The scandal affecting the Church today has put a spotlight on many issues that the Church has been facing for many years. The lack of leadership on the part of major Church leaders, a colossal shift in their priorities, and deep flaws in Catholic education have created an environment where many people’s faith has been shaken. One of those flaws is the lack of education about human sexuality.
Let’s be honest. As Catholics, we don’t talk about sex. It’s not seen as appropriate in “polite” company. This attitude, however, is downright destructive. We need to be teaching our young people about how the amazing gift that God has given them and how to use that gift appropriately.
A problem that I have found is that there really isn’t all that much out there to guide young singles. Sex is a gift and a natural part of most Catholics’ lives, yet resources such as Theology of the Body are rarely taught in Catholic schools. The Catechism contains very little in explanation as to why certain things are right or wrong in regard to this topic. With little guidance on these teachings, how can one expect young Catholics to live these teachings and find good marriages? This lack of knowledge is manifesting in all sorts of ways. For example, an upstanding, generally considered “good” Catholic high school in North Carolina has a teen pregnancy rate almost three times the local county rate. We need to be educating our children and taking steps to eliminate this problem in our communities.
If we want to ensure that something like this never happens again, we have to start somewhere. Reforming the Catholic education system to include sexual education and health as a vital part of the curriculum is a real actionable intervention and one that I firmly believe will have an immediate, positive outcome.
Bridget Seelinger, BSN, RN, lives in Asheville and is pursuing a master’s degree in public health.
In an article about the Church abuse scandal in the Catholic News Herald’s Aug. 31 issue, it was suggested that the solution to this crisis in the Church was to go back to “tradition” because what has been going on for the past 100 years hasn’t worked. I couldn’t disagree more.
It was the Council of Trent, with its “circling of the wagons” rather than confronting the clear sickness in the Church at the time, that accelerated the decline to where we have come today. We became an even more imperial Church, ever more rife with clericalism and triumphalism. We became a Church with no accountability, answering only to itself and killing (either literally or virtually through “silencing”) anyone who dared to dissent or question through the Inquisition and its later form, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The last thing we need is to go back to an environment where priests and the hierarchy are unquestionable little kings rather than “servants of the servants.” No matter how “pure” their original calls and vocations may be, “absolute power corrupts absolutely” and unaccountable power will only lead to consistent abuse. Certainly not all priests succumb to these temptations, but those prone to power grabs would continue to be enabled.
What we need is true servant leadership that actually looks to furthering the Church’s mission: to bring people into ever-growing relationship with God, rather than using the power of the Church for crowd control and self-preservation of the hierarchy and its institutions. This must be coupled with outside accountability and transparency that is not beholden to the hierarchy. The Church is most assuredly not a democracy, but if the clergy don’t start to come to grips with what their actual role is, I strongly suspect the faithful will be “voting with their feet.” I, for one, won’t stand any longer with the Church if it continues to hide behind power and legal strategies to protect its might rather than standing with the “least of my brothers.” I will trust that, as Ezekiel said in chapter 34, God Himself will shepherd His lost sheep and remove those who have been plundering them.
John Knippel lives in Hayesville.