It is not only Irish prelates who practice mental reservation in the service of lying. Their American brethren excel at it as well, the context being the same sacrifice of innocent victims to preserve their assets.
The Vatican continues the evasive pattern in the trial balloon sent up this week for the papal letter planned for Ireland. Truth departed long ago midst irrelevancies and dissembling. It’s a pity the Gospel does not suffice as guidance, while spin takes over.
I am drawn to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s definition of a lie: “Communicating truthfully means more than factual accuracy…There is a way of speaking which is…entirely correct and unexceptionable, but which is, nevertheless, a lie…When an apparently correct statement contains some deliberate ambiguity, or deliberately omits the essential part of the truth…it does not express the real as it exists in God.”
It is the lack of truth-telling that is the open sore in the Church now. Healing cannot be built on lies and all their variants. The refusal by bishops and pope to express the real as it exists in God betrays the faith they profess. “Not I, Lord, not I” strains the gnats of procedure, and jurisdiction, and technicality, and interpretation, and liability, and diplomatic immunity.
Documentary records in Ireland and the US would shame any person of conscience into penitential confession. Instead bishops stand fast in denial. It’s the structures, the system, not their individual moral choices at fault. It just happened; an abstraction of sorts, making bishops unable or unwilling to admit their culpability in the painful scarring of innocent flesh. Meanwhile the bleached language of risk managers contaminates the Body of Christ. The shepherds have fled.
Donald Cozzens asked in a December article in The Tablet how Irish bishops could sleep at night once “their protest of innocence by way of ignorance” became unsustainable. Their “mental maneuverings” and “constrictions of conscience” arose out of bishops acting like feudal lords for whom secrecy was a divine right. Ambition, clericalism, secrecy, “the idolatrous pull of status, power and money” - these support a mindset that "I lie only for the sake of the Church." But twisting corruption into morality should not be in the job description.
Truth or Consequences? Sadly, there were and are no real consequences for straying from genuine mental reservation. Gratitude to Prof. Kaveny for demolishing bishops’ rationalizations.
It is not only Irish prelates who practice mental reservation in the service of lying. Their American brethren excel at it as well, the context being the same sacrifice of innocent victims to preserve their assets.
The Vatican continues the evasive pattern in the trial balloon sent up this week for the papal letter planned for Ireland. Truth departed long ago midst irrelevancies and dissembling. It’s a pity the Gospel does not suffice as guidance, while spin takes over.
I am drawn to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s definition of a lie: “Communicating truthfully means more than factual accuracy…There is a way of speaking which is…entirely correct and unexceptionable, but which is, nevertheless, a lie…When an apparently correct statement contains some deliberate ambiguity, or deliberately omits the essential part of the truth…it does not express the real as it exists in God.”
It is the lack of truth-telling that is the open sore in the Church now. Healing cannot be built on lies and all their variants. The refusal by bishops and pope to express the real as it exists in God betrays the faith they profess. “Not I, Lord, not I” strains the gnats of procedure, and jurisdiction, and technicality, and interpretation, and liability, and diplomatic immunity.
Documentary records in Ireland and the US would shame any person of conscience into penitential confession. Instead bishops stand fast in denial. It’s the structures, the system, not their individual moral choices at fault. It just happened; an abstraction of sorts, making bishops unable or unwilling to admit their culpability in the painful scarring of innocent flesh. Meanwhile the bleached language of risk managers contaminates the Body of Christ. The shepherds have fled.
Donald Cozzens asked in a December article in The Tablet how Irish bishops could sleep at night once “their protest of innocence by way of ignorance” became unsustainable. Their “mental maneuverings” and “constrictions of conscience” arose out of bishops acting like feudal lords for whom secrecy was a divine right. Ambition, clericalism, secrecy, “the idolatrous pull of status, power and money” - these support a mindset that "I lie only for the sake of the Church." But twisting corruption into morality should not be in the job description.
Truth or Consequences? Sadly, there were and are no real consequences for straying from genuine mental reservation. Gratitude to Prof. Kaveny for demolishing bishops’ rationalizations.