10/03/02
Church's wound stays unhealed
By Eugene Cullen Kennedy, Globe Staff, 3/10/2002
The infection of conflicted sexuality in the Roman
Catholic clergy, its festering long veiled like a
leper's sore, has now been publicly lanced. How,
people ask, could it have been left unattended for so long?
While church leaders say that the doctors never told
them how serious the condition was, and victims find
their voice and lawyers file their claims, the most
important question remains not only unanswered but
unasked: If sexual abuse of children is the tainted
surface symptom, what is the underlying wound?
We find both the healing question and the answer in
Wolfram von Eschenbach's version of Parzival, who sets
out to find and cure the Grail King. Like other mythic
figures, the king's wound is sexual in nature. He
sustained it on his search for the Holy Grail, the cup
of the Last Supper that represents Western emphasis on
the spirit.
Before becoming king, the Grail seeker from the West,
who symbolizes the spirit, encounters the Black Knight
riding out of the East, who represents nature. In a
clash, the future king slays the Knight of the East but
is wounded by a spear that passes through his genitals.
In vanquishing nature, spirit sustains a wound that
will not heal. His court members fear to speak of it
lest they say something that may endanger their places
of preferment.
Having imitated the silent courtiers on his first
visit, Parzival returns to ask the simple human
question that heals the king's wound: ''What is it that
ails you?'' Thus Parzival rends the court's cloak of
self-serving silence by speaking the plain truth that
so threatens its members.
Myths are the tales in which we store the truths of our
human condition, protected by poetry from the effects
of history. In this ''Parzival,'' we find the story of
the official Catholic Church in the aftermath of this
sex abuse crisis. The latter flows from the wound this
earthly church suffered when it lost sight of the
wholeness with which its founder, Jesus Christ, viewed
human beings.
The priest pedophilia crisis is but one symptom of the
unhealed wound that resulted from the official church's
strike at the unity of human personality. That blow
divided the person into two warring components: spirit
and nature, soul and body. Spirit and soul were good
while nature and body were evil. Human beings were made
to feel guilty for being human and sexual, and the
organizational church has controlled its people by
keeping that wound open and manipulating them through
the false guilt they feel for being human. This
official church, seeking to overpower nature, wounds
itself and its people whenever it blindly enters or
boldly distorts the most intimate area of their lives.
The members of the church's ecclesiastical court are
afraid to speak about this great sexual wound oozing
beneath their bureaucracy. Nor can they recognize, in
the sexual abuse of children, the same pattern of
behavior that some of them employ in their everyday
dealings with people.
The wound has, therefore, become systemic in the
officialdom of Catholicism. In the way some church
officials deal with dissidents, or those seeking
annulments of their marriages, for example, we observe
the same dynamics that are present when a priest
seduces a child. Both are exercises of power, both
insist that the other ''submit,'' both demean and
debase the other, the child by sexual assault, the
dissidents by an emasculation that renders them
impotent. Modern dissenters, such as theologians Hans
Kung and Charles Curran, and minister to gay Catholics,
Sister Jeannine Gramick, are forbidden to call
themselves Catholic or to teach, preach, write, and in
any way express themselves in church work.
In myriad ways, church officials have dominated women
for centuries, elevating them in the abstract, while
treating them as inferior in concrete daily life. Women
are demeaned when they are told that they cannot be
priests because they do not look like men and therefore
do not reflect Jesus, a classic but weak theological
argument to preserve the all-male priesthood. The
officials who behave this way are gratifying their own
displaced sexual need just as pedophile priests do,
rationalizing it so as not to face its essential truth.
This is a failure of the organizational church, not the
pastoral church. The church as a religious mystery, as
a family for believers, does not hold the divided view
of humanity that its officials do. The church as a
source of the sacraments embraces sinners, affirms
life, and encourages lovers. That is a different church
from the one still trying to please its wounded king by
silence and circumlocution.
This wound may be clearly seen. For this style of
sexually abusing the innocent that goes unnamed by
those powerful members of the church court who commit
it is the same one observed in every squalid seduction
of an innocent by a troubled priest who cannot name it
but asks for the same future silence about the
manipulation that has occurred.
Many good bishops hesitate to ask what ails the
official church that it has kept its silence and
demanded it of others for so long on such primitive use
of others. That is what is at the heart of the
confusion and uncertainty in so many chancery offices.
They cannot disentangle themselves from the officialdom
to which they have been asked to give, at a price they
never understood before, their unquestioning support.
What is it that ails this officialdom if not an asexual
bent that finds women unacceptable in the priesthood
because they are not men? What is it that ails it if
not an asexual disdain for human sexuality that
motivates such hostility to homosexuals that they are
branded as bearing an intrinsic disorder within
themselves?
This problem cannot be settled by lawyers, new
policies, or promises that attention will be paid in
the future. A wound has been exposed to sunlight and
fresh air. The church, of which its officialdom is a
prominent but lesser part, is ever ready to face the
truth that it knows will make it free. What it needs
are churchmen as true as Parzival who will risk their
careers and save their souls by asking of the
bureaucratic church, What is it that ails you?
Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a psychologist and former
priest, is the author of ''The Unhealed Wound: The
Church and Human Sexuality