Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal by Michael D'Antonio
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Metaphysical Monster

The Catholic Church is the world’s first and largest corporation, an organisation which can own things but which is not owned by anyone and an entity which is composed of its members but is superior to them. These are legal facts, which could be changed by legislation. But the Church’s legal status, it claims, is grounded not in law but elsewhere - in metaphysics, the study of existence itself. It is from metaphysics that the Catholic Church argues its uniqueness, its exception to all civil law, and its absolute right to govern itself without interference. These claims are ancient. So are their effects: most recently the demonstrable inability of the Church to purge itself, after almost forty years of trying, from the plague of paedophilia (more than sixty years from the earliest internal reports). Until it drops its metaphysical pretensions, even another forty years effort is unlikely to be enough to solve the problem.

Like most things Catholic, the rationale for the existence of the Church comes from St. Paul. Paul called the Church a ‘body’. He was not being metaphorical; he literally meant a body, an entity which was neither a tribe, nor a civil association, nor a state. The body he had in mind, he claimed, had a very different kind of existence, what philosophers call an ontology, from other sorts of organisations. According to Paul, the Church has an identity which is entirely independent of the identity of its members. Those who accept this identity take on mutual responsibility for the conduct as well as well-being of one other. And they are accountable only to the identity of the Church - effectively its clerical hierarchy - which determines if this responsibility is being carried out properly.

In short, Paul’s body of the Church is a metaphysical being which is inherently superior to the being of its members. It is empowered, because of its mode of being, to demand accountability from its members. But it possesses a metaphysical immunity for any actions it takes to further is own interests, which are per definition the real interests of humanity and the entirety of creation. The Church therefore is the sole legitimate arbiter of the interests of its members. And although its members are responsible for each other, the Church is not responsible for anything they do.

If this sounds vaguely like the definition of the modern corporation in law, that’s because it is. Paul’s body became an institution which spread throughout the world - not just the world of religion but also the world of law, which controls this very unusual, very troublesome institution. But the entity which began it all, the Church, has never been willing to compromise its metaphysical status by submitting to the mundane demands of law. The Church is and has its own law. And although it will submit to judgments of civil and criminal law because it is forced to, it will not admit to the superiority of civil justice.

D’Antonio calls the manifestation of this metaphysical theory “clerical culture.” This isn’t incorrect but it isn’t the whole story either. The leaders of the Church, priests, do act to protect the reputation and the physical well-being of the Church as a matter of course. Nevertheless, the idea of the clerical culture is an incomplete description of the problems of deception, evasion, and duplicity which have been clear progressively in North America, Europe, Africa, Australia and South America as scandal after scandal has emerged. And it is a dangerously incomplete characterization because it doesn’t address the essential metaphysical issue.

The apparently unending series of revelations of abuse of children by clerics also shows the complicity of the lay community. Family members of the abused children, parochial and episcopal administrators, and run of the mill parishioners, routinely cooperated in the cover-ups and often offensive denials of the culpability of the Church. This at least suggests that whatever it is about the Church that candidate priests learn in the education and that inculturates them into an attitude of both casual denial and equally casual rationalisation of abuse, is not an adequate explanation of the phenomenon.

The culture of the Church is not a matter of clerical attitudes or training alone. Clerical training, parochial and episcopal administrative responses to reported problems, and the perceptions of the non-clerical members of the Church are shaped not by policy statements or procedures. They are shaped and directed by doctrine - the drawing out of the logic of metaphysical presumptions. Catholics are not so much taught the doctrines of the Church, as immersed in them as reality from infancy. These doctrines are not separable from each other. They form a whole. Compromise on one implies compromise on all.

Baptism, for example is not simply a ritual of admission, it is doctrinally a metaphysical transformation which alters the fundamental existence of the new member of the community. Similarly the ordination of a priest is doctrinally a further change in being, a change which can never be undone. The Church itself is doctrinally a societas perfecta, an entity controlled and protected by the Holy Spirit which provides everything it needs to carry out its mission. Baptism creates a duty - primarily to obey. Ordination creates a privilege, to instruct, direct, and forgive (including of course other priests). The societas perfecta is an ontological status which cannot be improved upon.

Metaphysics is the sea in which Catholics swim. But metaphysics is not something inherited from Jewish roots. It is a Greek philosophical invention coopted by Catholic theologians over centuries. The resulting narrative of existence is not a topic of everyday conversation. Nevertheless it underlies any conversation involving the Catholic Church and what is possible to justify in the Church for itself. This is a pervasive metaphysical not clerical culture. Until the Church comes to grips with its obviously self-serving metaphysics, that is to say convenient fictions, conversation is futile and possibilities for reform are nil. The incidence of reported abuse may diminish but as long as the theory of the Church remains intact, abuse will recur in one form or another.

D’Antonio quotes Tom Doyle, a Catholic priest who was involved in investigating the first publicly litigated case of child abuse in Louisiana in 1984: “The Church in America is a dinosaur with a head the size of an ant, and the head thinks it’s in charge.” This is the kind of metaphysical monster which the Catholic Church has made of itself, and not just in America: a corporation which has lost control, particularly of itself. Ill-considered metaphysics is wont to do that to folk.

Postscript: an article received today which touches on the importance of metaphysics in the abuse scandal: http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articl...

Post-postscript 24July 2018: the crisis just doesn’t quit: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/ch...

Yet more: the scandal that keeps on giving: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/ho...

15Aug2018: Incredibly, the pace of the thing appears to be increasing: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/a...

19Aug2018: It’s a fair question to ask: who lies more, DJT or the bushops of the Catholic Church? https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/19/us...

30Aug2018: It turns out that JP II had about as much credibility as DJT, but they made him a saint anyway. Another symptom of the metaphysical mess: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/an...

24Sept18: a very encouraging sign of rebellion. This is a sermon given last Sunday in Washington DC and reportedly met with sustained applause from the congregation: https://docs.google.com/file/d/1DoogB...

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