The sad state of truth-telling and the high state of lie-receiving
The line is from the 3/15/10 edition of Sightings, Martin E. Marty’s weekly newsletter, and it describes one of the ongoing lunacies of Glenn Beck. “The fact that Mr. Beck charms millions of devotees tells more about the sad state of truth-telling and the high state of lie-receiving than civil citizens should want to hear.”
When reading the John Allen interview in NCR with Mother Clare Millea, who is heading up the Vatican “investigation” of American religious women, this patient and sane-sounding woman says the following in answer to John Allen’s question about the reaction the visitation has generated:
NCR (aka John Allen): A year into this process, are you in a better position to understand some of the fear and resistance it’s generated?
Mother Clare Millea: Initially I got many reactions along the lines of, “We were not consulted, we were not warned, this was just thrown on us.” That’s certainly foreign to our American mentality, and our way of doing things. … One time I said to a major superior who lives in Rome, “You and I both live here, and we know this is what happens. Why don’t we just get over it?” She laughed and said, “You’re right. Let’s do it.”
Here in the third millennium, the Church has a structure of governance that is a divine-right, absolute monarchy. It is grossly unrepresentative, lacks checks and balances, deadens the global and national voice of the bishops, excludes the sense of the faithful, compromises liturgy, paralyzes needed development in canon law, ignores the lessons of modern jurisprudence, is obsessed with obedience and secrecy, conflates traditional doctrine with papal opinion, and compromises the intellectual life of the Church. The sexual abuse scandal has shown time and time again that the hierarchy will value the institution over the safety of innocent children, rotting the Church spiritually (and financially) from within.
Yet otherwise sane people continue to accept this governance structure. As Mother Clare Millea said, ”You and I both live here, and we know this is what happens. Why don’t we just get over it?”
Little will change in the Church at the top. When it happens, it will happen from the bottom when people like Mother Clare Millea refuse to accept that “this is what happens” and start exercising some civil (i.e., papal) disobedience instead of just getting over it.
