Deconstructing Papal Pronouncements

Today, Christians worldwide celebrate the resurrection of Christ. Lent is over; Good Friday has passed. To a church that has experienced the deep pain of clergy sexual abuse, these days are a reminder that from pain and sorrow eventually come hope, redemption and new life.

“resurrection of Christ” - a mythical event in which a dead person's body “rises” to heaven. “Lent” and “Good Friday” are holy days specified by “the book”.

“church” - is that the building, the keepers of the church, the followers of the church? The “church” that experienced deep pain is the parishioners. The analogy is drawn between these parishioners who have been harmed and the “Christ” figure, who dies in an agonizing fashion, but then gets to go to the nice place forever. This is fine justification for suffering on earth. Out of this suffering will come “hope, redemption, and a new life”. Uh-huh.

This new life will come only by confronting sexual abuse head-on, taking responsibility for the wrongs of the past and committing to doing all that we can never to allow the tragedy of abuse to happen again. In the United States, we bishops have put in place tough standards for reporting allegations to civil authorities because we recognize that abuse is not only a sin but also a serious crime. In the Archdiocese of Washington and in dioceses nationwide, we mandate child protection training for adults and education for children. Seminarians, clergy, volunteers and employees who work with children must undergo criminal background checks. Independent advisory boards of lay experts guide our work, and, perhaps most important, we continue to reach out to those harmed to help them heal from their pain.

Oh. I guess they mean the keepers of the church “experienced the deep pain”! Yes those priests are really suffering from guilt by association – it's simply horrible. They must all be seeking psychiatric help.

“Seminarians, clergy, volunteers and employees who work with children must undergo criminal background checks” - “Faith” in God to protect the children is not very strong; We have the police check on whether these people have good intentions!

In 2008-09, 6 million children in the United States received lessons on recognizing inappropriate behavior and what to do if someone tries to harm them or makes them feel uncomfortable. Two million adults underwent background checks. Here in Washington, we have had a written child protection policy for nearly 25 years.

We've been warning the children, but they just don't get it.

This commitment to safety has been done with the support and leadership of Pope Benedict XVI.

Then-Cardinal Ratzinger, as the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Pope John Paul II were strong voices supporting the American bishops when we asked for changes in canon law and for special norms to expedite the removal of priests involved in sexual abuse of minors in a quick and decisive manner.

“special norms” - that's a twisted term. They also had administrative obstacles to getting rid of bad priests, I guess.

Pope Benedict has made pastoral care a priority. Two years ago this month, he stood with us at Mass at Nationals Park and spoke about the sexual abuse of minors: "No words of mine could describe the pain and harm inflicted by such abuse. It is important that those who have suffered be given loving pastoral attention. Nor can I adequately describe the damage that has occurred within the community of the Church."

One of the most poignant moments of the Holy Father's visit to our city was his private visit with victims of clergy sexual abuse. He spoke with each person, he listened to them, he prayed with them and he heard how devastating the abuse was to their lives.

And that made them feel a lot better ...

Clergy sexual abuse, and in fact all sexual abuse, must be addressed wherever it occurs. No child should ever be harmed. But the wrong actions of some do not justify the vilification of all. The priests who harmed children violated the heart of their ministry and have harmed not only our young people and our community of faith but also the vast majority of their brother priests who faithfully live out their promises to serve Christ and his people.

It is not easy to be a priest today. In a culture sometimes overly focused on material goods and getting ahead professionally, it may be hard to understand why someone would voluntarily choose a life of service and a job that is 24-7. Priests are there for others when they are in despair, grieving and destitute. They help people find hope in the darkness, a reason for living and the love of God.

Some of the most significant work of priests is found in what so many take for granted -- directly, quietly, caringly and effectively serving people in parishes. Priests celebrate Mass, baptize children, witness marriages, bring reconciliation through confession, serve the poor, console the sick and bury our loved ones. Their selfless ministry helps hold together the Catholic faith family and the wider community.

celebrate Mass, baptize children, witness marriages, bring reconciliation through confession, serve the poor, console the sick and bury our loved ones –

If they stop doing these things how many lives will be adversely affected?

Priests don't expect thanks and often don't receive it. They see the priesthood as an opportunity to bring the love of Christ to others and to help them come closer to God. It is in earthen vessels that we carry a magnificent treasure.

WTF? I guess we are the earthen vessels, and aren't we precious?

As the Catholic Church continues to face the tragedy of clergy sexual abuse, we must pray for the victims, recommit to doing all that we can to keep children safe, and remember and pray for the priests who every day faithfully live out the deep love that Christ has for all of us.

Maybe recommitting will work better than the original committing... But don't worry, Christ loves us all – even the pedophiles must be part of God's plan?

The writer is archbishop of Washington.

The commentator is robdashu.

Paradigms and Beliefs

paradigm - a pattern, example, or model -Webster New World
dictionary

The world we live in is an incredibly complex place. Man has developed to the point that he is striving, with some success, to understand the world around him. He has learned to harness many of the forces of nature. He has learned to shape many elements of his environment. In so doing he has built an understanding of how the world works; physical processes have been studied and documented to the point where man is dangerous to himself and all of the other creatures of the earth. Nonetheless, his understanding of the physical world is complete enough that he can shape his environment, and he has developed a practical knowledge sufficient to predict the immediate effects of his actions. The study of physical processes has led him to develop models, or paradigms, that are useful in this prediction.

The primary model underlying this understanding is his model of causality. If I do A, B follows. Man has had such success using this model in the exploration of the physical world that it has become an assumption that underlies nearly all of his undertakings. This assumption is at the heart of the "scientific method", whish is a model unto itself of how man expands his understanding of the universe.

As man's body of knowledge has developed, the exploration of causes has been pushed further and further from it's original basis - causality in the physical world that is clearly explained by physics and chemistry. The same methods are being applied to the elucidation of questions that border on religion: philosophy, cosmology, ethics, and human behavior in general. The lack of agreement that is found among the proposed answers to these root questions implies that this approach fails badly when applied to these areas of inquiry. The fact that "objective" approaches to demonstrating causality fail in contexts other than the physical world means that there can be, and is, a much wider diversity of opinion (and belief) about the answers to these more abstract questions.

Some in the academic world have carried the causality paradigm to its logical extreme. They have given birth to such theories as behaviorism that would have us believe that man is much like the machines that we understand so well from physical science, only so much more complex that the actual forces and influences that "cause" his behavior cannot be singled out.

If one has given the matter any thought, one has probably developed some kind of belief concerning the validity of behaviorism. Such beliefs are based on ... Just what are they based on? Beliefs about the physical world are based, in the simplest cases, on our perceptions of the world around us and how it reacts to our influence. In cases that are outside of our everyday experience, we rely on the "experts" (beginning with mom and dad) who have models of why things work the way they do - in general, these models are accepted by us because they seem to explain the world of our everyday experience fairly reliably. When we reach the realm of psychology or other less tangible pursuits, we rely on such things as "knowledge", "reason", or "the experts" - Ah, the experts. At this point, we must take a leap of faith, directly into the arms of those who have made it their business to apply their "knowledge" and "reason" to the area of interest at the moment. Where did their knowledge come from? In most cases, most of it came from the "experts" that preceded them.

So, can one show us that the explanations that they would have us take as beliefs are any more than a house of cards? Should one of the basic tenets, or foundation amends of their models turn out to be false, will it collapse on itself leaving us with nothing more than chaos?

Well, I digress a bit here, but only to make the point that beliefs are not always founded on extremely solid ground, but instead are notions that we pick up during life that we internalize and make our own. The fact that they are not necessarily True is not evident to us because "we take these truths to be self-evident", as the wise men who framed the U Declaration of Independence put it.

The fact that there is such diversity among humans with respect to which truths that they take to be self-evident must lead one to question the validity of all beliefs!

This essay explores some of the literature on beliefs, belief systems, their adaptability, their development, and the human characteristics that cause us to either accept existing belief systems or to forge our own.

Belief Systems

First, a definition is in order. One definition proposed in the literature seems reasonable:

The belief system is conceived to represent all the beliefs, sets, expectancies, or hypotheses, conscious or unconscious, that a person at a given time accepts as true of the world in which he lives.

This belief system need not be "systematic" in that all of the parts fit neatly together. Some or many beliefs may be logically related or consistent, but there may be apparent contradictions or ambiguities between individual beliefs. Nonetheless, it functions as a system in that concepts are evaluated with respect to the entire group of beliefs. It may be useful to think of the system as consisting of a group of sub-systems, each of which does display a high degree of integrity within that sub-system. The degree to which such sub-systems vary or appear contradictory may be viewed as a measure of the willingness of the individual to tolerate ambiguity, or as an acknowledgement that the world is indeed complex, and apparent contradictions are just that - apparent contradictions. The fact that the disparate beliefs can coexist may mean that the individual is willing to accept that a resolution is possible, but not achievable yet, due to a lack of knowledge or understanding. In the extreme case, the individual may be so openminded as to have a high degree of inconsistency between sub-systems. Each sub-system may itself be quite narrow in scope, and there may be a much larger number of sub-systems than in most other individuals. Such an individual would probably exhibit a confused state when faced with a decision, or might be judged to be quite irrational by most observers. He would probably be seen by society as mentally disturbed.

This raises the issue of the functionality of belief systems. The barrage of sensory input presented to man needs to be filtered, weighed for importance, interpreted for its meaning, and evaluated with respect to its relevance to the individual's survival (see Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception). If this process were wholly conscious, the individual would be totally absorbed in the process. We develop early in life a set of expectations about the world we live in that allows us to classify perceptions at an unconscious level so that our conscious mind need only deal with those that "important" or "relevant". These expectations form a very basic part of our belief systems. In this way, belief systems allow the individual to move beyond dealing with the barrage of perceptions, and free up his mental resources to deal in a more in-depth way with those perceptions that are deemed important.

Social psychologist Milton Rokeach (who penned the definition above) developed a model of belief systems and how they are organized. He proposes that they can be viewed as consisting of three layers: central. Intermediate, and peripheral. What Rokeach calls the central region contains our most basic beliefs concerning:

* the nature of physical reality and the physical properties of the world we live in;
* the social world he lives in;
* the self.

The beliefs in this region he terms primitive beliefs. One characteristic that he proposes to identify a belief as primitive is that "virtually everyone is believed to have it also".
The intermediate region consists of a very special kind of beliefs: those associated with "the nature of the positive and negative authority to be depended upon to fill out" our knowledge of the world (i.e. which experts to believe). Each individual can only hope to gain first-hand knowledge of a small part of the world, and must rely on others who he deems trustworthy and knowledgeable to provide him with credible beliefs about the rest.

This intermediate region is not concerned with what types of authorities (they may be religious, governmental, political, academic, popular, journalistic, etc.) an individual accepts, but their attitudes towards these authorities' pronouncements. Is there blind faith in the pronouncements even though they may contradict the individual's experience? Are the authorities' statements weighed as to their rationality? The answers to these questions and many related ones places the individual somewhere on a scale of dogmatism. Psychologists have studied this field quite a bit and have developed tests to measure how dogmatic individuals are.

[ More on dogmatism to come.]

A Decent Proposal ...

We have an estimated 400,000 new homes in builder's inventories that need to be absorbed into the housing market.
[ 2006 National Association of Homebuilders (NAHB) 2006 Fall Construction Forecast Conference held Oct. 25 in Washington, D.C. ]

In early 2007, the National Alliance to End Homelessness reported a point-in-time estimate of 744,313 people experiencing homelessness in January 2005.
[ National Coalition for the Homeless ]

This got me thinking. We don't really have a “housing surplus”, we have a “market surplus”. America, as a nation needs the housing. 744,000 people homeless at any given time! Probably half a million houses now that those that were in the pipeline in late 2006 have been completed.

Assuming most of the housing “overhang” is in 3 and 4 bedroom homes (i.e. McMansions), each of them can accommodate three or four people. So, with about 250,000 of these McMansions dedicated to housing the homeless, we're all set. Access to these units would only be as a last resort, of course. Candidates would prove that they own nothing besides the clothes on their backs, and have repeatedly failed to find employment.

Just the bureaucratic nightmare of administering such a program would put legions of administrators back to work, filing, making appointments, verifying abject poverty, coordinating vacancies among the Public McMansions. Of course, some kind of transportation will be needed to move folks that ain't got nothin to their McMansion housing. Defunct limousine services can be aquired by the Dept of McMansion Housing to move the people to their rooms.

We need a name for this economic program. Any ideas should be sent to Dept. of the Treasury, Attn: T Geitner.