Ubi Petrus

Leticia at causa nostrae laetitiae just made my day. And my list of modern-day unsung heroes. Any time people these days directly confront their representatives in government and offer the unadulterated Gospel one has to take notice, and she’s done it in spades here. It’s one thing to write an anonymous letter, another to write a signed letter, and entirely another to make a public stand. May we all learn from her example…

Dom has posted, some live-blogging reflections on this past weekend’s Theology of the Body seminar with Christopher West held at the Marian Community Center in Medway, Mass. I wish I could have made it down there but, of course, other commitments intervened. I’ve been reading, on and off as I try to keep up with all my other reading, the new translation of Theology of the Body, edited by Michael Waldstein; I was heartened to find Dom’s notes from the seminar largely match my own personal take on what I’ve read thus far. As for what he suggests in his wrapup (that the Boston Archdiocese may be the center of a renewal of interest in all things ToTB-related), I only hope he’s right. And that he remembers his neighbors up here to his north.

Dom’s writeups are here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Wrapup

Fr. Finigan posts about a story in the Catholic Times where two schools have been chastised for allowing students to serve at Mass during school hours. Mind you, of course, this is a venerable tradition that goes well back in history.

When I was a small boy, we took it in turns to walk round from school to serve Mass. It was actually a very educational experience. We learned about being given the responsibility to get ourselves there and back without messing around: going to serve Mass was a privilege we didn’t want to lose. We learned to respect the different priests of St Mary’s in Croydon. And of course, we learned to love the Mass and the care of the altar and the sacristy. I thank God that the “curriculum” was not such an idol then.

Exactly. It is high time we restore some sanctity and reverence to and for those who serve at the altar. I find absolutely nothing wrong with allowing kids who are doing well already in school and who properly fulfill their roles as altar servers to periodically scoot over to the church to serve. Particularly in the case of schools attached to parishes or sufficiently close to them as to not pose a safety risk. Our parish and kids’ school would be a prime opportunity for this – a quick jaunt from the school to the church across the parking lot and the children could be available to serve for funerals or any other mid-day need.

By tying their opportunity to serve Mass to their attaining and maintaining good grades, the children would also see serving as a rewarding experience, which can help build respect for the task required in those who need it and reinforce it for children who already understand the great gift that is serving at the altar. And just maybe a few of them would see the gift that serving at the altar is and just maybe it would tickle in them an interest in the priesthood. It would, in a way, be a Catholic variant of the “senior privilege” many schools offer to seniors who maintain a certain GPA – they can come in late, leave early, leave the campus or any variety of other treats. This treat just happens to come with a spiritual uplift as well – the opportunity to serve at the altar and receive Christ in the Eucharist. And learn some responsibility along the way as well. I wonder what our pastor thinks about this…

After re-reading my previous post about the NH Attorney General’s audit of the Diocese of Manchester I realize it may come across as an uncritical apologetic defense of the Diocese rather than the first step of an analysis as I had intended. Commenter Carolyn has kindly brought to light some issues that need to be dealt with in any full analysis and I thank her. I’ve had some more time to further review the situation, so I’ll be following up shortly.

In the mean time, I just wanted to make a quick post to give a little background and framing for my perspective on this matter. I don’t want to suggest for a second that the Diocese is lily white and the audit was completely useless. I will, however, confess to a distinct level of frustration with the distressing willingness to Bishop-bash in this Diocese and to point always to the Diocese as the source of all problems (see my post on the Cluster Task Force listening session for an example). For a while I didn’t find too many problems with this since it fits with our corporate approach to life in America. Then I read Ignatius of Antioch’s Letter to the Ephesians in one of Mike Aquilina’s books and it cut me to the quick.

Wherefore it is fitting that ye should run together in accordance with the will of your bishop, which thing also ye do. For your justly renowned presbytery, worthy of God, is fitted as exactly to the bishop as the strings are to the harp. Therefore in your concord and harmonious love, Jesus Christ is sung. And do ye, man by man, become a choir, that being harmonious in love, and taking up the song of God in unison, ye may with one voice sing to the Father through Jesus Christ, so that He may both hear you, and perceive by your works that ye are indeed the members of His Son. It is profitable, therefore, that you should live in an unblameable unity, that thus ye may always enjoy communion with God.

And again

Now the more any one sees the bishop keeping silence, the more ought he to revere him. For we ought to receive every one whom the Master of the house sends to be over His household, as we would do Him that sent him. It is manifest, therefore, that we should look upon the bishop even as we would upon the Lord Himself. And indeed Onesimus himself greatly commends your good order in God, that ye all live according to the truth, and that no sect has any dwelling-place among you. Nor, indeed, do ye hearken to any one rather than to Jesus Christ speaking in truth.

When an Apostolic Father speaks, I’m sorry, but I find a need to listen.

I was spurred on by Dom’s post to take a look into what the Diocese of Manchester has to say about the apparently negative review of its sexual abuse prevention program by KPMG on behalf of the NH Attorney General’s office. You’ll have to forgive me just a bit though if I’m a bit jaded regarding the Boston Globe’s coverage of anything related to this issue – their recent history is not one of trying to see the Church’s side in any way in this matter. Sad, but not surprising. The Union Leader article, which is both longer and slightly more even-handed is here. The Nashua Telegraph editorial which is far less even-handed (being an editorial, I suppose this should be expected, but calling for “regime change” is a step too far in my book) is here. More coverage: Concord Monitor, New Hampshire Public Radio. The actual report can be found here and supplemental information here, and the Diocesan response can be found here.

The Diocese further responded here by laying out changes it has made since KPMG last visited the Diocese. Unfortunately, I can’t tell for sure if these changes have been factored in to the AG’s report or not since this document is undated, although the wording suggests it was not a factor. The list is rather decisive, including (note these are direct quotes, so the “we” is the Diocese, not “me”):

• In accordance with the action plan, we are making site revisits to each parish and school based upon the risk-based model created to determine which parishes and schools should be revisited. These site revisits include the detail testing of support maintained at the parish or school for the safe environment requirements. This eliminates the “self-reporting” that KPMG has mentioned in the past two assessments. The risk-based model contemplates a revisit to every location a minimum of every three years based on risk. This risk-based model is well documented and sustainable for years to come.
• We are in the final stages of developing a camp specific review procedure that will be followed annually. The Compliance Coordinator determined in the summer of 2006, prior to the start of the Attorney General’s second assessment, that given the number of young people attending camp and the number of camp counselors employed, it was appropriate to visit the camps each year. . As a result, procedures have been developed and will be formalized in a “procedures manual”. The process and procedures will be similar to those used in 2006, and will be required annually before the opening of the camps.
• We are conducting quarterly reconciliations of all priests, deacons, and seminarians to ensure that all are screened and trained. These procedures are documented and on file in the Compliance Office. We are in the process of completing the same procedures for the Diocesan Review Board (DRB) members, Protecting God’s Children trainers, and administrative employees.
• Safe environment coordinators (SEC), pastors and principals can now update their own contact information and inform the Compliance Office if a SEC resigns or if there is a new coordinator. This update feature is part of the new on-line database that was effective April 9, 2007. The on-line database will be available to all entities. The Compliance Coordinator has established an implementation plan to transition all parishes and schools to the on-line database over the next few months.
• Monthly reports continue to be made to the Bishop and DRB, and full reports on each review are also provided.

Whether the AG will review and revise these changes or wait until the next audit remains to be seen. One thing I will say regarding the KPMG audit report which is disturbing tone whereby it is suggested that those accused sexual abuse must be regarded as guilty until proven innocent. That is neither Christian nor American – nor is it legal. If this is typical of the position from which this audit was conducted it is simply no wonder that Fr. Arsenault could be faulted for being “difficult”. One also finds it interesting that the Diocese asserts there are certain factual errors in the report.

Even more disturbing is reading the letter from the Diocesan attorney here. In it are relayed items whereby KPMG could be perceived as being specifically antagonistic and borderline irrational rather than acting as an impartial observer and auditor. One gets the feeling they were investigating in a dark room someone they picked up with a dime bag on the street rather than auditing what should be a respected organization. Some of the most relevant sections I’ve taken the liberty to cut-n-paste below.

With respect to the “tone at the top” section on page 2 of your letter, you may not be aware that this “finding” represents an isolated instance in which a disagreement arose in the context of an assessment interview conducted by KPMG with the Delegate for Ministerial Conduct, Fr. Edward Arsenault. To the extent your letter suggests that the 2006 KPMG Assessment illustrates a lack of “acceptance or commitment to cooperation with” the Agreement reached between your Office and the Diocese of Manchester in 2002, we strongly disagree. Indeed, the criticism in the 2006 KPMG Assessment is based on a single interview with Fr. Arsenault from which it is grossly unfair and inaccurate for KPMG to conclude a lack of acceptance or commitment to cooperate with the Agreement. Unfortunately, this results in unfounded conclusions in your letter.

If only that’s where it stopped, but it continues to get worse.

…Based upon what we perceived to be inappropriate and unnecessarily aggressive interview procedures during the 2005 audit, we agreed that KPMG would follow certain protocols in conducting interviews during the 2006 audit. Regrettably, in the particular instance of the interview with Fr. Arsenault, and with others, it was reported to me that KPMG ignored these protocols. When Fr. Arsenault called the protocols to the attention of Mr. Donovan of KPMG, this created tension in the interview process, causing Mr. Donovan to unilaterally suspend the interview with Fr. Arsenault after 15 minutes. … When he was asked to speculate, retrospectively or prospectively, about hypothetical situation posed by the assessor, he resisted doing so. Fr. Arsenault also asked Mr. Donovan to clearly define the meaning of terms to ensure that his understanding was clear. I concur with this effort to remain focused on providing clear, factual responses to questions.

Not that it takes much, but that downright gets my dander up. They were interviewing an otherwise respected member of the clergy who is responsible for overseeing the safety and well-being of thousands of children and yet they treated him like a dime store thief? Come now, that is certainly not the way to hold a respectable audit. For my two cents (and since I’m a tax payer in this state it is my two cents) if KPMG can’t find a way to hold a professional interview working within established and agreed-upon protocols then it is incumbent upon the Attorney General to find an auditor who can. I certainly hope either KPMG or the
AG’s office intend to comment on this issue.

As for some editorial content, I’m not at all surprised there are problems with this audit in terms of representing any level of respect for the Diocese or its employees. For reasons more tangential than topical there is a palpable willingness in this Diocese to blame anyone who works at the Diocesan offices first as soon as anything goes wrong; this extends to your average Joe and Jane Catholic who want to blame anything wrong on the Bishop. At the Cluster Task Force session this past weekend I heard specifically at least once and indirectly several more times people complain “they need to replace the Bishop”. For my money, that goes right along with firing the manager when your baseball team is losing. You’ll notice it rarely has any effect other than to make it look like someone is trying.

Conversely, when I talk to people who actually know the Bishop, they say he is a warm, knowledgeable and truly concerned person who cares deeply about his priests and his flock. If people are asking why he doesn’t solve this, that or the other problem by some sort of fiat, they need only look in the mirror and ask themselves if they’d be willing to support him. This is a crisis, an ongoing problem we need to deal with now and for the future, but we can only solve it like the Church has solved all of Her problems in the past: in union with the Bishops, united with the Holy Father. There is simply no other way this will work.

Finally, since it’s more than marginally topical, some interesting from the 2006 CARA survey:

Dates when reported abuse of minor began

Ages of complainant when abuse began:

Hmmm… That data seems awfully familiar to me. Equally interesting is that we have had no reported cases since Bishop McCormack took office. If this is all his fault, how do you explain the data?

Alive and Young has a great snip from Chesterton’s Heretics on “progress”. It’s amazing how relevant it is to this once-again “enlightened” age. Plus ça change, indeed. I’ll leave you with a little snippet just to make sure you go read the rest.

It is not merely true that the age which has settled least what is progress is this “progressive” age. It is, moreover, true that the people who have settled least what is progress are the most “progressive” people in it.

Please offer up any prayers that may come to you for a little boy I just heard of. I called my mother (at my wife’s faithful prodding, of course) to wish her a happy birthday only to find that it has been rather interesting times recently. In particular, the step-grandson of her co-worker, a young boy of all of one year old, has been diagnosed with a cancerous neuroblastoma very close to his spine. They recently inserted the port which they will soon be using for his chemotherapy. While he is doing well his family is, needless to say, quite stressed. Any prayers would be most appreciated.

Yesterday was a very, well, interesting day. Sufficiently interesting, in fact, that it has taken me until today to write about it because I’ve been trying to digest everything since then. In fact, I still haven’t fully processed everything even now, but if I don’t write anything now I never will.

The morning started, per the norm for our Sundays, with our RCIA session – this weekend’s topic was Holy Orders. Since we’re still using “Come and See”, and the article on Holy Orders was frankly morbidly obtuse. Not a single defense or explanation of the apostolic origin of the structure of the Church but rather four pages of Fr. Richstatter stammering about how the priesthood of today (this was 1997) is “different” than the priesthood of yesterday and a predictable over-emphasis on the common priesthood of the Baptised. Don’t get me wrong – that was one of the most important aspects of the documents of VCII, the common call to holiness, but to place it as opposite to the ordained priesthood in what is supposed to be an article about the ordained priesthood, well, that disqualifies it as a valuable teaching tool in my book. You want to have a theological argument about the relative positions, values and strengths of the common and ordained priesthood? Fine, but not in a teaching tool for those who don’t have any depth of knowledge in the field, and certainly not without providing counter-arguments.

Enough about that. Suffice it to say I’m very glad our Deacon was the leader for the session – he is a very wise man (he’s currently pursuing his Doctorates, a D.Div, I believe) and has an amazing capacity for personable and soft but yet exuberant and intellectual discussion. I have much to learn from him when it comes to “keeping it simple” (note to self: if you use the word “ontological” you’ve just lost your audience).

It turns out he is also on the Diocesan task force assigned to formulate the formation program for the next Diaconal class. As a part of describing that some very interesting, very difficult, numbers came out. Our diocese expects to ordain one priest this year and none – nada, zero, zilch – next year (although the understanding is there is an uptick in years after that). Those are hard numbers to overcome. Even if we, tomorrow, had twenty folks enter the seminary it would still be between four and six years before they would be ordained and anywhere from five to nine years before they would be appointed as pastor. Sometimes people forget that it isn’t just a case of “opening the spigot” where priests will just magically appear shortly at the end of some hose – these things take extraordinary amounts of time. Pray for Fr. Jason Jalbert and his vocations staff – they need all the help they can get.

Now… if that’s where the “interesting” part ended it would be a fairly normal day, but that’s not how things go. Later in the afternoon there was a listening session for the Cluster Task Force of which my parish is a part. (IYDK: our Diocese is broken up into Deaneries and then each Deanery is further delineated into Clusters – how this is all done is beyond me.) Our particular Cluster is composed of St. Catherine of Siena in Manchester, Holy Rosary in Hooksett and St. John the Baptist in Suncook; of the three, St. Catherine’s is by far the largest, St. John the Baptist is in the middle and Holy Rosary is the smallest by a large margin. As it stands now, and due to the above-mentioned ordination figures is likely to stay for the near future, those three parishes have two priests between them: Fr. Paul Montminy at St. Catherine’s, and Fr. Ed Crowley is split between Holy Rosary and St. John the Baptist. Further exacerbating the issue is the projected large growth in population in the area served by these three parishes over the next several years – this area has become an extended bedroom community for both southern NH and metro-Boston thanks to its proximity to two major highways. I think that should suffice for background.

How can I put this without coming across as unnecessarily blunt? I feel terrible for those who sit on the Task Force. Over an hour of the allotted hour and a half was spent with people asserting in tones ranging from a timorous plea to aggressive how-dare-you that the only acceptable solution was to do nothing. This was, of course, capped by a man who virtually shouted his feeling that the Diocese is being, in his word, “disingenuous” and that effectively the decision had already been made. His proof, naturally, was “a priest who knows people at the Diocese” – yes, we’re dealing with insulting our priests and our Bishop via third-hand information in the Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. Of course, Rome was also blamed – they apparently don’t care about the United States any more according to one. I shouldn’t even mention the complaint that there were only men on the Task Force (someone in the combox please explain to me how one gender or the other empirically cannot understand the ramifications of parish realignments on members of the opposite gender because I just don’t get it). It was all very hard to listen to.

There were, happily, a few bright spots. One man reminded everyone that the real solution to the problem is to work and pray for greater vocations or more correctly a greater response to those vocations. While absolutely true and I am truly grateful that the gentleman made that point, it sadly does nothing to address the five year problem which is the core driver for the Task Force. Another man made a rather rambling but well-informed speech about how, as Pope John Paul II said, the restoration of the Church can only come through the Eucharist. He didn’t do much to tie that point to the question of parish re-alignment but I can only hope the pure faith he portrayed gave those sharpening their knives some pause for reflection. I was impressed the members of the Task Force took the sometimes harsh words in as well as they did and did not respond to some of the more slanderous statements which would have risked turning a listening session into a debate or worse. Their calm and cool was commendable.

I, for my part, decided for an as-yet indeterminate reason to remain purely an observer, listening and people-watching. What I wanted to do was to ask those who would accept nothing than the retention of their own current comfort, if necessary at the expense of others, if they had forgotten that the Church has been built upon self-giving sacrifice. “Amen, amen I say to you, no slave is greater than his master nor any messenger greater than the one who sent him. (Jn 13:16)” As happened to the true Master, so shall it be for His disciples.

Have we forgotten how to sacrifice, with our ready-made lives and shrink-wrapped entertainment, with our “relevant” liturgies and our anything-you-want-any-time-you-want amenities? I ask because I did not hear, other than one person, the suggestion that “not my will, but yours be done. (Lk 22:42b)” Father, if I must sacrifice my convenience for the good of your Church and the greater Glory of your name I only count myself as unworthy of such a privilege. What I have is Yours for it comes from You from the beginning; do with me as you will. Not my will, but yours be done. Lord of the Harvest, send laborers, for the harvest is great and the laborers few.

I mentioned one day in our RCIA class, on the topic of suffering, that our God is a God of seeming contradictions. The way to life is hard, the way to death easy. A seed cannot produce life but that it should die. The salvation of the world required the death of the Son. In a perfectly logical, “ones and zeros” kind of world those things don’t make sense. But while God is pure logic, He also transcends logic. or at least our feeble attempts at understanding it. Thus, we wind up with nuggets like this, from CNA:

Washington DC, May 4, 2007 / 01:18 pm (CNA).- Protestors gathered outside the US Supreme Court building this week to demand that the judicial body reinstate the right to pray in public places. Among those present was William “Bill” Murray, son of the late Madelyn Murray O’Hare, the militant atheist who won a 1963 court battle to prohibit prayer in public schools.

Several years ago, William Murray converted to Christianity and today he leads the Coalition for Religious Freedom. He grew up under the shadow of his mother, who won the famous court battle that removed expressions of faith from the public school system in the United States.

The Rev. Rob Schenck, who participated in the protest, said the presence of Murray was emblematic. “Nobody knows this issue like he does. He was used, abused and indoctrinated to think that prayer violated the Constitution. Now he uses the genius that God gave him to return prayer to the schools and to all public life in America,” he said.

Murray became one of the most outspoken critics of the work of his mother, who was accused of manipulating her followers, robbing funds from her organization and tax fraud. Madelyn Murray O’Hare was killed in 1995 together with her son Jon and her granddaughter Robin, William’s daughter.

The son of the woman who perpetrated a great crime is given the opportunity, and grasps hold thereof, to right the wrongs and stand up for the rights transgressed by his mother. This is a far cry from visiting the sins of a man upon his descendants for seven generations. Just when it seems most terrible, God has a twist just waiting for you.