{"id":46678,"date":"2019-03-27T19:36:46","date_gmt":"2019-03-28T00:36:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/?p=46678"},"modified":"2019-04-03T08:49:42","modified_gmt":"2019-04-03T13:49:42","slug":"loving-the-church-means-loving-your-enemies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/2019\/03\/27\/loving-the-church-means-loving-your-enemies\/","title":{"rendered":"Loving the Church means loving your enemies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Adam J. DeVille<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Starting last fall, I re-designed my ecclesiology class. Doing so as the sex abuse crisis was and is in high gear required me regularly to remind myself of the sober counsel of Evagrius of Pontus on the logismoi <\/em>or disordered thoughts, including anger. The fourth-century monastic Evagrius, whom I regularly teach to my students, gave us that diagnostic system of eight disordered thoughts which eventually makes its way, in modified form, into the West as the \u201cseven deadly sins.\u201d For Evagrius, anger – even righteous anger at abuse and evil – is the most dangerous of the eight disordered thoughts he describes in detail for it is the fastest route to wrecking the inner stillness (hesychia<\/em>) you need to pray and to live in community. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That stillness is of course hugely important to monastic communities\nin the traditional sense, but – and here I follow Paul Evdokimov on the\nuniversal call to monasticism – it is no less important to all other\ncommunities of home and parish and university where we try to pray and to live\nin self-giving chastity and charity with one another in obedience to the Lord.\nIs it possible to have peace in those communities today, and charity towards\ntheir leaders – priests and especially bishops? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not only is it possible, it is more necessary than ever. What good\nis it to love clerics and hierarchs when they do good, but not when they commit\nor cover up acts of evil? How can we reconcile the Lord\u2019s command to love our\nenemies if we treat bishops as the enemy in the Church today and hate them for\ntheir manifold sins against children, seminarians, nuns, and others? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet, we are not loving them if we fail to find ways to hold\nthem accountable. Love without change, love without amendment, love without\nrepentance and renewal is no love at all. Love of the Church today in the\nabstract, without implementing new structures to cement into place local\naccountability, is no love at all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In these pages late last year, Liborius Lumma<\/a> argued for several new reforms to bring about such accountability, saying that the Church today is facing the \u201cabysmally destructive consequences of the connection between power and uncontrolled, unreflective, irresponsible forms of sexuality.\u201d That connection between abuses of power and of sex is more recently treated, and in even greater detail, in my newly published Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power<\/a>. <\/em>There I argue that love for the Body of Christ cannot remain an abstraction or a pious sentiment, but must be shown in concrete local practices and reforms in which we all hold each other accountable starting at the parish level, proceeding to diocesan structures, and including reforms to national episcopal conferences so that they can finally function as real and proper synods with electoral, legislative, and disciplinary functions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But before many of us can begin to think about such reforms, we\nhave to get control of what, following Evagrius, I would call the ninth\ndisordered thought that afflicts Catholics more than anybody else: the\nelevation of clerics, and the pope above all, into celebrities and oracles, one\nconsequence of which is that we assume they alone can exercise power in the\nChurch; the rest of us are unworthy to do so. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is natural that those Catholic hierarchs who have power, and\nwho have squandered it so wickedly in the on-going sex abuse crisis, should\nfear any attempts to reconfigure its exercise. The natural fear is that – as\nBenedetto Croce is reported to have said about the progress of history – victims\nand executioners will merely swap roles. But proposals for reform in the Church\nare not ginned up by mobs coming to push prelates off purple thrones and mount\ntheir heads on Traitor\u2019s Gate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather, my proposals – which follow Congar and Afanasiev\nespecially by being deeply grounded in history and tradition, including that of\nthe Christian East – are aimed at showing love for bishops and priests, and for\nthe whole Church, by denying to anybody <\/em>what,\nusing the language of the moral manuals, we must call near-occasions of sin. A\nmonopoly on power, such as bishops have in their dioceses and priests in\nparishes, is always one such near-occasion, and leaving such occasions open for\nmanifestly weak men to fall into is not a loving thing for the Church to do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hard though it may be to believe in the heat of the moment, when so many people are justly angry at the abuse and myriad betrayals, the desire for what Lumma calls a \u201cparadigm shift in its system of power\u201d must never be feared as some scheme concocted by some Comit\u00e9 de salut public <\/em>looking to subject bishops to a reign of terror. The reforms I propose in Everything Hidden <\/em>are born out of love for the Church, a theme treated with powerful eloquence in Christoph Sch\u00f6nborn\u2019s 1998 book Loving the Church, <\/em>which I have included as one of several in my newly redesigned ecclesiology class – as much a reminder to me as to my students of this most difficult of challenges in this dark and dolorous hour which love alone can redeem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n