I would have assumed that the author of this recent comment proclaiming Maciel’s innocence was either a troll or someone being sarcastic. However, in the last couple days I have come across a former-LC-brother-turned-RC-organizer with an Anglophone name who actually expressed similar thoughts.
Regardless of whether the individual is trolling, being sarcastic or expressing sincere thoughts, his/her following words hit me: “Finally, it is Catholic teaching that good comes out of evil. Jesus was from the lineage of David, and David had an adulterous relationship with Uriah’s wife and then had him killed.”
Okay, we’ve all heard LC/RC apologists use the King David analogy before. And we’ve all responded: “King David repented publicly. Maciel claimed innocence until death.” Fair enough.
But what about King David before he repented? Before Nathan confronted him with the story of the two shepherds? Let’s take a good look at 2 Samuel 12.
First, God deprived King David of his first child with Uriah’s wife. In short, God permitted the death of the fruit conceived from David’s and Bathsheba’s adultery. Moreover, God did so on the seventh day, which is the day a baby boy would normally have been circumcised under the Old Covenant – signifying his covenant with God. Since David was asleep when the child died during the night, I’m guessing the child died before receiving circumcision. But I will leave the Biblical experts to figure this out.
Second, God forgave David, but David’s adultery and murder continue to curse his descendants long after David had repented. As the prophet Nathan tells David in confronting him: “Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house, because you have despised God, and have taken the wife of Uri’ah the Hittite to be your wife,” and “Thus says the LORD, `Behold, I will raise up evil against you out of your own house; and I will take your wives before your eyes, and give them to your neighbor, and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of this sun.
For you did it secretly; but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun.’”
Forgiveness is possible. God will forgive a repentant heart as He forgave King David. But forgiveness does not remove the temporal consequences of sin. Nor does God’s forgiveness insure the survival of the fruit of one’s sin.
Tag: King
Stephen King gets it? Does Fr. Alvaro?
Cassandra Jones posted a report of Fr. Alvaro’s homily at yesterday’s Legion of Christ professions in Cheshire. You can read Cassandra’s report here. Fr. Alvaro spent quite a bit of time asking for forgiveness, Cassandra states. But in reading over the report I keep asking myself Forgiveness for what?
Fr. Alvaro appears to allude to the Fr. Maciel scandal on several occasions. I say “appears to” because one is never entirely clear from reading Cassandra’s report that this is what the Legion’s Director General is referring to in sprinkling spiritual advice with mea culpas. As Cassandra’s source reports: “I wanted to know how the scandal would be handled, so that’s what I will emphasize. It was not mentioned directly at all, of course, but a lot of what Father Alvaro was saying seemed to relate to it very closely.” (Emphasis mine). For an order whose defenders were quite specific in denouncing their founder’s victims, “seemed to” is not enough.
Allow me to digress as I confess the following: I have a weakness for Stephen King. (Or in current Legion-speak, “The troubling imagination of a certain modern author has integrated itself into my personal library, which is kept separate from my professinal and spiritual library.”) Some of it goes back to my budding years as a writer, exploring Catholic themes through short horror stories. Some of it, I am sure, is due to the ministry God has called me to as a canon lawyer, which often deals with the darker aspects of man’s fallen nature.
Regardless, there’s a common discrepancy in Stephen King’s writing that I first noticed when reading Needful Things. It’s in the way he portrays clergy. Protestant clergy are generally nutty fundamentalists, no different than Hollywood’s usual stereotype. This contrasts with how King typically portrays Catholic clergy – conservative, heroic, dedicated to the welfare of their flock and of their community, and struggling to overcome one or two minor personal flaws. In short, King often portrays Catholic clergy both sympathetically and realistically as good ministers struggling to be saints.
What makes this fascinating is that King is not Catholic. He was raised by his mother, a strict Methodist who struggled as a single mother to hold the family together after King’s father walked out. It’s his wife Tabitha who is Catholic. Moreover, he disagrees strongly with the Church’s teaching on contraception, as he has made clear through both his fiction and non-fiction. Nevertheless, his fundamentalist protestant clergy tend to be one-dimensional fanatics (The Stand‘s Mother Abagail a noted exception), while his Catholic clergy tend to be multi-layered, reflective and human. The contrast becomes all the more fascinating when King’s Protestant and Catholic characters interact.
Which brings me back to Cassandra’s report about Fr. Alvaro’s homily yesterday. As I read through the report, wondering what Fr. Alvaro was asking forgiveness for, my mind wandered to an incident in one of King’s books. It begins with the child of a Bible fundamentalist doing something naughty to a Catholic neighbor. It might have been a rude insult or a small act of vandalism, and I think the book was The Regulators. I can’t recall the details and it’s been several years since I read it, so I apologize if I recall the story vaguely or incorrectly.
Yes, I apologize. Specifically, I apologize for my recollection that is not as specific as my apology. And this, according to King as he describes the incident, is what distinguishes devout Catholics from fundamentalist Protestants.
In the book, the child’s father frog-marches the kid before the victim of the child’s bad behavior. The child alludes to the wrong-doing, if I recall correctly, but doesn’t actually name it. The child beats himself up verbally, inviting the wronged party to follow up with a physical beating as the kid’s father watches on. What follows is my recollection of the passage.
The victim suppresses a smirk, looks down at the child, and says something along the lines of “I just want you to do one thing. Look me in the eyes and tell me what you did wrong.”
Upon hearing this, the child transforms from resigned and robotic to visibly uncomfortable. He begins to squirm and looks up at his father with a pitiful gaze. Father is as horrified as son and begins to protest as parent. Speaking through the voice of the narrator – or perhaps the child’s victim – King launches into a thought about how admitting to one’s wrong-doing is the worst form of punishment one can inflict upon a Christian fundamentalist, who sees no value in the sacrament of confession. On the other hand, Catholics understand that freedom from sin only comes when one lets it out by confessing to the wrong-doing. What an interesting insight from a writer of psychological horror.
In short, Stephen King gets it. He may not have been raised Catholic; his novels may be saturated with dark themes and four-letter words; he may lack the grace of holy orders, of advanced degrees in Catholic theology, of being the head of a large Catholic order – but in spending a lifetime observing and writing about the darker side of our fallen nature, he understands that forgiveness and healing are tied to a specific admission of one’s wrong-doing and guilt. So he gets it.
Here’s the question: Does Fr. Alvaro?