Couples Therapy for the Catholic Church
A betrayal by the clergy is much like that of an adulterous spouse.
By Arthur C. BrooksI have counterintuitive advice for the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church, who feel battered and besieged: Welcome the anger of the laity.
In the past two months, the church has been rocked by multiple accusations in quick succession, including charges of widespread clerical sexual abuse in Pennsylvania, decades of molestation by a cardinal and cover-ups extending all the way to the top of the Vatican.
Almost two decades after the sex abuse scandals of the early 2000s — which elicited promises of “never again” — anger among the laity is palpable and widespread. I hear it every day, in every conversation with faithful Catholics, conservative and liberal.
The first impulse of many leaders in the church has been to find a way to deflect or quell this anger. But this is a deadly error.
To an outsider, this might seem like a crisis involving sexuality and celibacy. It’s not. From the predation to the cover-up, this is a crisis of betrayal, much like that between spouses — an apt and common metaphor to describe the relationship between the clergy and laity.
The spousal bond is a cosmic kind of love. Happy couples, even secular ones, have a strong sense of what is meant by “one flesh,” and indeed, feel an almost visceral intermingling of their identities. Marriage is the one place where guile should be unnecessary and indeed, futile. This surrender to spousal love can be the source of the greatest joy and pleasure.
But woe be to the partner willing to betray this bond. If a friend or business partner double-crosses you, it feels awful. In contrast, spousal betrayal is so catastrophic that psychologists often compare it to death. Whether the clergy is aware or not, the Catholic lay faithful smell death in the air these days.
When people are betrayed, they begin to question everything. Did you ever mean it when you told me you loved me? Articulated or not, Catholics are beginning to wonder something similar: If some priests and bishops don’t believe the church’s most obvious teachings on pastoral care and sexual morality, what else do they not believe? Do they think the Gospels are false?
Anger is normal and healthy — in fact, necessary — when there is betrayal. And it is not necessarily dangerous. To extend the metaphor of a marriage, anger is not correlated with separation and divorce , according to the relationship expert John Gottman , a professor at the University of Washington. Anger says, “I care about this and want to fix it.”
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