A rchive Date
[ 07-02-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[A church must believe, especially in itself
By GEORGE JONAS -- Toronto Sun
August 24, 2000
Reports say the United Church decided to force its ministers to submit to mandatory police checks as a condition of employment. If so, I consider it melancholy news.
Periodic police checks may, admittedly, weed out a few child molesters among the clergy. (They won't weed out all, just as the screening of teachers or coaches, instituted years ago, hasn't eliminated, or perhaps even reduced, sexual predation in schools.) It's also possible that mandatory checks may attenuate a church's legal liability if abuse does occur. But what a meagre gain for the price.
The price is a reduction in the dignity of the clergy to begin with, but it's also much more. A call for police screening signals something worse than a flock's loss of trust and faith in its spiritual advisers, or in the church authorities who select and educate them. More painfully, it denotes the church's lack of trust and faith in itself. A church that needs the police to supervise the morality of its ministers, diminishes its own reason for being.
Child abuse is a great evil, but over the centuries churches have survived occasional child abusers. It's more doubtful if churches can survive inviting the police to vet their pastors.
From now on the faithful might as well look to the boys and girls in blue for spiritual guidance. This is another stage in the process that has seen many social institutions, mainstream churches prominently among them, abdicate their moral authority. It symbolizes modern society's progression from revering men of the cloth to revering men of the gumshoe.
By naming churches as co-defendants in some of the 7,000 lawsuits arising out of alleged residential school abuses, the Liberal government is showing its true colours.
Perhaps it's no exaggeration that "the federal government of Canada is a party to a systematic and egregious attack on the institutions of Christianity," as a National Post editorial put it this month. But many of the mainstream churches appear to be willing partners in the process.
Some churches seem bent on self-destruction. In their pathetic eagerness to make amends, not for cases of actual abuse (which would be proper), but in surrender to such spurious notions of political fashion as "cultural genocide," many Anglicans, Catholics and Presbyterians are guilt-tripping over each other.
It's one thing to compensate people who have fallen victim to a betrayal of trust. It's only right to attempt restitution to those who were sexually abused as native children while in the care of religious institutions. It's a totally different thing, however, to bankrupt congregations to atone for a historical change of perspective.
For a long time the churches, as well as the larger society, saw assimilation as serving the good of people who were to be assimilated, native or immigrant. They designed their programs accordingly. This may have been a tragic mistake (frankly, I'm not so sure it was), but be that as it may, it was done in good faith. It requires no repudiation today in self-abasing acts of psychodrama.
It's the spiritual rather than the fiscal bankruptcy of churches that should concern us. If the ecclesiastical hierarchies that permitted, and in some cases inspired, epidemics of self-mortification end up being swept away by them, it might be just as well. It will allow the vacuum created by the collapse of a moribund mainstream to be filled by more vigorous - dare one say, more fundamental - institutions of faith.
The spiritual impulse of human beings is puissant. It won't be blocked by the confusion or weakness of an effete hierarchy. It will simply find itself newer and wider channels.
After such news, it's a bit of comic relief to see a front-page picture of Mel Lastman, Toronto's carnival barker of a mayor, in the company of a somewhat distressed-looking Pope John Paul II.
Lastman - a master of visual and aural pollution, who with his street parties and ghastly gypsiferous moose has come close to turning Toronto, the archetypal WASP city of dull decorum, into a mixture between Coney Island and a Galician theme park dedicated to bad taste - seems bent on extending his influence to the Vatican. In the news photo he's seen pressing a hideous native print on the alarmed pontiff.
Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com. Jonas, author and producer, appears Thursdays
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