I FOUND THE past few days, watching and listening to the events in Washington, depressing. As a priest, even if not particularly in good standing with my own Church, I was especially upset by Trump’s references to religion and God.
His notion of himself as a messianic figure, sent and rescued by God to make America Great was, in my view, a travesty of the message of Jesus, you could even say a defamation. In so many ways what he is proposing is the opposite of what should be expected from someone who claims to have God on his side, to even to be a special messenger of God.
So when I listened to Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, of the Washington Episcopal Church, speak at the ceremony on the morning after Donald Trump was inaugurated, it was for me the first sign of light in the darkness of the preceding days.
She addressed the President directly, clearly speaking on behalf of the poor and underprivileged in America. She did not in any way deviate from the fundamentals of the Christian Gospel. She was in no way disrespectful or arrogant. Rather, she spoke in a gentle, but very clear, voice.
Her message was challenging and had to be uncomfortable for President Trump to hear, and you could see that she was speaking out of the depth of her own faith and her own experience of the Divine presence in her life. It took a lot of courage to do what she did.
I was immensely impressed by her. But clearly, Trump wasn’t. Branding her a ‘so-called bishop’, nasty, a hater and boring was, perhaps, to be expected from someone who denigrated his female opponent. Bishop Mariann was the opposite of those adjectives, She clearly spoke out of love, and I was riveted both by what she said and the way she said it. It made me yet again realise what we in the Catholic Church are missing by excluding women from the ordained ministry.
The deep political divide in the United States is mirrored in the religious divide that now besets that country. President Trump has many religious supporters, particularly those of the more fundamentalist churches, but sadly, a majority of catholics voted for him on this occasion. The Catholic Church in the States is also split down the middle, between those who are of a Trumpian mentality and those who follow Pope Francis.
A great many of the bishops would appear to be opponents of Francis and as such lean more towards the President. I can think of only maybe three or four who might have the courage to speak like Bishop Budde. I could mention Bishop Cupich in Chicago, Bishop McElroy, soon to take over in Washington, Bishop Tobin in Newark, and maybe one or two more. I am hoping they will come out strongly and publicly in support of Mariann, so that she will not feel isolated.
I know from my own experience that if you stand outside the system, or say or do something disapproved of by those in power, the doors can quickly be closed against you, and you can be left on your own and alone. Luckily, Pope Francis has already given the American bishops a headline when, prior to the inauguration, on hearing the incoming President speak about his plans around migrants and emigrants, he said that if he followed through on his intentions it would be a disgrace.
If the majority of the leadership of the United States Catholic Church follow along with the President and with his actions and attitudes and his treatment of people, they will lose all credibility and the Catholic Church in that country will die, or what will be left of it will have little or no relationship to the Gospel.
The Church itself is, of course, an institution, one of the most ancient in the world. The sole reason for its existence is to preserve and spread the message of Jesus. His message is both inspiring and demanding. But as an institution it is led by humans, and is subject to, and has demonstrated down through the centuries, many forms of corruption, abuse of power, and everything else that goes with human nature.
It has also in many instances loved power more than Gospel, and cosied up to the civil powers. But it also has produced people who were inspired by Jesus, and who spoke out against both church and state, and sadly found that both institutions turned against them.
There are many examples of this, but I can think of an American priest named Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest. He worked in South America and saw at first hand the struggles and poverty of so many people there. Back in the part of the US where he had come from there was the School of the Americas, a military establishment, where at the time they were reputed to be training soldiers to foment revolution in countries led by left-leaning governments.
He began to protest, and of course, drew the state on him and his followers. He was sent to jail on a number of occasions. This radicalised him even more, and he also began to challenge the Church over its exclusion of women. He ended up being dismissed from the priesthood and his religious congregation. Happily, he is still going strong, challenging both systems.
This is just one example of many cases I have witnessed and known personally. Institutions of their nature, religious or lay, do not like it when someone stands out from the crowd and challenges the system, and they have their ways of dealing with them. My impression of Mariann Budde is that she would be no pushover. I hope her own Episcopalian Church stands by her, and that she can continue to be a voice for goodness and love against a prevailing system that is seemingly going to operate by very different methods.
Fr Tony Flannery is a Redemptorist priest who was forbidden to practice by his superiors in Rome in 2012 for speaking up on many issues. This continues to this day. More at TonyFlannery.com.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say