Eugene Cullen Kennedy's blog

"It's not easy being green," they sing on the soothing fantasy byway of Sesame Street. It is even harder being violet or crimson for church officials struggling to extricate themselves from the pile-up car wreck of the sex abuse crisis on the all-too-real road to Rome.

We all feel that we know Barbara and Jerry Heil, a Catholic couple presumed dead after the cruise ship Costa Concordia, like a prehistoric creature too clumsy to escape its adversary, heaved its wounded bulk one last time before turning on its side and dying in the shallow waters off the Tuscan coast.

Jerry and Barbara Heil are remembered by their grieving fellow parishioners at St. Pius X Church in White Bear Lake, Minn., as "quiet kindly people deeply involved in the congregation."

In a story likely to be unsurpassed as what psychologists term an "unobtrusive measure" of what is wrong with the Catholic church in Ireland, its venerable national seminary at Maynooth has decided, according to The Irish Catholic, to "separate the seminary environment from the wider university community."

The cackling and cawing of the media birds of prey stripping the Iowa cornfields clean blurred the weekend of our transition into a new year. Yet their departure from Iowa in a noisy fluttering wedge to disturb the peace elsewhere reminds us, as does this steep path of descent from the craggy peak of one year to the lush foothills of another, of the Mystery that swirls around this familiar passage.

The New York Times recently asked an author of a book on imaginary gardens to review a new book that was actually old hat in its debunking the idea that the Garden of Eden and its alleged inhabitants, Adam and Eve, ever really existed.

That flatfooted reduction of the first power couple and their idyllic garden to inventions, like the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, to beguile children and the gullible masses, is one of the misunderstandings of the myth of Eden that causes us to miss the spiritual and psychological meaning of this account of our origins.

The Oxford English Dictionary offers several definitions of culture, at least two of which help us understand the sex abuse scandals that have burst into flame on the campuses of Penn State and Syracuse universities and the very same scandal that is still eating its windswept way across the vast prairie of the Catholic church.

These are different faces of a scandal where origins and accelerants are exactly the same. They are functions of the cultures in which the blazes exploded from the same kindling, waxed stronger as the officials perched atop their common hierarchical structures, certain that they could keep them under control, decided not to pull the fire alarm -- what the heck, the fire chief and the newspaper editor were old friends of ours, we can count on them to keep this quiet and, besides, reporting it might increase our insurance rates, and we've had little fires before and if you don't make a big deal out of them, they burn themselves out.

I must credit my wife for the best observation I heard as we drifted out of Mass among other grumbling survivors of the wreckage of the most over-ballyhooed maiden voyage since that of the Titanic a century ago. Rome, as she observed, is indeed burning, and the pope, surely winking like a German paterfamilias aware that he isn't fooling anybody in his Santa Claus suit, boasts that the Catholic church is leading the way in the war against sex abuse.

Not many bishops can drag their whole diocese with them when they get indicted for failing to report information about a priest predator to the authorities. Sadly, many people are neither surprised nor saddened that Bishop Robert Finn has brought the Kansas City-St. Joseph diocese -- the institutional apparatus not the people who are really the Church -- down this rabbit hole of ignominy with him for failing to act about a priest with a computer filled with child pornography.

They would never have thought about themselves in this way. In fact, they didn't think much about themselves at all. That is what made them both great and good at the same time, a combination that is elusive in what we might call the Age of the Drone that refers not to silent airborne weapons that blow people up suddenly, but to the grating windblown political pundits who bore people to death slowly.

Nobody would ever accuse the so-called Reform of the Reform of a lack of transparency. You can see right through its almost weekly moves to return Catholicism to the Eden of church life that they perceive on the far side of Vatican II.

Liturgical seasons, such as Lent and Advent, are meant to open us less to articles of the creed and more to the essential character of religion, the experience of Mystery.

That's not the Hercule Poirot small letter mystery with everybody grouped as if for a family photograph as the Belgian detective neatly answers the questions about and explains a death in which everyone is a suspect.

New York's Mayor Bloomberg has proven himself the Cirque de Soleil gymnast of political correctness by banning, on grounds of vague and affected nobility, the presence of any members of the clergy on the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Towers. Has the Mayor asked New Yorkers whether they want members of the clergy present on the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks?

The sex abuse crisis among priests and other church personnel has now exploded like napalm across the entire Catholic world. New revelations tell an old story almost every day: that of the suffering of its victims, often in secret and compounded by ecclesiastical ineptitude, inattention, or moral insolvency.

The Reformers of the Reform resemble those who restore and sell antique cars. They labor strenuously to polish up once sleek models out of the '20s and flog them confidently as the next big thing in Catholic life.

It is hard not to believe that Pope Benedict XVI has either a richly cultivated sense of irony or a finely honed capacity, as the saying goes, “to put people on.” What else would explain his advice to Sicilians on his one day visit to that island last autumn? Catholic Culture reports that he urged Sicilians “to be saints” and then, in almost the same breath, offered a quick, sure passage to Heaven by telling them to “reject the Mafia.”

The lack of a sense of humor in the self-designated Reformers of the Reform is matched only by their lack of a sense of irony. Otherwise, they would have noticed the squealing dissonance between their assertions for their new/old translation of liturgical texts and the words of Jesus in the Gospel reading for the 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time.

Part Two of Two

The first common characteristic of set-decorators is their affinity for surfaces. Professing commitment to the depths of the faith, they are obsessed with rustling cassocks, billowing capes, sounding bells and bows, the stuff, in short, with which they can redecorate the set of hierarchical Catholicism. If they build it, these clerics believe, the people will come.

Part One of Two

Decoration: (2) That which decorates or adorns, an ornament, esp. an ornament temporarily put up on a special location; used ... of scenery on the stage.
-- Oxford English Dictionary

Set-decorator: The person responsible for dressing a motion picture set with appropriate decorative furnishings -- furniture, rugs, lamps, draperies, wall paintings, books, etc.
-- The Film Encyclopedia, Third Edition

It is almost overwhelmingly ironic that the military intervention to kill bin Laden -- symbol of the seemingly nothing-in-common state of Islamic–Christian relations -- was a Night Journey, an example of the mythic religious themes that Christianity shares with Islam.

The currently ill-timed, ill-stated, and certainly ill-advised critique of Fordham theologian Elizabeth Johnson's book, Quest for the Living God, is a remake of a slasher movie that Catholics have seen many times. You know the one in which the monster, thought slain in the original film, rises and returns to his pursuit of the innocent. Note that "Inquisition II" contains violence and may not be suitable for younger viewers.

In his last telephone call to me, Joe Feuerherd genially but deftly sought pertinent facts for my obituary for which he was better prepared than I. It was like him, of course, to anticipate things and to turn a potentially cold and unsettling inquiry into a warm and funny exchange.

Norman Mailer advised writers to "learn to kill your little darlings," and "how much you must leave out to get this little bit in."

George Weigel, the not inexperienced author of "The End of the Bernardin Era" amazes the reader with how much he has left out to get so little in and so much wrong.

"What the Twin Tower attacks were for the United States," Italian journalist Massimo Franco tells NCR’s John Allen, "the sex abuse scandals are for the Church."

Denver Auxiliary Bishop James D. Conley seems as pleased with himself as the boy chosen to be class monitor in his recent explanation of the liturgical changes that come into effect in Advent of this year.

“Let me say this,” he confesses, “I’m very excited about the changes that are coming and the opportunities we have for liturgical renewal.”

COLUMN

Folklore grinds out the grains of truth that are found in such notions like: “If an Irishman is given a choice of water or whisky, the water will go untouched.”

With Pope Benedict XVI’s latest plans for time traveling the church back to another era, we recall another claim: “If a German is offered a choice between justice and good order, he’ll take the good order any day.”

When the Church speaks of Ordinary Time, it is really talking about our time -- the season set aside for us ordinary people who have bit parts in the true Reality Show of the human condition.

COLUMN

By their nature, metaphors allow us “to make journeys,” “to go beyond” a point that we could not otherwise pass.

Metaphors enrich us by their connotations -- the rich allusions and meanings that they deliver as a cloud of witnesses to a broadened and deepened truth about a person or an event.

As Norman Mailer once suggested that ego was the word of the 20th century, so civility is fast becoming the word of at least this year of the 21st century.

That we all want to be civil should not make us less suspicious of any substance used in excess, and any word that politicians suddenly start using as if they practice it or believed in it. We have many reasons to be cautious about civility as the style of -- as well as the accustomed mask for -- cover-ups.

I started the year with a pseudo-noble promise to be more understanding and supportive of bishops, somewhat in the spirit of my father’s frequent advice about criticizing others: “Leave the poor fellows alone; they’re doing the best they can.” He, however, did not use the word “fellows.”

We can hear all creation groaning, Saint Paul tells us, but that plaintive signal of the spiritual longing of the cosmos -- and of us -- may be muffled by our own heavy breathing at having run the race and finished the course of the departing year. Don’t we get a medal or something for keeping the faith?