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Article Excerpt
WITH THE RELEASE OF "A Report on the Crisis in the Catholic Church in the United States," the question of the accountability of bishops for their decisions has come to the forefront of contemporary discussions about the Church. (1) In a response to the report, Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk of Cincinnati tried to explain why bishops made the decisions that led to the crisis. First, he claimed that removing priests who abused minors from the clerical state or from ministry was "virtually impossible" under canon law prior to 2002. (2) Without the option of removing the offending priests, Pilarczyk concluded that bishops had little choice but to follow the advice of psychologists who assured that the sex abusers could be effectively treated. In addition to psychology and canon law, bishops also turned to civil attorneys for guidance. (3) Since bishops did not have today's knowledge and experience to guide their decisions, Pilarczyk identified attempts to judge bishops by today's standards as the fallacy of "presentism." (4)
Pilarczyk's defense of episcopal decisions, however, failed to consider the possibility that the Church has dealt with this type of crisis in the past. This leads to the impression that this is a new problem. If his account of bishops' decision-making process is accurate, then it is clear that magisterial officeholders rarely consulted Scripture or tradition on the matter. The reality is that scandals involving clerical sexuality and the abuse of minors have emerged periodically throughout history and there is a significant amount of material in our history and theological tradition addressing the issues surrounding sexual abuse in the Church. Some of the worst and most widespread outbreaks took place in the eleventh, twelfth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. During this time, the clergy were formally exempt from secular or civil law, which pointedly raised the issue of how to hold them accountable if bishops failed to enforce discipline. Even with these limitations, the Church has been able to restore discipline in the past and we have every reason to hope for a renewed and purified clergy in the future.
The great medieval Doctor of Reform, Peter Damian (1007-1072), determined the root cause of systemic sexual abuse to be episcopal laxity resulting from a misunderstanding of the bishop's office. Instead of seeing the bishop as a teacher who leads people by his humble example, whose authority is based on his service for the community, and who seeks to persuade people freely to embrace a Christian life, a number of medieval bishops frequently understood their roles as princes or lords of the Church, whose office unequivocally demanded obedience, and who pronounced the moral law by fiat. For Peter Damian and the medieval reformers, scandal is the inevitable result of collapsing teaching authority into the power to govern. (5) This is a twofold corruption because it improperly extends teaching categories such as infallibility to episcopal decisions and it subjects the authority of Scripture and tradition to custom, which was a category Peter Damian used for local corruptions of canon law. (6) Nor was Peter Damian alone in this diagnosis. Bernard of Clairvaux charged bishops who had these attitudes with being rebellious servants, of being teachers who set themselves up as lords. (7) To put this in our language, conditions are ripe for scandal when magisterium is seen as an unaccountable imperium. (8)
Of course, a good magister or teacher must do research. If bishops had consulted both church history and traditional sources in addition to canon law and psychology, they would have found that Peter Damian had written extensively about problems associated with clerical sexual abuse. While there are many sources on the subject of the sexual scandals of the clergy to which one could point from Gregory the Great (540-604) to Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) or from medieval penitentiaries to the decrees of councils, Peter Damian's treatment of the relationship between the bishops' lack of accountability and outbreak of scandal became foundational for reformers in the Church. (9)
Ironically, Pope Leo XII decided in 1823 to name Peter Damian the Doctor of Reform in order to bolster his claims that he had the authority to govern the Church without external manipulation by secular authorities and without internal opposition to his policies. The pope knew Peter Damian was one of the first theologians to argue for universal papal jurisdiction. But because the saint's writings were sanitized by Catholic scholars, Leo XII most likely did not know that Peter Damian had argued that everyone is subject to correction, including the pope. Further, he was probably unaware of Peter Damian's doctrine that lay persons have a duty to reform members of the clergy when they fail to reform themselves in light of divine revelation. Nonetheless, Peter Damian's theology was officially designated as the model for those who wished to reform the Church by an act of the papal magisterium.
After providing a brief biographical sketch of Peter Damian's life and of his historical context, I shall explain how he understood the cause, the effects, and the remedy for the sexual scandals in the Church of his day. I then turn to consider his justification of lay leadership in reforming even the most prominent members of the clergy. Finally, I draw out implications of how his approach to correcting abuse and scandal could be applied to the current crisis. (10)
PETER DAMIAN'S LIFE
Born in 1007 in Ravenna, Peter Damian experienced evil early in life. According to his medieval biography, Peter Damian's mother had willfully withheld food from him so that he would die and relieve the family of the burden of having another child to care for and feed. This was not an uncommon way of handling unwanted children, especially in times of famine. However, it was the mistress of a local priest who intervened and saved his life. As a child, he lost both parents and spent some time being raised by his siblings. His medieval biographer claims that he spent some of his childhood with an abusive older brother, but Peter Damian never confirms this in his own writings. Peter Damian did, however, reminisce warmly about a period of time that he spent under the care of one of his older sisters. (11) Finally, his brother Damian, the archpriest of Ravenna, took him under his care and saw to it that he was properly cared for and educated.
Peter Damian was an excellent student and eventually became a master rhetorician at schools in Parma and Ravenna. To appreciate his work, it is important to keep in mind that he was trained as a rhetorician using language and categories that would have appealed to eleventh-century sensibilities. As Jean Leclercq noted, his was an age that loved powerful language. (12) Though his language was strong, his goal was to call people to penance and to reform their behavior. While it is true that he wrote some sophisticated theology on issues such as divine omnipotence, it would be a mistake to read him as a philosopher.
Perhaps as a result of his early experiences of evil, Peter Damian was increasingly scandalized by the behavior of the students and professors at the diocesan cathedral schools. Town and gown fights, sexual immorality, simony, and clergymen jockeying for higher positions were just some of the behaviors that scandalized him. In 1035, at the age of 28, Peter Damian walked away from his promising career and joined a strict monastic community at Fonte Avellana. Once he was in the safe, if austere, environment of the monastery, he set about the task of reforming the Church through a series of widely distributed letters, treatises, and sermons.
Because of his growing fame as a preacher and a reformer, Peter Damian was plucked out of the monastery and appointed the cardinal bishop of Ostia in 1057. The reform issues facing the Church as an institution during his lifetime were simony, clerical concubinage, and the sexual immorality of monks and clergy. Simony, the buying and selling of sacred things, was a pervasive sin. He defended the moderate position that simoniacal and sexually active clerics could validly perform the sacraments for others--though their sacramental acts simply served to condemn them as vessels fit for destruction. (13) His most lasting institutional reform involved the process of electing the pope. Peter Damian and several of his fellow reformers established the system whereby the cardinals elected the pope in order to free papal elections from the direct control by the Roman nobility, the emperors, and other political powers. (14)
After several years in the vanguard of the reforming party of the Roman Curia, Peter Damian asked to be relieved of his duties so that he could return to the eremitical life of his monastic order. Still he never abandoned the cause of reform. He was a man deeply committed to the quiet life of contemplation even as he played a large role in international affairs involving both the Church and the state until his death in 1072. As a monk, he was a strong advocate of "the discipline" or self-flagellation but his sermons reveal a playfulness and delightfulness that seem inconsistent with his harsh ascetical practices and strident reform rhetoric.
THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Peter Damian is the officially designated Doctor of Reform but he could just as easily have been honored as the Doctor of Discipline. His interest in discipline extended from the life of the individual believer to the enforcement of ecclesiastical laws. Many of the abuses he worked to correct resulted from the lack of order in the collections of canon law. Without any uniform standards of canon law, bishops were able to rule their dioceses absolutely as they personally saw fit. (15) Because they tended to treat the Church as their own property, many bishops did not succeed in maintaining ecclesiastical discipline. (16) Since the vast majority of them had bought their offices, it is not surprising that they would see the Church as a form of investment.
The idea of the Church as a community had almost disappeared. (17) One of the key goals of the reformers was to root out simony and to recover a more communal understanding of the Church. Whereas prohibitions against simony were recognized to carry the force of tradition, the reformers were attempting to move people away from local customs. Additionally, they had to contend with the traditional status of the secular laws stemming from the proprietary church system established by Charlemagne and his heirs. Under this system, ecclesiastical positions were related to benefices associated with particular churches, dioceses, and abbeys. These benefices provided income to support the work of the monks and the clergy as well as resources for poor relief, but it was often the local nobility who held the right to install someone into a benefice. What had started as a means to provide income to the clergy had gradually led people to see churches as buildings that could be either owned or leased in the same way as a mill or an orchard. (18) The resulting sense of entitlement, both on the part of the laity who held the rights to the benefices and the men installed into these positions, paved the way for more serious abuses.
The most serious of these abuses often concerned clerical sexuality. Like simony, the ecclesiastical laws calling for clerical celibacy had for centuries been well established in the Western Church. Nonetheless, a significant number of the clergy in Europe were cohabitating. This state of affairs was possible because the culture placed little value on celibacy and cohabitation was an accepted institution in society. (19)...
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