Clerical Abuse Redefined

When we hear the term “clerical abuse,” most think of perverse sexual behavior. But it seems worth asking if the parameters of the term might need to be expanded to include other abuses of power.

BY THOMAS HARRINGTON

View original article at Brownstone.org.

Clerical abuse is a term we’ve all, sadly, become acquainted with over the last two decades or so. As a practice, it revolves around the grievous misuse of power, of leveraging an authority rooted in a supposedly special relationship to transcendent forces to commit soul-destroying violence against those who are truly the “least of our brethren.”

It is hard, for me at least, to think of a more vile form of trespass, in that it not only violates the physical and psychological dignity of the victim, but robs him of trust, the mental attribute he will most need to successfully engage in the arduous task of healing from the violation.

When we hear the term “clerical abuse,” I think most of us think, quite rightly, of perverse sexual behavior.

But in light of the recent passing of Pope Francis, it seems worth asking if the parameters of the term might need to be expanded to include other abuses of power that resulted in the violation of the physical and psychological intimacy, as well as the inherent dignity of those who look to the Catholic Church for spiritual guidance.

This came to mind after watching the Spanish language video promoting vaccine uptake that the late pontiff, working in coordination with a number of Latin American Cardinals and bishops, released in late August of 2021.

While I do not generally like to use long citations, I believe it is warranted in this case to provide a full sense of the rhetorical arsenal that the pontiff and his hand-picked collaborators employed in their effort to convince their followers to take the Covid vaccines. The italics are mine.

Pope Francis: Thanks to God and the work of many, we now have vaccines to protect us from Covid 19. With them, come the hope that the pandemic might end. But this will only take place if they are available to all and if we collaborate with one another.

Archbishop José Gómez (USA): The terrible Covid pandemic has caused sickness, death and suffering across the entire world. May God grant us the grace to face it with the strength of our faith, making sure the vaccines are available to all so that all can get vaccinated.

Cardinal Carlos Aguilar Reyes (México): As we prepare for a better future as a global interconnected community we seek to spread hope, to all people, without exceptions. From North to South America, we support vaccinations for all.

Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga (Honduras): There is still much to learn about this virus. But one thing is sure. The authorized vaccines work, and they are here to save lives. They are key to the path of personal and universal healing.

Cardinal Cláudio Hommes (Brasil): The heroic efforts of health professionals have resulted in the making of safe and effective vaccines to protect the entire human family. Getting vaccinated is an act of love, especially toward the most vulnerable.

Cardinal Gregorio Rosa Chávez (El Salvador): Vaccination helps us protect the most vulnerable. Our choice to get vaccinated affects others. It is a moral responsibility and an act of love for the entire community.

Archbishop Miguel Cabrejos (Perú): We are united, North, Central and South America along with the Caribbean to promote and support vaccination for all. I encourage you to act responsibly as members of the great human family, striving for and protecting integral health and universal vaccination.

Pope Francis: Getting Vaccinated with the vaccines authorized by the relevant authorities is an act of love, and helping to insure that the majority of people do so is also an act of love, for one’s self, for our families and our friends and for peoples. Love is also social and political. There is social love and political love, always overflowing with small gestures of personal charity, capable of transforming and improving society. Getting vaccinated is a simple but profound way of promoting the common good and caring for one another, especially the most vulnerable. I pray to God that each one of us contribute their small grain of sand, their own gesture of love. However small it might seem, love is always grand. Contribute your own small gesture in the hope of creating a better future. Thank you and may God bless you.

What is most immediately clear is that, in their role as allegedly privileged interpreters of God’s wishes, these church leaders are presenting the act of taking the vaccine as an act of love for our fellow human beings.

Implied in this call to love our fellow human beings is the belief, as the Pope said in his opening statement, that the vaccines have the capacity to “protect us from (getting) Covid” as well as passing it along to others.

Indeed, this idea—that by taking the vaccine, each of us is in some way protecting the welfare of others, especially the most vulnerable—is the most recurrent rhetorical element of the whole presentation.

Then there is the flat affirmation, submitted by Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga, “The authorized vaccines work, and they are here to save lives.”

Cardinal Hommes takes things one step further when he says, with a flourish that he no doubt stayed up all night struggling to compose, that the vaccines are “safe and effective.”

Less given to enticing compliance through reasoning is Cardinal Rosa Chávez, who simply says that taking the vaccine is a “moral responsibility.”

But it would not be a tried-and-true Covid vaccine pitch without a subtle threat of social ostracism for those that might be entertaining contrary ideas.

It is Archbishop Cabrejos who takes on the job as the enforcer when he says, “We are united, North, Central and South America along with the Caribbean to promote and support vaccination for all. I encourage you to act responsibly as members of the great human family, striving for and protecting integral health and universal vaccination.”

Shorn of its surface gentility, the archbishop’s utterance could be boiled down to something like this: “All the good people are united with the representatives of God here on earth in doing the right thing and getting vaccinated. Will you be responsible like us, or will you shirk your sacred duty?”

Am I being overly harsh with these princes of the church? I don’t think so.

And my reason for saying that proceeds precisely from my knowledge of a practice whose value has been stressed time and again in the course of my on-and-off relationship with the Church, and especially in my interactions with Jesuits like the recently departed pontiff: discernment

As presented by those Jesuits, discernment is, in the most basic sense, the art of discriminating carefully from among the many paths life offers us, and seeking through personal meditation and prayer, to identify the one that is most amenable to one’s own flourishing as a physical and spiritual being.

It is understood that this process is most effectively carried out when we intentionally separate ourselves from the day-to-day rhythms of the world—as is done in the exercises of Saint Ignatius—so as to not be swept up in its often overwhelming “common knowledge” which can obscure the custom-made truths we are tasked with locating within the often roiling mysteries of our own being.

In this presentation by the Pope and his Latin American chosen court, where was this concern for the sanctity and dignity of each individual and his or her own unique life journey? Where was the supposedly important Catholic concern with freedom of conscience?

Nowhere that I’ve been able to recognize.

What I saw and heard instead was a group of men who not only spoke again and again of the need to sublimate the self to the group, but that did so in manipulative clichés that were largely indistinguishable from those being mouthed at the same time by the sold-out press, our politicians, and the public-facing ghouls at the WEF and the WHO.

This indicates to me that, insofar as the practice of moral discernment was operative among them, it was occurring at a decidedly low pulse.

And where was the intellectual discernment, another supposedly very Jesuit trait, that should have been applied to the industry and government claims about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines they were so heartily recommending to the laity in the name of love and solidarity?

Was there no one in the entire policy-making apparatus of the Curia who found the time to read the FDA briefing papers issued upon the release of the vaccines and to see what I immediately saw in them: that the trials had not shown that the vaccines had any clear ability to either prevent infection or stop transmission of the virus?

Given their repeated emphasis on presenting vaccination as an act of altruism, this is not exactly a trivial matter. And yet it does not appear that any of these church spokesmen took the time to figure out if they were on solid scientific ground in presenting vaccine uptake as an inherently social act.

During his pontificate, Pope Francis repeatedly underscored the need to listen to the voices of those who have been ignored or excluded from society by the rich and powerful.

But interestingly, this laudable impulse was not extended by him or his court to those like Sucharit Bhakdi and scores of other doctors and scientists who, quite early on, sought to warn the world of the potentially devastating health effects of the vaccine.

Did he or his collaborators speak up about the need to respect minority opinions on the efficacy and safety of the vaccines, opinions that, as we know, were being actively censored by the press and the government in all the majority Catholic countries in the world?

Not to my knowledge.

And did this supposed champion of the excluded, or any of his cardinals or bishops, speak out against the scientifically baseless, morally repugnant, and patently illegal regimes of social exclusion that were erected in the name of fighting the virus and saving lives?

Or the enormous and entirely predictable cognitive and spiritual damage done to billions of children around the world wrought by scientifically unsubstantiated school closures?

Or the pain caused to tens to thousands by nonsensical rules that prevented them from being with dying loved ones during their last moments of earthly life?

If either he or they did do so, I must have missed it.

And given that he and his hierarchy actively promoted vaccine uptake as a moral act, one would think that, now seeing the hundreds of thousands of debilitating injuries and deaths caused by the injections, and the manifest inability of the same shots to do any of the “loving” things they claimed they would do, the Pope and his courtiers would have spent the last 1-2 years in 24-hour repentance mode, offering care and succor to the vaccine-afflicted.

But as far as I know, the official church has not begun any campaigns of repair or repentance, nor made any public requests for forgiveness.

Billions of people around the world look to the pope and his bishops for guidance in navigating the difficult moral issues of their lives. This trust is rooted in the belief that, owing to their extraordinary devotion to prayer and study, these men possess a greater understanding than do most of how God wants us to conduct our lives here in the material realm of existence.

It is now clear that these members of the Church hierarchy abused this trust during the Covid crisis by providing advice cum commandments that not only did little or nothing to ameliorate the problem at hand, but damaged the lives and longer-term life prospects of millions of people in the process.

And it appears likely that when it comes to the wave of physical suffering and death wrought by vaccines they so heartily recommended to their flocks, we are probably closer to the beginning than to the end of that process.

It seems to me that their behavior casts a whole new light on the term “clerical abuse.”

Doesn’t it?

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