This
Week's Column
For the week of Sunday, April 27, 2008
© Janus Adams 2008
“Of Soup and Stew”
Now that the Pope has departed, can we talk?
I was sitting in a restaurant when the conversation – not mine, but that of two men in the booth behind me – turned to priests and the scandal in the church. The conversation was all the more intriguing because one of the two forty-to-fifty-somethings wore his collar turned back. Perhaps he was Catholic, perhaps Episcopalian; I do not know.
Given the fact I was eavesdropping, I was not in a position to check his credentials. What I did check – strictly in the name of professionalism and the public’s right to know, of course – was the time it would take me to whip out paper and pencil and take down what they said.
In the interest of full disclosure, let me state from the top: though baptized Episcopalian, as child I wanted to be Catholic.
Now, don’t let anyone fool you. Episcopalians don’t show it, but, at their core, we’re a rambunctious lot – and it’s not just a fondness for receptions and sherry. It’s rooted in the founding all those centuries ago when King Henry VIII wanted a divorce and the Pope wasn’t going for it. (Talk about the legacies of scandal...)
But, the reason I was jealous of the Catholics was because Catholics had more fun. Yes, Catholics.
There were always a lot of them and, being an only child, I envied their numbers. They got release time on Wednesdays when the rest of us had to stay in school. When they came back on Thursdays, they knew stuff we didn’t. But, once in a while, one of us outsiders would overhear something and let the others in on it (from whence derives my eavesdropping expertise).
It was on a Thursday, I’m sure of it, that I learned what boys do when girls wear patent leather shoes. The Catholics always knew what I didn’t. Weeks, passed before another useful Thursday brought another clue. Oh-ma-gosh. Now we heard what boys do when girls wear sleeveless blouses. Then, from weeks more of waiting came: what boys do when a bra strap shows.
Of course I wanted to be Catholic; religious instruction was fascinating. Unfortunately, my mother refused my conversion and stunted my growth; hence my attentiveness in restaurants when talk turns religious.
Herewith, a quote from my latest Catholic research project. “A woman goes to an OB/GYN, he molests her,” said the minister/priest. “Does she stop going to doctors? Same with the church – a relationship with your body, a relationship with your spiritual self.” Somehow religion had lost its fun. This was real.
Now, I’m all for a good metaphor. But, as a woman, I find something troubling in the casual, passing reference to molestation by doctors. Has either man considered the numbers of women dead of breast and ovarian cancer on account of such unorthodox diagnostic techniques?
In the analogy, my feelings on the current crisis crystallized. For there is something quite unholy about a Body (or a body) professing spokesmanship for God that consistently finds shame and innuendo in God’s greatest temple.
I do not confuse my body with a church; one being my “all”; the other my “choice” with room for interpretation and denomination. Amid growing numbers of women as priests (and rabbis) in all religions, holy and apostolic, but not Catholic; who can deny the imbalance to Nature’s male/female equation when male denominates to the extreme?
I’m troubled too by the disproportionate emphasis on the molestation of boys. We all know it is not only boys being molested. But we’ve been accustomed to calling it something else when girls are targeted. We call girls seductresses and neurotic to protect ourselves from having to call a priest a rapist.
In the church as in society, there is nothing new about minimizing women; what happens to boys is serious. Hence the second cover-up: by negating the girls and highlighting the molestation of boys, the problem isn’t the church it’s homosexuals.
In every institution, from the church to government to the police, people err; sadly, others cover up. For all its professed closeness to God, down here on earth, the church has stumbled upon the altar of its humanity. Somehow, a mere mortal myself, I can’t see that such a bad place to begin the healing.
So much for the stew; back to my soup.
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