Wed, 06 May 2026 19:52:57 -0400WeeblyThu, 19 Feb 2026 18:52:10 GMThttps://www.catechistcafe.com/morality/justice-for-father-curran-part-2The first part of this entry from February 12 can be read in its entirety by scrolling down beneath today’s entry of February 19. References are to Loyal Dissent unless otherwise indicated.
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 THE ROLLER COASTER OF 1967 AND 1968:
 
On April 17, 1967, Father Charles Curran was informed by his employer, The Catholic University of America, that his application for promotion had been rejected and that his employment at CUA was terminated. Why he was fired is rather simple to explain, on one level. Some of the members of the CUA board of trustees, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, were disturbed by allegations that Father Curran was teaching heresy at the only Pontifical University in the United States. Recall that the Bishop of Rochester, New York had released Father Curran for approximately the same reasons just two years earlier.
 
No one has ever proved that most U.S. bishops wished for Curran’s firing. The decision was not made by the full body of bishops in an annual meeting. The actual vote, by a representative group of the USCCB, was 28-1 against Curran. The dissenting vote came from the much-respected Archbishop Paul Hallinan of Atlanta. At the time of the vote, Curran had lectured at CUA for just two years. From a distance it seems unusual to build such ecclesiastical animus in that relatively brief period. As I noted in Part 1, some of the complaints about Curran to Cardinal O’Boyle were, at the least, eccentric. On the other hand, the moral professor was making a name for himself in his teaching and public speaking. He published Christian Morality Today [1966, revised 1971] and contributed to several national Catholic academic journals. He recruited friends in the field to apply to teach at Catholic University. Again, from the first post, my own collegiate theological advisor in seminary utilized Curran’s theology in my personal/professional guidance.
 
What those on the USCCB overlooked was the atmosphere at Catholic University, a subtle but growing alienation of the faculty from its overlords. Of course, in the unsettled 1960’s, Catholic University was hardly the only school with issues. Recall Columbia University in 1968. When Curran was released by the university, he made a public statement that due process had been denied him, a brilliant tactical move which took the issue from religious controversy to civil rights. Curran’s claim was, in fact, true. His theological department had voted unanimously for his advancement just weeks before, and the USCCB override brought the entire lay faculty into solidarity with their religious counterparts. Within hours. emergency meetings of faculty and students were held. A campus-wide strike was called for full reinstatement of Curran, with general faculty voting 400-18 to support the theology faculty. Between 3000 and 4000 students and supporters rallied peacefully in support of Curran. The CUA standoff became national news on such media arms as The New York Times and Time Magazine.

In his autobiography Curran admits that there was concern over how long the siege could last, so to speak, [p. 38] But as he recalls, the USCCB was under much greater pressure, and its senior members such as Cardinals Lawrence Sheehan of Baltimore and Richard Cushing of Boston criticized the vote against him. Finally, senior members of the university’s administration met with Washington’s Cardinal O’Boyle and reversed its previous ruling. Curran was promoted to associate professor effective in September 1967 and would serve the University until the Vatican examined his works in 1986. [See below.] In the narrative of the 1967 events, Curran notes that over the years he has learned more of the internal discussions of his case, but that some minutes of meetings in the university archives have been put off limits to more recent historians. [pp. 43-47]
 
Curran had been on record as calling for a reexamination of the Church’s teaching against artificial birth control as taught by Pope Pius XI in 1930. With the availability of the birth control pill since 1960, there was hope among many that the teaching might be altered or reversed. However, on July 25, 1968, Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical Humanae Vitae [“on human life”] which maintained that all acts of marital intercourse must be open to the conception of human life. I reread the encyclical this morning and came away again, as I have in the past, with the sense that Pope Paul was trying to salvage the authority of the papacy as well as address procreative principles. This is unfortunate, because the document addresses a variety of valid concerns over which there were minimal disagreements. The pope had strong words for countries [notably China] where centralized government limited the size of families, and for marriages where husbands demanded sex from their wives without consent—an unfortunate common occurrence which we correctly address as “marital rape” today.
 
The efforts of the American hierarchy to enforce the pope’s teaching were very uneven. For Father Curran, some of the pressures must have seemed like déjà vu of the previous year, except that in 1968 the ax of obedience hung over the heads of all priests, and particularly of teachers of morality in colleges and seminaries—and certainly the theology faculty of the Catholic University of America. At least in 1968 he had much more company in the foxhole. But Curran was instrumental in organizing a nationwide statement of disapproval of Humanae Vitae from 87 of the country’s prominent Catholic theologians, the “87” became something of a slogan; eventually Curran’s name would become the handle for professional dissent. Eventually 600 professional Catholic leaders would sign the statement.
 
Penalties for dissent were sporadic and often implemented reluctantly. Some bishops realized that there was no way to enforce the teaching among the faithful per se. What individuals chose to disclose or withhold in the confessional was ultimately an exercise of personal conscience. Could a priest ask a penitent about contraception in the confessional? I can say that in my own seminary education we were never told to pry about anything in our function as confessors; later I learned that St. Alphonsus Ligouri and St. John Vianney, two famous confessors, held the same positions. With this in mind, it is easier to understand why, collectively, the bishops wished that priests—particularly the theologians—vigorously upheld Humanae Vitae rather than publicly question it. In the Washington, D.C. archdiocese, Cardinal O’Boyle revoked the faculties of forty of his diocesan priests who publicly dissented from the encyclical. In 1971 the Congregation for the Clergy in Rome intervened with O’Boyle, who invited the priests back to full service. Only 19 remained; the others had left the priesthood.
 
Father Curran and his colleagues fell under the civil discipline of the university, a prolonged [“glacial,” in Curran’s words] series of hearings and assessments by university officials and then by the trustees, the body of the USCCB or United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The hearings were still in progress when I showed up at CUA’s school of philosophy in September 1969. The bottom line: dissent from non-infallible teaching was tolerated, but faculty members were [forbidden? Advised not to?] make their dissent public. It was an awkward conclusion, but Curran and his colleagues were not disciplined…except for their lawyers’ fees. In concluding Chapter 3, Curran reflects upon his role as the public “dissident of the Church,” and 1967 and 1968 were difficult for him but the circumstances left him little choice but to stand on principle. [pp. 67-69] It does occur to me in 2026 that the principle of synodality—scorned by some, ignored by many bishops—may save us from future theological showdowns. We cannot ignore that, for example, 83% of practicing Catholics in the United States favor the use of artificial contraception, per the 2024 PEW Research survey. That cannot be laid at the doorstep of poor old Charlie Curran.
 
Moral theology, like all academic disciplines, falls under the rigors of academic research, but the task is harder here because of the faith element. Curran devotes several chapters to laying out his methodology [see Chapters 4 and 7 through 10]. He cites the principles that guided his work early in Chapter 4:
 
“The principal aspects of my developing methodology were the importance of historical consciousness, the recognition of historical development in many teachings and the influence of outmoded biological understandings of human sexuality, the need for a critical evaluation of the experience of Christian people, and the problematic aspects of the neo-scholastic understanding of natural law.” [p. 72]
 
Curran argues that the Church must consider “historical consciousness” or the thinking at the time a principle was first codified. This is obvious in Old Testament morality, which permitted fathers to put recalcitrant daughters to death and to stone homosexuals, to cite just two examples. St. Thomas Aquinas, the man at the heart of medieval morality, held that the sex of a fetus was assigned naturally in males after forty days, and females after 80-90 days in the womb. Medical knowledge in the twenty-first century, particularly in the realm of reproductive medicine but also in psychotropic medicine and other fields, can bring significant information to moral puzzles. As a psychotherapist myself, I often think about the moral impact of commonly used mood stabilizers and other drugs. If an angry or destructive individual softens his stance toward others after taking Prozac/fluoxetine, just to cite one drug, are we looking at a moral reform or a chemical alteration?
 
A HIGH PRICE TO PAY
 
After the confrontations of 1967 and 1968, Curran enjoyed both a high degree of respect from most of his academic and theological peers at Catholic University and opposition from those whose tactics exceeded the normal extension of peer review. The years leading up to 1986 were filled with classes and dissertation supervision, requests for lectures around the country, and prodigious writing—multiple books, journals, and contributions to the prestigious Theological Studies, published by the Jesuits.
 
As the author notes in Chapter 4, the academic landscape around theology was changing over the 1970’s and 1980’s. Pope John Paul II was elected in 1978, and he appointed the theologian and archbishop Joseph Ratzinger [the future Pope Benedict XVI] Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Together they sought to reinforce doctrinal discipline around the world, targeting theologians of note whose teachings were viewed by the Vatican as beyond the pale of official Church doctrine. Curran received notification as early as 1979 that his works were under review in Rome, and over the next several years he received correspondence requesting more detail. Curran objected—as he had years earlier—about the absence of due process. But under Ratzinger the Holy Office was determined to bring into line the scholars shaping the cutting edge of contemporary moral theology. Several American theologians, colleagues of Curran, had their works publicly cited as beyond Roman Catholic teaching; some lost teaching positions in Catholic institutions. In 1984 Curran, along with Hans Kung of Switzerland and two others, was cited for “robbing the encyclical [Humanae Vitae] of its intended effect by [his] dissent. [p. 112]
 
Loyal Dissent goes into considerable detail about the charges against the author, as well as the friends, churchmen, and colleagues who supported him. [Hans Kung, who had been stripped of his faculties to teach as a Catholic theologian, flew to Washington to console Curran.] On July 25, 1986, Pope John Paul II signed a letter to Curran stating that “one who dissents from the Magisterium as you do is not suitable nor eligible to teach Catholic theology.” Put simply, the pope had revoked the priest’s right to teach theology for any Catholic institution around the world. Curran would appear on “Meet the Press” on the following Sunday to explain his reasoning not to recant his position on due process owed to theologians, but the game was up. Chapter 6 describes Curran’s subsequent civil suit against CUA, arguing that the university, as a civil chartered university, had violated his rights by breaking his contract. The court ruled against him on February 28, 1989.
 
WHAT NEXT?
 
The Vatican’s ruling against him did not in any way invalidate his teaching degrees. His doctorate in theology, for example, was still civilly valid. Thus, any non-Catholic institution of higher learning could offer him a position, and this is what happened in 1987 when Cornell University of the Ivy League offered him a one-year position as holder of the Kanab Chair in Catholic Studies, endowed by a Catholic donor on the board of trustees. Cornell, incidentally, is in the Catholic Diocese of Rochester, where Curran was ordained and remains incardinated, as far as I know.
 
[I should explain here that many excellent non-Catholic colleges and universities—state and private--offer courses and degrees in Catholic studies, and it goes without saying that Catholic bishops have no legal right to interfere with such employment. One of my Catholic colleagues years ago—a teacher in a Catholic high school—had earned her degree at Vanderbilt.]
 
The following year Curran taught at Southern Cal University—yes, the school with the football team. His next year found him at Auburn—yes, the school with the football team. [I have never researched whether the Tigers and the Trojans ever played each other in football during Curran’s tenure at either school.] By this time, however, the traveling professor was looking to set roots for a long-term professorship and residence. Southern Methodist University, as it turned out, had its eye on the former Catholic University professor for some time. Except for opposition from the Dallas Catholic bishop that was quickly put to bed by SMU’s governing hierarchy, Curran was offered a tenured position which allowed him the opportunity to teach, research, write, and honor invitations to lecture.
 
Is there anything odd about a Catholic priest theologian unpacking his library and suitcase for a long term stay at a Methodist University? Not at all. Over the twentieth century Catholic and other Christian theologians came to appreciate—in scholarly circles, at least—that their research and propositions were bringing them closer together; they were, in many cases, looking for answers to the same question. [Pope Pius’ 1943 instruction allowed Catholic Biblical scholars to interact with Protestant Biblical scholars on methods of Biblical study.] Curran’s historical background in Catholic moral studies would have been invaluable to his colleagues. The reverse was also true: Curran received at SMU what every academic must have for credibility: peer review from fellow faculty and researchers. This is probably a primary reason why Curran wished to settle in a long-term residence near other working theologians.
 
In recent years, since about 2000, I have not been able to stay afloat with Curran’s most recent writings except for occasional journal pieces. However, in general, I have the impression that moral theology as a faith discipline has evolved in all Christian traditions, toward Biblical, political, and social concerns. I also sense that the best Catholic students of theology are lay, not clerics, studying in “safe havens,” i.e., away from Catholic denominational schools. Massimo Fagioli, professor at Vilanova in 2024, produced an excellent book on the future of religion in the classrooms of our colleges and universities. [See my review here.] The last three moral books I read were written by women scholars. The same is true of Biblical studies. Times are changing.
 
When historians look back a century from now, I believe they will evaluate the role of Charles Curran and his works on morality as a major factors in a transitional time, between excessive legalism and a new age of subjective human acceptance of the Word of God and the pillar of a new morality structure, a greater sensitivity to Jesus’ command, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
 
Good health to you, Father Curran, and thanks. ]]>Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:07:22 GMThttps://www.catechistcafe.com/morality/justice-for-father-curran-part-1

The Catholic theologian Charles E. Curran, a priest of the Diocese of Rochester, New York, came into my life at a time when I needed direction. I was a college seminary freshman during the 1966-1967 school year, a time of immense turmoil across the Church in the United States. Vatican II [1962-1965] was just completed, and to be frank, few people in church authority anywhere had a clear picture or plan of how to adjust the catechesis and practices of the Church to the new mentality of the Council. My freshman year of college seminary religion was, truthfully, a mishmash from a professor who knew in his heart that the ecclesiastical times were a ‘Changin”, as Bob Dylan was singing at the time, but he was not either comfortable with or significantly read in the “new morality” as it emanated from Catholic academia in Europe or the United States.

I knew something was wrong or different, that I was changing at 18, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I stopped going to confession as a college freshman. A cluster of us classmates talked about it one time, and we had lost our reason[s] for going to confession. To use a phrase common at the time, “I didn’t get anything out of it anymore.” I was in grad school some years later, and I came to realize that the 2-week confessional practice was a holdover from the old school manualist approach to the Sacrament of Penance.

When I returned to my seminary in the fall of 1967 as a college sophomore, I was surprised to discover that there had been a major turnover in the faculty; four newly ordained friar priests arrived who were well-versed in advances of the post-Conciliar Church, particularly in theology and liturgy. One of them, Father Adrian Porter, became our theology professor and walked us through the development of twentieth century Catholic theology in many of its subdisciplines—among them Scripture, Liturgy, and of considerable interest, moral theology. Before I went home for Thanksgiving, I scheduled an appointment with him to help me wrap my head around the “changes in the Church.” I come from a large family which in the late sixties was all over the map on the Catholic situation. Father Adrian and I spent two hours together, and he helped me to reset my moral compass and reasoning, so to speak. And one name from that conversation remains with me to this day: Charles Curran.

WHO IS FATHER CHARLES CURRAN?

As of this writing Father Curran is 93 years old and is listed as Elizabeth Scurlock University Chair emeritus of Human Values at Southern Methodist University. I am presently reviewing Father Curran’s autobiography, Loyal Dissent [2006], which outlines a rather remarkable personal and professor life as one of American Catholicism’s most visible, if not always welcome, priest, teacher, researcher, and author throughout the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Young Charles progressed through the seminary system of the Diocese of Rochester until his bishop, in 1955, assigned him to study at the North American College in Rome. This was not uncommon, as bishops needed priests with Roman pedigree to teach in their diocesan seminaries and serve as canonists in Diocesan marriage tribunals, etc.

In his autobiography Curran writes that “I went to Rome in September 1955 and returned for good in 1961. I left Rochester a very convinced, happy, and traditional pre-Vatican II Catholic. I came back, even before Vatican II, recognizing the need for a change and reform in the church. What transpired in Rome? Looking back on it, there were no lightning strikes, but some significant events and people there changed my understanding. [p. 7] It should be noted here that Curran’s classes in Rome were taught in Latin, the custom of the time. He observes in an aside that “the notes of the professor became notes of the pupil without passing through the minds of either!” [p. 7] Absenteeism was something of a European student fixture.

Curran, at this juncture, had no intention of specializing in moral theology, but he was, in fact, ordered to stay in Rome by his Rochester bishop to complete his doctorate in that field. He began to rub elbows with moralists in Rome, including the Jesuit Franz Hurth, the reputed ghostwriter for Pius XI’s 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii, which forbade artificial birth control, and similarly ghosted Pius XII’s moral teachings. Hurth and Curran frequently conversed on moral questions, and in one such instance Curran asked why the Church forbade artificial insemination even when the sperm was the husband’s and the instrument was the Doyle cervical spoon, a device invented in the late 1940’s to ensure better passage of sperm to the cervix. Curran observed that the Doyle device, as he understood it then, increased the odds of a successful conception in a couple that clearly embraced a sacramental end [then the sacramental end!] of marriage, i.e., creating new life. “A few years later I came to the conclusion that [Hurth’s] approach was a good example of the problem of physicalism, whereby one ‘absolutized’ the physical act of marriage.” [p. 9] As it turned out, Hurth told Curran that the Doyle aid was “an American issue and I’m not going to get involved in it.” The Vatican has never commented on the Doyle device, which can be purchased today on Amazon Prime well over a half century after the young Curran inquired about it.

We all have had moments where insights or experiences have altered our life direction to some degree. Curran did not embrace an academic career when he began his studies, but his immersion in moral theology, as in his lessons from Hurth and other professionals in the moral field, later coupled with Vatican II’s teachings on spiritual renewal and engagement with the other disciplines, focused him on the need for a revision of the principles of moral theology. After his ordination in 1958, he had the good fortune of taking courses and other opportunities at the Pontifical Alphonsian Academy, founded by the Redemptorists to nurture the spirituality and moral outlook of the Order’s founder, St. Alphonsus Ligouri.

One of the pivotal works on the renewal of Catholic moral theology in the twentieth century was written in 1954, the three-volume The Law of Christ, by the Redemptorist Father Bernard Haring. [I reviewed Father Haring’s 1998 autobiography and his book makes a good companion piece to Father Curran’s autobiography.] Of Father Haring, Curran has this to say: “Bernard Haring had the most significant influence on my thought…Haring’s holistic approach brought together morality, spirituality, scripture, and the sacraments.” [p. 14] There is a story that when Haring was a young priest in the 1930’s, his superiors ordered him to seek a doctorate in moral theology. Haring protested on the grounds that moral theology, as taught and enforced by the Church then, was too legal and stale. He asked to be sent to the foreign missions! His superior replied, “If you feel this way about Catholic morality, then stay and fix it.”

Curran completed his own graduate studies and authored his dissertation on “The Concept of Invincible Ignorance in Alphonsus Ligouri.” The topic was reflective of the time [1960], bringing back memories of the late medieval preoccupation of “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Curran writes that the biggest lesson of the dissertation was the intense animosity between the new school moralists and the traditional moralists in Rome; during his oral defense, two of his judges got into a heated argument and consumed nearly all of Curran’s time. An interesting sidebar: Curran’s opponent in the dissertation defense later took him out to lunch and counseled him on how to teach in his home diocesan seminary, St. Bernard’s in Rochester, a school with a very conservative reputation in the United States. His advice: “teach in Latin. That’s all anyone will talk about.” The ploy worked…for a while.

THE PILL:

Curran returned to the United States and began teaching seminarians in the fall of 1961. He taught a wide range of courses, integrating into his work the trends in theology he had absorbed in Rome. His students were divided in their reception of his teaching, falling along progressive/conservative lines. Some of the St. Bernard faculty welcomed his novel [to them] theological content.

Much was transpiring beyond the gates of St. Bernard’s, however. In 1960 the United States FDA approved the oral contraceptive Enovid for general use. “The pill” posed a challenge for Church teaching, as it was the first contraceptive which did not act as an overt barrier to intercourse nor did it intrude upon natural male-female intercourse. Curran had found, in his Roman research, that the Church’s present-day understanding of science was weak, in some cases resting upon principles from the medieval era. He was not the first theologian to call for a change in the Church’s contraceptive ban; Father Louis Janssens of Louvain argued for acceptance of the pill but not other forms of contraception.

Curran had begun writing for Catholic publications—this was a heyday era for the Catholic press—and then, consequently, to receive speaking invitations. Most notable was an invitation from Harvard to speak on the role of conscience; the school was looking for a Catholic scholar to present a newer approach to moral theology. It speaks volumes that Harvard turned to a 29-year-old seminary professor from Rochester to learn how Catholic theologians were facing the challenges of the future. After some anguish of decision, Curran agreed, and presented “The Problem of Conscience and the Twentieth Century Christian.”

Curran had wisely, in my view, not imitated Janssens in defending the pill on a technicality. Rather, he laid out a broader series of questions that thoughtful Catholics—not just academics and cardinals but certainly including them—would all need to address going into the future

[1] The lived experience of Catholics—in this context, married Catholics—needed to be considered and taken seriously in authoritative Catholic moral teaching. To say, on record, that laity belonged in the discernment of Church teaching was stunning to hear. Many Catholics at the time thought this was precisely the Lutheran heresy. We were now in unfamiliar territory that went far beyond the pill, though Enovid lit the fuse.
[2] Going back to his dissertation experience, Curran highlighted how present-day Church moralists in Rome labored under woefully inadequate understandings of science in formulating moral principles.
[3] “Moral judgement is the ultimate human judgment, bringing together all the partial aspects—be they sociological, psychological, eugenic, hygienic, and so on.” [p. 22]
[4] …” Church teaching had changed on some issues in the past and could change here as well.” [p. 22]

The content of this presentation seemed to capture the imagination and affirmation of many priests and academics, not to mention even some bishops. Notably, Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston invited Curran to give eight lectures to all the priests in his diocese. He received invitations to speak at or even to teach at the Catholic University of America, my alma mater. Curran’s bishop, James E. Kearney, would not release him from St. Bernard’s, however.

St. Bernard’s, however, was growing more troubled about Curran’s theological orientation. He was advised to “tone it down.” His bishop allowed him to write for academic journals but not for popular Catholic reading by the faithful. Finally, in the summer of 1965 Curran was released [ecclesiastical firing] from his teaching at St. Bernard and then quickly hired by Catholic University. What made the Rochester bishop change his mind? The author is not totally certain, but from his account I have to wonder [1] if the neighboring Bishop of Syracuse—whose seminarians attended St. Bernard’s—threatened to pull his future priests from St. Bernard’s, or [2] the Rochester Bishop wanted Curran out of his diocese, period. Washington, D.C., was far enough away. Curran, incidentally, offered to remain in Rochester as a parish priest, but the bishop was adamant he report to CUA and move to the nation’s capital..

Equally intriguing is Curran’s rapid hiring at Catholic University. CUA is a Pontifical University—an extension of the Church’s universal teaching authority, so to speak. Its board of directors is the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. On the face of it, Curran would not have been a good fit at CUA, any more than he was for the Bishop of Rochester.

But there were other considerations, The 1960’s were not kind to CUA—my own religious order joined with about six others in D.C. to form the Washington Theological Coalition in 1968, my future graduate alma mater [1971-1974], a free standing, chartered and accredited theology school which offered master’s degrees in theology by pulling together the best scholars in each order. As a later student myself, I was much happier studying theology at the WTC [later WTU], having previously graduated from CUA’s School of Philosophy. CUA, in my time, could not decide whether to cling to the past or explore the future, academically speaking. The WTC had set its face for Jerusalem, so to speak, and prepared us as best it could for the priesthood that would be needed in the generations ahead. At the WTC we read Curran’s books—he was a prolific author by then—and at least once in my tenure he came to the Franciscan house of studies, Holy Name, and lead us in an evening of prayer and recollection.

Once established at CUA in the fall of 1965, Curran taught a modest classroom schedule and directed dissertations. In 1966 he used the research of one such dissertation as the basis for an address to the Catholic Theological Society of America: on the question of whether masturbation, in and of itself, constituted objectively grave matter, i.e., mortal sin. Curran believed it did not. The topic itself could have been treated in 1856 as well as 1966, a relic of the old manual style moral theology. Interestingly, proving Curran’s point about development in moral theology, I myself would disagree with Curran’s 1966 judgment. Masturbation brought on by fantasies of child abuse or the degradation of women or vulnerable individuals I would consider grave matter…and matters of mental health concern as well as religious morality. For contrasts in theological generations, I am including a link to the 2026 CTSA Convention, sixty years after Curran’s paper at the same convention. Talk about culture shock.

In his autobiography Curran takes time to explain to readers his theories and structures of the discipline of moral theology. If you never had a college level course in Catholic morality---which is, sadly, very possible today--it is an opportunity to understand the theological evolution of the post-Vatican II years. Every theological discipline in the Church, from Liturgy to Law, has advanced, certainly not without objection or mistakes, nor without suffering, which would find Father Curran soon enough.

Catholic University, located in Washington, is situated in the Archdiocese of Washington. In 1966 the archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle, received information about, and I am not kidding, “the masturbation lecture” cited above. A letter to O’Boyle from an influential priest stated that “this paper, without doubt, will induce thousands of young persons to masturbate without any qualm of conscience. Among these will be priests and clerics and nuns. And, of course, Father Curran will appear to be backed up by the Catholic University of America.” [p. 35] There is an amusing element to the correspondent’s line of reasoning about teens exhausting themselves after a CTSA academic paper, a society that admits only Ph.D.’s. [I applied, once, and was sent a list of the prerequisites.]

But O’Boyle brought the matter to the Board of Trustees and Curran’s work came under scrutiny. Or, perhaps more accurately, the discussion centered on how to dismiss him. Curran did not have tenure at the time and had applied for renewal of his contract. On April 10, 1967, the board of trustees voted against renewing Curran’s contract. Curran was informed a week later of his dismissal, but he responded that the procedure was secretive and dishonest, that there was no due process, and that he was prepared to go public with his case.
Within several days, the Case of Father Charles Curran and the Catholic University of America would become national news.
To be continued….February 16 ]]>Fri, 05 Dec 2025 20:02:37 GMThttps://www.catechistcafe.com/morality/december-05th-2025We have a “second agenda” in today’s post. I received a letter early this week from a lady who is studying theology, specifically moral theology. She asked my opinion on purchasing the three volume The Law of Christ [1954] by the German theologian Bernard Haring. Haring was a pivotal figure in the theological renewal of moral theology just prior to Vatican II and certainly afterwards. I wrote back and told her that her inquiry came at an excellent time as we are embarking on the third section of James O’Toole’s For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America. [2025] So today we will look at how theologians of the past four centuries—including Haring—influence how we view morality and confession…and I will make my recommendation about buying Haring’s classic at the very end.
 
First, to our correspondent I say welcome to the Catechist Café Family. The letter arrived at a time when the Café is currently treating Penance/Confession in the context of sin and virtue. So, it is appropriate to ask if purchasing the three-volume classic, The Law of Christ [1954], is a wise investment of time and money. Over the past two weeks of posting we have been examining For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America [2025] by the Church historian James M. O’Toole of Boston College. O’Toole [Rise and Fall, pp. 226-228] references Haring’s writing and teaching in the context of confession and the birth control controversy, sparked by the encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968. Let’s investigate the roots of Haring’s work and how it impacted the Church.
 
THE MORAL LINEAGE THAT FORMED THE WORK OF FATHER BERNARD HARING
 
Father Bernard Haring [1912-1998] was a pivotal figure in the study and practice of moral theology in the Catholic Church. He has left us an autobiography, which I reviewed for Amazon here. He was a Redemptorist priest, a member of an order founded by St. Alphonsus Ligouri in the eighteenth century.
 
Let me stop here and explain St. Alphonsus Ligouri [1696-1787], the ultimate inspiration for Haring’s later thinking. Ligouri, a civil lawyer for some years before seeking the priesthood, founded his order to sanctify Catholics; he was a keen observer of the spiritual needs of souls and the degree to which morality and confessional practice of his day helped or hindered the faithful. His was a kindred spirit to St. John Vianney [see my Amazon review] who, a century later, became possibly the best-known confessor in the world. Ligouri’s spiritual writings, of which there are many, tended to emphasize mercy and piety in confessional practice, with less emphasis upon legalism and casuistry in the Sacrament of Penance. [Think Jesuits.] “Alphonsus was canonized in 1839 and proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius IX in 1871, recognized for his significant contributions to moral theology and his founding of the Redemptorists.” [quote per Britannica] That Ligouri was posthumously honored with sainthood, and the title of Church doctor is an indication that the Church at some level viewed the sacrament of Penance, and morality itself, as something more than black letter law.
 
Consequently, from the eighteenth century forward there has been something of a subtle back-and-forth between approaching Confession as an exclusive listing of sins in their number and species, on the one hand, and something akin to spiritual direction on the other. The “number and species” approach is referred to in historical texts even today as “The Manualist Tradition” for the obvious reason that a confessor could consult the book, the manual, if there were question of the existence or severity of mortal sin and guilt in a person’s confession. The most famous English language manual was Moral Theology compiled by Father Heribert Jone and Father Urban Adelman in 1929. [I met Father Adelman in his seniority around 1972, and I told him I had seen his work published at a student bookstore across the street from Catholic University in Washington, where I lived at the time. To which he replied: “Don’t tell me they’re still selling that thing!”]
 
Vatican II [1962-1965] called for a renewal of all the sacraments. Regarding Penance, an AI commentary states: “The history of the sacrament of confession has seen significant changes since Vatican II. The Council introduced new rites and expanded forms of penance, encouraging a broader pastoral focus. The sacrament has evolved from a strictly private, forensic model to rites that highlight scripture, communal preparation, and pastoral accompaniment.” It is a satisfactory answer in and of itself, but for years after the Council the Church in the U.S. debated about how much latitude could be given [or taken] to confessors and penitents alike. The major debate among and between moralists and confessors in America after the Council involved artificial contraception.
 
Many confessors felt that prudence was better served if priests did not probe into the conjugal practices of married couples [i.e., are you and your spouse using the pill or a barrier device?] Other confessors believed it was their duty, in the Manualist Tradition, to press the question in the belief that they were preserving the integrity of the sacrament and saving the penitent’s soul. In my family’s parish back in the 1960’s, it was general knowledge which priests asked, and which ones didn’t. The ultimate question, it would seem, was the best way to live a moral life which acknowledged personal sinfulness in tandem with a spiritual relation to Jesus of the Scriptures. And here is where Bernard Haring and other European theologians realigned the chess board.
 
THE SEEDS OF CONFESSIONAL REFORM
 
Every thoughtful European Catholic bishop, priest, philosopher, and theologian was profoundly shaken by the events of the first half of the twentieth century—World War I, World War II, the Holocaust—and interpreted events as evidence that a profound rethinking of Christian life was necessary. [Think Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his The Cost of Discipleship written in Nazi Germany in the 1930’s.] But in the postwar years Catholic scholars, along with many Protestant and Evangelical confreres, were able to conjoin morality to deeper Scriptural scholarship and social justice ministry. For Catholics, this meant that in the confessional the Manual alone was seen as insufficient in addressing the needs of a penitent in developing a closer communion with the Jesus of the Scriptures. The postwar moral theologians deeply influenced many American universities and seminaries…including those attended by young American seminarians and priests studying overseas, including several who would become my professors and confessors.
 
The flagship work of the modern renewal of moral theology was the three-volume The Law of Christ by Bernard Haring, written in German in 1954 and then available in English in the early 1960’s. As a seminarian myself, I recall lectures on Haring and the reform of moral theology beginning with my entry into college in 1966 and the impact it made on the way I went to confession and would in turn celebrate the Sacrament of Penance after ordination. My class was never assigned the reading of The Law of Christ, in part because it was incorporated into our textbooks and lectures, and in part because of its sheer size. Three volumes, the first one alone six hundred pages. Within those pages, Haring had to address the nature of moral law which had stood for seven hundred years.
 
Haring and his confreres addressed the nature of morality as understood by the Church of his day. They faced the challenge of integrating the Bible, social justice, and personal conscience into the standing Church structures of morality established by the medievalists and reinforced later by the manualists. In the thirteenth century St. Thomas Aquinas and others drew from the philosophy of Aristotle that any human action is directed toward its proper end, and any conduct undertaken against its nature is sinful. An easy example is speech. As humans, we are created with the faculty of speech to communicate truth. If we lie, we have sinned, and the manuals would help the confessor to distinguish the gravity of the lie and the severity of the penance to be imposed. The absolution, or divine forgiveness of the sin, became the center of the sacramental encounter. As Haring and his associates took inventory of the world in 1945 and beyond, there was general consensus that the content of the confessional rite and its individual nature was doing little to broaden the human conscience and communal consciousness toward an outward disposition to engage in the works of Christ.
 
Haring’s generation of moral theologians labored to find philosophy, language, and rites to enrich the moral and sacramental environment of the Sacrament of Penance. The tension between the old ways and the new came to a head with Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, Humanae Vitae, in 1968, on artificial contraception. In the logic of the Aristotelian/Thomistic traditional theology, the human body was created and designed for reproduction; intercourse was the means to the end, i.e., for the creation of new life. To thwart the possibility of conception through artificial birth control was gravely sinful. So, too, were sexual acts where conception would be impossible, such as homosexual intercourse and masturbation. Humanae Vitae was directed toward everyone in a highly personal aspect of life. However, with the invention of “the pill,” the expectations of many moral theologians and lay Catholics alike had become confident that permission for use of the pill would be granted, and in fact many Catholics had assumed so and were already using birth control pills in 1968.
 
Father Andrew Greeley, the sociologist-novelist, pinpoints the 1968 encyclical as the primary factor in [1] the drop off in confessions, as penitents were faced with a bleak option of lying or withholding information from the confessor, which defeated the purpose of the sacrament; and [2] Catholics becoming more inclined to eschew certain Church moral teachings and the practice of personal confession entirely in favor of personal conscience. In 1993, the Catechism of the Catholic Church included the teaching of Humanae Vitae, so no change is seen in the foreseeable future. Given that traditional Catholic moral law is wedded to the law of nature, it is hard to see how the teaching could ever be changed. What would need to be changed is a more comprehensive understanding of the spirituality and the science of Catholic morality.
 
With the election of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the Church emphasized greater fidelity to traditional teaching. Moralists of the Haring tradition came under higher scrutiny. Haring’s criticism of the Pope's encyclical Humanae Vitae and his advocacy for a more personalist and scripture-based approach to moral theology led to tensions within the Church. Haring came under an intensive four-year investigation by the Vatican in which he vigorously defended his work. But Haring's views on contraception and his subsequent writing which called for a re-opening of the debate on this issue and many others were seen as a challenge to the Church's official teachings. We know from the research of CARA-Georgetown U. that in the 2020’s there is serious disagreement between the teaching Church and many of the faithful on several moral issues in the U.S.
 
The struggle, it seems to me, is finding a balance between the wisdom of the Holy Spirit granted to each of the baptized and a teaching authority in the Church that is true to the Scripture and a source of unity. The next post on this stream will address possibilities to improve the Sacrament of Penance as a gateway to prayer and holiness, in about two weeks.
 
TO BUY OR NOT TO BUY?
 
[A note to our correspondent and any reader wishing to go further in reading]:
 
I would recommend John A. Gallagher’s ​Time Past, Time Future: An Historical Study of Catholic Moral Theology [1990], a one volume overview of Catholic moral studies. Bernard Haring’s role in the twentieth century renewal of moral theology development is more than adequately covered. I just discovered I reviewed this book for Amazon twenty years ago. My memory is not what it used to be.
 
You might find Gallagher’s work more time economical in your moral studies, as well as the works of Father James Keenan, link here. From synopses I have read, the first volume of The Law of Christ highlights the principles of Haring’s theology.
 
Whatever you choose, good hunting! ]]>Sat, 22 Nov 2025 16:36:41 GMThttps://www.catechistcafe.com/morality/making-my-way-to-forgiveness-part-2-do-we-need-to-rethink-the-riteWhen I received my first notice of For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America [2025] I knew I would like it. But I had no idea of how much I would be captivated by this objective analysis of why Catholics frequented the confessional box [or, more recently, the confessional room] for so many years and then, within a generation, discontinued the practice. The late priest-sociologist Andrew Greeley always maintained that the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which reinforced the Church teaching that artificial birth control, notably “the pill,” was always mortally sinful, was the watershed moment when Catholics retreated from confession.
 
The author, James M. O’Toole, Ph.D., of Boston College, paints a broader landscape of the penitential tradition in the U.S. He acknowledges the stressful intersection of Catholic moral life with seismic social shifts after World War II, but his even-handed treatment of the sacrament gives us much better insight into the days when people waited for hours for their turn to confess. No matter how estranged a Catholic might become from either a devotional or moral life, or both, the confessional sacrament was there, lodged in the consciousness as a way of avoiding hell.
 
Avoiding hell has always been a “big deal.” In concluding his masterful Medieval Christianity [2015, see my review] Kevin Madigan describes the attitudes of many Catholics in Europe on the eve [c. 1500] of the Reformation: “No matter how much one confessed, it was impossible to say if one was in a state of grace and justified in the eyes of God. Far from offering relief, the salvific instrumentalities of the late-medieval church could have encouraged hypersensitivity and doubt. In the end, what one group of Christians could feel as consolation, another could feel as anxiety-causing torment and, finally, un-Christian.” [Madigan, p. 435]
 
When Catholics and their priests began settling en masse in the United States after 1800, they brought their fear of hell with them, though in a more resigned state of mind. O’Toole, in his opening chapters, makes a compelling argument that confession, unpleasant as it may be for many, then and today, brought certain spiritual satisfactions that carried an appeal to Catholic penitents. These are a few of the blessings experienced. For example, confession was an “affective experience of worship.” A Catholic might fall asleep during Mass, but in the confessional he or she, along with the confessor, was something of a concelebrant in the sense that the penitent’s faith, feelings, words, and history, were necessary for the completion of the sacrament. Take away the penitent, no sacrament. And, upon leaving the confessional, the penitent felt something. Often it might be simply relief, but at other times it might be a closeness to Jesus like receiving a worthy communion at Mass. In truth, both sacraments are encounters with Christ. [Incidentally, the penitential rite at Mass, with its absolution by the celebrant, forgives venial sins. In my adult life I have never heard that mentioned in a sermon or instruction. Mortal sin requires personal, verbal confession.]
 
Another blessing: the confessional offered a meat-and-potatoes school of moral living in terms of understanding where the moral guardrails were. In the nineteenth century, when Catholic schools were rare and religious education hit or miss, moral teaching was conveyed by sermon or confession. Later, the churches in the United States offered aids such as pamphlets with examinations of conscience to be reviewed before entering the confessional, and eventually there were Catholic magazines such as Sign or Liguorian, the latter still publishing today, which offered moral instruction for examining the conscience before confession. It may come as a surprise that there were/are instructional publications for priests, too, notably Homiletic and Pastoral Review. [The preparation for and discussions of confessional practices by and for priests will be treated in a future post.]
 
The best of confessors provide the most pointedly personal advice that a penitent with an open mind is likely to hear. One problem throughout the generations of confessions is time. Parishes today tend to schedule confessions in abbreviated time periods, such that several people are waiting in line as the penitent gets down to business in the box. In the 1800’s and into the twentieth a circuit-riding priest customarily heard confessions before the parish Sunday morning Mass. [Saturday evening Masses did not begin until the late 1960’s.] O’Toole relates a correspondence between an American priest and Roman officials in which he sought to move his 12 PM Mass to 1 PM because his lines for confession were so long; by Church Law the latest hour for a Sunday Mass was 12 PM. The author notes, correctly I am sure, that most priests simply did what they needed to do without asking.
 
Confessional advice is probably ignored by some, but I have had experiences where, by the grace of God, I did respond with words that must have solved problems of longstanding. People would tell me years later, outside of confession. Of course, I struck out swinging more than once. To one penitent I suggested that a repeated sin might be a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder—I hold a mental health degree—that might mitigate the extreme guilt. To my surprise the response was, “I don’t come in here for psycho b-------! I want absolution.” Pastorally speaking, the role of psychology in ministry has become part of the training of those in ministry since the 1950’s, though Catholicism lagged most other Christian churches. The author devotes a lengthy Chapter 6 to the relationship of psychology to church ministry, including the confessional on such matters as scrupulosity; he does make reference to the slow integration of psychological testing into seminary screening and its relevance to the revelations of child abuse, which had serious repercussions for the confessional ministry.   
 
I was fortunate to find an on-line copy of the approved Roman Rite of Penance, for those confessing one-on-one to a priest. Vatican II’s mandate to reform all seven sacraments took about a decade. This rite was promulgated in 1974, the same year I was ordained. When I read the new rite for the first time, I said to myself, “This is never going to play.” Take a minute and look at it yourselves, and ask yourself, “How long will confession take with this formula?” It is possible your parish may use the new rite of 1974 and has figured this out. I hope so, but I suspect we are still mostly using the “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned” format.
 
That said, the new rite—the one we still don’t use regularly—was and is much closer to the other six sacraments in its proclamation of Scripture and its reinforcement of priests providing spiritual counsel toward conversion and growth in spiritual consciousness. We assumed--wrongly, perhaps—that people stopped going to confession because they were lazy, embarrassed, or quit believing in sin, or the devil, or the teaching authority of the Church. But forty years ago, my own father gave me a different window on the exodus. I took my parents up to Canada to fish one summer, and as all true fishermen, we sat up late and put a big dent into a bottle of Canadian Club. It was then that the conversation turned to church matters, and I simply remarked that “you don’t see as many people in the confessional these days.”
 
Now my father practiced his faith to the hilt. Daily Mass, confession twice a month, and evening rosary; in fact, my parents offered the fifth decade of the rosary every night for Franklin Roosevelt, the father of Social Security. In response to my observation about confession, my father said, “You know, if your mother didn’t make me go, I don’t think I would.” “Really?” “I don’t get anything out of it.” A remarkable admission from a man who was later buried with the worn rosary “that got me through World War II.” I had to side with my dad’s reasoning on that one, privately, and here is why he was on target.
 
From the time of the Reformation [1500’s] the Catholic Church has generally embraced an approach to moral theology in a highly systematic and methodized nature. Over the years sins in all their degrees and kinds were [and still are] categorized in a similar fashion to civil law. This approach is referred to as ‘casuist” [or case oriented] or manualist, after the legal books which sliced and diced morality with all the warmth of a tax code. Priests formed in this universe of morality would devote much attention to crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s regarding the kinds and numbers of confessed sins before administering absolution.
 
Not for nothing was this movement referred to as “casuistry” [or case law], or the “Manualist Era.” Seminarians were expected to study the manuals [in Latin, I might add] until an English edition appeared in the 1960’s. But from about 1700 onward there was a reaction away from an overly strict pastoral practice of confession, led by St. Alphonsus of Ligouri, founder of the Redemptorist Order. Of Ligouri, Wikipedia says:
 
Liguori's greatest contribution to the Catholic Church was in the area of moral theology. His masterpiece was The Moral Theology (1748), which was approved by the Pope himself and was born of Liguori's pastoral experience, his ability to respond to the practical questions posed by the faithful and his contact with their everyday problems. He opposed sterile legalism and strict rigorism. According to him, those were paths closed to the Gospel because "such rigour has never been taught nor practiced by the Church". His system of moral theology is noted for its prudence, avoiding both laxism and excessive rigour.
 
Couple Ligouri’s pastoral outlook with the new devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and later the apparitions of Mary at Lourdes and elsewhere, and you have a Catholic population sorry for sin but hungry for sacramental input, the merciful outreach and spiritual counsel that went far beyond avoiding hell. As I have now reached my father’s age, I am coming to appreciate the wide range of crosses, griefs, losses, memories, etc. of seniors, and the spiritual help I need to craft a penitential yet hopeful spirituality as I approach my death. I don’t know if my dad found a confessor to personally support his spiritual quests as he deserved. I know he worried about all five of us kids regardless of age, as any good father would; he saw the worst of World War II as a front line medic from Africa to Germany; he worked much of his career with the high pressure that comes as a hospital administrator; he was one of fourteen children born and raised in the coal region of Appalachia. I hope somewhere along the line a confessor took the time to comfort him with words from the Bible itself, as the new rite encouraged,
 
Come to Me, you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from Me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your soul.…     ]]>Tue, 11 Nov 2025 19:31:33 GMThttps://www.catechistcafe.com/morality/making-my-way-to-forgiveness-part-1I completed a reading of this year’s [2025] release, ​​For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America just a week ago, and at this juncture I would put it near the top of the books I have reviewed this year. To tell you the truth, with my concentration in grad school theology, twenty years as a priest confessor, and a quarter century as a psychotherapist, I still learned much from this work about the developments [plural] of the sacrament of Penance and the concerns of bishops and priests about confessional experience over the centuries. I need to add here that any Catholic reader of this book may feel naturally more inclined to reflect upon Jesus’ Resurrection appearance to the Apostles in John 20:23, Easter Sunday evening, in the light of this book. As the Gospel writer records,
 
[Jesus] said to them again “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”  And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” NABRE Translation.]
 
Penance is a big deal. Jesus equated it with the reception of the Holy Spirit! Let’s talk about it.
 
FROM THE BEGINNING
 
James M. O’Toole’s For I Have Sinned provides an intense examination of the post-Reformation [roughly 1600-present day] theology and pastoral practice of the Sacrament of Penance. Much of the book covers confessional practice in our lifetimes, including the pre and post Vatican II rites of Confession. The author’s treatment of the radical decline in confessions is addressed in distressing detail. He does not lay out a “master plan” for filling those confessionals again, but he is for the most part on target with his critiques.
 
The Church needs a top to bottom evaluation of how we celebrate [or, more appropriately, don’t celebrate] the rites of forgiveness, because there is a massive gulf between the Sacred Scriptures’ revelation of mercy and our current-day practice of confession. It makes sense, then, to go back to the roots of the Christian Era and see what our evangelists and the other leaders of the earliest days to celebrate redemption from sin with the glory of the Holy Spirit.
 
Jesus himself was Jewish and never “converted” to anything else. Rather, as a descendent of Abraham, as St. Matthew’s Gospel records, Jesus saw himself as the son of the Father, come to fulfill the entire Hebrew Scripture of promise of the reign of God. As a devout Jew, Jesus would have embraced the ethical conduct of the Chosen People delivered to Moses as it was understood and enforced in Jesus’ day. Some precepts of the Law came to be perceived as too harsh; executing homosexuals or wayward daughters by their fathers were not enforced in Jesus’ time though they still appear in your home Bible [see Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13.]
 
Jesus certainly had difficulty with misuses of the Law, which led many who heard him to identify him with the classical prophets, such as Isaiah, Amos, Ezechiel, etc. For Jesus preached that contemporary law and worship were missing conversion of the heart, and by example he taught that the law of love superseded an inflexible and unreasonable interpretation of law. Jesus performed healings on the Sabbath, ate and drank with unclean sinners, and evangelized among Samaritans and Romans with the blessing of his Father.
 
For our purposes here, it is Jesus’ extension of the Father’s saving mercy and forgiveness that underlies what time and tradition would evolve into the Catholic institutional/liturgical sacrament of mercy. Jesus was no antinomian; he publicly upheld the Ten Commandments, and in many of his cures and personal encounters he gave a serious but encouraging charge to “sin no more” or “avoid this sin.” His perfect love of his Father’s truth made him an evangelist of the heart. “Purity of heart” underwrote his mission upon earth. It is hard to understand Jesus without his passion for justice and “love thy neighbor as thyself.”
 
It should be no surprise, then, that the first New Testament pen put to parchment, St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, would in large part address the lifestyle of new baptized Christian communities in terms of how they loved one another. The Gospels, for their part, were written later than the Epistles, roughly 70-100 A.D., but they, too, exalt a morality that calls for an imitation of the Father’s love between Christians, coupled with an apocalyptic expectation that when the kingdom of God reveals itself at the end of time, those who have lived an imitation of Christ’s love and fidelity to God’s law will find their place in a chosen seat of honor at the eternal banquet.
 
By 100 A.D. we can safely say that the “forgiveness sacrament” was Baptism, received once in a lifetime. Given that there were no “second baptisms,” some potential converts elected to wait until their deathbeds to receive baptism and admission to the Kingdom, a risky choice then as today. Christians identified post-baptismal “grave sins” as adultery, apostacy, and murder. Over the years the early Christians appear to have followed a variety of rites or gestures to restore unity among themselves and make reparations for minor offenses, including fasting, giving alms, and prayer.
 
THE LAST PLANK
 
It became clear, as the Church expanded in numbers, that some kind of post-Baptismal moral/liturgical rite was necessary, i.e., a second chance for salvation for those baptized persons who had gravely sinned at some point in their lives after their baptism. Theologically speaking, this was a major step forward for the Christian Church: a new sacrament with the same saving effects as Baptism. In a real sense, the concept of repeatable forgiveness bestowed by an ordained minister dates to the second and third centuries, but only in rare cases cited above.
 
It should be noted, though, that most baptized Christians never experienced this second rite of conversion, as most were not guilty of adultery, apostacy, or murder. The reason these three sins received so much attention then was their destructive influence upon a small community of believers centered around the Eucharist. The gravity of apostacy is particularly understandable in an age of periodic Roman persecutions. An apostate denied membership in a Christian community while his or her fellow Christians were tortured and martyred. There was no way an apostate was going to return to the local church without passing through a rite that literally began from the beginning.
 
A serious sinner would seek the bishop, confess his sins, and then if the bishop judged him sincere, he could enter a lengthy period of penance—minimally a year, sometimes several years. What the local church was looking for was evidence that the sinner grieved his past and embraced a turn toward austerity and charity—sitting by public buildings collecting alms for the poor, etc. At an appropriate time, the bishop would receive the sinner back into full communion with the Church through the laying on of hands to forgive the sin[s], often on Holy Thursday so that the forgiven member could participate in the Easter Eucharist.
 
The above-described rite of forgiveness could not be repeated. The unfortunate individual who sinned gravely after the above-described rite was consigned to the judgment of God, period. Not for nothing was this protracted rite of conversion and forgiveness nicknamed “the last plank.”
 
THEY DID IT DIFFERENTLY ON THE EMERALD ISLE
 
Anyone who took history in high school has at least some idea of the “barbarian invasions” and the “dark ages” as the Western Roman Empire collapsed during the first millennium. There was one site, however, where the thought and practice about sin and ritual forgiveness made enormous strides—and where “confession” as we know it today began to take form. If you have ever visited the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Dublin, Ireland, you may have noticed that its next-door neighbor is a pub called “The Confession Box. “Neither structure was standing in the fifth century when an intrepid missionary named Patrick set foot on the island of Ireland in the late 400’s A.D. In the early days of the Irish mission, the goal of Christian missionaries who followed Patrick was quite basic: baptize and preach peace to the warlike Celtic tribes.
 
This mission must have been successful, for within a century or two there were enough baptized Christians to begin the establishment of numerous monasteries and thus an extraordinary period of devotion, charitable service, and the healing of sinful acts. Ireland had no cities; the monastery was the bulwark around which the development and the governance of society.
 
It is in this milieu that the monks were inspired—incrementally—to make the single greatest theological and liturgical change in the history of what we know today as the Sacramental Penance. The change was not sudden; in fact, its gradual development reveals it to be a response to the penitential needs of all the baptized as the Irish Church intensified its evangelization.
 
The beginnings of the change were utterly simple. It should not surprise anyone that, in a typical monk’s day, the community gathered for readings and psalms at least six times per day, exclusive of the Eucharist. The final prayer of the day, sung before retiring, is “Compline.” It seems that in the earliest days of monasteries St. Benedict in Italy included in his universal monastic rule a provision that the day’s prayer include an examination of conscience, a public confession of the day’s faults by each monk, and an acknowledgement/blessing from the abbot.
 
But the Irish gradually expanded the scope of this chapter of faults/penance rite because of two insights. First, Irish society, being tribal, looked to the guidance of a wiseman, a brehon, as a personal and community source of wisdom and order. As Irish priest-monks expanded their pastoral work into the countryside, converts began to view the priest in a brehon-esque sort of way, as a guide to a more wholesome life. Beyond that, Irish Christian thinkers came to agree that sacramental Penance was not reserved for grave sins but belonged at the heart of every believer. This indeed was a radical step; Ireland went out on a limb by initiating repeated confession and absolution, a change we take for granted in 2025 although few take advantage of it today.
 
To ensure that multiple confessions and absolutions helped the Irish Christian to grow in Christ, the penitent--monks, and then laypersons-- were instructed to confess all sins and failures since the last confession. Curiously, the Irish moralists did not depend upon the Ten Commandments as the root of moral principles, as we might expect, but rather, the seven deadly sins. Of course, no one had faced the challenge of establishing pastoral/moral guidelines for a full multitude of sins before, except the adultery-apostacy-murder triad on the continent. The more I think about that, there is considerable wisdom in the Irish approach to the examination of conscience in terms of the seven deadly sins: the seven deadly sins are pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. [You knew that already, I’m sure.]
 
Using these seven categories of sinfulness, a confessor was able to function something like a modern therapist in getting to the heart of the penitent’s moral challenges, using open-ended questions on each category of behavior. Also, there is the “brehon” element, the confessor on journey with each penitent toward a stronger faith and deeper holiness. Commentators on this era of Irish history note the balance in the penitential process. On the one hand, the penitent is called to do appropriate penance [acts] for confessed sins depending upon the nature of the acts and the attitude of the penitent. On the other hand, the penance is geared, depending upon the sin[s], toward the specific sinful opposite. The goal of the sacrament of forgiveness is precisely to turn sinful attitude into a saving grace in the following of Jesus Christ. [Can this be accomplished in our 2025 method of hearing confessions? A good question, which will be pursued in the next posts on the subject. Stay tuned.]
 
The Irish Church took great pains to identify sin and the appropriate “penance” or follow-up, which led to a series of guides for priests to use in their encounters with penitents. Many of these “Irish Penitentiaries,” as the books came to be called, have survived to this day. A useful source if you are interested is The Irish Penitentials [1995] by Hugh Connelly. I reviewed this work twenty years ago and I admit, I didn’t get everything right back then. ]]>Tue, 01 Jul 2025 20:50:38 GMThttps://www.catechistcafe.com/morality/the-long-arm-of-the-lawTHE LEGAL ARM OF THE CHURCH
 
Christianity has always had rules, but by the year 1905 there were multiple collections written as far back as 1500 years including Gratian’s Decretum. Gratian, a Benedictine monk, was a major figure in Church history, but still, he was just one of many churchmen compiling regulations from the writings of other thinkers, academic debates, bishops’ synods, and even from some Councils. In 1215 the Fourth Council of the Lateran legislated the “Easter Duty," the rule that one must confess sins once per year and receive the Eucharist annually, during the Easter Season [Ash Wednesday through Pentecost.] As a young student I thought this rule set the bar rather low—I went to communion every day--but in grad school medieval studies I came to appreciate that medieval life was neither as virtuous nor chivalrous as portrayed for me in the sixth grade. Could all these laws and directives be brought together in one place?
 
In 1905 Pope Pius X announced to the Church that a single, official body of the laws of the Church should be undertaken “to put together with order and clearness all the laws of the Church thus far issued, removing all those that would be recognized as abrogated or obsolete, adapting others to the necessities of the times, and enacting new ones in conformity with the present needs." This was an ambitious challenge. It took twelve years to examine every worthwhile surviving legal document back to at least Gratian’s time, with over 10,000 norms to consider; the future Pope Pius XII was one of the researchers. The Code of Canon Law was formally promulgated by Pope Benedict XV on Pentecost Sunday, May 27, 1917.
 
The 1917 Code of Canon Law would remain in force until the 1983 Code was promulgated by Pope John Paul II. The Vatican forbade the translation of the 1917 Code, and those who taught Church Law, or studied it [seminarians, notably] or researched or debated its renderings were expected to do so in Latin [though eventually English translations came into use if the Latin ran down the facing page.] The Church did not envision many, if any, additions or subtractions to the 1917 Code, but there were some notable “papal bypasses” in my youth. Pope Pius XII authorized change in the Communion fast rule from midnight to three hours before Mass—a necessary change in the 1950’s when permission was given for the Triduum Masses and Holyday Masses to be held at night. [The 1983 Code: one hour of communion fast.]
 
DOES CANON LAW AFFECT ME?
 
Canon Law is an important piece of a full-bodied outline of Catholic life, but it is far from the only source for Catholic ordered living. I can understand that most Catholics are not aware of the scope or the complexity of Canon Law, although many of our familiar practices are mandated in that Law. The “Easter Duty” enacted at IV Lateran in 1215 made the 1917 and the 1983 cuts. The baptism of infants soon after birth is cited in the present Code, along with the general window for First Confession and First Communion “at the age of reason” or about seven years old. The obligation to marry before a priest [or an approved delegate] and the thorny issues of divorce, annulments, and remarriage are treated in the 1983 Code. The qualities and requirements of men candidates seeking sacred orders are cited, perhaps not as clearly as they should be. There were 2414 provisions in the 1917 edition; 1752 in the 1983 edition. In the later code, more decision-making authority was granted to local bishops for particular circumstances, and thus less need for universal precepts on various points.
 
A typical Catholic can go a lifetime without an “embarrassing encounter” with the Code, but they do happen, and since we don’t teach the basics of Catholic legal principles in religious ed or adult education, some provisions of Canon Law can create sticky situations. A few examples from today’s Code:
 
Regarding Sponsors: Any sponsor or “Godparent” must be a practicing Catholic, since the law assumes—logically—that a Catholic role model for a child candidate for Baptism and/or Confirmation is, in fact, a practicing Catholic—i.e., attends Mass, lives in a sacramental marriage, does not give major scandal, etc. If you watched “The Sopranos” you might recall that when A.J. was confirmed, his uncle-sponsor was a high-ranking Mafioso; the pastor, apparently, was not about to upset the Don. But many pastors will ask tactfully about the sponsor’s character during the paperwork phase. Some pastors are stricter than others in their investigations. However, in pastoral guidebooks many authors suggest that a weak or non-practicing Catholic sponsor candidate meet with the officiating priest for a heart-to-heart about the responsibilities of sponsorship. That was my practice, and if the individual committed himself or herself to deeper involvement in following Christ and engaging in the sacraments, I would sign off. The best parishes have preparatory programs for parents and sponsors. There are evangelization possibilities in these sacramental celebrations where the Catholic faith is “rediscovered” in these family events. It is true, too, that shopping for a parish with the “fewest hoops” is not unheard of, nor are pastors with a casual attitude toward the spirit of the law.
 
Weddings: The number of Catholic weddings has declined dramatically in the past half century. There are many reasons, to be sure, and I suspect one reason is the reality that one or both candidates for marriage have been married before. There is a misconception that the Catholic Church only recognizes marriages performed by the Church. So, the thinking goes, if a Catholic future bride who has never been married gets engaged to a divorced Methodist, there should be no impediments for a “Catholic wedding” here to worry about. Right? Wrong. The Catholic Church would hold that the Methodist’s first marriage was probably a valid marriage. Think about it this way: the Catholic Church recognizes all Trinitarian baptisms [Father, Son, Holy Spirit] so it certainly recognizes Methodist baptisms. Second, non-Catholics are not bound to the Catholic formula of marrying before a priest, so the prospective groom’s first marriage had nothing standing in the way when he entered that marriage in presumably good faith. This may sound odd but imagine the Church saying that all marriages in the world are invalid except the ones that meet Catholic muster, which it never claims.
 
Now imagine yourself as the Catholic bride-to-be [or, as happens from time to time, the pastor] who must explain to her fiancé that he needs an annulment from the Catholic Tribunal, and not his Catholic fiancé. In twenty years of pastoring, I had to break this unwelcome news more than once after interviewing a couple seeking a Catholic wedding. Even my most active members did not always understand that Catholicism recognizes marriages outside of its jurisdiction, and we have to address that. Now, if the Methodist had married a Catholic woman in his previous exchange of vows, we have a different situation. The first wife, being Catholic, was bound to marry before a priest [or his delegate.] Assuming she married the Methodist before his minister, or even an officer of the state, and she did not have a “dispensation from form” approval from the Catholic Church, her marriage is not valid per the Code. She was bound to do it by the book. The situation can be rectified through the filing of appropriate paperwork; as I recall, I just needed to present paper proof of the previous marriage to the Diocesan Tribunal, such as a civil marriage license. [Of course, if the Methodist married another Methodist…I don’t even want to take you down that road….]  
 
The moral of the story: if you are planning a Catholic wedding to anyone, including another Catholic, make your FIRST step an appointment with your pastor or the official minister of marriage in your parish, who can reassure you if there are no issues with the Code and you can proceed through your parish’s normal pre-Cana or premarital preparation. Many church bulletins say that you should inform your parish of your wedding intentions six months before the wedding. I would say, at least one year. While it is true that the annulment process has improved greatly in my lifetime, it is still time consuming, and a pastor has limited, if any, influence in speeding along an annulment, should one be needed. Neither your parish priest nor you want that axe of anxiety hanging over your head.
 
ARE THERE OTHER “LAW BOOKS” IN THE CHURCH?
 
I wouldn’t use the term “law book” as much as formularies of faith and morals, which can be found spread out in two other main sources: the Catechism of the Catholic Church, published in 1993: and Liturgical directives, found in the “books of sacramental rituals” including the Missal used at Mass; these appeared gradually after Vatican II through the mid-1970’s. [There is considerable overlap in content, though, as you might expect.] One might say, then, that the Code of Canon Law is the operational manual of the Church, the outline of necessary deeds and functions to ensure that the graces of God impact all persons, such that everyone has a chance for eternal reward. The Catechism is the meaning of the human encounter of God, the blueprint of spirituality. The sacramental rite books put forth the universal prayer and action by which we encounter God as a united people. These sources are interlocked. Consider: The Code prescribes Easter Communion; the Catechism explains the religious encounter with the Risen Christ. The Sacramental books bring us together by celebrating one universal formula of worship, particularly in the holiest season, Easter.
 
I should add here that in the first millennium the Irish monks developed the practice of periodic confession of sin and individual penance. The monks collected all known sins into books called penitentials, in order that the appropriate penance might be administered. In the Middle Ages such guides for confessors came to be called “manuals,” and the Manualist Era lasted until well into the twentieth century. Today the Catechism of the Church embodies the major moral teachings. Private confession determines the depths of guilt and re-establishes a moral conversion path depending upon the need. Everyone’s needs are different; hence, the importance of private, individual confession.
 
I can see three follow-up posts flowing from this one. Something that has bothered me for some years is the possibility of violations of the 1917 and 1983 Codes in the way the Church mismanaged the sexual abuse crisis. Second, I would like to review and recommend a handbook on Church Law that is up to date and current. As a Church, we do need to circulate crucial information to avoid hurt and misunderstanding. And finally, some examples of where Canon Law and other Church “guard rails” change lives and attitudes for the better.
 
And no more legalese—or just a little—to tell the tales. ]]>Sat, 01 Mar 2025 14:19:30 GMThttps://www.catechistcafe.com/morality/review-and-reflections-on-bioethics-mattersFor Roman Catholics and all thoughtful persons who respect the dignity of life, the study and implementation of bioethics is both clear and complicated, as stand-alone biology is a science with its own history, principles, and ethical debates. If you have the time, scan the “Bioethics” entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica to see the complexity of the field even before one enters the religious questions raised by science. Our book at hand, “Bioethics Matters” is a beginner’s introduction to the Church’s reasoning and teachings on the morality of medical issues impacting the human being. Author Moira McQueen emphases focus upon abortion, contraception, marital intimacy, and end-of-life issues, including physician assisted suicide. It is worth noting that the author writes from Canada [St. Michael College/University of Toronto], where bioethics issues presently occupy much attention in the nation’s parliament. I call Chapter Four Dr. McQueen’s “hold my beer” section, for the author has plenty to say surrounding “Euthanasia and Physician-assisted Suicide” as it plays out in Canadian politics. [p. 97-124.]
 
The author states that “lay people deserve to be as educated as possible in Catholic teaching.” [p. 9] Right off the bat, I have difficulties with the passive stance assigned to lay Catholics in matters of morality. Church moral teaching in the present day is de facto authority-driven, from directives of the sitting pope and/or solemn instructions from the appropriate office of the Vatican Curia. The author’s introduction goes on to explain Church moral law as a product of divine and natural sources. Ideally, Catholic moralists today draw from Scripture, natural law, the scholastic medieval tradition, and the papal teaching office of the Church called the Magisterium. However, there is no mechanism to hear the life experiences and consciences of baptized Catholics on precisely how moral teachings are formulated, taught, received, and enforced both within the Church community and in public society.
 
Such dialogue might have prevented an embarrassing moment for the Church in 2022. The story of the 2022 Kansas Referendum is a good example of why laity needs to be heard in public moral formulations of Church life. The Kansas Referendum would have removed the civil legal right to an abortion from the state constitution; the ballot resulted in a 59-41% landslide vote to maintain the legality of abortion. Later analysis found that Catholic voters on the whole opposed abortion—but what Catholics opposed in the referendum was potential criminalization of minors, mothers of large families who would have died had they carried the pregnancy to term, the poor, victims of rape, etc. More nuanced discussion before the ballot might have had greater moral impact on the civil legislation. There are many instances in life where a human being is not willingly choosing evil over good, but rather, facing the lesser of two evils.
 
Chapter One defines the various schools of ethical thought across society, i.e., how humans make decisions about conduct. “Natural Law” ethical thinking is highlighted as “the time-tested ethical approach used by the Catholic Church.” [p. 19] The term “Natural Law” populates many Catholic texts, schoolbooks, catechisms, and Church documents as the innate wisdom of God made evident in creation; in the 1200’s A.D. St. Thomas Aquinas taught that it was possible to reason from nature even the very existence of God, with help from the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, proof that the natural law or wisdom of the Christian God was bestowed across the human species. The problem here is that our understanding of what is natural in the human species continues to evolve.
 
The Bible, as a moral source, is a complicated matter. McQueen goes on to explain the methods used by the Church to deduce the moral teachings of the Bible. We Catholics did not and do not approach the Bible with a simple literalism. If we did, we could justify the stoning of a homosexual couple, as Leviticus 20:13 commands, or similar punishment for a rebellious teenager, as Leviticus also commands in 20:9. The author goes on to explain how the modern science of Biblical study and meaning was brought forward in the debates of the Council Vatican II [1962-1965]. Natural law as a tight, specific moral code periodically reinforced by the pope faced a challenge as more Church scholars raised questions about how one determines right and wrong in an examination of conscience based upon his or her circumstances of life. The Conciliar reforms across the board are replete with a rediscovered Christo-centric refocusing of all aspects of Church life. What the Council could not do in its limited time was reorient the clergy and the laity toward specific Jesus-centered moral attitudes and actions. To be truthful, few of us were ready to integrate a Biblically inspired natural law into our personal practice of Catholicism.
 
The terms “natural law” and “biblical teaching” were not generally hot button items in everyday parish life before Vatican II. At the time I was making my first confession in 1956, the term “natural law” was not a significant phrase in my parish’s Catholic lay vocabulary. If my memory is correct, the term in catechetics for natural law was probably “conscience,” as reinforced on TV by Jiminy Cricket on the Disney Show. [See this offbeat summary of Jiminy’s moral reasoning.] “Conscience” was God’s inner prodding to do good. We were expected to use the Ten Commandments in the confessional as our moral guide, at least the commandments we understood. [Adultery? Idolatry? Coveting thy neighbor’s wife?] In high school and college, however, during and after the Council our teachers—priests—told us that the Council was pulling away from practical confessional attitude and advocating a rearranging of our moral thinking, i.e., away from individual sins with measured satisfaction toward a general embrace of the Gospel of Love preached by Jesus, as we interpreted it. Magisterial moral law-- fasting from meat on Friday, for example--was replaced by an attitude of love, peace, and justice. In graduate school we were taught Karl Rahner’s phrase, “fundamental option” to the Gospel. Like, it was the 60’s, you know. “All you need is love.” The curious thing is that the post-Council era Church might have been helped by dialogue with secular science. Every psychotherapist worth his or her salt writes a client-specific treatment plan with specific behavioral goals and objectives for every patient, which coincidentally is a secular model for what was happening, or supposed to happen, in the confessional when a penitent is laboring with habitual sin.
 
In Chapter Two, “The Human Person: Church Teaching,” the author reviews Church teaching and thinking on the nature, rights, and dignity of the human person in the face of modern science. She cites Canadian law that “we are not persons until we are actually born, and even then, not until we are completely delivered from the birth canal.” [p. 45] Obviously, this law is radically at odds with the 1987 papal teaching, Donum Vitae, that we are to be regarded as persons from the moment of conception.” Donum Vitae’s measure of precision regarding the moment of life does run up against scientific studies that most fertilized eggs do not attach to the womb, a significant point in considerations of abortion and birth control, particularly the latter.
 
Dr. McQueen notes parenthetically that “for many in our society the prospect of new life is not greeted with joy.” [p.44] When a Catholic picks up a morality study for the first time, the first hurdle is the challenge of balancing what ought to be versus what is. The Book of Genesis, interestingly, cites the twin curses of Adam and Eve as work for the man and childbirth for the woman, which might give us some clue as to why a working mother might not automatically dance with glee at the clinical confirmation of another pregnancy. Church teaching documents, and many theological writers, do not fully acknowledge how painful life can be. To its credit, over the centuries the Church has sacramentalized forgiveness in a fashion where personal circumstance and pain play a significant role in the reconciliation process when the confessor learns how to listen as well as instruct.
 
Most of Chapter Two is devoted to the issue of infertility and the clinical efforts to facilitate conception. This is valuable information for a Catholic, and it does clarify why the Church hold deep reservations about ancillary medical and social implications. When I became a full-time psychotherapist, one of the things that surprised me the most was the number of adult patients wrestling with infertility. [My third-party payers listed me as a “Christian psychotherapist” which perhaps skewed my intake population. My marriage counseling roster certainly increased when the word “Christian” was added to my other concentrations.]  
 
It is interesting, though, how the discussion of bioethics in this work seems to circle back to reproduction, reflecting the trend of the Church’s teaching office itself. Which is why I was most surprised at Chapter Three’s omission of the true game changer in Church and medicine, “the pill.” I don’t say this as a criticism of the author; many moral authors tiptoe around one of Catholicism’s best or worst kept secrets: a formal moral teaching that was not “received,” to use the theological term, by the faithful. If you are unfamiliar with the release of the encyclical Humanae Vitae [July 25, 1968], Wikipedia’s essay is surprisingly thorough and fair.
 
When I think of Humanae Vitae, which in 1968 reiterated the teaching of Pius XI [1931] that artificial contraception is immoral, I think of Sunday Mass when I watch the assembly of two or three children families process to the altar to receive communion. It is hard for me to imagine that all these couples employ the “rhythm method” as it was called in the recent past, periodic abstinence during the fertile days of the cycle, Natural Family Planning, to space their children. Humanae Vitae was a watershed moment in the United States and Canada, among many other places, where most Catholics took the reins of sexual decision-making on all matters of their personal lives. Strangely, the Humanae Vitae event was a rare instance where laity was consulted, but the pope did not accept the strong recommendation of a commission to change the teaching.
 
Chapter Four, “Euthanasia and Physically Assisted Suicide,” goes further into numerous moral dilemmas surrounding care of the sick and the dying. The author notes several changes over the last century in Church directives, including definitions of what constitutes “ordinary means” and “extraordinary means” of keeping a person alive. For most of my lifetime withholding food and water was considered an extraordinary means of keeping a dying person alive. It was Pope John Paul II who defined that all persons in such circumstances are entitled to food and water as a basic right of a human being. An issue not treated in the book but certainly a major one for my generation [upper 70’s] is the right to decline line-altering, expensive, and painful treatments in favor of palliative care and a probable shorter life. My wife and I gave considerable thought on this matter when we prepared our wills and instructions to our executors, but my understanding at the time—and remains so today—is that there is no Catholic moral prohibition of palliative care. In many cases, it may be the wise moral option.
 
Of course, in much of Catholic moral teaching, we circle round to the Humanae Vitae teaching and the reality that only a small percentage of Catholics even think of such personal issues as Church matters. As a result, the good work of the author of Bioethics Matters and countless other teachers, preachers, and authors starts off at a deficit, that Catholics as a rule are not inclined to consider the Catholic tradition as a major source in personal decision making, most notably in matters of health and sexuality. Of course, this is a two-way street.]]>Wed, 22 Jan 2025 19:25:57 GMThttps://www.catechistcafe.com/morality/the-best-catholics-in-the-world-by-derek-scallyPossibly because of its notorious weather, Ireland has a plethora of bookstores, and it was a pleasure to visit as many as I could over three months late last year. That there are first class book outlets in the cities in the north—Dublin, Belfast—was no surprise. But as we moved south into more rural settings, I noticed that there was no slack in availability of the printed word. Even Valentia Island, jutting into the wild Atlantic with a population of 600 souls, had a busy second-hand bookstore in 2015, where I bought Dante’s Inferno on my only other visit to Ireland, for a Euro. The bookstore has since closed to make room for small tourist condominiums in the tiny village of Knightstown.
 
In one retail and used bookstore—in Galway, I believe—I was hunting around and came to an entire shelf entitled “Institutional Religious Abuse,” which gave me a mild jolt. I had always entertained the idea that Church abuse in Ireland and the United States ran on parallel tracks. However, in reading, conversation, and physical visits to cemeteries and sites, I came to appreciate that while the crimes of clerics are publicly acknowledged in Ireland, as they are [supposedly] in the United States, there is a major measure of collective shame and guilt unique to Ireland for a lengthy church abusive system of a different sort, the “Magdalene Girls Laundries.”
 
Before I continue, let me say that if you are looking for an insightful history of the last century of the Irish Catholic Church, you may find The Best Catholics in the World: The Irish, the Church and the End of a Special Relationship [2021] by Derek Scally. Scally is a major reporter and columnist for the Irish Times who had spent twenty years based in Germany. He returned to Ireland in the late 2010’s on a mission aptly described on Waterstone’s website. Waterstone’s, a relatively new [1982] chain book dealer with bookstores and cafes throughout England, Ireland, and Europe, summarizes Scally’s bestseller in this way:
 
When Dubliner Derek Scally goes to Christmas Eve Mass on a visit home from Berlin, he finds more memories than congregants in the church where he was once an altar server. Not for the first time, the collapse of the Catholic Church in Ireland brings to mind the fall of another powerful ideology - East German communism. While Germans are engaging earnestly with their past, Scally sees nothing comparable going on in his native land. So, he embarks on a quest to unravel the tight hold the Church had on the Irish.
 
He travels the length and breadth of Ireland and across Europe, going to Masses, novenas, shrines, and seminaries, talking to those who have abandoned the Church and those who have held on, to survivors and campaigners, to writers, historians, psychologists and many more. And he has probing and revealing encounters with Vatican officials, priests and religious along the way.
 
…With wit, wisdom and compassion Scally gives voice and definition to the murky and difficult questions that face a society coming to terms with its troubling past. It is both a lively personal odyssey and a resonant and gripping work of reporting that is a major contribution to the story of Ireland.
 
I posted this extended commentary from Waterstone because it states the heart of Scally’s thesis: that Ireland’s “healing” has a long way to go when contrasted with the recovery of other countries from national/cultural/religious scandal. In Germany’s case, where the author lived and worked for the Irish Times for twenty years, his impression was that twenty-first century Germans were not running away from their national history of shame, specifically Hitler and the Holocaust. In traveling to Nuremburg and other German cities a few years ago, I noticed many public plaques and markers at the former homes of entire Jewish families who were seized and shipped to the extermination camps.
 
I read The Best Catholics in the World with an eye toward similarities and differences in the ecclesiastical abuse scandals in Ireland and the United States. The similarities are easy enough to note—serial abusing priests shuffled from parish to parish by bishops concerned with diminished devotion to the Sacrament of Orders above all other considerations. Irish bishops were finally brought to some grudging concession of the corrupt priests and victimization of youth by the courage of laity, particularly adults in later life who came to understand the nature and the atrocities of what had happened to them in their youth.
 
But some intrepid youths did come forward to parents and local clergy, and in these cases the differences in culture become clearer. Pay close attention to Chapter 8, “The Fall of Sean Brady.” Scally describes “due process” for abused Irish minors in the 1970’s [pp. 100-114] who were typically denied parental/clerical/legal counsel in abuse interrogations before chancery investigators in secret interviews. The minor and his or her entire family were placed under an oath of secrecy with the threat of excommunication from the sacraments. The interrogatories for such investigations are bizarre, and Scally lists the typical church rubric. If, for example, a thirteen-year-old boy admitted to having ejaculated at any time in his life, including nocturnal emission, typically a bishop or representative ruled that the youngster enjoyed sex with men and was wont to invite them into such activities.
 
Scally’s Chapter 8 is of historical interest because the diocesan recorder in the three-cleric interrogation of fourteen-year-old Brendan Boland was Father Sean Brady. A quarter-century later, the same Father Brady was named Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of all of Ireland and received the Cardinal’s Red Hat. Given that Boland’s complaint had been dismissed in the 1970’s, the abuser continued in his ways for decades with dozens of minor victims until major investigations in this century uncovered Cardinal Brady’s failure to report the priest to civil authorities. Brady was forced to resign his clerical offices to Pope Francis in 2014.
 
To this point, it might be easy to conclude that Irish Catholics and American Catholics suffered the same pangs in the same way. We have horror stories of coverups, and of course our own disgraced Cardinal, Theodore McCarrick. But the roots of clerical abuse are different in the two countries. For starters, American Catholics make up the largest religious group in this country but only at 20% of the population, with ex-Catholics at 15%. We live in a nation where church and political governance is separate, and Catholics themselves are deeply divided about rites and practices, not to forget civil politics. I believe that in the 2024 U.S. Election the Catholic vote tended 60-40 toward Republican candidates and policies, give or take.
 
Ireland, by contrast, is Catholic to its core, bound by blood, history, persecution, tragedy, and creed. The most recent figures put the Catholic population at 69% with an additional 14% calling themselves ex-Catholics—which means that four of every five people living in Ireland today.
are or were in the Catholic tribe. How deeply engrained was Catholic identity in Ireland versus the United States, for example? Given the position of Irish Catholicism—which statistically was probably even higher in the 1970’s before the abuse scandal became public—Irish Church leaders enjoyed an autonomy of respect and authority far greater than we Americans live with here. One way to understand the difference between the two countries is to consider the authority and power bestowed by Catholic ordination.
 
The Irish Church strictly observed the central doctrine of the identity of the priest which in principle is still taught universally in religious education and seminaries: that ordination creates an “ontological” difference in a man that makes him different from all other human beings in the world. Only the priest can utter the sacred words that change the bread and wine at Mass into the Body and Blood of Christ, i.e., transubstantiation. Only an ordained male can utter the words that save a human from an eternity in hell. Catholic doctrine in Ireland was tightly reinforced by its uniform catechetics, notably a green-covered Catechism of the Catholic Church. [See Chapter 6, “The Little Green Book.”] The memorization of the “Green Book” was only gradually replaced by modern texts after Vatican II—newer trendy styles that the author has little use for. The old catechism remained something of the fallback authority and mindset on many issues related to the abuse crisis well into this century.
 
The visitation of priests to Irish homes were frequent, and occasions of pride and joy to the hosts, many of whom had priest chairs and/or a special place at the table for an ordained Catholic priest. It is not hard to put the pieces together: a unique man who spoke for God welcomed into the bosom of a family and trusted unquestionably. If the word “grooming” is running through your head, you are correct, and in the Irish culture the later sufferings of parents like the Bolands were multiplied by a misplaced guilt that they were unwitting co-conspirators of their children’s violation—and the fact that they were bound by oath to do nothing about their child’s plight. Parish priests, as a rule, were more socially engaged in Irish community life. I believe it was Cardinal Paul Cullen [1803-1878] who bragged that there was a Catholic Church within three miles of every Irishman.
 
I bring up Cardinal Cullen here because, as the leader of Ireland in the years after the potato famine and the elimination of the British penal codes against the Church, he ruled Catholic Ireland with an iron hand and instilled strict observance of Catholic life and morals. He supported Vatican I’s [1870] declaration of papal infallibility. From his time until 2000 Catholic practice reflected the late Victorian bias that repelled the morally weak from their place in church and public society—by segregating them from the view of “proper society.” Thus, a new avenue of institutional abuse arose, one that has captured international attention—literary, stage, and film—and continued uninterrupted till 1996 and remains contested as of this writing. [And, I should add, may become an issue with U.S. immigration law.] What, specifically, are we dealing with? Conspiracy between Church and State.
 
The literature on this form of abuse continues to grow under the generic title of “The Magdalene Laundries” [originally, “asylums’]. If the term is unfamiliar to you, Wikipedia’s lengthy entry on the laundries is an inexpensive place to start, for it provides a healthy list of books, TV specials, films, autobiographies, etc. I will provide a quite simple description of the laundries here, but Scally devotes several chapters, [Chapter 9, “Sex in a Cold Climate;” and Chapter 10, “The Necessary Lie,” among other citations.]
 
Going back to the 1700’s Protestants in England had residences and institutions for women of “loose morals,” as a means of keeping public sinners out of sight [and prurient interest?] of “Christian society.” We tend to jump to the conclusion that we are talking about prostitutes, but by the post-potato famine era in Ireland such institutions were more likely to contain young girls who had borne children out of wedlock, or children and teens with behavioral, intellectual, or domestic problems, including the deaths of both parents. By the twentieth century communities of religious women operated such institutions.
 
In 1923 the Republic of Ireland was established, and as a new government, it had no department equivalent to, for example, Florida’s Department of Children and Families. As a result, it turned to the largest existing private social ministry, religious orders. The Sisters of Mercy tend to be remembered as the main provider of domestic services, but there were several others as well who have been named in recent investigations. By the 1900’s such institutions had morphed into profitable laundries, attached to convents, which serviced much of Ireland’s middle class.
 
Who was remanded to these domiciles/sweat shops? There was no recognizable observance of the habeas corpus principle. Any minor who didn’t fit anywhere, in the judgment of any adult, could be housed/incarcerated. Scally cites numerous examples. Children who told their parish priests about problems at home would be remanded on the direction of the priest. Parents could dispatch a child at their judgment. And teenaged girls who became pregnant with a boyfriend—or worse, through incest—could be conveniently hidden away. Residents were contained by lock and key. Whether there were schooling, health, or other human services available to “residents” is hard to say, for two reasons. First, as of this writing, the records of operations have not been released by the three or four religious communities most deeply involved in this arrangement; and second, the Republic itself is enmeshed and is not eager to serve subpoenas to its business partners since 1923. Where liability is concerned, the state does not have exposure to priestly abuse claims, but it does in the laundries.
 
The author interviewed many Irish citizens who admitted they had some idea of these institutions but did not give much thought to the nature of these residences. Scally reports a cab driver telling him about a laundry he served: “They’re pregnant. That’s where their families hide them.” Apparently, the resident minors, mostly but not exclusively teenaged mothers, went to Mass on Sunday in their local parishes. Parishioners kept their own children away from these motley residents of the laundries who spent their time in factory work.
 
What happened to the babies born in the laundries? Investigative reporting undertaken in the 1990’s and beyond indicates that the infants were farmed out for adoption without the consent of the mother, with many of the newborns finding new parents in the United States, among other sites. There is a network of survivors online calling upon Ireland and the religious orders to unseal their records on the minors who passed through these institutions.
 
The story of the Magdalene laundries might never have reached the crescendo it did if in 1993 the Sisters of Mercy had not sold a parcel of land to a developer, who discovered 155 human remains—young women--on the former residential site. As I noted above, there is a considerable library of video and printed material on the laundries on the Wikipedia entry; my wife recommends the film Philomena.
 
Scally devotes the final chapters of his work to more pastoral, philosophical and sociological questions about the structure of Catholic life in Ireland and how scandals like the ones above can survive—even thrive—in the heavily Catholic milieu. In the final analysis he concludes that his native country is only beginning to acknowledge and heal. As one analyst observed to the author, the end of the Magdalene Laundries system did not come about because of public outcry, but because most families could afford clothes washers. Another explained to the author that the silence and collective guilt of Irish Catholics upon the revelations of the laundries was much different from the revelations of priestly abuse, because “everybody brought their nappies to the laundry outlets.”
 
MY PERSONAL TAKE
 
I recently returned from three months in Ireland, with two week stays in Dublin, Belfast, Donegal, Galway, Valentia Island, Kinsale, and Thomastown-Kilkenny. As a visitor from the United States, much of the material discussed in this entry is hardly of the conversation starter type for a pub visit in Galway’s Latin Quarter. However, we did have opportunities to attend Mass in multiple settings, on Sundays and, if lucky, during the week. [Few churches have daily Mass given the declining number of clergy, but an effort is made to have Mass on a Tuesday or a Thursday for example, sometimes in the evening.] Aside from Dublin and Galway, most priests cover multiple parishes. The typical weekend Mass is brief--thirty minutes--and there is little or no congregational singing, but the Mass experience is devout and the number of families was encouraging.
 
Scally, in the book’s title, refers to “the end of a special relationship” between the Irish and the Church. Is this due to multiple abuse scandals, or is there another factor to consider? It is safe to say that Irish Catholics, like those in other Western nations, do not fear the hierarchy as in the days of Cardinal Cullen, nor are they slaves to prescribed Catholic rules of life. I found interesting statistics; 91% of Irish polled disagree with the Church’s teaching on artificial contraception, Humanae Vitae, most recently issued in 1968 by Pope Paul VI. By contrast, 67% of American Catholics disagree with the same teaching. The scandals may have confirmed subterranean doubts about the “Little Green Book” order of things, but Ireland has been changing for quite a while.
 
Having examined at least thirty church bulletins collected from the trip, I noticed the same omissions as those from American bulletins: an absence of adult religious education programs and spiritual direction opportunities. Scally discusses the “kicky relevant” [my generation’s term] religious ed texts of the late 1960’s and beyond for young people with a barely concealed dismay. It is fair to say that Catholic adults sustain themselves with Mass—30% attend weekly, slightly better than United States Catholics—and private devotions to the Blessed Sacrament, Mary, and the saints. The churches are open all day.
 
One major difference between Ireland the United States: Every time you turn around in Ireland, you see stone ruins of medieval monasteries, churches, castles [13,000 of those], and homes. The Irish, for better and worse, have their long history in plain view. We, in the states, have the luxury of forgetting...and repeating our mistakes. 
]]>Tue, 18 Jun 2024 19:37:58 GMThttps://www.catechistcafe.com/morality/does-psychology-belong-in-the-community-of-the-churchI don’t like to repeat myself, but in a recent Café blog I quoted from Homiletic and Pastoral Review [May 24, 2024] Fr. Etienne Huard, O.S.B., who was defending the idea of extending seminary life to nine years and explaining why more and better formation is necessary. As he put it,
 
There are three critical areas of concern: psychological, spiritual, and intellectual health and ability. Psychologically, men [today’s seminary applicants] present with higher rates of anxiety and depression, personal and family trauma, isolation, and lower rates of people skills. Spiritually, men entering the seminary have less familiarity with Catholic tradition, piety, prayer, and common practices. Additionally, men often have a lower sense of worth and being a beloved son of the Father, possessing an obscured sense of masculine virtue and value. Intellectually, men tend to have a diminished ability and desire for critical thinking and expression, especially in writing and the basics of intellectual work. This issue has only been compounded since the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, there is a lower ability for hard, focused, and sustained work.
 
It is my understanding that American bishops are looking at these issues as they consider seminary admissions and components of seminary life. St. Meinrad’s Seminary in Indiana has already added the ninth year, which it describes as an introduction to the clerical way of life, a year of discernment. The term used to describe this new first year at St. Meinrad is “propaedeutic,” which Meriam Webster defines as “preparatory study or instruction.” The preparation is for seminary-clerical life. I have a link to St. Meinrad’s propaedeutic philosophy here. Muted in the discussion is the “winnowing” in the psychological dimension of seminary life. Seminary staff—in coordination with licensed mental health personnel who understand Catholicism and the challenges of the ordained ministry—should follow the psychological health of seminarians over a longer period, with an increasing eye on career prognoses.
 
There is a growing sense, too, that ordained priests do not always know how to take care of themselves, i.e., to rest, to cultivate private and group prayer, to maintain theological updating, to enjoy the arts, to work out, to write, to give presentations and retreats for a change of pace, and to prepare for retirement. Obesity, overwork, and alcohol abuse afflict the mood, ministry, and self-esteem of many priests. Could seminaries train future priests in the good habits and attitudes of post ordination life? This is the hope.
 
The Church, obviously, wishes to improve upon a sorry record of ordaining or incardinating priests who are pathologically unsound. Until recently the Church was suspicious of psychology and depended upon its own observations of a candidate’s life in the chapel, the classroom, and the common room. Seminary life hides as much as it reveals. A factor of seminary secrecy was longevity—if a seminarian hid his true doubts and disfunctions and did not rock the boat, it became harder and harder each year for authorities to dismiss him. Secrecy was a factor for the seminarian, as he came closer to his ordination date, it is harder to confide personal misgivings to seminary officials. Like all people, seminarians can deny their problems. And, in my day [a half century ago] nobody ever asked me about anything. I was in the seminary for twelve years, and I can honestly say that I was never given either a battery of psychological tests or a sit-down with a board of examiners, aside from academic testing for a course.
 
For me, the closest thing to an outside assessment did not come from a staff member or superior. In novitiate [year #7 in my training when I was 21] the novices were required to write an evaluation of each of their classmates before the superiors’ vote for admission to simple vows. “Peer evaluation” was popular back in the 1960’s. Each of us would then meet to review the results with the novice master, who in my time fancied himself as something of a psychologist, which he was not. [He himself left the order and married after my class completed novitiate and professed simple vows.] By some twist of fate, on the night of my review the novice master was away for meetings, and my reviews were assessed by the assistant novice master, an unflappable individual who years later would “transgender.”
 
When he reviewed each point, I was surprised that most of my classmates evaluated me positively. There were about thirty of us left by that point, down from forty-three. We came to one of my last evaluations, though, and I was struck by [an anonymous] classmate’s impression of my life trajectory. He gave me high grades for friendliness and felt I would be an effective priest. But then my seven-year classmate added this: “I do worry that beneath his outwardly positive attitude, Tom suffers from a profound inner loneliness that may became harder and harder to cope with as he ages.” The assistant novice master asked me, “is this true?” I said I wasn’t aware of it, but inside me, I was anxious and unhappy a good part of the time. He nodded and moved on.
 
Did I ever figure out who wrote this correct prediction? I had an idea, and truthfully, I respected him very much over the years. But we never talked face to face about his concern, and I never followed up my doubts with superiors, for the same reason athletes never visit the team doctor. [“They’ll take me out of the lineup.”] Well, three years later we were packing for our solemn vow [lifelong profession] retreat, ten years into the seminary, and my insightful classmate knocked on my door and asked me, “Are you really going through with this?” I answered affirmatively. The next morning, he did not make the trip for solemn vow retreat, and he departed the order to pursue a challenging humanitarian profession. That was 52 years ago. I was sorry to see him go. Perhaps we could have helped each other. Very slowly in my order and in others, the admission/review/evaluation process improved to a point where more open and honest evaluations were a feature of common seminary life; but not fast enough to meet the needs of all candidates for solemn vows and holy orders.
 
PSYCHOLOGY AND FAITH: HOW DO THEY MESH?
 
Seminary rectors and bishops are urged to consider closely in priestly studies three components in the life of every seminarian—psychological, spiritual, and intellectual—as they are interrelated to strong mental and spiritual health. In truth, everyone in Church ministry, indeed all of us who call ourselves Christians and Catholics, deserve regular opportunities to reflect upon our own health, our intellectual hunger, and our enthusiasm for the things of the Holy Spirit. Sadly, we do not talk much about this. One reason is our overkill of “legalism” in the Western Roman Church, particularly regarding the Sacrament of Penance. This sacrament has degenerated over the centuries to a brief encounter climaxed by the formal absolution. Yet, the essence of Penance is rebirth in Christ and a renewal of the spiritual journey along the lines listed above. It can never be trivialized. Church law and practice, in fact, recognizes such a thing as a “general confession” which, in the best of circumstances, includes a retelling of the major sins and moral failures of one’s life with an assessment of how one is living now, at this juncture of life, and how one is engaged in psychological, intellectual, and spiritual growth. One of the most basic principles of the spiritual life: if you are not engaged in growth, you are falling away from God.
 
Does this process of confessional rebirth have a psychological component? Absolutely. For example, St. Thomas Aquinas [1225-1274] defines profound sadness [acedia or hopelessness in his day, depression in ours] as “the pain of the soul.” He warns against excessive sorrow, which can lead to despair and distance us from God, who is the source of hope. Aquinas actually recommends treatments for destructive attitudes and behaviors:
 
[Self] Pity: Cultivate compassion for others.
Anxiety: Trust in divine providence.
Envy: Appreciate the blessings of others.
[Depression] Torpor: Engage in virtuous activities and seek joy. Remember that these remedies can help alleviate sadness and guide us toward happiness.
 
Aquinas adds: "a hurtful thing hurts yet more if we keep it shut up, because the soul is more intent on it: whereas if it be allowed to escape, the soul's intention is dispersed as it were on outward things, so that the inward sorrow is lessened." (I-II q. 38 a. 2).
 
Six hundred years later in1886, a German physician, Josef Breuer, discovered that hypnotized patients talked more freely about their past lives in ways that brought them better understanding and acceptance of the difficulties of their past. Sigmund Freud embraced Breuer’s “Talking Cure” which eventually became known as psychoanalysis, with or without hypnosis. Psychoanalysis is essentially getting to know your true self with the goal of a better lifestyle. As a psychotherapist myself, I can tell you that many patients were reluctant or refused to “go deep.” A typical treatment request: “Teach me some techniques so I feel better.” My MD friends hear “prescribe something” all the time.
 
I need to interject here that the relationship between Freud and the Catholic Church is very strained because of the doctor’s published views on several issues across the board. However, Adam A.J. Deville’s “The shrink and the spiritual director: Freud and the Jesuits” [2019] is a fascinating essay that discusses how the Jesuits—and other Catholic practitioners and communities--have integrated psychoanalysis into ministry. Several years ago, Pope Francis told an interviewer that he himself had undergone six months of psychoanalysis at some point in his life as a Jesuit.
 
Aquinas’s admonishment to promote the verbalization of pain is a backbone of modern psychotherapy. What neither Aquinas, nor Breuer, nor Freud could appreciate in their times was the physical operation of the brain. In 1951 doctors discovered a drug [today called imipramine] which alleviated severe depression and discouragement. Medical science pressed forward to explore medications like imipramine that might alter the neurotransmitters of the brain: by the 1980’s the neurotransmitter serotonin was isolated as the “quarterback of the central nervous system” even though how and why this particular neurotransmitter [the backbone of such drugs as Prozac] aids in management of mood disorder “is still not fully understood,” as that long instruction sheet with the pills is honest enough to admit.
 
A parish minister who enjoys his or her work will inevitably be approached for advice or support about anywhere and anytime. People seek the counsel of the priest inside and outside the confessional, to be sure—but consider deacons, youth ministers, hospital visitors, and the wide range of other ministers functioning with diocesan and parish blessing. Any of us involved in ministry have the same obligation as our medical confreres, the Hippocratic Oath: “Do no harm.” At the same time, we need enough skill to do the right things, too, and this is a skill set that gets neglected in ministerial training.
 
As you may have read between the lines of my recent posts, seminaries are the canaries in the coal mine of pastoral life. The quality of seminarians’ prayer life, learning, and psychological bearings depend on the eight years [with possibly a ninth] in the major seminary. The Vatican and the U.S. bishops are working now to improve that experience, and their measure of success or failure will directly impact the quality of U.S. parish life. It stands to reason that we owe a more profound scope of preparation to parish ministers and Catholic school staff, and in fact to all baptized Catholics, period.
 
Fr. Anthony J Stoeppel of St. Patrick’s Seminary & University in the Archdiocese of San Francisco posted an interesting essay on how seminarians are trained to hear confessions. He notes that “Some seminaries offer courses on pastoral counseling and psychology to present a more complete picture of the human person. Such courses also give seminarians an understanding of mental illness and teach them how to work with psychiatric and psychological professionals to help the penitent fully heal.”
 
Mental health, to be sure, is getting a lot of press coverage these days, particularly the sufferings of the young. Father Huard’s essay above did a good job in isolating several specific psychological issues that seminarian candidates share with their peers and bring to admission, issues in fact that impact a wide swath of society: anxiety and depression, trauma, isolation, and poor interpersonal skills, complicated by a breakdown in reading skills and academic performance attributed to the Covid-19 interruption in normal schooling. Add to that the toll of drug overdose, the “gender issues” and the social divide we live with in this country.
 
While some who approach us will obviously need a step-up to a licensed practitioner, there is nothing to stop us from assisting ourselves and our people in the community of our own parishes. In the next post on this stream, I will discuss how the Sacrament of Penance brings a holistic peace—the kind that comes from knowing and acknowledging one’s true self, and how we can all create the atmosphere where this can happen.]]>Mon, 03 Jun 2024 18:53:48 GMThttps://www.catechistcafe.com/morality/pope-francis-view-of-seminaries-versus-my-experienceWHAT POPE FRANCIS SAID THIS WEEK ABOUT SEMINARIES…
 
If this breaking story [excuse me, stories] did not lead your 11 PM local news this week, let me be the harbinger. Within the past week Pope Francis exhorted a meeting of Italian bishops to exclude homosexuals from admission to seminaries. Then, reporters picked up from some of the bishops present that Francis, speaking in Italian, spoke of seminaries marked by “faggotry” [English rendering of an Italian term.]. The Vatican quickly issued an apology but without an admission that the pope said that.
 
In truth, the Vatican Congregation for Clergy had instructed bishops several times recently that homosexuals were not to be admitted to holy orders: in 2005 under Pope Benedict XVI, and in 2016 in the Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis, the official Church teaching on the formation of priests, which is updated periodically. The 2016 Ratio, signed by Pope Francis, is a bit more nuanced on the subject than the pope’s instruction last week. In the 2016 document’s words, “The Church, while profoundly respecting the persons in question, cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies, or support the so-called ‘gay culture’. Such persons, in fact, find themselves in a situation that gravely hinders them from relating correctly to men and women. One must in no way overlook the negative consequences that can derive from the ordination of persons with deep seated homosexual tendencies.”
 
Curiously, with a few strokes of a pen, one could write the same instruction for “heterosexuals.” A bishop is not likely to ordain a sexually active straight man, either, nor one with a deep-seated preoccupation with fantasies about women, nor a card-carrying member of the Playboy Club.
 
But then the 2016 Ratio continues: “Different, however, would be the case in which one were dealing with homosexual tendencies that were only the expression of a transitory problem – for example, that of an adolescence not yet superseded. Nevertheless, such tendencies must be clearly overcome at least three years before ordination to the diaconate.” It is interesting to note that both the pope’s words of last week, and the Ratio of 2016 single out what one might call “institutional gay culture.” The Ratio draws a line between public sexual orientation and display, on the one hand, and the individual who is privately [with Church counsel] working out his life, “an adolescence not yet superseded.”
 
Again, you have to wonder how any candidate seeking seminary admission-- who today is a typically older individual than in, say, 1962, when my class entered St. Joe’s as high school freshmen—could enter with "adolescence not yet superseded." but evidently many seminarian applicants today bring significant deficits to vocation recruitment, as I will explain later in the post. However, in the following paragraphs I have included several sources which we can use for two points of discussion: [1] Did Callicoon prepare us with the age-appropriate assistance we needed during our critical formative adolescent and early adult years, and [2] is there something to what the Pope said, allowing for the messy way he said it?
 
BACK ON AROMA HILL…
 
“The Boys of Aroma Hill” blogsite has focused over the years on our individual and mutual experiences of life for up to six years in a minor seminary—with occasional forays into our major seminary years for those of us who did the dime plus two. It has been a long time since I posted a “Boys of Aroma Hill” entry…age and attention to other blog topics has kept me busy, but I didn’t want to lose connections with that significant part of my life and the community of guys around me who, more than they know, kept me sane and reasonably optimistic about the future.
 
What was the purpose of any minor seminary, [i.e., a high school or junior college seminary] including the one I left my family for? In 1962 the raison d’etre of minor seminaries—many of which were boarding seminaries--was still the 1917 Code of Canon Law, which described the purpose of minor seminary personnel "to take care especially to protect from the contagion of the world, to train in piety, to imbue with the rudiments of literary studies, and to foster in them the seed of a divine vocation." Suitable boys were encouraged to graduate to a major seminary, where they would continue their tertiary studies for the priesthood.
 
In the early twentieth century the popes were deeply concerned about the spread of secularism, i.e., the alienation of religion from the world at large. In 1910 Pope Pius X, in his encyclical Quam Singulari, moved the age of First Communion to age seven, to strengthen even young children from the modern ways of a changing world. This logic extended to seminary training, too, the earlier the better and far away from the corrupting influence of urban life. To be sure, Callicoon met those standards.

However, the pre-Vatican II and post-Vatican II literature on minor seminaries enjoyed a certain enlightenment, too. Those who advocated them understood such schools as aids to life discernment and, curiously, as ministerial outreach to all who studied in them, wherever their destinies lie. The fact that many would not go on to collegiate seminary studies was accepted, and as the twentieth century progressed, Vatican directives instructed seminaries to maintain or initiate civil accreditation so that those students who left the priestly studies could transition into other careers. St. Joe’s was a New York State Board of Regents high school which made us eligible for $500 annual scholarships for our seminary college studies, the tuition of which was, conveniently, $530. [I hope my Uncle Nelson Rockefeller took care of you “Jersey Boys,” too.] In some parts of the country, a minor seminary boarding school might be the only Catholic secondary school, period, in a fifty-mile radius, as I later learned from my Catholic University classmates years later from other orders.
 
I received acceptance to Callicoon, a boarding school, and to the Diocese of Buffalo’s high school seminary, a day school, at the same time in 1962. The Callicoon letter was welcoming. The Buffalo letter told me to avoid, among other things, unnecessary social contact with women and to avoid swimming pools as an occasion of sin for a future seminarian. Seriously.
 
For better and worse, I tried to come to grips with my human and religious development during my six years on the hill, between my 14th and 20th years. Curiously, the few classmates I have recently discussed this with talk about a perceived spiritual deficiency during those years that they have worked to develop in adult life. We did not grow religiously in the direction of Thomas Merton or Thomas a Kempis. We were certainly regimented to daily Mass, regular confession, and devotions such as the Crown [Franciscan rosary] after supper. The language is telling. Spiritual “exercises;” like training for the Olympics.
 
However, in the real world of the seminary, I cannot recall the idea of meditation or silent, wordless prayer ever mentioned to me or to my class, nor recommendations of any book of spiritual guidance. I had my own copy from home of Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, which I reflected upon after receiving communion. I brought the book from home. It brought me my only measure of spiritual peace and consolation for several years.
 
Looking back, it is worth noting that seminaries like St. Joe’s had one assigned spiritual director for everybody. Later, in the major seminary—for my class, Holy Name in Washington—each cleric was supposed to have his own director, although that was not always observed in the breech. But there are plenty of times in Callicoon I could have used personal and spiritual guidance and encouragement. We were separated from our natural fathers and the parishes/schools and clergy that launched us, and given the boarding seminary structure, our parents were cut out entirely from our development. In six years, my parents came to Callicoon three times—two graduations and a 1962 October visit in first year to make sure I was OK.
 
I was not OK. I gained fifty pounds in my first year and my grades dropped two letters. Nobody on the faculty said a thing. The irony: in the fifth year I dropped fifty pounds, and Eddie Flannagan told me to stop dieting.
 
To make matters worse, the “changes” in the Church were just starting to build to a crescendo through the 1960’s—more so in Callicoon in some ways than in many of our families’ parishes-- and in my sixth year a letter went out from the Rector’s Office [Columban Hollywood] to all the parents in my class saying in essence that a “healthier environment” for our priestly training would be achieved if our class enrolled in Siena College after sixth year; St. Joe’s College Division would be closing. I can’t speak for the other parents, but my mother was furious. My family could not afford Siena. She wrote Columban an unfiltered opinion of his missive. He never held it against me, though, and eventually the plan was scrapped, and my class entered novitiate after sixth year in 1968 as originally planned. To this day I do not know the politics of how that policy change was rescinded.
 
We were administered the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory once, I think, and I have severe doubts that anyone ever actually scored them beyond screening for profound psychosis. In 1986, when I was thirty-eight and a friar pastor, I took the MMPI again, this time to learn how to interpret it as I was studying for a master’s degree in counseling at Rollins College. I had several elevated scores—anxiety, psychosomatic tendencies—but the one that alarmed me was an elevated schizophrenic score. I talked to my Rollins professor, and he explained that the number indicated a tendency to “think outside the box.” A valuable gift, he told me [unless your box is the highly structured clerical life.] I’m sorry that we didn’t get personal guidance and insight in the minor seminary. Even public schools had guidance counselors.
 
How each of us progressed with our sexual identities is obviously a question I would not assume to answer except in my own case. My first stirrings of sexual feelings for a particular girl occurred before Callicoon, in the seventh grade. She and I had gone to the same school since first grade, and one day I looked at her…and she was a fully developed woman! And I realized I was a man. I went to her house every night to help her with math, and then, when the seventh-grade school year was over, she moved away to the suburbs. Life is cruel. But after she left, I flirted with other girls in my parish’s CYO. I liked the experience of womanhood in my life. I reasoned, though, that giving up girls, hard as it might be, would be more than compensated by the joys of clerical life. Later, in college, Eric Kyle commented on the joys of adulthood—wine, women, and song: “You guys can sing all you want.”
 
Curiously, I think that the classes several years behind ours may have been a little more sexually liberated in Callicoon. In sixth year [1967-68] I was often a substitute waiter at table, and part of our job was to answer the phone down the hall and retrieve the student being called. Pretty soon we older guys noticed a steady stream of calls for certain of our younger brethren. We didn’t report it that I know of, and as things turned out, those younger classes were heading to Siena, a coed school, where presumably they wouldn’t need phones anymore.
 
I don’t recall much serious thinking about same-gender attraction as an issue, or if any of my classmates were “queer.” I had already been taught at home that “some men love other men” but at 13 I just filed that away as an irrelevant topic for me. In Callicoon we used gay slang, on occasion, but more about people who engaged in activities or interests outside of the “jock culture” that pervaded a lot of life on the hill. The seminary handbook, written long before my class arrived and read every Friday, stated that PF’s [particular friendships] were forbidden; we were certain that this was related to homosexual mores, and we laughed the rule to scorn because close friendships are one of the best things we took from Callicoon.   
 
Was there sexual activity between students in Callicoon, heterosexual or homosexual? The institution was open for 72 years, so statistically it must have happened. I was not aware of any substantive “coupling” in my time between students. There were two expulsions from St. Joe’s in my six years for sexual conduct issues that I know of. In one case, a classmate tried to smuggle letters to a girl in another classmate’s mailed laundry case. Both guys got bounced. A few years later it was discovered that two guys had a porn stash in the trunk room. They, too, were missing by suppertime.
 
But what of sexual abuse by adults in authority? About all dioceses and religious orders in the United States have made public those with credible accusations of abuse accusations. Holy Name Province’s public list is here, but it is unusual in that it does not list the accused assignments of the accused, the normal procedure. There are on this list two friars who served at the seminary during my time, as well as the friar who recruited me to the Order. The issue may have been more pronounced in Washington, our major seminary. I can say with certainty that at least two friars in formation in Washington were sexually assaulted by an individual in a position of authority.
 
A year or two ago I received a private communication from a St. Joe’s student in a different class who had been physically beaten on seminary grounds by a friar in position of authority. This occurred in the 1960’s, but by the 2002 U. S. Bishops Dallas Charter guidelines, such an action, if investigated and corroborated, would have been grounds for removal of the friar from ministry and arrest.
 
THE POPE’S REMARKS…
 
The Pope’s instruction regarding the admission of homosexuals, has generated much controversy. My opinion, having read several commentaries, is that the pope’s remarks are directed at the institution of seminaries and their leadership as much as the individuals who people them.
 
Father James Martin, S.J, noted for his LGBTQ ministry, observes that the offensive word in the pope’s remarks is better translated into English as “campiness.” When I arrived in Washington to study in 1969, where so many religious orders had houses of study and formation, it was “common knowledge” which houses were gay, and which were straight. How could one tell? The word “camp” was commonly used back then, and evidently still today in many quarters. In simple terms, camp is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as “ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical; effeminate or homosexual; pertaining to, characteristic of, homosexuals…”
 
Campy seminaries? Apparently, the pope and the Italian bishops discussed the fact that as late as 2024 candidates are avoiding seminaries where such an atmosphere persists. The United States went through a period when a similar problem existed in some seminaries and among cliques of priests throughout some dioceses. The 1960’s marked the age of cultural upheaval in the United States, and this tectonic shift impacted Church life, particularly in the close quarters of seminaries.
 
A blanket prohibition of admission of homosexuals to the seminary and priesthood does not make sense to me. I have close family members and friends who are gay, and every one of them is an exemplar and a witness to Christian living. Interestingly, the Catechism’s teaching 2357 admits that regarding homosexuality, “its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained.” In fact, we do not know or understand human sexuality as well as we claim to, and future Church moralists may revisit the Church’s body of moral teaching to embrace a fuller communion with what we know and don’t know about the human species.
 
TODAY’S ADMISSION/FORMATIVE SEMINARY POLICIES VERSUS OURS….
 
It is 62 years since I entered St. Joe’s, and despite all the years, the Council Vatican II, and the reworking of priestly formation since then, there is more angst among bishops and seminary personnel about the screening of today’s seminary prospects than I remember. To be sure, Doc Fink weeded out the eccentrics back then and regaled us with stories about the odd balls, and today’s candidates enter older than many of us did. But the United States Bishops are adding a ninth year of seminary life due to the issues that candidates bring to the admission process.
 
I came across a May 24 essay in Homiletic and Pastoral Review by Fr. Etienne Huard, O.S.B., defending the longer seminary format for American applicants, which many seminarians object to. This is an excellently composed piece which describes areas of deficiencies in formation which some of us observed a half-century ago and compares the cultural world from which we launched forth compared to the culture of 2024. If you have time read the full essay, I have attached it here. Here is a powerful excerpt:
 
The culture young men are being formed in is no longer Christian. American society now promotes extremes in self-absorption, pleasure-seeking, and grave distortions surrounding gender, marriage, and sexuality. These experiences are combined with social media technologies’ isolating effects and influence (e.g., TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc.). The effect is that society and media have contributed to negatively forming men, where their sense of reality and mental habits of choice and belief have often been corrupted. The Program for Priestly Formation 6th edition [the U.S. Bishops’ directory for the acceptance and training of seminarians, 2022] understands that these factors create an environment where new seminarians lack the “requisite qualities for formation.”
 
There are three critical areas of concern: psychological, spiritual, and intellectual health and ability. Psychologically, men present with higher rates of anxiety and depression, personal and family trauma, isolation, and lower rates of interpersonal skills. Spiritually, men entering the seminary have less familiarity with Catholic tradition, piety, prayer, and general practices. Additionally, men often have a lower sense of worth and being a beloved son of the Father, possessing an obscured sense of masculine virtue and value. Intellectually, men tend to have a diminished ability and desire for critical thinking and expression, especially in writing and the basics of intellectual work. This issue has only been compounded since the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, there is a lower ability for hard, focused, and sustained work.
 
This is hardly a cheerful assessment. I wonder where the Church will find and finance the personnel necessary to address all three areas of concern.
 
AND A PERSONAL NOTE…
 
Seminary life—in Callicoon and in Washington—was difficult and disappointing at times, but for distinct reasons. St. Joe’s fostered something of an adversarial divide between the friars and the students. I was not used to that. In Washington, to be frank, nobody was in charge and many of us floundered in the chaos.
 
For all of that, formation was successful in one particularly important aspect—learning the joys and the obligations of friendship. In 1998, at the age of fifty, I married my best friend, and she and I have enjoyed our common life for over a quarter century. Strange to say, I had no idea I was so suited for marriage.
 
Now if you will excuse me, it is my night to cook. 
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