A Pastor's Legacy

 Some years ago I read a book entitled Married to the Church by Raymond Hedin. Hedin was an ex-seminarian and indeed an ex-Catholic, who after attending a class reunion at St. Francis Seminary in Milwaukee in 1985 decided to write a book about the experiences of his former classmates (class of 1969), both those who had left the priesthood and those who remained priests.

There's a lot to be taken from the book about what went wrong with the Church in the US shortly before and after the Second Vatican Council. But one of the key things that struck me was the complaints of his fellow seminarians who had gone on to become priests that people did not sufficiently respect them as professionals. As narrated by several of the priests, it was dissatisfying that people did not think of them like doctors, lawyers, or professors, despite the fact that they too had attained advanced degrees, studies secular subjects such as sociology and psychology, etc. 

I was reminded of this as I read some of the discussion about the death of former Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland. To pick an egregious example, Fr. James Martin (in a series of tweets he later deleted) posted in memory of the archbishop: 

“An erudite scholar, gifted pastor and Benedictine abbot primate, his legacy was marred by revelations that he paid money to a man with whom he had been in a relationship. I considered him a friend and mourn his loss. May he rest in peace.”

This seems to imply that one can somehow be a "gifted pastor" while at the same time having sexually abused (and then paid to silence) a young man under his pastoral care. (Not to mention Weakland's terrible handling of clerical abuse more generally: shredding records of abuse by priests why continuing to transfer them around in secret, blaming victims for the abuse they suffered, etc.)   It implicitly endorses the idea of the priest as "professional" such as the Milwaukee priests in Medin's book saw themselves to be. In this vision, one can label a bishop or priest as a "gifted pastor" because he gave speeches the author likes, wrote books, was a trained musician, and had avante garde tastes in liturgical art and architecture. It is a view in which the work of "pastor" can be separated from the actual work of being a shepherd of souls.

But this is an entirely incorrect view. A shepherd who makes a practice of randomly torturing and killing sheep is quite simply not a good shepherd, not matter what other skills he may show with the shepherds pipes or the craft production of shepherds crooks.

The work of priests and bishops is not alone in this sense. We would not say of a father, "He was a really good father. He did a lot of amazing improvements on the house. He was really supportive of his kids sports teams. He also sexually abused his kids, and that marred his legacy, but really overall a great father!"  Nor would we say of a teacher, "Such a great teacher. Always the most inspired lectures and leadership in extracurriculars. Of course, he also sexually abused some kids, but you know... overall a very gifted teacher!"

Just as we would not say that someone was a "gifted father" or "gifted teacher" while then mentioning that oh, yeah, well, he also sexually abused those who were entrusted to his care, it betrays a total lack of understanding of what the vocation of a pastor is to suggest that someone can be a "gifted pastor" and yet also a perpetrator of clerical sexual abuse.