Dear Bishop Barnes,
I reviewed your fund-raising video from last fall at the diocesan office last week to see if I remembered correctly how it showed why you and your fellow bishops are having such small success in putting the pedophile scandal behind you, as we are reading again this week.
For simplicity, I will address just one point – your comments on those who attacked the WTC on 9/11/2001.
Now these guys were bad guys, according to the gospel, much like Barabbas, and there is nothing wrong in itself with your saying so. But because they are bad guys, you seem to think that there is nothing wrong with defaming them, although even the archangel Michael, having dignity at least equal to yours, feared to speak carelessly even against Satan himself, who is at least as bad a guy as any of the men you chose to revile.
Just exactly what ground did you find for calling them cowards? Being responsible as a bishop for our moral and ethical formation, you are obliged, if you make such an assertion, to show us what about their conduct was cowardly. It is not obvious to all of us that losing your life to fly an airplane into a building is any more cowardly than killing thousands of people with cruise missiles from thousands of miles away at no risk to oneself, nor that it is any more abominable to kill 3,000 people in an office building than it is to spend over ten years killing hundreds of thousands of children with a pitiless embargo. Indeed, it is by no means obvious that a bishop who refuses to make these points for fear of his people’s prejudices is any less cowardly than these men who willingly died to accomplish their mission.
Moreover, you asserted that their aim was nothing short of destroying this country, implying that they are totally unreasonable and implacable men. But they themselves made clear their grievances and their aims – the cruel Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing in Palestine, unconditionally backed by the United States; the sanctions regime against Iraq and the resulting deaths of hundreds of thousands of children; and the American forces in Saudi Arabia, which should seem offensive to any American who acknowledges that we should do to others what we want them to do to us, since Americans don’t want Saudi soldiers based here.
Since your brother bishop, Tom Gumbleton of Detroit, is fully aware of all these things, who can believe that you are unaware of them, unless you are willfully averting your eyes as the rich man did, so as not to see Lazarus lying at his gate?
By misrepresenting their stated aims, you simply slandered them. Perhaps you suppose that, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor,” does not apply, since these are bad guys. But we never want to bear false witness against our neighbors unless we think they are bad guys. Bad guys, therefore, are the only neighbors the commandment is talking about.
Certainly your people would prefer not to know their own iniquity. They would much rather dwell on the iniquities of others, and in this you accommodated them, evidently because sucking up to them in this way is more likely to open their wallets for your programs than if you rebuke the iniquity of their nation, in which they are complicit. In so doing, have you not become complicit also in the bloodshed you conceal in order to please them? Is delighting to dwell on the iniquities of others so as to overlook one’s own the spirituality that Jesus has called us to?
Jesus says our Father tracks every hair of our heads. Do you suppose then that he does not track every drop of innocent blood in America’s pursuit of empire, every cry of anguish in Palestine, every tear, every lie by which the cruel keep out of sight their silent victims and justify what they do to them, every accusation by which we blame the victims? Can you, for institutional convenience or your own personal comfort, walk in that path with God’s approval?
How then does the cynical calculation I have documented here relate to the pedophile scandal? What is the pedophile scandal, correctly called by you an “abomination,” but a cynical concealment of injustice and cruelty for the sake of institutional advantage, to make people feel better by consenting to the grinding up of unnoticed human beings, and in that case too, blaming the victims?
Is it not clear to you that your cynical suppression of the truth in this video for the sake of gain is one substance with the cynical suppression of truth for the same ends in concealing pedophile priests? And be sure that this one substance is not that one substance that we speak of in the Nicene Creed! These iniquities are one, and their common substance is treachery and human sacrifice.
In sum, you have no reason yet before the God of truth to find resolution to the pedophile scandal, because you have not even begun to define the nature of the crime or the extent of depravity in you and among you to be confronted and forsaken before the God of truth.
You have expected by putting policies in place and making pious noises to cure a problem rooted in dreadful corruption in your own hearts, manifested in shocking behavior, which you appear quite comfortable with so long as only God and not men see what is really being done. But be sure that if I see it at all, then God sees it in full. And if it makes uncomfortable reading here, then you will find no pleasure discussing it at the judgment seat of Christ.
In all of this, one would think that men are the only audience that matters, when in truth God is the only audience that matters. This truth is what Mary grasped when she chose to walk around with a big belly which only God would really understand, which would surely take way too long to explain to men.
It should be obvious to all that any devotion to Mary that refuses to
follow in her tracks this very day counts her a fool for making that choice,
and so amounts to an insult – much like saying to Jesus, “Lord, Lord,”
while despising his word so as not to do it. In view of how Catholics
view Mary, this is strange to see in a Catholic bishop. So long as
you reject her path in the sight of all, can you pass the laugh test as
a shepherd of God’s people?
Yours,
Peter Attwood