By John R. T. Lamont
In the light of new revelations about sexual abuse in the Church,
many Catholics are asking how the situation that these revelations have
disclosed can possibly have come about. The first question that occurs, a
question of long standing, is; why did bishops deal with sexual abusers by
concealing their offences and moving them to new assignments, rather than by
removing them from ministry? No sufficient answer has yet been given to this
question. It has now been made more pointed by a further question; how did
Theodore McCarrick get appointed as Archbishop of Washington and Cardinal, and
even become a principal drafter of the American bishops’ policy on sexual abuse
in 2002, when his own involvement in sexual abuse was widely known in clerical
circles and had been made known to the Holy See?
These things did not happen because of the
law of the Church. Until November 27, 1983, the law in force in the Latin
Church was the 1917 Code of Canon Law. Canon 2359 §2 of this code decreed that
if clerics commit an offense against the sixth commandment of the Decalogue
with minors under sixteen years of age, they are to be suspended, declared
infamous, deprived of every office, benefice, dignity, or position that they
may hold, and in the most grievous cases deposed.
This canon was replaced by
Canon 1395, §2 in the 1983 Code, which states that 'a cleric who in any other
way has committed an offence against the sixth commandment of the Decalogue, …
with a minor below the age of sixteen years, is to be punished with just penalties,
not excluding dismissal from the clerical state if the case so warrants.’ The
1983 Code addressed offences of the kind committed by Cardinal McCarrick with
Canon 1395 §2, which states that ‘A cleric who in another way has
committed an offense against the sixth commandment of the Decalogue, if the
delict was committed by force or threats or publicly or with a minor below the
age of sixteen years, is to be punished with just penalties, not excluding
dismissal from the clerical state if the case so warrants.’ These canons do not
present these punishments as options; they require that such offences be
punished by ecclesiastical authority. So our question now becomes; why did
ecclesiastical authorities break the law by not enforcing these canons?
No doubt a number of factors combined to
produce this disastrous situation. There is one factor however that has not
been widely discussed or understood, but that has had an effect that is second
to none in giving rise to the scandalous situation that now engrosses our
attention. This is the influence within the Church of a conception of authority
as a form of tyranny, rather than as being based on and constituted by law.
This essay will present the nature of this conception, describe how it came to
be influential, and explore some of its more significant results.
The intellectual origins of this conception
of authority and obedience are largely to be found in nominalist theology and
philosophy. William of Ockham notoriously came down on one side of the
Euthyphro dilemma by asserting that good actions are good simply because they
are commanded by God, and that God could make idolatry, murder, and sodomy
good, and abstention from these actions evil, if he commanded that they be
performed. This conception of divine authority lends support to a tyrannical
understanding of authority in general as based on the arbitrary will of the
possessor of power, rather than on law.
A law-based understanding of authority,
in contrast, holds that law derived from the nature of the good provides the
source of the authority of a ruler, and delimits the sphere in which a ruler
can give commands. Scholars have long known that the dominance of nominalist
thought in the fourteenth century left its mark on Catholic thought for
centuries, with key nominalist theses remaining entrenched even in scholars who
believed themselves to be upholding anti-nominalist traditions. The nature of
authority was one of these theses. Catholic theologians and philosophers during
the Counter-Reformation all held that law and moral obligation are to be
understood as resulting from the command of a superior; Suarez gave a
characteristic description of law as ‘the act whereby a superior wills to bind
an inferior to the performance of a particular deed.’
Restoration of discipline among clergy and
religious was one of the main goals of the Counter-Reformation. The theories of
law and authority that guided this restoration differed from a pure nominalist
position, but these differences were lost when the practical principles for
training in obedience were devised. These principles embodied a tyrannical
understanding of authority, and a servile understanding of rightful obedience
as consisting in total submission to the will of the superior. The most
influential formulation of these principles was given in the writings of St.
Ignatius Loyola on obedience. The key elements of the Ignatian notion of
authority are the following:
— The mere execution of the order of a superior is the lowest degree of obedience, and does not merit the name of obedience or constitute an exercise of the virtue of obedience.
— In order to merit the name of virtue, an exercise of obedience should attain the second level of obedience, which consists in not only doing what the superior orders, but conforming one's will to that of the superior, so that one not only will to obey an order, but wills that that particular order should have been given – simply because the superior willed it.
— The third and highest degree of obedience consists in conforming not only one's will but one's intellect to the order of the superior, so that one not only wills that an order should have been given, but actually believes that the order was the right order to give, simply because the superior gave it. 'He who aims at making an entire and perfect oblation of himself, in addition to his will, must offer his understanding, which is a further and the highest degree of obedience. He must not only will, but he must think the same as the superior, submitting his own judgment to that of the superior, so far as a devout will can bend the understanding.'
— In the highest and most meritorious degree of obedience, the follower has no more will of his own in obeying than an inanimate object. 'Everyone of those who live under obedience ought to allow himself to be carried and directed by Divine Providence through the agency of the superior as if he were a lifeless body which allows itself to be carried to any place and to be treated in any manner desired, or as if he were an old man's staff which serves in any place and in any manner whatsoever in which the holder wishes to use it.'
— The sacrifice of will and intellect involved in this form of obedience is the highest form of sacrifice possible, because it offers to God the highest human faculties, viz. the intellect and the will.
It
should be said that St. Ignatius’s practical exercise of authority did not
agree with his own writings. He was accustomed to send Jesuits on independent
missions where they had to use their initiative. Literally construed, his
writings on obedience could have no application in these situations, because
the superior was not there to give the commands to which this kind of obedience
is due.
We can explain the contradiction between his theory and his practice by
the influence of the accepted philosophical and theological ideas of his time,
and by the goals that his teachings on obedience were aimed at. His doctrine on
obedience was intended to provide for an initial training in discipline, of the
kind practiced in the military profession that he had once followed. Once this
training was completed, it was also intended to ensure that Jesuits on independent
missions internalized the objective that their superiors had sent them to
accomplish, so that they would correctly and wholeheartedly carry out the
missions they had been given. But St. Ignatius did not intend to give religious
superiors a totalitarian control over all the thoughts and actions of their
subordinates.
Unfortunately,
the interpreters of his works read his writings literally, and credited him
with upholding a totalitarian control of this kind as the model of religious
authority. Some expositions of his teaching described obedience to an order
than one suspects but is not certain to be immoral as an especially high and
praiseworthy form of obedience. This statement about the exceptional merit of
obeying orders that are morally dubious is made in St. Ignatius's letter 150.
The letter was in fact written for him by Fr. Polanco, his secretary; but since
it went out under St. Ignatius's signature, it benefited from his authority.
The
full development of a tyrannical conception of religious authority and a
servile conception of obedience can be found in Alphonsus Rodriguez
S.J.'s Practice of Perfection and Christian Virtues. This work, the
most widely read manual of ascetic theology of the Counter-Reformation, was
published in 1609. It was required reading for Jesuit novices up to the Second
Vatican Council. Its contents were accepted as the correct interpretation of
St. Ignatius’s teaching on obedience. In his proposed examination of
conscience, Fr. Rodriguez (who is not to be confused with St. Alphonsus
Rodriguez) requires the penitent
II. To obey in will and heart, having one and the same wish and will as the Superior.
III. To obey also with the understanding and judgment, adopting the same view and sentiment as the Superior, not giving place to any judgments or reasonings to the contrary.
IV. To take the voice of the Superior … as the voice of God, and obey the Superior, whoever he may be, as Christ our Lord, and the same for subordinate officials.
V. To follow blind obedience, that is obedience without enquiry or examination, or any seeking of reasons for the why and wherefore, it being reason enough for me that it is obedience and the command of the Superior.
Rodriguez praises obedience – as he understands it – in illuminating terms.
One of the greatest comforts and consolations that we have in Religion is this, that we are safe in doing what obedience commands. The Superior it is that may be wrong in commanding this or that, but you are certain that you are not wrong in doing what is commanded, for the only account that God will ask of you is if you have done what they commanded you, and with that your account will be sufficiently discharged before God. It is not for you to render account whether the thing commanded was a good thing, or whether something else would not have been better; that does not belong to you, but to the account of the Superior. When you act under obedience, God takes it off your books, and puts it on the books of the Superior.
Like other writers, Rodriguez
makes the usual exception for obedience to commands that are manifestly
contrary to the divine law. It has however been noted that the Jesuit doctrine
of probabilism tends to nullify this exception. According to this doctrine,
there is no sin in doing any action that a reputable authority maintains to be
permissible; and one's religious superior normally counts as a reputable
authority. There is also a psychological fact that tends to make this exception
nugatory. Internalising and practicing this notion of obedience is difficult,
and requires time, motivation, and effort. When it has been done successfully,
it has a lasting effect. Once one has destroyed one's capacity to criticise the
actions of one's superiors, one cannot revive this capacity and its exercise at
will. Following the directive to refuse obedience to one's superiors when their
commands are manifestly sinful then becomes psychologically difficult or even
impossible – except perhaps in the most extreme cases, such as commands to
murder someone, which are not the sort of sinful commands that religious
superiors often have an interest in giving in any case.
This
conception of obedience did not remain a peculiarity of the Society of Jesus,
but came to be adopted by the Counter-Reformation Church as a whole. It became
prevalent in the new institution of the Counter-Reformation seminary; the Treatise
on Obedience of the Sulpician Louis Tronson gave St. Ignatius's
teaching and writings as the summit of Catholic teaching on obedience. The
Sulpician adoption of this conception was particularly important because of
their central role in the training of priests in seminaries from the
seventeenth century onwards. The servile conception of obedience remained the
standard one into the twentieth century. Adolphe Tanquerey, in his widely read
and translated (and in many ways excellent) work Précis de théologie
ascétique et mystique, could write that perfect souls who have reached the
highest degree of obedience submit their judgment to that of their superior,
without even examining the reasons for which he commands them.
The
Jesuit approach to the manifestation of conscience contributed to inculcating a
totalitarian understanding of authority. St. Ignatius not only encouraged but
required the manifestation of conscience, and he required that the
manifestation be made to the religious superior. The manifestation of
conscience included 'the dispositions and desires for the performance of good,
the obstacles and difficulties encountered, the passions and temptation which
move or harass the soul, the faults, that are more frequently committed … the
usual pattern of conduct, affections, inclinations, propensities, temptations,
and weaknesses.’ He required that such a manifestation be made every six
months, and he directed that all superiors and even their delegates were
qualified to receive these manifestations. Instead of restricting the purpose
of the manifestation of conscience to the spiritual well-being of the manifestee,
he not only permitted but required the superior to use the knowledge of his
subordinates gained through the manifestation of conscience for the purposes of
government.
The
overweening power that this practice gives to the religious superior needs no
underlining. The ancient religious orders resisted the introduction of an
obligatory manifestation of conscience on St. Ignatius's model, but many modern
religious institutes adopted it. The abuses of the practice were so severe that
the papacy eventually had to forbid it. It was banned for all religious by
canon 530 of the 1917 Code of Canon Law (the Jesuits, however, were permitted
to preserve it by a special decree of Pope Pius XI). By this time, however, the
practice had had several centuries to leave its mark on the understanding of
authority, the forms of behaviour, and the psychology of superiors and
subordinates within the Catholic Church.
The
novelty of this understanding of obedience can be seen by contrasting it with the
position of St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas considers the proper object of
obedience to be the precept of the superior (Summa theologiae, 2a2ae q.
104 a. 2 co., a. 2 ad 3). St. Ignatius’s lowest degree of obedience, which he
does not consider to be virtuous, is considered by St. Thomas to be the only
form of obedience. He holds that St. Ignatius’s alleged higher forms of
obedience do not fall under the virtue of obedience at all:
Seneca says (De Beneficiis iii): 'It is wrong to suppose that slavery falls upon the whole man: for the better part of him is excepted.' His body is subjected and assigned to his master but his soul is his own. Consequently in matters touching the internal movement of the will man is not bound to obey his fellow-man, but God alone. (2a2ae q. 104 a. 5 co.)
St. Thomas does not consider
obedience to involve the sacrifice of one’s will as such. The virtue of
obedience in his view only involves the sacrifice of one’s self-will, which is
defined by its adherence to objectives that are contrary to our ultimate
happiness. Rodriguez however makes it clear that it is not self-will, but the
entire human faculty of will itself, that is to be sacrificed. This is a
sacrifice in the sense of an abandonment and a destruction, since it involves
eliminating the operation of one's will and handing it over to the will of
another human being. Nor does St. Thomas think of obedience as a virtuous form
of personal asceticism. He does not hold that obeying a command we dislike is
better as such than obeying a command we are happy to fulfil.
A good person
will be glad to carry out any suitable command, since such commands further the
common good. He does not consider that all good acts are motivated by obedience
to God, because he considers that there are virtues the exercise of which is
prior to obedience – such as faith, which religious obedience presupposes. Nor
does he consider that the essence of sin consists in disobedience to God, or
even that all sin involves the sin of disobedience. All sin does indeed involve
a disobedience to God’s commands, but this disobedience is not willed by the
sinner unless the sin involves a will to disobey the command in addition to a
will to do the forbidden act (2a2ae q. 104 a. 7 ad 3). Obedience is
simply an act of the virtue of justice, which is motivated by love of God in
the case of divine commands and love of neighbour in the case of commands of a
human superior. These loves are both more fundamental and broader than
obedience.
The
conception of religious authority and religious obedience that became dominant
in the Church from the sixteenth century onwards was thus a fundamental
innovation that departed from previous Catholic positions. It came to influence
the Church through the training given in seminaries for diocesan priests, and
the approach to discipline in religious congregations. The daily life of
seminarians and religious was structured by a multitude of rules governing the
minutiae of behaviour, and activities that fell outside this routine could
generally be pursued only with the permission of the superior. Such permission
was arbitrarily refused from time to time in order to encourage submissiveness
in subordinates. Reasons for orders were not provided, and questions about the
reasons for orders were not answered.
This
approach to authority had damaging effects on clergy and religious. The
exaction of servile obedience from subordinates destroyed strength of character
and the capacity for independent thought. Exercise of tyrannical authority by
superiors produced overweening pride and incapacity for self-criticism. The
fact that superiors all started off in a subordinate position meant that
advancement was facilitated for those proficient in the arts of the slave —
flattery, dissimulation, and manipulation.
The
laity could not hope for advancement in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, so the
effect of promotion of a servile understanding of religious obedience was to
infantilize them in the religious sphere. This infantilization can be observed
in religious art and devotion, especially from the 19th century onwards, and in
willingness to give blind obedience to the clergy. The resulting dissociation
between adult maturity and religious belief undermined religious faith and commitment
among the laity, and contributed to the steady secularization of Catholic
societies.
The
effects of this conception of obedience were mitigated by countervailing
factors. Canon law, liturgical discipline, and the rules of religious orders
provided detailed prescriptions that limited the tyrannical exercise of
authority by superiors. Scholastic philosophy and theology, classical
education, and the requirement for proficiency in Latin all imposed objective
standards for the knowledge and intellectual capacity demanded of the clergy.
Jesuit secondary schools, which were by far the most important and successful
of their apostolates, were governed by an excellently designed ratio
studiorum that laid down in detail what was to be studied and how. As
long as the tyrannical conception of authority was restrained by these factors,
it was crippling but not fatal to the Church.
An
insidious feature of this conception of authority is that at the outset it
seemed to be a success. It was used to put an end to the financial and sexual
misbehaviour of the clergy that had helped to produce the Reformation. By so
doing, it contributed to the brilliant achievements of the Counter-Reformation.
The situation of the Church was like that of Rome under Augustus or France
under Louis XIV; the peace and order produced by absolute rule permitted a
flowering of the talents produced by the free society that had existed prior to
absolutism. When the inheritance of freedom was spent and the full effects of
absolutism were felt, these talents withered. The brilliant constellation of
saints and geniuses that illuminated 17th century Catholic France was succeeded
in the 18th century by failure and frequent capitulation in the face of the
anti-Christian attacks of the Enlightenment.
This
exposition of the history and nature of a tyrannical conception of authority in
the Church explains many features of the crisis of sexual abuse. Psychological
maturity is needed in order to successfully resist sexual temptation. By
attacking this maturity, the inculcation of a servile understanding of
authority makes chastity very difficult. The warped and inadequate
personalities of those who are attracted to perverse sexual activity will not
be identified in a system of training that is based on inculcating servile
obedience. Such persons are often good at servility and dissimulation. They
will thrive in a system based on servile obedience, while men of intelligence
and character will struggle under it.
Superiors will not think of their own
authority as bound up with the authority of the law, and they will not be
inclined to respect and obey the law as such. They will have a strong incentive
to conceal sexual abuse, because the authority of the clergy over the laity
will rest on an infantilized conception of clerics as godlike father figures
who can do no wrong. Such a conception is destroyed if serious wrongdoing by
the clergy is made public. The laity who hold this conception will easily be
persuaded or intimidated into silence about the cases of sexual abuse that they
encounter. Both superiors and subordinates in a tyrannical system are taught to
worship power and those who hold it, and to despise inferiors, the weak, and
victims. As a result they will not tend to feel sympathy for victims of sexual
abuse, especially children. Their sympathy will go to the abusers, who have
been exercising tyrannical power in an extreme form. All the
above phenomena have been observed time and time again in the cases
of sexual abuse that have come to light.
The
infantilization produced by this understanding of authority contributed to
sexual abuse in several ways. An infantilized person cannot exercise
independent judgment and is not able to stand up for himself or others. Infants
are not able to comprehend evil, and they are not able to admit or even
understand that their father figures are evil. Those priests who took the
tyrannical understanding of authority seriously, rather than conforming to it
in order to realize their ambitions and enjoy the pleasures of tyranny, were
thus psychologically unable to speak out against sexual abuse and take risks to
correct it. The ambitious did not do so because there was no percentage in it
for them.
As
for the laity, the brutal truth is that much sexual abuse of children by
priests occurred with the collusion of the parents of these
children. Without this collusion, the sexual abuse of children and
adolescents by priests could never have taken on the dimensions that it did. Witness
this statement by ‘James’, a boy repeatedly sexually abused by Cardinal
McCarrick:
James said he had tried to tell his father
that he was being abused when he was 15 or 16. But Father McCarrick was so
beloved by his family, he said, and considered so holy, that the idea was
unfathomable. … James says that as a boy, he had no safe place to discuss what
was happening to him. “No place. No place.
My father was just not going to hear it.” … “I
tried a couple of times with my mother, but she would say ‘I think you’re
mistaken.’ My father was born in 1918, my mother was born in 1920. They were
raised in a way that the Catholic Church was everything. My father was a holy
guy. He’d walk around with a rosary in his hand all day. My parents were very
holy, and their parents were very holy. Their whole idea about life was that
way.”[1]
This erroneous conception of
holiness was not the result of the stupidity of this man’s parents. It was what
they had been taught by the clergy -- following a tyrannical conception of
authority. It meant that they were incapable of grasping that priests could be
evil - and that they thought that this incapacity was virtuous and a religious
duty.
The
chaos that engulfed the Church in the 1960s and 1970s was probably due in large
part to rebellion against the tyrannical exercise of authority that had been
inflicted on clergy and religious prior to the 1960s. Like other revolutions
recorded by bistory, however, this revolt against tyranny did not lead to the
triumph of freedom. Instead, it produced a more far-reaching and thorough
tyranny, by destroying the elements of the ancien régime that
had placed limits on the power of superiors. It did away with the factors
listed above that had counteracted the influence of a tyrannical conception of
authority in the Counter Reformation Church.
The progressive faction that
seized power in seminaries and religious orders had its own programme and
ideology that demanded total adherence, and that justified the ruthless
suppression of opposition. The tools of psychological control and oppression
that had been learned by the progressives in their own formation were put to
most effective use, and applied more sweepingly than they had ever been in the
past -- the difference between the two regimes being rather like the difference
between the Okhrana and the Cheka.
Part of the progressive ideology was the falsity
and harmfulness of traditional Catholic sexual teaching; the effect of this
tenet on the sexual abuse crisis need not be laboured. But it would be a
mistake to think that progressivism as such is responsible for this crisis, and
that its defeat would solve the problem. The roots of the crisis go further
back, and require a reform of attitudes to law and authority in every part of
the Church.
