Thoughts on Threshing and Sowing

For the past several years there has been a point of contention (and, I will admit, on my part some deliberate prodding/provoking) between my mother and me: Catholicism. I expect that now it can no longer be a point of disagreement and debate but rather a painful line of division.

Salinger once wrote "Catholics are always trying to find out if you are Catholic." I have to give him props for that observation. To be Catholic is, as my father explained, like being Jewish: It is not a question of practicing but of cultural definition. We are Catholic because we have been called so - excluded and oppressed since "The Flight of the Earls," through the Troubles - (and key to the success of Tammany Hall). To abandon that identity - a sacrliege, not because of any question of Transubstantiation v. Consubstantiation, election or good works, but because it is a denial of self-history: what went before you, what made you. Understood thus it is an act of self-mutilation.

But there are times you have to pass the scalpel.

Now, if I was a Protestant (and thus better versed in Scripture over Saints) I would quote something about Threshing and Sowing or plucking out thy left eye if it offend thee.

Well, I am offended. And the Church's defensive and aggressive response to its malfeasance concerning the abuse of its most vulnerable members is the last straw. Last week a letter from then Cardinal Ratzinger resisting the explusion of a priest repeatedly accused of molesting children in his charge surfaced. In this letter the Cardinal, in elegant Latin while acknowledging the "grave significance" of the charges filed, asserts that it is "necessary to consider the good of the Universal Church together with that of the petitioner, and it is also unable to make light of the detriment that [such action]...can provoke." He closes his letter referencing once again "the common good" which must always be in mind.

This is where his future Holiness was wrong: it is not a question of cost or benefit analysis. Christianity is not a formula, or, despite Jesus's ability to make a little bit go a long way, a multiplying of loaves and fishes - the greatest good for the greatest number. Christianity is a practice of faith. Faith that what we do matters - that there is a right and a wrong - and that we always have a decision between the two.

The Church's focus on caution in confronting controversy and the pre-emminence of the preservation of the "common good" over the protection of the least of that common's members may be many things: reasoned, calculated, cautious, but I cannot think it Christian.