Let’s assume we were in Nazi Germany. Let’s assume I was harboring a Jewish family in my church. Some Nazis came and knocked on the door and asked me if there were Jews here. In invoking the doctrine of mental reservation, I would be able to say no, which would be a lie and a sin.


”By reserving unto my own mind that the real complete answer would be ‘No, not here at this point in time,’ or ‘No, not standing here in this room.’ With that qualification in mind, I’m not lying and I’m not a sinner.”


”You really don’t know,” Zalkin said. “You put somebody under oath; you assume they understand that under civil law they would be committing perjury to lie. It complicates that process when there is a doctrine that allows for a lie to avoid scandal to the church.”


How priests and church workers testify bears directly on what has become central to the lawsuits in Los Angeles: whether Mahony and his predecessors at the head of America’s largest Catholic archdiocese failed to protect young congregants from known pedophile priests.


Both sides spent years trying to negotiate a settlement of claims, as was done successfully in Orange County two years ago.

It has been only over the last several months that the investigation has resumed, resulting in depositions and the surrender of church files such as those that revealed differences in Mahony’s descriptions of priestly wrongdoing to congregants here and to church officials in Rome.


Doyle has noted that the oath newly minted cardinals take before the pope includes the vow that they will never tell secrets “the revelation of which could cause damage or dishonor to the Holy Church.”


The problem is lack of certainty. “You’re never going to know the truth, one way or the other,” Zalkin said. “If she says ‘No,’ you don’t know. If she says ‘Yes,’ you don’t know.”


On the other hand truth prevailed recently in Boston:

Vatican dismisses 2 Boston-area priests accused of sexual abuse

by christina wallace / metro boston
MAR 23, 2007

The Archdiocese of Boston yesterday announced that two former priests who were charged with sexual abuse have been permanently dismissed from the priesthood.

Anthony J. Laurano and W. James Nyhan have both been restricted from public ministry since 2002, but yesterday the Vatican took the next step in dismissing the two men from the clerical state permanently. Both men will no longer receive financial support and are forbidden from practicing as priests, with the exception of offering absolution to the dying, according to a statement from the archdiocese.

Laurano, who retired in 1995, was indicted on two counts of child rape and was arraigned in Plymouth Superior Court in April 2005. Again, in 2006, new charges were brought against him in Plymouth County. Nyhan was originally placed on administrative leave in 2002 after he was accused of sexual abuse against a minor. Last year, he was convicted of criminal charges involving sexual abuse of children while he served as a priest 25 years ago in South Carolina.

“For those who have been sexually abused by members of the clergy, I sincerely apologize for the suffering you and your families have endured. Sexual crimes perpetrated against children or vulnerable adults by priests are shameful and grievous,” Emphasis mine said Cardinal Sean O’Malley, in a statement. “I remain committed to providing support for survivors and their loved ones who have experienced such profound emotional and spiritual suffering as a result of these depraved acts.”

And this ‘brief’ meditation makes a great deal of sense during this the holiest of all weeks:

A Time to Weep

While the events of Holy Week lie before us that recall the suffering and death of Jesus, we must add our own tragic reasons to weep.

Weep for our Pope Benedict who, according to his theology students, believed and taught that Jesus did not intend to start a church anything close to the what we have today, yet now he must lead the largest monarchical conglomerate in the world and attempt to imbue it with the same spirit that Jesus did. Weep as he, seemingly oblivious of change, desperately grasps at archaic measures to deal with problems of the present..

Weep for your bishop who is trapped between his vow to keep secret anything that he learns that would damage the image of the Church and the overwhelming burden of conscience to expose and address the great sins against the children of his people as well as his own possible cover-up, trapped between justice and the measures he must take to protect the temporal goods and image of the Church.

Weep for our good priests who serve us with dedication and love as they try to understand how their friends and fellow priest could have fallen so far and they ponder their own guilt of silence, suspecting but immobilized by loyalty and fear.

Weep for the children victims. Weep for the guilty priests.

Weep for your brothers and sisters whose families have a victim or perpetrator amongst them.

Weep for our Church as it tries to nourish us with its abundant spiritual gifts, yet shackled by a structure of its own design and bound by the chains of its own laws that demand silent obedience from God’s people rather than empower them with God’s Spirit of freedom and new understanding.

Weep for our country so full of promise, fallen so low.

Weep for ourselves and our own sins and failings and die with Jesus on our own cross so that we can rise with Him and attempt to dry the tears of all the above by freeing them and us to live as the children of God we are.

“He is risen as He did say” and so are we in Him. ___

Catholics coming of age in the pew are slowly getting the picture and coming to the realization that church officials do not always tell the truth!