Denver, Colo., Sep 1, 2018 / 06:04 am (CNA/EWTN News).- When sex abuse scandals first rocked the Catholic Church in the United States in 2002, Miriel Thomas Reneau was young, and felt “truly shocked to realize that men of God could inflict such terrible wounds on victims with impunity.”
This summer, as accusations of abuse against former cardinal Theodore McCarrick surfaced, a grand jury report from Pennsylvania detailed decades of clerical abuse, and the Pope has been accused of allegedly covering up abuse, Reneau, as well as many other lay Catholics, wanted to do to something.
“I wanted to express my solidarity with the victim-survivors of these abuses and do everything within my power to urge the leaders of the Church to act as courageous fathers in enacting meaningful and visible reform,” she told CNA.
That’s why Reneau, along with a friend who wished to remain anonymous, started The Siena Project, which encourages laity to write letters to their bishops “to enact meaningful reforms in light of recent revelations of grievous abuses in the Catholic Church.”
On its website, the Siena Project includes printable letter templates that can be sent to the apostolic nuncio to the United States, to Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and a template letter that can be sent to one’s local ordinary.
Reneau told CNA that she had already written letters to her bishop and to Cardinal DiNardo when she felt inspired to build a website that would help other Catholics do the same.
Using St. Catherine of Siena as the namesake for the project was a no-brainer for Reneau, who has a strong devotion to the Dominican tertiary, even naming a daughter after her. Furthermore, St. Catherine met and corresponded with Gregory XI so persistently that she eventually convinced him to move back to Rome after 67 years of papal exile in France.
Her example “shows us that courageous and persistent correspondence with Church leaders can be a channel of renewal during times of crisis in the Church,” Reneau said.
The project also lists in their mission statement six points which they affirm, including that clergy publicly admit the sins of the Church, that they submit to outside investigations, that seminaries and places of formation be reformed, and that the Church works to extend statute of limitations laws so as to give victims more time to find justice in court. Those who affirm the mission statement in whole are encouraged to sign it.
However, “we care much less about acquiring signatures than we do about encouraging people to write to their bishops in their own voices and from their own convictions,” Reneau said.
“I didn’t really know what to expect when I launched the website, and the response has reassured me on the most important point: I am not alone in perceiving a need for profound and visible reforms within the Church that I love so much.”
A similar letter-writing initiative was organized by a group of Catholic women, who signed an open letter to Pope Francis demanding answers to the questions and accusations raised in a letter by former U.S. nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò.
As of Friday afternoon, the letter had more than 20,000 signatures.
Kendra Tierney is another lay Catholic who felt called to do something as the news of scandals in the Church kept coming this summer.
A mom who blogs at Catholic All Year, Tierney said the response to the scandals was something that frequently came up in a Facebook group of female Catholic bloggers to which she belongs.
Together with Bonnie Engstrom, who blogs at A Knotted Life, Tierney launched a social campaign encouraging prayer and fasting, which is how #SackClothandAshes began.
The women designed shareable graphics which describe the mission of the campaign, explain the purpose of prayer and fasting, and provide prayers of reparation. The campaign is set to last 40 days – it began Aug. 22, the feast of the Queenship of Mary, and will last through the month of September.
“We are Catholic, faithful to the Magisterium and disgusted by the abuse and cover-ups that have plagued the Roman Catholic Church. We are heartsick over the 1,000+ victims of abuse in the state of Pennsylvania and all the other boys and girls, men and women who have been sexually abused by priests and further victimized by the bishops who covered up these crimes,” one graphic for the #SackClothandAshes campaign states.
Tierney said she didn’t expect as big a response to the campaign as it has received.
“The response has been really heartwarming, because it felt like here was something real and concrete and based in Catholic doctrine and tradition that we could do,” she said.
Fasting in particular is a practice that has “sort of fallen by the wayside in Catholicism recently,” Tierney said, “yet this is a tool that makes us better and makes our Church better.”
Tierney said one of the most encouraging responses to the campaign she has received is from a woman who was sexually abused by a priest as a child. While the abuse happened many years ago, and the woman has since married and left the Church, she told Tierney that “it was the first time that she felt like the Catholic Church was supporting her and all that she had gone through.”
“There’s so many intentions for this (campaign), but that has to be one of the main ones, is showing the people who have survived this kind of abuse that we are aware of them and that we want to do what we can to support them,” Tierney said.
She noted that September is an especially appropriate time for a campaign that calls for fasting and reparation, as it contains the feasts of Our Lady of Sorrows and the Exaltation of the Cross, as well as the autumn ember days – the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday after the third Sunday in September, which were, historically, days of fast and abstinence.
The sacrifices and prayers are “a daily reminder that I haven’t given up on this, I haven’t forgotten about it, it’s…40 days that I keep it in the forefront of my mind,” she added.
Author Leah Libresco is also inviting laity to use the Sept. 14 feast of Our Lady of Sorrows as an opportunity to call their bishops about their concerns.
In her Facebook event, Libresco said she will be asking her bishop “what (he) knew about McCarrick, what he did, and what he plans to do now. I’ll also ask for him to work for the release of documents that would confirm or refute Archbishop Viganò’s testimony.”
She encourages attendees of the event to use the letter templates from The Siena Project as a guide for what to say on the call, and also to pray the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary or the Chaplet of Seven Sorrows for the bishops and their staff ahead of time.
“Let them know when you call that you’re praying for them!” she noted.
Kevin Heider is a Catholic singer-songwriter who has responded to the scandal through song.
“The Body” is the result of thoughts that Heider started having as news of sexual accusations against McCarrick came out this summer, as well the thoughts he had surrounding his wife’s pregnancy and the birth of his son.
“As we snuggled and stared and held our son close for two days in the hospital, our minds were split between the joy of this new life and the shame and sorrow wrought by recent revelations of the extent of the suffering our church has brought to so many of the men, women, and children she was supposed to shelter — not abandon,” Heider wrote in a reflection which he shared on his Facebook page.
Heider told CNA that he had been reflecting on the Church.
His song opens with a meditation on the ugliness of sin among the members of the body of Christ, the Church.
As member of the body of Christ “we have to embrace the pain caused by our members and bear it and deal with the weight of it all,” he told CNA.
Music helps Heider process, and he said he hopes his song could help others who are struggling with the scandal in the Church to do the same. He said he hoped it might have a unifying effect, and could help his listeners move from anger to sadness.
“When people allow themselves to just be sad, they’re truly united in that sadness. There’s a beauty in that, I think, in the simple acknowledgment that we’re in this together.”
In his Facebook reflection, he closed with an apology to anyone who has been hurt by members of the Church.
“To every beautiful body one of her members has ever perversely desecrated: I do not have the words to tell you how sorry I am.”
Chris Stefanick, a Catholic speaker and evangelist with Real Life Catholic, told CNA that the pain of the abuse crisis “hits very close to home,” as he has had family members endure the devastation of abuse, with effects that can last for decades.
“So any form of institutionalized cover ups infuriates me on a very personal level. I know I’m not alone in that. I think that watching this kicks up a lot of personal pain for a lot of people…even if it wasn’t a member of the clergy who abused them,” he said.
He encouraged Catholics to do four things in the face of the abuse crisis: demand transparency, pray, hope, and remain faithful.
“Don’t ever let anyone inside or outside the Church tell you not to talk. Solid accusations must be dealt with until they’re resolved. Be an annoying voice if you need to be,” he said on the need for transparency.
At the same time, Catholics should not let the crisis “rob you of your focus on Jesus.”
“I’ll never let Judas drive me away from Christ,” he said.
“In every crisis in the Church God sends saints as the solution. This is a time of profound crisis. God is calling us to be saints. To rebuild his Church.”
[…]
Bishop Powers was at best clumsy in beginning a Chrism Mass and the blessing of the Holy Oils with an Ojibwa religious ceremonial dance. Having the ceremony at the start gives the impression of formal equivalence.
In the Southwest our bishops had a long history of incorporating Native American ritual, singing and drumming at intervals, the Franciscans had implemented that well especially among the Pueblo, but also with the Navajo, Kiowa, Apache and others so that the impression was simply one of recognizing the culture of the participants without any sense of ritual and belief equivalence.
Well said. And yet there still can be a misunderstood “equivalence” in the minds of, say, the poorly informed/formed within the fold, and the sometimes invincibly ignorant. Three points:
FIRST, this, in our time when the synthesis of Faith & Reason was occasioned in the West when Jerusalem met Athens (Greek culture). And, now, when the West is being positioned as more-or-less equivalent with the variety of non-Western natural religions and worse. A pope who handles ambiguously exchanges his staff for a Wiccan Stang at the Youth Synod, accepts a Marxist crucifix gifted in Peru, and celebrates (?) Pachamama in the Vatican Garden, and then for the fertility goddess approves a niche in St. Peter’s Basilica. True, she was later given a lay baptism in the Tiber…
SECOND, so, this type of engagement when evangelization attempts to connect with populations and cultures wherever they might be at the moment. Speak their language, but then total capitulation under Fiducia Supplicans, toward the pandemic of carnal paganism from within the post-Christian West itself. So, yes to cultural expressions if handled well as you report, but in all cases what of true and clear inculturation of the Faith? A Faith which is received (!) and not only an expression?
Too many self-destructive expressions now embedded in an aggregated and bottoms-up Synodality…
THIRD, this, too, from Cardinal Sarah:
“Without silence, the Church does not live up to here calling. I fear that the reform of the liturgy, especially in Africa, is often the occasion for noisy, purely human celebrations that are hardly in keeping with the will of the Son of God as expressed during the Last Supper. It is not a matter of rejecting the joy of the faithful, but there is a time for everything. The liturgy is the place, not for human rejoicing, passions, a profusion of discordant words, but for pure adoration” (“The Power [!] of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise,” Ignatius, 2017, p. 221).
When it’s contained within the language [liturgical texts in Swahili, Maasai, Navajo] of the populace, and their musical genre, usually drums, religious songs written for the liturgy, melody identified with their culture it has in my experience in Africa, and in the Southwest had positive outcome. Cardinal Sarah is likely criticizing abuses to what Vatican II approved.
So Vigano thinks that there is a Deep State that has much power under the present regime and that threatens Christianity. Hmmm. We have just learned that FBI whistleblower Steve Friend has said that FBI taught Agents that Pro Lifers are more dangerous than Islamic terrorists: “We were shown a video that was produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center” that “ranked people who oppose abortion, pro-life activists, as a greater threat than Islamists.”
There are a lot of confusing and contradictory claims about this entire disturbing affair. To begin with I have seen much online speculation about who “archbishop Vigano” really is which assumes he posts under a pseudonym. Bishop Powers in his complaints against Vigano not only identifies him by name and title but says that he was the papal nuncio who attended his installation as bishop of Superior, Wisconsin in 2016! Bishop Powers then says that such ceremonies were not only practiced then but in every significant church event since! If AB Vigano is correctly identified, then how indeed has he escaped the treatment that befell AB Strickland and Cardinal Burk? Can anyone make sense of this?
Archbishop Vigano was indeed the papal nuncio to the US in 2016, and he does not use a pseudonym. There’s a wikipedia article on him. 2016 was his last year in the office of papal nuncio, as he retired. It would not be surprising either that he witnessed the ceremony and made no objection, or that it has continued every year since, he did not start objecting to practices and personnel choices until years after he retired, and I believe he apologized near the start of that for having held his peace so long.
He has no office to be removed from, so the treatment accorded Bishop Strickland and Cardinal Burke is not possible. Supposedly he has also been physically avoiding contact with any Vatican emissaries, preventing him from being semi-voluntarily carted off to a mental facility, as has happened with some priests, but I don’t think there’s any evidence that anyone would have tried that on him. But then, the only solid evidence possible would presumably be his presence in a mental facility.
Before Archbishop Vigano would be committed to a mental facility, he’d have to get in line. There’s a long list of bishops, Cardinals and Vatican officials who need to have their heads examined because so many of them are deranged. I can’t imagine that all their lunacy can be attributed to moral derangement alone.
Archbishop Vigano has not “escaped the treatment that befell AB Strickland and Cardinal Burk (sic)” as a brief internet search will reveal.
I, for one, have had my fill of the bastardization of the Catholic liturgy at the hands of prelates who are “off the reservation” (pun intended). By the way, Bishop Gumbleton just died.
May Gumby reset in peace.
Praise God for giving Gumby time to reflect and repent.
Thank God for giving us grace to endure.
I would like to know the words which were chanted. Yet I have a problem with women holding feathers gathering around the altar, doing what looks like some non-Christian ritual in the Sanctuary.
I also have a problem with this:
“Powers wrote that it has “long been a tradition in the Diocese of Superior to honor the heritage of our Native Americans before major diocesan celebrations,”
It is a false order of values which becomes more and more widespread in the Western Church. Christianity is the highest = absolute value; the local cultural traditions are secondary. Christianity is the Truth above all so it should not seek “to honor” local traditions. Instead, the local traditions should seek to give what good they have to the Liturgy but only as long as doing so does not violate the Truth expressed in the Liturgy itself. To be clear, I will give an example: being Russian I do not expect the local Roman Catholic Church to invite me to dance before the Mass playing balalaika for the sake of recognizing my culture; being Russian I offer my skills of an iconographer to the local church and paint and embroider which bear an imprint of the Russian culture.
And so, it is unacceptable to insert some pieces of culture into Mass for the sake of “being nice”. In that particular case (on the video) there should be no women in the Sanctuary doing some kind of a ceremony. But the native music could be easily incorporated into Mass if the congregation has natives. Look for example at this short video of the end of the Easter service in the Eastern Orthodox Church in Africa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VNptIdyVzo
Women there are dancing while singing a hymn, a priest is dancing as well standing in the Sanctuary. The women are not in the sanctuary. I find it great and an excellent conclusion of the Easter Liturgy (I think); if I was there I would join them and dance as well. I am sure no one there thought of “honoring local traditions”, the locals just acted their Christian faith out with the means they used to.
As for the accusations of defamation it is laughable. Since when theological accusations are to be defined as “defamation”? Our Church fathers would be buried under pieces of paper sent from the court.
I will add the following. This shamanic (I think) ceremony, the red dragon in the Vatican for the Chinese New Year, a priest who encourages stupid greetings before Mass, Synod on Synodality, are all the same in essence. They all have the same root: those who push them do not have Christ as the felt center, in the Church and their own world. Instead, they have themselves, “the beloved themselves” at the center and that fact they cover by “for the good of others”. If they push “honoring” local culture at the expense of Christ they are “nice” you see and have the glory which they steal from Christ Who by their actions is denied the glory and also the chance to connect with others (including those who do shamanic ceremonies).
All the above things could be verified and done away over a few minutes. How Christ’ Body and Blood in the Chalice are honored by the shamanic ceremony? What the Author of the Revelation would think about the Red Dragon in the Vatican dancing around the Pope, not so much about the fact but about the zero clue the Pope had about the symbol he was giving to the Church? Where is Jesus Christ in the Synod on Synodality? Would He like to participate in such a thing? What would He say? Would He understand their oblique (to themselves as well) language which is so different from His “yes – yes, no – no”?
The further it goes the less I am able to understand the language those people use. They appear to be in another world. My conversations with them usually goes like this:
– Listen, you cannot have the shamanic dance in the Sanctuary before Mass!
– We are honoring local traditions.
– It is Christ who should be honored by His Church, not the local traditions.
– What?
(silence and bewilderment after the following is usually said)
– You are not nice! You do not think of those people who need to know we honor their traditions!”
– But what about Christ? Should you not think of Him first?
(silence and bewilderment etc.; that can go indefinitely)
Those people defend “other people” only because in “honoring them” they honor themselves. They do not care about bringing “those people” to Christ, they care about bringing them to themselves and being seen as “nice”. Christ to them is someone who spoils their show, the one they must bow to and this is why they push Him away (mostly unconsciously).
We have an old saying, a paradigm of a meaningless conversation: two people saying to each other “There is a red berry tree in my garden” – “I have an uncle in Kiev”; “There is a red berry tree in my garden” – “I have an uncle in Kiev”; “There is a red berry tree in my garden” – “I have an uncle in Kiev” etc., endlessly. (sounds a bit political right now but I am unwilling to change our folklore.) This is what is going on in our Church now. Two camps, one which has Christ as their felt center, another one who have “themselves, the beloved” as their center, with an insatiable desire to be seen as “nice”. The second camp will win on this earth because it is nice to be nice. Those who stick to Christ because they know they will sink without Him looking and will continue looking plain disgusting: “unloving, uncaring, cruel, rigid” and so on.
Thank you Anna. No worries, since nice is not a virtue. Charity seeks the good of the other. God is Good. If we love our neighbor, we share our love of Christ with them, our Good Lord and Savior. Happy Mercy Sunday!
Well, this gives the bishop of Superior the opportunity to aknowledge he was wrong to have this ceremony at Mass, especially Chrism Mass.
I suspect that until now they haven’t touched Archbishop Vigano because he knows too much about too many active and important cardinals, bishops, and priests. It’s all part of the smoke, mirrors, and obfuscation that we’ve had to endure for quite a long time now. That said, I do think that Archbishop Vigano has gone off the rails, though these days staying on the rails is might difficult for any faithful Catholic. Bishop Powers’ protest will likely end there; I’m actually surprised that anyone had the nerve to challenge Vigano at all. In fact, don’t be surprised if Bishop Powers gets himself into some sort of trouble for rattling that cage, and his resignation will be for “health reasons.” Sigh.
So are these ladies with the feathers members of the new CCW? Ridiculous paganism. Bishop should be exorcised.
This is what happens when you fail to do the red and say the black!!!!!!!
Pachamama Powers claims Archbishop Vigano’s comments resulted in a “violation of my right to a good name and reputation.” Nope. He did that all by himself.
Touché
I personally find Native American culture quite interesting, as I do several other cultures. However, I do not believe a church sanctuary prior to Mass is the place for such cultural demonstrations. Its been my understanding that most Indian ceremonies of music and dance like this are calling upon the spirits they believe in to purify, help with sickness, chase away evil, etc. These are not simply musical reviews. A Catholic Church is a place to honor Jesus, period. Its not a Broadway stage. I would have suggested this parish have Mass in the church, followed by a display of Native culture in the church yard outdoors, clearly not part of Mass. This stuff should not be done in the Sanctuary, nor inside the church in any way. Vigano is absolutely correct to be critical of this use of church space , which is an attempt to establish an equivalency between the Native Spirit beliefs and Jesus.This is a slippery slope and should be discouraged. Its entirely possible to respect other cultures while recognizing they are not at all the same as our own.
Well, this has been informative about Archbishop Vigano. It has, however, only reinforced the outrage I first expressed when I added this story to the April 3 news thread. When I finally managed to coax Microsoft’s mentally ill AI into isolating the ceremony on the video it was obvious that it was pagan. There was the shaman with his four female assistants chanting. They wound up the lengthy ceremony by briefly invoking the Earth Mother in English. It for sure wasn’t the Virgin Mary!! Bishop Powers only raised my alert status further when he claimed that this was already a long established practice when he took over in 2016! To put all this in context I need to mention the late Deacon Paul Mullens a full blood native American I am blessed to have had for a friend. He was very active in Indian affairs and devoted to Saint Kateri Tikawitha but never brought native religion into the Catholic Church which he served in many ways. Deacon Paul told me once of something he witnessed on an Indian reservation as a child. He was at Mass with his family when a horrible desecration occurred. Someone from off the reservation took the host out of his mouth, laid it on the altar rail and stabbed it with a knife. The host bled profusely. Someone who has experienced the miraculous can never stop being a believer and could never mix his faith with anything else. People who dedicate their lives to the Church you would think would always be the same way would you not?
JJR, it seems to me that sadly, people are more invested in human secular approval than they are in their status with God. There have been too many high churchmen willing to “go along to get along” where church teaching is concerned to think anything else. We are not generally in the age of martyrs here in the US.Humans are compromised creatures and much too much under the thumb of what I call the “tyranny of “nice”. They will say or do anything to be regarded as “nice” by others. Even if in fact they are anything BUT nice.
Wasn’t sure what to think until I read the comments, especially Anna’s. Thanks, Anna.
Curious to see what, if anything, happens next.
I have lived in the Superior diocese for over 30 years. In that time I have seen many abuses. This would not be the first.
You can’t keep equating culture with Rite. Worse, when you insist and demand that you are right to do so. Neither is culture an adoption of Rite.
In centuries gone by, this was precisely one of the problems faced in correcting the traditional Mass when it had fallen into similar abuse. Common sense.
You must stop distracting from Rite back into culture. Culture can be in the parish get-together or harvest and then more in the local play (LJ, above).
The same type problem develops with “taste” and “presentation” like dances that then have more to do with ubiquitous artistry though made out to be “culture”.
The idea of “inculturation” means witnessing faith to the culture not witnessing the culture in the faith. Adding intrusiveness to the latter is not witness.
Archbishop Vigano more directly condemns the abuse according to the nature of the offense. Bishop Powers has to mature quick and accept it as his correction.
This can not be a defamation since defamation in civil law does not apply here and the matter requires to be addressed and administered from faith and reason.
Apparently the good Archbishop likes to follow the rules, but is he in this case? I wonder. Who is this priest’s superior? What authority do the Archbishop have over him? Is it his place to be making public judgments about this matter? I’m confused. Wouldn’t private, brotherly council be the prescribed (according to scripture) method of dealing with this situation? Just asking.j
“In a duel you don’t count or measure the blows, but strike as you can.”
Pope Saint Pius X
By following the Magisterium ad33-ad1958, Archbishop Vigano is applying to this Modernist Apostate the exactly prescribed treatment.
V is for Vigano