Digging a hole with narrow focus
“There was once a priest with cold, watery eyes, who, in the still of the night, wept cold tears.”
Father Adolphus Schwartz was the fictional creation of the wayward Roman Catholic F. Scott Fitzgerald. The good Father had a bad case of scrambled marbles. In the final stanzas of Fitzgerald’s short-story “Absolution,” Father Schwartz does a deep dive into his troubled psyche, prompting the 11-year-old boy protagonist of the story to conclude, “This man is crazy.”
As metaphor, Father Schwarz’s “cold tears” is not bad, reflecting the misery of the Church as it passes through a dark night of the soul and conscience. The Pennsylvania grand jury report detailing instances of child sexual abuse numbering in the tens of hundreds by men of the cloth has brought the Catholic Church to an abyss from which there may be no crawling out, except by means of radical reconstruction.
(The fact that the allegations keep on coming is not helping. Late last week word surfaced that Monsignor Michael Matusak, pastor of three Uniontown churches, has been accused of inappropriately touching a girl in the 1990s, when he was pastor of a church in Mount Pleasant. Matusak, suspended from his duties, is awaiting the outcome of an investigation by the Diocese of Greensburg.)
On the other hand, the Church has been here before. Somehow, it has managed to survive and even flourish. It’s been little short of miraculous, given the scope of the scandals. Here are some of the low points, in short-hand:
n A French peasant girl, seeing visions of three saints, inspires an army to fight against English domination of a large part of France. Captured, she is tried by a pro-English bishop and found guilty of heresy and burned at the stake in 1431. Exonerated 25 years later, in 1920 she is declared a Catholic saint.
n In 1517, Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar, attacks Church practices, including the selling of indulgences, an abuse that generates large sums of money for the papal treasury. Luther, excommunicated as a heretic, refuses to recant, ushering in the Protestant Reformation.
n Galileo Galilei, a 16th-century Italian polymath, theorizes that the sun, not the earth, is at the center of the known universe. The Church deems his theory heretical and he is forced to recant his idea. In 1992, Pope John Paul II expresses deep regret over Galileo’s treatment and issues a declaration acknowledging the error of the Church.
The period 1470 to 1530 saw a succession of six popes whose malfeasance was enormous and ultimately disastrous for the Church. Leo X, while the most congenial of these popes, may have been the most disastrous of all.
“The greatest scandal of the age,” according to historian Barbara Tuchman, took place during Leo’s watch. Indeed, Leo instigated it.
A member of the fabulously wealthy Medici clan of Florence, Leo was convinced he was the target for assassination by Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci of Siena. The plot was quite ingenious: rumor was that Cardinal Petrucci had hired a physician whose job was to lance a boil on the papal buttock. Instead, the physician would be injecting Leo with a lethal dose of poison.
Leo, learning of the plot, had Petrucci strangled by an infidel, since “protocol did not permit a Christian to put to death a Prince of the Church.”
The real scandal arose from the fact that Leo then created 32 new Cardinals in a day, collecting large sums of money from each one. Leo was suspected of killing Petrucci and greatly enlarging the list of cardinals to benefit the depleted Vatican treasury, which he himself had undermined.
Tuchman added that Leo was too busy mourning the death of his favorite artist Raphael to pay much attention to Luther and the outrage over indulgences.
The sack of Rome soon followed, which most reasoned was “divine punishment for the worldly sins of the pope and hierarchy, and few questioned that the fault came from within.”
In modern times, Pope Pius XII, says historian John Cornwell, “helped Adolf Hitler destroy (the democratic) German Catholic political opposition (to his rule and) betrayed the Jews of Europe” before and during World War II, all in pursuit of “absolute power” for himself.
Speaking to reporters last week in Pittsburgh, Mark Fuller, who suffered priestly abuse in the 1970s, said he appreciated the fact that his perpetrator and the other priests named by the grand jury were in some sense “sick.”
“The real shame,” he said, “is on the people who hid them and moved them around, and the whole institution that supported the culture.”
The Pittsburgh Diocese’s opposition to a lifting of the civil and criminal liabilities ban on acts of priestly wrongdoing from years past is yet another instance of the Church focusing on narrow self-interest rather than the greater good.
The Church is digging itself quite a hole, again.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.