H/T to the blog, Pray Tell (which I'll feature as a Link of the Day soon after Easter) for this remarkable text from Vienna. This is in the form of a dialogue and it's worth noting which part Cardinal Schönborn chose to speak...
On Wednesday, March 31, a liturgy of lamentation and penance was held in St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna in the context of the many cases of physical and sexual abuse which have come to light in Austria and elsewhere in recent weeks. Over 3,000 people took part. Cardinal Christoph Schönborn and Catholic theologian Veronica Prüller-Jagenteuful read the following confession.
Cardinal Schönborn: Triune God, you led our mothers and fathers out of slavery into freedom and taught them the 10 commandments of a good life. You became flesh in Jesus Christ and showed us that love is the fundamental rule in all things. You are with us as Holy Spirit to lead us.
Veronica Prüller-Jagenteuful: And yet we become sinful before you and before one another. Enormous sin has been revealed in these weeks. It is the sin of the individual. It is the sin permeating structures, models of acting, and models of thinking. It is the sin of not offering help and not daring to speak up.
Both: The responsibility for this concerns us as members of the church in widely varying degrees. And yet, we are your people together and we stand in common responsibility. And so we confess to you and to one another our sin:
Prüller-Jagenteuful: We confess that we have not followed God alone, but rather have followed the gods of our need for lording over and superiority.
Cardinal: Some of us have, precisely in that sense, abused others, even children.
Prüller-Jagenteuful: We confess that we have obscured and betrayed the name of God which means love.
Cardinal: Some of us have preached the love of God and yet have done evil to our charges.
Prüller-Jagenteuful: We confess that we have not kept holy and not sufficiently valued the sacraments and other times and places of special encounter with God.
Cardinal: Some of us have used these as opportunity for assault.
Prüller-Jagenteuful: We confess that we have not maintained between adults and children relationships of unconditional respect for the other.
Cardinal: Some of us have used and destroyed the trust of children.
Prüller-Jagenteuful: We confess that we have not takes seriously the destruction of life and happiness in life, that we have not understood the destruction and we have trivialized it.
Cardinal: Some of us have become guilty of the inner murder of other people.
Prüller-Jagenteuful: We confess that we have not cherished bodiliness and have failed in the task of rightly living out our sexuality.
Cardinal: Some of us have done sexual violence.
Prüller-Jagenteuful: We confess that we have wanted to possess youth, beauty, and vitality for ourselves.
Cardinal: Some of us have stolen childhood from boys and girls and robbed them of the capability of living out successful relationships.
Prüller-Jagenteuful: We confess that we did not wish to acknowledge the reality, that we covered up and bore false witness.
Cardinal: Some of us have been able thereby to further delude ourselves and others and continue the criminality.
Prüller-Jagenteuful: We confess that we have wished to have control over others and possess them.
Cardinal: Some of us have thereby usurped the bodies of the weakest ones.
Prüller-Jagenteuful: We confess that we craved security, calm, power, and reputation.
Cardinal: For some of us the Church’s appearance of sinlessness was more important than anything else.
Both: We, the People of God, his Church, bear this sin with one another.
We confess this sin to those many people whom we as Church and some of us as particular individuals have sinned against.
We confess this sin to one another, for the Church has become sinful in its members.
We confess our sin to God.
We are ready to take on our responsibility for the past and the present, individually and communally. We are ready to renew our models of thinking and acting according to the Spirit of Jesus and to collaborate in the healing of wounds. We place ourselves as Church before the judgment of Christ.
Cardinal: O Christ, you said that you have taken our sin upon you. And yet we implore you today: Leave some of it for us. Help us not to brush it away too quickly, and make us ready to take it on: each one for individual sin and all of us together for common sin. And then give us hope in judgment: hope for new freedom from truth, and for that forgiveness for which we have no claim.
Amen.
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Great prayer. May we all suffer as a Church, as a community, as a body. And may this suffering point us to the cross of our Lord. Lord, have mercy on us sinners.
ReplyDeleteAlthough much of this confessed the sins of individuals, I think the most important acknowldegement I found in this confession was near the end: "For some of us the Church’s appearance of sinlessness was more important than anything else." What has always bothered me more than anything else about all of the allegtions of abuse is the Church's attempts to cover it up and save face. This seemed to be more important than the pain of the victims. And when called on it later, so many bishops have claimed that they did not understand the abuse nor realize that pedophiles were almost never capable of rehabilitation. This confession recognizes that the sin is "permeating structures, models of acting, and models of thinking. It is the sin of not offering help and not daring to speak up."
ReplyDeleteIn a similar vein, in editorial last week in the Washington Post, EJ Dionne calls on the Church to look within itself to find the "heart of its problem." Dionne explains that it is not enough for the Church to deal with this as if it were only a problem of individual priests. According to him, "the church needs to show it understands the flaws of its own internal culture by examining its own conscience, its own practices, its own reflexives when faced with challenge. As the church rightly teaches, acknowledging the true nature of our sin is the one and only path to redemption and forgiveness."
I hope those who hold the power in the Church will consider his message.
Mary R
Pockets of admission and remorse. Progress and mercy requiredfor all of us.
ReplyDeleteSorry for the briefness of words. I am rushing !!
Thank you for all your posts and I wish you a very Holy Triduum and peace on us all.
There is hope for the institution after all.
ReplyDeleteIt has been very hard not to see the hierarchy as rotten all the way to the top, these past weeks.
(Note I did not say "the Church"...)
I'm waiting for the dust between the Vatican and the NYT to settle before deciding where the truth might be most clearly seen.
ReplyDeletePastor this article can help settle things.
ReplyDeletehttp://blog.archny.org/?p=42
That's the best confession I've ever read. I hope that it will lead to healing wounds.
ReplyDelete