What Bishop Barron’s “Letter to a Suffering Church” Nails (and Misses) About the Sex Abuse Crisis

When Word on Fire’s Brandon Vogt reached out asking if I wanted a review a forthcoming “Bishop Barron book on sexual abuse crisis,” I was quick to respond. It wasn’t so much the prospect of a free book (the book is available to parishes for just $1 per copy with free shipping, and individuals can get a free single copy if they cover the shipping/handling, with all profits going directly to organizations who support sexual abuse victims). Rather, it’s that I was eager to see what Bishop Robert Barron – undeniably one of the brightest minds in the Church today – might have to say on the subject. To that end, I found the book — Letter to A Suffering Church: A Bishop Speaks on the Sexual Abuse Crisis — something other than what I was expecting. Initially, that was a bit of a letdown, but once I understood what the book was, I was able to get a great deal out of it. So here’s about 1000 words on each side of that.

I.

What may leave readers wanting is that Bishop Barron sometimes seems to avoid the “hard issues.” One of the most powerful parts of the book is his examination of past spiritual and sexual crises within the church: what went wrong, and how we got through these things as a Church. Barron focuses “particular attention” on the “notorious eleventh century, when the papacy was so compromised,” and when “sexual abuse of young people by the clergy was also rampant.” Why? Because “it has so many resonances with our present predicament” (51). Just what these “many resonances” are goes largely unuttered. Instead, he turns his attention to the man who “above all others, shed light on this situation and raised his voice in strenuous protest,” St. Peter Damian.

In a letter to Pope Leo IX, Peter complained that “the befouling cancer of sodomy is, in fact, spreading so through the clergy, or rather like a savage beast, is raging with such shameless abandon through the flock of Christ.” Peter complained also of “sympathetic confessors who would underplay the sin and give only light penances” to abusive priests, and had particular scorn for bishops who sexually abused their priests and seminarians; or as Peter put it, “those who commit these absolutely damnable acts with their spiritual sons” (52). Barron’s presentation of St. Peter Damian’s witness is powerful, but it again raises the question: what’s the parallel to the present? Perhaps the closest Barron gets to showing his cards is when he says that the sodomy condemned by St. Peter Damian  included “a range of homosexual behaviors” (51).

It’s easy to say “sexually abusing children is horrible, and so is covering it up, and everyone who did either of those things acted badly.” But that doesn’t say much beyond the obvious. What’s hard, what’s potentially going to alienate people, is to boldly ask (and examine, and answer) questions about the underlying causes. In the context of showing the successes of the Dallas Charter, Barron points out that “Numerous careful studies have revealed that instances of clergy sex abuse peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, declining steadily thereafter, and precipitously after 2002, so that now the reporting of new cases is down to a trickle” (85). But why did things get so bad in the 1960s and 70s? Like many readers, I was interested in hearing Barron’s take on all of the underlying factors: people have blamed clericalism, homosexuality, the sexual revolution, celibacy, a culture of secrecy, and an over-reliance of psychiatrists. Barron briefly wonders aloud about the role of moral relativism and clericalism in the post-Vatican II era (88-89), but he doesn’t really answer his own questions, let alone ours.

I was likewise interested in Barron getting “in the weeds” to talk about the specifics. At the least, given that Barron is an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, I thought he would at least bring up his own diocese’s particularly troubled history. Cardinal Mahony’s record was so bad that his successor, Archbishop Gomez, tried to prevent him from exercising public ministry, specifically barring him from performing confirmations in the Archdiocese, a prohibition that Mahony has flouted. This, after the Cardinal’s criminal pattern of abuse cover-up ended up costing a shocking $660 million in abuse settlements to 508 victims (payouts dwarfing the $157 million Boston paid), and which is now being investigated by California’s Attorney General. Nor was his awfulness on sexual abuse in isolation. Mother Angelica famously accused Mahony of not believing in the Real Presence, and he did everything in his power to force her to apologize and to try (unsuccessfully) to destroy EWTN. Hubris, clericalism, doctrinal infidelity, repeated deception of the laity, the shuffling of abusive priests, etc. All these were the hallmarks of Mahony’s rise to the College of Cardinals. In other words, if Barron had wanted a compelling case study of the problems he laments, he wouldn’t have had to look very far.

Beyond examining underlying causes and naming names, the other thing I hoped to get out of the book but didn’t was current events commentary. What does Bishop Barron think of the latest news related to the sex abuse scandal – the Vigano accusation, Pope-Emeritus Benedict’s letter, Pope Francis’ motu proprio? Again, we’re let to read between the lines. Perhaps the most we can say is that Barron considers that an “essential move, if the Church is serious about preventing McCarrick-like situations going forward, is to launch a formal investigation, both on this side of the Atlantic and in Rome, to determine how someone like Theodore McCarrick, whose serious misbehavior was well known, could possibly have risen so high in the government of the Church” (86-87). That, more or less, is what Vigano was asking for and has never gotten. And Barron’s own policy suggestions highlight the special role of the lay review board, since “this involvement of lay people— competent in law, psychology, criminal investigation, etc.—assures that clergy are not judged simply by other clergy, who would perhaps be prejudiced in favor of their brothers” (85). But when something like this was proposed by the USCCB, the Vatican intervened to stop the bishops from even voting on the proposal. Pope Francis’ own solution excludes any meaningful lay involvement.

Now, in fairness to Bishop Barron, he’s spoken more directly on some of these factors elsewhere. More importantly, none of those things are his aim within this book. As he says at the outset of chapter 2: “This terrible crisis has, God knows, been analyzed from numerous perspectives: psychological, interpersonal, criminal, cultural, etc. These are all valid and illuminating paths, but the problem will not be adequately investigated until it is seen in the light that comes from the Word of God” (19). In other words, those other questions and those other methodologies are important in their own right, but we’re already having those conversations.

II.

Quite explicitly, Barron’s aim is not to understand how the sex abuse crisis happened. Rather, it’s a book-length response to a single question: what should we say to the 37% of Catholics who report that they’re considering leaving the Church, in light of the abuse scandal? Barron’s response is the thesis of the book:

It is my conviction that this is not the time to leave; it is the time to stay and fight. The Scriptures shed a great deal of light on our present situation; we’ve been here before in our history and we’ve survived; everything you love in the Church is still present and is worth defending; there is a path forward. (16)

Each of the subsequent chapters explores one of these claims. And this is where the book is excellent, particularly in the chapter on the light of Scripture. Barron explores, in a way that few others could, what the Bible has to say on the question. He takes familiar scenes from the Bible and puts them into a new light. For instance, he discusses Sodom and Gomorrah, and particularly Lot’s “rather appalling solution”: “In order to stave off a brutal sexual assault, he presents his own virgin daughters for a violent gang rape. Could we imagine a more thoroughgoing undermining of the Creator’s intention regarding sex?” (23). Returning to this later, he points out how Lot’s daughters (despairing of the destruction of their city) intoxicate and seduce their own father. Barron’s insight:

Can anyone miss the connection between the shocking psychological and sexual abuse to which these girls were subjected—their own father offering them to a violent mob—and their subsequent abuse of Lot? Haven’t we seen over and again in our time the sadly familiar dynamic of sexual abuse begetting sexual abuse, the sin passed on like a contagion from generation to generation? (24-25)

Equally insightful is Barron’s description of the story of the high priest Eli and his sons as “an almost perfect biblical icon of the sexual abuse scandal that has unfolded over the past thirty years” (29). If your exposure to Eli is only through the readings at Mass, you might think he was a pretty good high priest. After all, he’s the priest that Hannah entrusted Samuel to, and in the “famous and poignant story of the Lord’s call to Samuel” (26), it’s Eli who teaches Samuel how to listen to the Lord. What the readings leave out is what a negligent priest, and a bad father, Eli was. The author of 1 Samuel put it bluntly: “Now the sons of Eli were worthless men; they had no regard for the Lord” (1 Sam. 2:12). Eli gives them a stern talking-to about their impiety and their stealing sacrifices, but he doesn’t follow this up with any action. And

In 1 Sam. 3 where young Samuel has learned to listen to God, and says, “Speak, for thy servant hears” (1 Sam. 3:10), the reading cuts offs right there. We don’t get to hear what God is about to say to Samuel. If we did read on, we’d discover God warning Eli through Samuel that “I am about to punish his house for ever, for the iniquity which he knew, because his sons were blaspheming God, and he did not restrain them” (1 Sam. 3:13). This divine wrath was exercised by delivering Israel into the hands of her enemies, resulting in the death of Eli and his sons. Presented in this light, it immediately reminds us of “priests abusing their people both financially and sexually; complaints are brought to their superior, who uses strong words and promises decisive action but does nothing to stop the abuse” (29). And thus, Barron argues, we shouldn’t be shocked that God chooses to purify the Church today by delivering her into the hands of her enemies.

While the chapter on Scripture is the most uplifting, the chapter on the Church is the most important. It’s here that Barron gets most directly into the question, why not leave? His answer recalls St. Peter’s words to Jesus, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). Ultimately, Barron will argue, “there is simply never a good reason to leave the Church. Never.” (59). Why? Because it’s in the Church that we find encounter with the God who alone can satisfy the infinite longing in our souls; because the Church is the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ himself; because the Holy Spirit is still present in, and animating, the Church; because it’s through the Church that we enter into the divine life, the life of the Trinity; because of the life-giving Sacraments; and ultimately, because of the Saints – both the ones who have come before us, and the ones we are called to be.

Summing these six reasons up, Barron says that “those who have put on Jesus Christ, who have been divinized through the sacraments, who have the Holy Spirit in them, who have become conformed radically to the Trinitarian love are called saints” (74). You can find filth inside the Church as well as without. But only the Church has the prerogative of being a sort of factory and testing ground for Saints. Turning away from the Sacraments because of corruption within the Church would be like pulling out your IV because of the disgusting personal lives of your doctors. The person such a protest primarily hurts is you. Sanctity, then, is both the best reason to stay and the heart of Barron’s solution – what are needed, badly need, right now are great Saints to respond to the great corruption of our age and the great corruption within the Church.

If anything I’ve written here piques your interest, you should pick it up. It’s cheap, it’s interesting, and it’s short (only about 17,000 words; for comparative purposes, this review is about 2,000). Barron describes Letter to a Suffering Church as “a cri de cœur, a cry from the heart” (i). Understood this way, as a Catholic (who happens to be a priest and a bishop and a theologian) struggling with the worst scandal and theological crisis of our lifetimes, the book is a tremendous contribution to the conversation, and the collective healing that has to happen. Just don’t expect it to answer every lingering question about how we got here in the first place.