#Paul V. Mankowski SJ

[apesoformythoughts]

«The Church in the West has enjoyed a half century of comparative ease, in which the agenda has largely been set by professorial Catholic clergy—men who dress, dine, recreate, and vote in ways indistinguishable from their heathen faculty colleagues, men who have had almost no price to pay for their highly adaptive Catholicism. It's not surprising that they should be alarmed by "rigidity" in their juniors. It's not surprising to read Fr. Richard McBrien lamenting a survey of seminarians that finds "many students resist 'the learning enterprise' because it threatens their 'preconceived ideas about theology.'" Yet, with some few exceptions, it's the professoriate, not the students, that feel threatened, and the source of the threat is not the students' inflexible ideas about theology (indicating rigidity), but their stubborn adherence to Catholic doctrine (indicating tenacity).

These aren't 18-year-olds arriving dewy-eyed from a 1950s high school sodality; they tend to be college grads, sometimes converts, with personal experience of the false promises of the secular world, who have made an existential alignment with Catholic teaching. Regardless of theological maturity or naivete, they know what they're saying no to.»

— Paul Mankowski, SJ, in Diogenes Unveiled (10/23/2005)

[apesoformythoughts]

«Since the Council, the Catholic clergy in the prosperous West has effectively transformed itself into a peacetime army, concerned not with fighting threats to the Church but with making life comfortable and consolidating political gains. The term "rigidity" belongs to the negative vocabulary of a peacetime army, "tenacity" to the positive vocabulary of a wartime one. The qualities that made Edmund Campion a hero in anti-Catholic England would make him a pastoral liability in Malibu.

Or so it may have seemed. Psychoanalyst Karl Stern, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who converted to Catholicism, remarked how the experience of the concentration camps falsified many assumptions of prewar psychology. Stern says it was the conservative Catholics, the Jehovah's Witnesses, and the ultra-Orthodox Jews who endured extremes of stress without selling out, going mad, or collapsing, whereas the enlightened bourgeois typically lost all sense of selfhood and integrity in the maelstrom. Stern's point was that his fellow psychiatrists didn't realize the extent to which their model of psychological health was conditioned by the context of peacetime upper-middle-class urban life, so that the types judged by agnostic academics "most likely to succeed" crumbled disastrously in the camps, while nonadaptive persons, well accustomed to marginalization through tenacious—did someone whisper "rigid"?—adherence to principle, maintained their equanimity and character.»

— Paul Mankowski, SJ, in Diogenes Unveiled

[apesoformythoughts]

“The Catholic Church was tending to orphans centuries before there was such a thing as a secular state. Yet now the secular state has determined, in its wisdom, that it is the Church that risks harming the orphan by refusing to submit to gay adoption. So when this latest social experiment crashes ten or twenty years from now, who's going to be there postdisaster to pick up the pieces—the human beings collaterally damaged in the cause of political gain? The Harvard Committee on Gender Studies? The Rainbow Sash Movement? The Lambda Legal Defense crowd?

Think again.”

— Paul Mankowski, SJ, in Diogenes Unveiled (06/01/2006)

[apesoformythoughts]

“There is no neutral ground here. It makes no sense—it's logically self-destructive—for a church to teach that an act that damns you today may ennoble you tomorrow, subject to a majority vote of its bishops and to indefinitely frequent political revision. If sodomy was contrary to God's will in A.D. 1840, it will be contrary to God's will in A.D. 2840, and for a church to deny this is to deny it knows God's will, which is in effect to deny that it is a church […]

And while the crisis hinging on this incoherence is especially acute in the Anglican Communion, and may prove fatal to it, provisional Catholics like Andrew Sullivan occupy the same plot of quicksand. Gays ask the Church to welcome sinners (which she delights to do) and also to welcome their sins (which she can't). By urging the Church to change her teaching they are ipso facto asking her to cease to be the Church.”

— Paul Mankowski, SJ: Diogenes Unveiled (Oct/05/2007)

[apesoformythoughts]

«I was hoping that the Church’s antipathy to female and openly gay priests would, in time, weaken and dissolve. Now instead, it seems, a whole lot of bigoted reinforcements are arriving [via the Anglican Ordinariate] to galvanise those more unpalatable aspects of Roman Catholic doctrine. Should I stay in a club that would welcome these people as members?

Just can't grasp the mindset. These stances that progressivists today denounce as bigotry were stances held universally and invariably by the Catholic Church for two millennia, and indeed until the last forty years or so they were held by all Protestant denominations as well. You could, if you were brainless, argue that the Church and her saints were bigots from the beginning, yet that's not a reason to hope the Catholic Church will correct herself tomorrow but a reason to reject Christianity root and branch. If you believe the Church was a purveyor of evil in the past, you have no grounds for denying she may be a purveyor of evil in the future. Moreover, the criterion by which you judge the Church wrong in condemning sodomy and correct in embracing it must be distinct from and more reliable than the Church herself, whence the Church is superfluous in any case.»

— Paul Mankowski, SJ: Diogenes Unveiled

[apesoformythoughts]

«Cardinal Mahony's former flatmate Fr. Carl Sutphin is accused of abusing six boys in the 1960s and 1970s, according to a recent article:

Attorneys for Sutphin argued that it is unfair and unconstitutional for the government to file sex abuse charges after so many years. "It is difficult for anyone to recall what they did at specific times on specific days so long ago," lawyer Kay Duffy said after the hearing in Ventura County Superior Court. "We have charges from 30 years ago. We have a very elderly defendant. It's difficult to prepare a defense."

Well, I can't honestly recall what I was doing this day 30 years ago. But I can be very, very sure there were certain things I didn't do. My favorite specimen of clerical indignation at the outrageous temerity of trick questions is that of Msgr. Frederick Ryan, who was alleged to have abused a 14-year-old boy in the chancery office (Ryan was at the time vice-chancellor of the Boston Archdiocese): "Asked if he had sexually abused Garland, Ryan replied: 'I don't think that's a fair question. Let me find out what this is about.'"

Good point, Fred. They should at least let you have a look at your desk calendar.»

— Paul Mankowski, SJ, in Diogenes Unveiled

[apesoformythoughts]

“But we're preparing contemporary American men for contemporary American ministry, someone might object, and Malibu isn't Dachau. True. But Dachau wasn't Dachau until 1933, just a drowsy Munich suburb. Times change. And times are changing. Has hatred of Christianity faded in the last twenty years, or increased? Has the secular world grown fonder of Catholic doctrine or less so? Are your grandchildren likely to find their faith easier to live, or more difficult? Having answered these questions, ask yourselves which quality is more necessary in the priests who will minister to your grandchildren—tolerance, or tenacity?”

— Paul Mankowski, SJ, in Diogenes Unveiled (10/23/2005)

[apesoformythoughts]

“…if you decide the Church is in error about something—I’m talking about solemnly declared doctrine—you make that judgment according to some standard. That standard, then, replaces the Church as your final arbiter of truth. That means the Church becomes superfluous, redundant, worthless […]

Hence the phoniness of so much of the ‘let’s patch up our differences’ rhetoric. The spiritual orientation of the man who has judged the Church wrong isn't and can't be the same as that of him who offers her his obedience—however perplexed or tormented he may find himself. If you think the Church has given you false answers, then even the value of her right answers is provisional. Should you come to doubt the truth of an answer you once thought right—say, about the prohibition of re-marriage—what sort of spiritual resistance could you put up? What would such resistance mean?”

— Paul Mankowski, SJ, in Diogenes Unveiled

[apesoformythoughts]

«Consider something else. Is it possible the Catholic Church still has it wrong on sexual morality and needs to reconsider church attitudes and teachings? This would require admitting the church is, like other institutions, capable of making mistakes, even big ones. It would require becoming a more humble church, perhaps one with less sweeping claims to infallibility.

Cute, isn't it? Our ’umble essayist ’umbly invites the Bride of Christ to admit she has spots and wrinkles like the rest of us ’umble folks. The Church makes mistakes too.

Fraud, and an ugly fraud at that. An honest man does not speak of "less sweeping claims to infallibility." If my calculator gives me a wrong answer for a sum, I don't stroke my chin and suggest that Texas Instruments make "less sweeping claims to accuracy"—I say the calculator's worthless, and throw it away. Dissenters have in fact ignored the teaching Church for years; they occasionally agree with her, they are never taught by her. Indeed, they can't be taught by her, any more than I can let myself be informed by a calculator that once gave me a bad answer. It's psychologically impossible. I might keep a worthless calculator as a paperweight; I can only keep a worthless church for private purposes of my own devising.»

— Paul Mankowski, SJ, in Diogenes Unveiled

[apesoformythoughts]

«For the ecclesiastically despondent Catholic, few forms of self-medication are as effective as a careful read through Owen Chadwick's The Popes and European Revolution (Oxford: 1981). When one realizes just how grim the situation looked from the vantage point of the late 18th century, our current woes, and the woefully inadequate leaders arrayed against them, appear comparatively manageable—not illusory, but less than lethal.

In 1768, for example, after a series of defeats and political humiliations, Pope Clement XIII issued a threatening edict against the Duke of Parma that was impossible to enforce, and the Englishman Horace Walpole, writing to gloat over the disaster to his friend Horace Mann in Florence, said "This is a crisis for the Court of Rome from which it will be impossible to recover." And again, after the death of Clement the following year, Walpole wrote Mann asking when the cardinals would elect "the last Pope."

Walpole was not without grounds for his belief. The man elected as Clement XIV was Lorenzo Ganganelli, whose papacy is best known for the suppression of the Jesuits, and who seems eerily contemporary in his style of churchmanship:

He remained for hours at his desk but he found it difficult to be responsible for even minor decisions, and was confronted with one of the most agonizing decisions which ever faced a Pope. He liked to be liked, shrank from displeasing, and therefore suffered temptation to say pleasant things to both sides and to procrastinate lest decision be unpleasant.

Sound familiar?

Walpole and similar-minded despisers of Catholicism rejoiced in the disarray in which the Church found herself in the early 19th century, but didn't and couldn't predict a Pope Pius IX, nor imagine how loss of temporal power could correlate with an increase of moral authority. So too it's worrisome, in our own time—when pride, sodomy, and the love of compromise have softened the episcopacy to a Ganganelli-like level of timidity—to contemplate the way forward. That's why it's nourishing, as Catholics, to have the consolation of history. Been there. Done that. Bought the hairshirt.»

— Paul Mankowski, SJ, in Diogenes Unveiled

[apesoformythoughts]

«An article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch discusses the controversy caused by priests who are alleged sex abusers turning up in court wearing clerical garb.

Richard Waites, a lawyer and psychologist who heads a nationwide jury consulting firm, said that more often than not he recommends that defendant priests wear their collars to court.

"In general, jurors are looking for any person to be as genuine as possible," Waites said in a telephone interview. "And since the defendant is under a great scrutiny, he needs or she needs to be as genuine as possible and as authentic as possible."

By "as genuine as possible", of course, Waites means the opposite. He knows perfectly well the odds that some jurors—enough to acquit, at any rate—may respond to the uniform covering the defendant instead of the genuine article inside. One of my favorite examples comes from the U.K. Telegraph (October 20, 2000), regarding a priest from Wales who confessed to six counts of molesting a 12-year-old before he became a priest, and to indecent assaults on two 9-year-olds after ordination. His game was to get little boys to join a soccer club he had started: "Fr Joseph Jordan was a modern priest, always dressed in baseball cap, tracksuit and trainers. One mother remarked that the only time she had seen him in clerical garb was in the dock at Cardiff Crown Court."

Love these guys. When it's a matter of barhopping, or going to restaurants, or taking in a movie, they're invariably in civvies ("I find the collar to be a vestige of an antiquated clerical caste system that puts a barrier between me and the people I serve"). When their recreations finally catch up with them and they end up facing a five-to-eight for conducting underage Listening Sessions, what emblem of 1950s piety and propriety do they hide behind?

Why, how did you guess?»

— Paul Mankowski, SJ: Diogenes Unveiled (Nov/06/2003)

[apesoformythoughts]

“Imagine a large suburban high school whose faculty and administration (considered a unity for present purposes) devises a series of programs to deal with the problem of student drug dealers. After some months of very mixed results it happens that a faculty member himself is arrested for selling drugs; then another; then two more in quick succession.

At a certain point the public will begin to feel, not only that the faculty is neglecting the students' interests, but that the core problem is within its own ranks. But at what point?

Suppose further certain complicating factors: that faculty members in almost every case are recruited and hired on the recommendation of two or three faculty acquaintances. That the faculty has for years been eerily ambivalent on the morality of recreational drug use. That students who complained that faculty had used or dealt drugs were often ignored, often reviled, and invariably saddled with such a high burden of proof that not a single student- or parent-initiated complaint resulted in disciplinary action against a faculty member. Ever.

Suppose that many of the student drug dealers were widely known to be teacher's pets. That many faculty members had been aware of student drug dealing but ignored it. That the pressure on the faculty to resolve the problem came entirely from outside its ranks, from clean students and parents themselves. That even this pressure was successfully resisted until law enforcement and media took notice of unconcealable crimes. That dealer students, when disciplined, were often given shockingly lenient punishments.

Suppose that it was wholly unknown for the faculty to identify and expel one of its own for drug use. That in every single case the faculty drug dealers were discharged only after an arrest by police or after overwhelmingly disgraceful media exposure.

Gives you a funny feeling inside, doesn't it?

Now imagine this. Not only does the faculty give absolutely zero indication that there is a problem that needs fixing in its own ranks, but it continues to speak exclusively—without exception—of a problem ‘out there’, among the students, and continues to speak of itself as the perfectly obvious body to effect the cure.

Thankfully, no such school exists, or could exist. Education, after all, requires a measure of trust.”

— Paul Mankowski, SJ, in Diogenes Unveiled

[apesoformythoughts]

«Therefore: I do not refuse this rainbow-sashed man Communion because the sash implies that he is an unshriven sodomite. I refuse him Communion because the sash unambiguously expresses his defiance and rejection of Church doctrine, and, by entailment, his rejection of the Church as a reliable teacher of God's law, and, by entailment, his apostasy—in the literal, not the formal canonical sense: the rainbow sash is a declaration by the wearer that he "stands apart" from the Church. It makes not the slightest difference, then, if it's a gay man's 74-year-old mother wearing the sash in solidarity with her son who presents herself for Communion. I refuse her the Eucharist not because she failed her blood test but because she herself has declared, "I am not in communion with the Church."»

— Paul Mankowski, SJ, in Diogenes Unveiled

[apesoformythoughts]

«Remember when the apostles James and John, the sons of Zebedee, commissioned a post-Judas investigative report on the causes of treachery? Neither do I.

Bishops also agreed to spend up to $1.5 million from a $20 million endowment fund to partly fund a massive study on the causes of priestly sexual abuse. The USCCB hopes to raise the remainder of the cost of the study, slated to cost between $3 million and $5 million, from private foundations.

Is there a single Catholic on the planet—and I include the bishops' own mothers in the question—who really believes the purpose of this study is to discover—and not to camouflage—the causes of priestly sexual abuse? Bishop Howard Hubbard's private investigator charged him $2.4 million to come to the conclusion that allegations of sexual misconduct made against him had "no merit"—and nobody laughed. Here too we can be sublimely confident that the scholars whom the bishops commission will find the principal "cause" of sexual abuse to be insufficient attention to the notions of the scholars whom the bishops commission. Expect multiple appendices detailing improved reporting procedures, seminary screening for doctrinal rigidity, and recipes for Rice Krispies Marshmallow Treats. In the same spirit of confidence, let me foretell some conclusions the researchers won't draw:

Apostolic Pro-Nuncio Jean Jadot (1973-1980) significantly damaged the U.S. episcopacy by the appointment of young, gay-friendly bishops who formed a self-defense network still in force.

The institutional "occasion" of the crisis is not secrecy, but blackmail, in which secrecy is merely instrumental. A clergyman with dirt in his past—whether hetero- or homosexual in nature—is blackmailable and incapable of acting against the crimes of other clergy except under duress.

Psychotherapists don't fix sins.

Too many individuals employed in priestly formation were and are in the business because they like to be around young men. This is not unconnected with the grossly defective instruction common in post-WW2 seminaries.

"Between men who want to have sex with adolescent boys and men who do not want to have sex with adolescent boys, the former are more likely to have sex with adolescent boys" (Richard Neuhaus).

Blackmail is not eradicated by systemic change or bureaucratic adiustment: firings (or firing squads) are necessary.

While Bishops Dupre and O'Connell are still refusing to testify about their own sexual abuse—with their brethren at least tacitly consenting—$1.5 million-plus is going into the pockets of those who will almost certainly not tell us what Dupre and O'Connell can tell as about "the causes".

Trust restored yet?»

— Paul Mankowski, SJ, in Diogenes Unveiled

[apesoformythoughts]

«Good news from this week’s America: the editors are calling for a return to “charity in intellectual life”. When the playground bully starts pleading for Queensbury Rules, he fears he’s in for a thrashing. Check this out:

The ferment produced by the Second Vatican Council has been stilled. Perhaps the last great Catholic contribution to American culture came with the bishops’ pastoral letters of the 1980’s. The Challenge of Peace, in particular, had significant impact on the wider society, educating the public and politicians to debate issues of peace and war in a disciplined way.

Sorry, lads, but anyone who believes The Challenge of Peace had “significant impact” on anyone outside of the bishops’ print shop is delusional, and seriously so. Exactly whose mind was changed—changed in favor of Catholic teaching, I mean—by this document? Of course it may well have been a high-water mark for the Jesuits of 56th Street, when the bishops and the Catholic academy were safe and snug in the embrace of the Democratic Party, but things began to slip soon thereafter:

In the intervening years, deep fissures have appeared in the U.S. church. On the public side of American Catholic intellectual life, charity has become hard to find. Intellectual exchange has fallen victim to petty name-calling, ad hominem arguments and a “gotcha” politics of denunciation. As Archbishop Harry Flynn of St. Paul-Minneapolis wrote last month, “This uncharitable, biased and reckless substitute for what formerly was fair-minded commentary and fact-based dialogue has found its venomous way into our Catholic family.

Translation: “Having been shielded from criticism for our entire adult lives by the enjoyment of a virtual monopoly on communications media, we now find ourselves obliged to operate on what is nearly a level playing field, where we find our noses rubbed in the same stuff we have heretofore dished out to our adversaries with impunity. It is unpleasant.”

Since when is the “‘gotcha’ politics of denunciation” foul play? Since when are ad hominem arguments out of court? Remember Rembert Weakland’s crack (cited in a fawning New Yorker profile) that pro-lifers “basically need a hug and a laxative”? Did America ever rebuke the archbishop for petty name-calling? Did Harry Flynn take him to task for his reckless substitute for fact-based dialogue? They did not. Why bother? After all, anyone with such poor breeding as to find Weakland’s quip uncharitable was in no position to make his complaint heard anyway, and besides, Susan Sarandon is calling on line 3.

It is characteristic of moral imbeciles to be incapable of seeing things from the other man’s point of view. Hannah Arendt tells how Adolf Eichmann, after his capture, lamented the fact that he advanced in the SS no further than lieutenant colonel, expecting his Israeli interrogators to sympathize with his hard luck. In the same way it argues for shocking obtuseness on the part of America in imagining that Catholic conflicts, until recently, were marked by equilateral charity. The fact that the alarm should be sounded today is a recognition, however confused, that the old order is coming to an end.»

— Paul Mankowski, SJ (10/09/04), in Diogenes Unveiled

[apesoformythoughts]

“‘Researchers have identified a pattern in the molestation crisis afflicting the Roman Catholic Church: most of the victims are older boys.’

So begins an article by Rachel Zoll from March of last year. Hardly a surprising finding, you might think, but that’s because you’re not in the sex-abuse industry. The Vatican’s recent symposium on child abuse delivered the ‘state of the art information’ that—wait for it—‘the majority of cases in the American crisis involve adolescent males victimized by adult gay priests.’ And the concern we should have as a consequence of these discoveries is increased protection for vulnerable boys, right? Wrong again. ‘“What I’m afraid of is we’re going into this witch hunt for gays,” said the Rev. Stephen Rossetti, psychologist and sex abuse consultant to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.’

Rossetti, the former CEO of the St. Luke Institute, is the author of the article mentioned below in support of ‘reintegrating pedophiles.’ He was invited to address the bishops in Dallas this year, and had a ringside seat at the Vatican symposium in question. Surprised? Neither am I.” [4/7/03]

“Perhaps [child molesters’] presence in society can ultimately be healing for us. They challenge us to face an unconscious and primal darkness within humankind. Our inability to face this darkness causes us to stereotype and banish all who embody our estranged dis-passions. In the past, this process spawned Molokai and a host of other human prisons. Today, we are banishing the child molester.

From ‘The Mark of Cain: Reintegrating Pedophiles’, America, September 9, 1995. The Rev. Stephen Rossetti of the St. Luke Institute is one of the three or four experts who have taught the U.S. bishops most about child abuse.” [4/11/03]

— Paul Mankowski, SJ, in Diogenes Unveiled