Contributed by: John Sheveland, Gonzaga University
For the last seven years I have been developing a new research competency around child sexual abuse and traumatic wounding, specifically as these have played out in recent decades in the Catholic church’s global abuse crisis. My efforts and the efforts of those with whom I have collaborated focus less upon mere description of the crisis in favor of what now seems to be the church’s unfinished business of developing, theologically, a victims-first approach to the crisis, centered on healing. A victims-first approach would commit the entire church – the people of God – to the causes of prevention, protection, healing, and hope.
There can be no meaningful healing without sober diagnosis of the causes and conditions of abuse which have been specific to many Catholic contexts. A reliable victims-first approach to abuse will be anchored in corrective and constructive responses to facts on the ground which have enabled abuse and cover-up. A victims-first approach seeks to re-sensitize and re-found the church – as the people of God – in an abiding commitment to those harmed by the crime and sin of abuse and by the complex institutional levers pulled to conceal and protect abusive priests, bishops’ negligence, or the inaction of any in positions of authority, including popes. A victims-first approach serves to quiet some of the surrounding noise – distraction, deflection, indifference – in order that we might create a holding environment of truth-telling, deep listening to survivors, and accompaniment with them. This is precisely the entire church’s task and responsibility.
But that surrounding noise is formidable, and we can think of it as cultural flows within the church not yet prepared to reckon with the damage done or to engage in the work that remains. It surfaces in myriad ways and expressions. Take for example the upside-down victim-stance frequently voiced, that the secular culture or the press or even fellow Catholics of differing ideological commitments will not give the church a break; that nothing bishops or priests do well will ever be enough; that the good name of priests must be protected at all times (a stipulation of canon law unhelpfully deployed in this moment); that protection is the specific responsibility of others or professionals rather than the general responsibility of all; or that the liturgy need not be a site for truth-telling and healing through prayers, homilies, or listening sessions to support a grieving church and its victims. In these and other ways, we are prone to becoming brittle in how we interact with the phenomena of child sexual abuse in our communities, moving too quickly to restore what we imagine to have been lost by centering our own desires or angers, while decentering victims and the daunting inter-generational work of trauma healing to which all the church must now commit itself. Sentiments like these reflect a disordered affective response to child sexual abuse. The amazing dedication and efforts of diocesan safe environment teams and victim assistance coordinators notwithstanding, a change in the culture of the Catholic church – always local, always personal – remains a necessity.
The needed change in culture is rooted in affect. How do we feel about clerical sexual abuse? What are the range of feelings, impressions, stories, and experiences within the community? Which sets of feelings center victims, their experiences, and their processing of trauma wounds, and which do not? Which feelings appear to be bound up with communal patterns of deflection, minimization, or lack of truth-telling? Which feelings align with shame responses and have us looking away, unable to engage the work? Which set of feelings if aired within the community might contribute to the all-important “holding environment” in which we all engage the work of listening, accompanying, and advocating for victim-survivors? Those variety of feelings which give rise to solidarity – or better in this context – accompaniment, are productive and creative feelings. They happen also to bring us to the center of Christian faith as well as Buddhist practice.
Some years ago, I was inspired by a colleague’s discussion of St. Paul’s theology of the body of Christ. Patrick T. McCormick, a moral theologian, reads Paul with the eyes of an ethicist seeking to apply biblical wisdom to fractures in the community, especially along lines of power and privilege.[1] Paul – and Śāntideva after him – have become decisive for my own thinking on the complex issues associated with clerical child sexual abuse and the (dys)functional ways in which communities deal with it. Paul and Santideva help us to learn where our affect is appropriate, wholesome, and developed, and where affect might be stunted or underdeveloped, even leaning toward indifference.
Galatians 3:28 reads: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28 NRSV). In Christ, our conventional social and religious dichotomies pitting one against another, one above another, or one invisible to another, are repositioned as sin, as objectively dissociated from the determining theological reality that all are made one – and yet distinctive – in Christ. In his letter to the Romans, Paul adds to this theme of unity a distinct reverence for interpersonal difference and the diversity of gifts which make the one body both unified and differentiated (Romans 12:4-5).
In 1 Corinthians, Paul notes within a liturgical setting of eucharistic sharing the ethical implications of living contrary to this theological reality, namely, participating in the eucharist in an unworthy manner (self-contradiction). Paul writes: “Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves” (1 Cor. 11:28-29). For Patrick McCormick, it is important to introduce Christians to their own vocation to be members of each other’s body, first to perceive and then to act with radical solidarity toward each other, especially among the bodies of the poor, the bodies of women, and the bodies of creation.
A still more recent deployment of Paul’s theology of the body of Christ can be seen in Pope Francis’ 2018 “Letter to the People of God,” in which he offers pastoral counsel to Catholics in the wake of the Pennsylvania grand jury report and the accusations against Theodore McCarrick, a former U.S. cardinal.[2] The Pope reflects upon 1 Corinthians 12:26, a single verse: “If one member of the body suffers, all suffer together with it.” But he parses that verse to give individual attention to each clause. First, if one member suffers: Pope Francis recounts in brief the “heart-wrenching pain of these victims, which cries out to heaven,” and how these victims were “silenced” and their pain was “long ignored” and “covered up.” The Pope’s passive verb tenses indicate some vagueness around who the agents or actors were, the covering up itself and what the personal and institutional enablers of it were. Even so, the Pope calls for ecclesial self-examination and repentance in a series of confessional statements: “we were not where we should have been,” “we did not act in a timely manner,” “we showed no care for the little ones.”
In his reflection upon the second part of the verse – “all suffer together with it” –Pope Francis calls Catholics to a victims-first perspective in which we hear and acknowledge the pain of those abused, sit with that pain and learn from it, and accompany the wounded toward healing. “Today, we are challenged as the People of God to take on the pain of our brothers and sisters wounded in their flesh and in their spirit. If, in the past, the response was one of omission, today we want solidarity, in the deepest and most challenging sense, to become our way of forging present and future history.” He calls for a conversion of heart, but not simply to be reflected in the isolated examples of local ecclesial actors working in child protection and victim assistance ministries. He calls for a conversion of heart and affect for all of the church – its many members – in the deepest of solidarity with survivors of abuse. The vocation to be in such solidarity is not additive to Christian faith and life; it is constitutive. “If one member of the body suffers, all suffer together with it.”
These verses from Paul, McCormick’s contemporary ethical reflection upon them, and the Pope’s letter, have percolated within my imagination while reading a variety of Buddhist texts, especially Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra.
In the process of teaching introductory courses on Buddhism to undergraduate students looked for classic texts which would edify and challenge students pressed for time and pulled in a variety of directions in their busy lives. Śāntideva’s Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life [Bodhicaryāvatāra] fit that bill, in small yet profound doses.[3] I discovered that he too, in different ways, sought to empower his readers’ capacity for solidarity, perspective-taking, empathy or compassion, by utilizing a body metaphor similar to Paul’s. For Paul, the body of Christ is a cosmic reality, which affects redemptive change for all of creation, even as sin and self-contradiction continue to mar creation and history. In Śāntideva, however, the body metaphor is heuristic, pedagogical, a thought-project meant to purify the mind of contaminants like dualistic thinking and clinging to self with indifference to other, so that the mind might apprehend its own native wisdom and radiate its own native compassion.
The Buddhist underpinnings are without question, yet the sheer logic and clarity of thought Śāntideva offers are also useful to those without foundations in Buddhism, even for those indifferent to child protection and healing. Śāntideva’s chapter on the fifth paramita or perfection – meditative absorption – is of special note, for it takes the reader into a relentless and gruesome analysis of the impermanence of one’s own body, which then helps the reader to relinquish clinging to it. At verse 89, Śāntideva wishes to cultivate in the reader the Awakening Mind, or bodhicitta, in which wisdom and compassion become mutually expressive. Once the aspiration for bodhicitta is in place, Śāntideva searches for a technique to foster spontaneous compassion in the minds of practitioners. He chooses a body analogy which, if transported into our various situations marred by abuse, can generate a powerful resolve. He writes:
90. At first one should meditate intently on the equality of oneself and others as follows: ‘All equally experience suffering and happiness. I should look after them as I do myself.’
91. Just as the body, with its many parts from division into hands and other limbs, should be protected as a single entity, so too should this entire world which is divided, but undivided in its nature to suffer and be happy.
92. Even though suffering in me does not cause distress in the bodies of others, I should nevertheless find their suffering intolerable because of the affection I have for myself,
93. In the same way that, though I cannot experience another’s suffering in myself, his suffering is hard for him to bear because of his affection for himself.
94. I should dispel the suffering of others because it is suffering like my own suffering. I should help others too because of their nature as beings, which is like my own being.
95. When happiness is liked by me and others equally, what is so special about me that I strive after happiness only for myself?
96. When fear and suffering are disliked by me and others equally, what is so special about me that I protect myself and not the other?
97. If I give them no protection because their suffering does not afflict me, why do I protect my body against future suffering when it does not afflict me?[4]
For communities suffering direct and indirect trauma wounds from abuse, this meditation on the equality of self and others is itself a breakthrough. It can and should be applied sympathetically to the ones we recognize rightly as victims or survivors of abuse. It can be applied as well to offenders, and to the indifferent: “All equally experience suffering and happiness. I should look after them as I do myself.” The body analogy in verse 91 encourages the reader both to identify with others who may seem very different from oneself, but also to develop protective impulses toward them, knowing that they too are subject to the same fear of suffering and desire to be happy readily identified in oneself. Such meditative attention would mitigate the indifference too many of us feel in the face of overwhelming suffering, and it would cultivate a felt sense of affiliation, solidarity, or accompaniment toward which both traditions aspire. Śāntideva helps the reader to recognize the truth that suffering is to be avoided, whether it is right here inside myself or over there in another. Suffering is suffering, whomever it belongs to, and is to be avoided and removed.
In a complementary – if not identical – way, the mind training opportunities available in Śāntideva can help Christians re-appropriate their own wisdom traditions – like Paul’s ever meaningful ethic of the body of Christ – and apply them creatively within communities in need. It is the conversion of hearts, the renovation of affect, that is needed to overcome the indifference we too often exhibit when confronted with the overwhelming effects of child sexual abuse. These spiritual traditions offer practical means by which we might replace such indifference with an intuitive, spontaneous, and real accompaniment of those who suffer the direct or indirect wounds of abuse. May we aspire for the same by seeking creative, skillful means to make these fonts of wisdom new again.
[1] Patrick T. McCormick, A Banqueter’s Guide to the All Night Soup Kitchen of the Kingdom of God (Liturgical Press, 2004).
[2] Secretariat of the Holy See, Report on the Holy See’s Institutional Knowledge and Decision Making Related to Former Cardinal Theodore Edgar McCarrick (1930-2017), 10 November 2020. https://www.vatican.va/resources/resources_rapporto-card-mccarrick_20201110_en.pdf
[3] Śāntideva, The Bodhicaryāvatāra. Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton, trans. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
[4] Śāntideva, The Bodhicaryāvatāra, 96.