If silence was a sin, voices are an answer, says a Boston priest

We did something five years ago in our parish that we grandly call our Liturgical Institute. The purpose is to improve liturgy by informed participation. The way it works is that the presider announces some themes beforehand that connect the readings. And then, after the Communion prayer, we open it up for discussion. We have a small church--1,100 families--so we can do that.

The first two years, we talked about liturgy; then, Catholic identity; then belief. We used it after September 11 to talk about the terrorist attacks. And we have been using it consistently since January 6, when the first major Boston Globe story about sexual abuse by priests was published. We've used it weekend after weekend, with people talking about their feelings.

People are outraged. They feel this situation to be loathsome and degrading. They do, however, make a distinction between this disaster and their Catholicism. They are trying to say that the crisis, grave and dreadful as it is, is not about faith or belief. It's not about Catholicism. It's about our structures, our governance. It shows the dichotomy between the ecclesiology of Lumen gentium--that great Second Vatican Council concept of Church as mystery, Church as people--and how the Church is administered.

But we are moving beyond anger. The mantra in our community, and in many others, is "organize and analyze." And we're doing that. And now we are forming a parish task force to design a strategy for change, and to join our efforts with others.

We know the Catholic Church is not a democracy, but it's not a dictatorship either, or an oligarchy. It is a community. And the sense that we may be able to make that realization effective is felt as a kind of exhilaration. At our parish on Ash Wednesday, we never saw such crowds. At the Arch Street Shrine, in Boston, the lines for ashes went around the building. It's almost like the aftermath of September 11--as though the wounded Church of the people is coming together to be part of the healing.

Boston priests, too, are organizing. This began prior to January 6. More than 100 priests are part of a Boston Priests Forum that will engage in imperative questions. What has happened to us? What is happening to us? What about our numbers? The numbers of Roman Catholic clergy are not diminishing, they're vanishing. We are vanishing. There are 27,000 parish priests for 63 million American Catholics. Matthew 9 and Luke 10 talk about Jesus' warning to observe the signs of the times. "The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few." We're not reading the signs properly. We're given pieties on praying for vocations, and we do that; but the prayers are being answered in ways we're not hearing. Why is there a shortage? That's the question that is not being investigated.

This association of priests will form task forces of men and women, lay and clergy, to investigate the issues of which this crisis is symptomatic. And we'll take advantage of remarkable resources in the Boston area, including the Boston College theology faculty.

I'm also a member of a Presbyteral Council--40 priests who meet monthly to advise the archbishop on matters of pastoral concern. But we don't advise. In all our deliberations, the matter of sexual abuse has never come up. It's not been mentioned. Once, a priest mentioned [defrocked child abuser] John Geoghan because John Geoghan was a [seminary] classmate, and he was concerned about his well being. He was greeted icily. No one came to his support. We feel cowed. We feel silenced.

This begs a larger question for priests. The abused children were our parishioners. The abusers were our brother priests. We may have heard rumors, we may have had suspicions, but only a few of us did anything. What is it that has made us so passive? What has made us so unwilling to take initiative and risks? We are quick to criticize our leaders for their silence and corrupt complicity, with good reason. And we were part of that silence. We didn't speak up.

Fr. Robert W. Bullock '51

Fr. Robert W. Bullock is the pastor of Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Sharon, Massachusetts. These remarks were edited from a panel discussion, "Priests and Pedophilia: A Current Crisis in the Church," which took place at BC on April 3. Other panel members were BC theologian Mary Ann Hinsdale, Social Work Dean Alberto Godenzi, and CSON Professor Ann Burgess.


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