A few years ago, at the height of the pedophilia scandals that rocked the Catholic Church in the United States, I received, as I had every year, Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput’s annual fundraising letter. By that time, I was no longer a practicing Catholic, having undergone a quiet and self-imposed excommunication. The reasons are familiar to millions of fallen away Catholics: the church’s marginalizing of homosexuals, divorced people, and women in general; its paternalistic refusal to sanction discussion of certain unpleasantries (women as priests, celibacy, etc.); the misleading posturing on embryonic stem-cell research; and, of course, the shrill and unrelenting rhetoric regarding reproductive rights.
Beyond my own parish, the church at large hadn’t noticed my absence. And so, despite the fact that for nearly five years I had not practiced the faith I was born and raised with, I continued to receive the archbishop’s annual appeal for money. In fact, I still do.
In previous years, I had been content to leave the letter unopened. After all, in addition to my extensive and growing list of grievances, I wasn’t in agreement with how I perceived the Denver Archdiocese administering its funds. For example, commensurate with the archbishop’s annual ask, I sensed an archdiocese turning a blind eye to the needs of inner-city Catholic schools and parishes, in fact closing some of them, while building new ones in suburban locales.
That year, however, I read Chaput’s letter. I was curious to see if his appeal would reference the child-abuse scandals in Boston and elsewhere and attempt to position and articulate his request in the context of those events. The gesture would not have been without precedent. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, for example, I know of at least one national charity that rewrote and repositioned its already printed fundraising materials out of a sense of respectful acknowledgment and humility for the country’s shared loss.
Sadly, no such respect and humility graced the archbishop’s appeal. What I read was familiar. Business as usual. Pay no attention to that scandal behind the curtain. Trust the church’s moral authority to administer your gift properly.
After I wrote to the archbishop, explaining that I wouldn’t contribute to his fundraising-efforts and chastising him for ignoring the emerging scandals, he responded with an explanation focusing on the impossibility of changing an already printed form letter. No matter. The closing line of his response, however, remains with me: “I’m at a loss to understand your anger,” he wrote.
And therein lies the problem, the fault line that runs through the soul of the Catholic Church.
The inability of a church leader to understand a person’s anger over the abuse of adolescents and children and the decades-long coverup and stonewalling is symptomatic of an organization far more concerned with maintaining and exercising control (and fundraising) than with the well-being of its people.
Fast-forward to the present. A new and all-too-familiar church scandal has arisen, this time here in Denver. Alleged child abuse allegedly perpetrated by a priest who spent time in several parishes, all allegedly papered over by the Denver Archdiocese for years. The focus of the complaints thus far isn’t the former priest. Correctly in my view, it’s the Denver archdiocese, the organization that allegedly covered up the actions of the priest in question, secreting him from parish to parish while fully aware of his actions.
As devastating as these allegations are, they once again present the archdiocese with an opportunity. From the shadows of these charges, will Chaput continue to ask for money? Of course. But as he does so, I’d like his requests also to acknowledge the issue before him and do so with respect, sorrow, empathy and, most importantly, humility. I would urge, too, that his requests for money be accompanied by a request for forgiveness, not for the particulars of this yet to be adjudicated case, but for the well-documented self-serving isolation and arrogance that have often driven church behavior.
The humility of such a gesture would be stunning and suggest, at least here in Denver, a church in the process of redefining its priorities.
It would suggest, too, that the archbishop is no longer at a loss to understand the anger.
Chuck Reyman is co-owner of Reyman/Welch Communication Design, a public relations, marketing and ad agency.
