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Can tattoos be sacramentals? 

August 29, 2019 CNA Daily News 1

Denver, Colo., Aug 29, 2019 / 03:30 am (CNA).- When the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to the English Carmelite, St. Simon Stock, she carried the Carmelite scapular in her hand and told him: “This shall be the privilege for you and for all the Carmelites, that anyone dying in this garment shall be saved.”

Some 300 years later, by the 16th century, a smaller version of the Carmelite scapular, known today as the Brown Scapular, was made available to lay Catholics who underwent a small ceremony and blessing that enrolled them as a member of the Brown Scapular Confraternity.

The scapular, carrying the powerful promise of escaping hell, remains a popular devotion today.

But scapulars can be awkward under certain types of clothes or simply easy to forget in the morning. So, could a well-intentioned Catholic already enrolled in the Brown Scapular Confraternity get a tattoo of the image of the scapular on their skin and receive those same graces and promises?

CNA asked; theologians and priests answered.

The short answer is: no. But, you might not want to write off tattoos completely. There is a bit more to it than that.

“It seems the answer is quite simply, no,” Dr. Mikail Whitfield, a professor of theology at Benedictine College in Atchinson, Kansas, told CNA.

The reasons for this have to do with the way the Catholic Church defines sacramentals, and the nature of tattoos, he added.

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, sacramentals are “sacred signs which bear a resemblance to the sacraments. They signify effects, particularly of a spiritual nature, which are obtained through the intercession of the Church. By them men are disposed to receive the chief effect of the sacraments, and various occasions in life are rendered holy.”

The Catechism adds that sacramentals “do not confer the grace of the Holy Spirit in the way that the sacraments do, but by the Church’s prayer, they prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it.”

Sacramentals are not just objects, such as brown scapulars or Miraculous Medals, but the Catechism notes that blessings, of people, objects, meals and places, are primary among the sacramentals.

The Miraculous Medal is a sacramental inspired by the Marian apparition to St. Catherine Laboure in Paris in 1830. On one side it features an image of Mary, and on the other, a cross with an “M” underneath it, surrounded by 12 stars and the images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Canon law defines sacramentals as “sacred signs by which effects, especially spiritual effects, are signified in some imitation of the sacraments and are obtained through the intercession of the Church” (Can 1166).

“Thus, for something to be a sacramental it needs to be a common object (or act) which can act as a sacred sign, which carries some imitation of the sacraments and is set aside by the Church as a means to seek grace,” Whitfield said.

The scapular, in its smaller form used by laypeople, imitates the full-length scapulars worn by members of religious orders, is a piece of wool clothing with is a common object, and imitates the vestments worn at baptism and by priests, Whitfield said.

Tattoos, on the other hand, lack many of these elements.

“While a tattoo is a thing, it is hard to consider it an object. It is more properly an image, though admittedly images can be sacred Furthermore, it is certainly not a ‘common object’ of daily life by which we can be reminded that all the things we do in this life, even the simplest things like wearing clothing, are supposed to be ordered towards our heavenly end,” Whitfield said.

Furthermore, he added, tattoos do not seem to imitate any other sacramental aspects of the Church, and they have not been set aside by the Church as sacramentals themselves.

In fact, the Catholic Church has not made any definitive statements on the morality, or lack thereof, of getting tattoos, and so answers to questions about tattoos vary widely among theologians and priests.

“I don’t think we can talk about tattoos as something good,” said Fr. Luis Granados, D.C.J.M, who serves as the J. Francis Cardinal Stafford Chair of Moral Theology at St. John Vianney theological seminary in Denver.

“They are not ‘intrinsically evil’ but they are wrong ways of treating our body,” he said, even if a tattoo is religious in its image or messaging. 

“The problem of a tattoo is…we are misunderstanding the meaning of the body,” he said. “Our body is called to be accepted as a gift from God. We can heal what is sick, but we are called to accept our body, with its characteristics.”

Adornments of the body, such as makeup or nail polish, are different because they are not permanent changes to one’s body, Granados said.

“I think the question to understand why a tattoo is wrong, is: Why do I want to get a tattoo? Why do I want to spend this money and to some extent risk my health? My body has been wonderfully created by God (Psalm 139) and it does not need my additional words. It already speaks,” he said.

However, in some parts of the world, there are deeply rooted traditions of Christian tattoos. Some Coptic Christian churches require that Christians must have a tattoo of a cross on their arm in order to be admitted into their churches.

One Coptic Christian family has been tattooing pilgrims to the Holy Land with crosses and other religious symbols as a token of their visit for more than 700 years.

Seeing a priest or a religious sister or brother with tattoos may become a more common occurrence as well, because according to a 2015 Harris Poll, a whopping 47% of millennials reported that they have at least one tattoo.

Br. MJ Groark O.F.M. Cap., is one of those millennials, and is “heavily tattooed.”

“As a millennial (and soon to be priest), I can tell you that my tattoos have been generally met with overwhelming generosity. I have a heck of a conversion story, and these are part of it,” he told CNA.

“I can tell you that God is calling many men and women from this generation into ministry, and a whole bunch of us have tattoos. It’s part of our generation’s way of expressing our lives, and increasingly, our spiritual beliefs,” he said.

Groark said that considering what he learned in his moral theology training, he thinks the morality of a tattoo lies in its meaning.

“…the human person is created imago Dei (in the image of God). We are indeed temples of the Holy Spirit. And like the temples of old, and the temples we continue to worship at, we are somehow lured by the Catholic imagination to decorate and to magnify the beauty of our spaces,” he said.

“As long as a tattoo points towards the true, the good, and the beautiful, I’m okay with it. If it does not, then there would be a question of the morality.” 

Father Ambrose Dobrozsi is another tattooed millennial priest in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, Ohio. Dobrozsi told CNA that he did not think tattoos could not be considered sacramentals in the strict, proper sense of the word.

“Sacramentals, used well, keep us close to the grace of Christ given to us in the seven sacraments, and receive their graces by the authority that Christ gives his bride, the Church, when she asks for his help. When the Church asks Christ for graces, He never refuses his bride,” he said.

“This means that sacramentals only work when they are done according to the rules of the Church. If we want to ask Christ for these graces, we need to make sure we do so authentically as the Church, obediently accepting the rules she sets down. It’s clear in Canon Law that the Apostolic See alone has the authority to establish sacramentals and define the criteria for their use [c. 1167],” Dobrozsi said. 

However, he added, it is possible that tattoos could be “sacramentals” in a broader sense of the word.

“A permanent image, engraved on the skin, could certainly serve as a constant, physical reminder of our new life in Christ. The image of a rosary, a cross, or other sacramental on our skin could lead us frequently to pray, to desire the seven sacraments more, and to think and act in communion with the Church,” he said.

“So, while a tattoo could not fulfill the requirements to be a proper sacramental in itself, if used in discernment and good faith it could certainly provide similar benefits and be helpful in the pursuit of holiness.”

Whitfield said that another reason that a tattoo would not be a proper scapular is because “an image is not the thing it images.”

“A picture of Michelangelo’s Pietà is not the same as seeing it in person. And standing in front of his sculpture pales in comparison to those who stood at the cross and saw Mary in person holding Christ’s lifeless body in her arms. The thing is always greater than the image. So, not only is a tattoo of the scapular not the scapular, but there’s some question of why it would be preferable; its an image of the thing, not the thing itself,” he said.

The Church already provides Catholics with an alternative to the traditional, woolen brown scapular through the wearing of a Miraculous Medal, which was approved by the Church as a substitute for the scapular in 1910.

“Why? In certain tropical and subtropical areas of the world the use of a scapular had been identified as impractical. High levels of sweat would cause scapulars to break down and deteriorate at such a rate that they were hard to maintain. Because of this, the Miraculous Medal was permitted by the Church to be worn in lieu of the scapular,” Whitfield said.

Is it possible, then that the Catholic Church could extend through its authority the same graces and promises of the scapular to a tattoo of the scapular?

“Aside from the fact that as we’ve seen, tattoos do not seem to be of the nature to appropriately be a sacramental, I have a hard time seeing a practical purpose why such an extension should or would be made,” he said.

Part of the appeal of a scapular tattoo, as previously mentioned, is its permanence – someone with a scapular tattoo would not have to remember to put their scapular back on every morning when they got dressed.

But that remembrance is important, Whitfield said, and a one-time commitment “is not how the Christian life is lived.”

“Each and every day we recommit to the God whom we love. Even those who take permanent vows must choose to live them out each day. It is a daily struggle, and choosing to affirm that wearing the scapular is as important to me today as it was yesterday is part of the very commitment that one makes in putting it on,” he said.

Ultimately, Whitfield said, because God is all-powerful, he could decide to extend the graces of the scapular to someone with a scapular tattoo, but he is not bound to do so, as they are not the same as the sacraments of the Church.

“Sacramentals are reminders and holy practices which dispose us to grace, and through them we believe that God gives further graces by the will of his divine mercy,” Whitfield said.

“(God) has not bound himself to giving graces through sacramentals in the same way he has in the sacraments. So, might he be able to will to give the same graces to someone with a tattoo as someone who wears the scapular? He certainly could, but having the tattoo doesn’t mean he will.”

 

 

 

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News Briefs

After the abuse: A bishop’s ministry of healing and trust

August 28, 2019 CNA Daily News 1

Minneapolis, Minn., Aug 28, 2019 / 04:25 am (CNA).- Bishop Andrew Cozzens became a bishop in the middle of a crisis.

“There was this kind of fire that was burning on the front page of the paper everyday,” Cozzens told CNA, “and then I got this call.”

The call was his appointment as an auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

Cozzens was appointed to that role just days after a whistleblower leveled charges of misconduct and cover-up against Archbishop John Nienstedt, who eventually resigned from his post amid scandal.

The archdiocese was in a state of chaos, and, Cozzens said, Catholics were in a great deal of pain.

“I was named a bishop at a very unique time, and it was so unique that it was clear to me God had planned it,” Cozzens told CNA.

He told CNA that he knew, from the time he was appointed, “that the Lord was calling me to be a part of healing. I didn’t have any idea what that meant when I heard that word in prayer.”

“Since the beginning,” he said, “I have felt like that’s why God made me a bishop and that’s what he wants me to do, and so I need to help do that.”

If God chose Bishop Cozzens to be a part of the Church’s healing ministry, meeting Gina Barthel was a big part of how that healing ministry would begin.

He remembers when she emailed him, in early 2014. It was just months after he’d become a bishop.

Barthel wrote to Cozzens that she had been a victim of clergy sexual abuse, and that she wanted to tell him her story. He accepted. They met in his office. Bishop Cozzens hadn’t met with many victims of abuse before. But when Gina told her story, he was disturbed. And he wanted to help her find the healing she sought.

“What was most disturbing about her story was the clear abuse of the office of spiritual direction. And since I’m a spiritual director, and have been a spiritual director, I understand how sacred that space is, and so the fact that it was clearly abused was for me the disturbing part,” Cozzens told CNA.

“Basically I knew that it would be very difficult for her to trust anyone, especially a priest or a bishop, so I was grateful that she was willing to share with me. And that was always the goal from the beginning, was to provide her an example of someone she could trust, and let her know that I was available to help her in any way that I could, to help her find healing, but obviously you can’t force those kinds of things.”

Gina Barthel told CNA that she’s found healing – and found Christ – through the Church, and with the help of Cozzens. But, she says, it wasn’t easy.

In 2005, nine years before she contacted Cozzens, Barthel was a novice in a religious community. She hoped to profess vows as a religious sister. In the course of spiritual direction, she told a priest, Fr. Jim Montanaro, OMV, that she had been sexually abused, and how that had impacted her spiritual and emotional life.

Armed with that knowledge, Barthel told CNA, Montanaro began to groom her, and eventually would sexually abuse her.

At first, the priest asked her to spend excessive time alone with him, and then discuss her body with him in sexual ways that made her uncomfortable. He told her, she remembers, that God could use that experience to heal her.

In the summer of 2005, Barthel decided to leave the religious community. She got an apartment in New York. Montanaro reached out to her, and said he wanted to remain her spiritual director.

“I was like, ‘Well that’s awesome because it’s impossible to find a spiritual director, so I don’t even have to look.’”

“So if you can imagine, a girl from Minnesota, who has no interest at all living in New York City, suddenly finding myself living in an apartment. I don’t know anyone except the sisters and what does that equal? I’m lonely. I’m isolated. It was a setup for disaster.”

Soon, she told CNA, she and Montanaro were talking every day.

“And then multiple times a day. And it turned into, at some point, a spiritual adoption. I don’t remember the timetable exactly, but he adopted me as his ‘Principessa’, like Italian for ‘princess’ and I called him ‘Papito.’ Like, ‘little father.’”

“And we would talk at night, and often the conversations at night would turn very sexual,” Barthel told CNA.

She said that over the phone, the priest would encourage her to imagine that the two of them were saints in heaven together. Then he would tell her that they should each strip naked, to be “naked without shame.”

“So it was just this weird, it feels awkward to tell you about it, because it’s creepy, right? So that was happening.”

In 2006, Barthel moved to her home state of Minnesota. She struggled with depression. She was hospitalized with major depressive episodes. And then a friend offered to send her on a pilgrimage, a group trip for which Montanaro would be the chaplain. The priest invited her to visit his home in Boston before the trip began.

“He invited me to come early and I stayed at their house in Boston, and I remember him putting a sign on the door saying: ‘Do not interrupt. Spiritual direction in session.’

“And he turned on music and he’s like, ‘I just want to hold my principessa.’ So there was a lot of holding and touching, but it was not sexual, yet.”

The priest was at least 20 years older than her.  But Barthel, struggling with loneliness and depression, said she liked that he was holding her. Still, she said she knew that what was happening wasn’t right.

“I feel like in that circumstance, I was a vulnerable adult, she told CNA. “Because it was like he abused the child inside of me. He wasn’t abusing an equal, adult-adult relationship. Everything was very childlike.”

The next year, Montanaro took Barthel to stay with him at a retreat center in North Dakota and there, she alleges, began a sexual relationship with her.

Barthel told CNA how confused she was. She believed in the Church’s teaching about sexuality, but, she says, she also believed what the priest told her.

“The entire time, he was telling me what was happening was ‘miraculous graces,’” she told CNA. “Like, ‘Jesus is healing you.’ All of the things he was saying we should do were all part of God’s healing plan for me.”

“And the biggest thing I wanted in my entire adult life was to be healed of the sexual abuse that I experienced as a child. And he used that to catapult his agenda to hurt me,” she said.

“Everything was under the guise of healing, Barthel told CNA.

“And even, he was saying, ‘God’s using you to heal me,’” she said.

“So then I felt special like, ‘Well that’s kind of cool, like, it’s mutual. God’s not just using him to heal me, but He’s also using me to heal Papito.’ Like, that’s really special,” she said.

Looking back, Barthel says she can see that Montanaro was using her insecurities to manipulate her. But at the time, she says, she felt confused, and she trusted the priest.

“And I remember asking, ‘Well, do I need to go to confession? Maybe I should go to confession.’ And he always said no. ‘No, we don’t need to go to confession. This is part of God’s will. This isn’t just okay, and it’s not just good, and not just great, it’s holy.’”

The relationship continued until, after a few months, Barthel told Montanaro that it had to end.

She told CNA she realized things were wrong when the priest admitted he hadn’t told his own spiritual director about the sexual relationship. 

“He said, ‘Some things are meant to be kept a secret between you and God.’ The minute he said that, my whole world started falling apart,” Barthel said.

She told a priest she trusted about the relationship. That priest called Montanaro and confronted him. Barthel said that Montanaro admitted the whole thing, but seemed to see nothing wrong with the relationship. The priest next called Montanaro’s superiors, and Montanaro was removed from ministry.

A spokesman for the St. Ignatius Province of the Oblates of the Virgin Mary told CNA that the province “first became aware of her allegations relating to Fr. Montanaro in November of 2007, when a priest of the Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis notified the rector of the retreat house where Fr. Montanaro resided at the time. 

“The then-Provincial of the St. Ignatius Province met with Fr. Montanaro on the day he heard of the allegations. Following that meeting, Fr. Montanaro was immediately removed from public ministry and was to cease all contact with that individual.”

“In January of 2008, the Provincial revoked Fr. Montanaro’s priestly faculties, and Montanaro subsequently sought, and obtained, dismissal from the Oblates, followed by laicization from sacred orders from Rome, which was granted in 2010.  Montanaro has had no role or ministry with the St. Ignatius Province since then,” the spokesman added.

The spokesman said that at the time Montanaro was removed, the Oblates “began to provide support” for Barthel.

The Oblates, Barthel told CNA, “sent me a couple of checks to help pay my rent because the trauma hit me so hard that I couldn’t work initially.  They also sent me a letter offering $15,000 and a year of therapy if I signed one of those letters stating I wouldn’t do anything further.” 

“I don’t know what I was more upset about: the fact that they were trying to pay me off to keep me quiet or the fact that they thought I would only need a year of therapy to recover. It’s 12 years later and I’m still in therapy!” 

Barthel said it took years of healing before she was prepared to report what had happened to police. When she did, it was too late.

“When I finally built up the courage to go to the police, I missed the statute of limitations by less than a month. That was devastating because it took so much from me to even go to the police. I finally went, I told my whole story, and then I get a call back and it’s the statute of limitation by less than 30 days”

But she was even more devastated, she says, because Montanaro’s community, the Oblates of the Blessed Virgin Mary, have declined to name Montanaro as a sexual abuser.

“One of my big grievances has been why aren’t perpetrators of adults also being listed publicly?”

Barthel told CNA that she has been concerned that Montanaro might groom other women.

The laicized priest now works as a photographer in Massachusetts. He has not responded to multiple attempts by CNA to contact him.

Among the photographs posted on Facebook by the studio where Montanaro works is a series in which several women have posed nude for the camera. The photo captions read “You are ravishing,”  and “Next time you think of something beautiful, don’t forget to count yourself in.”

On the website of the studio, Montanaro writes “My biggest satisfaction is capturing the unique beauty of each person who entrusts that privilege to my partners and to me. We love to help people discover (or rediscover) their God-given beauty in a photo session, and fall in love with themselves all over again.”

In March, Barthel wrote to the Oblates.

“I have concern that he could use his credentials of previous pastoral work and education to get a job in any helper position where he would have access to vulnerable adults. While he is no longer able to hurt people using his position of power as a Catholic priest, that doesn’t mean he isn’t still a threat if he has access to vulnerable adults,” she wrote.

“This is a hurdle in my healing journey. I keep thinking, hoping, praying and wishing that someday when I Google his name, it’ll show up that he is a self-admitted abuser of adult women. Yet, to date, I find nothing. It floods me with grief and also adds to my anger that waxes and wanes as I continue to heal. I feel that as long as the Church stays silent on these matters, there is danger the abuse may continue. Who are we trying to protect and why?”

She requested that Montanaro’s self-admission of sexual misconduct be publicly acknowledged by the order.

She told CNA she has yet to hear back from the Oblates about her request.

The Oblates declined to respond to questions from CNA about Barthel’s request.

While Barthel is discouraged, she told CNA that she has not lost her faith.

“I love Jesus, I love the Church. And it’s not easy and my relationship with Jesus and the Church are different now, but in some ways it’s more beautiful than it was before because I’m more dependent upon Him. And I don’t know how to explain it.”

“My deepest healing has all come through adoration,” she said.

Barthel emphasized the role that Cozzens has played in her life. They’ve met together regularly, and prayed together, for years.

“I needed a safe place to allow the rage and pain to unfold,” Barthel told CNA.

“Yes, I did a lot of that in therapy, but the injustice against my soul demanded someone in the Church hierarchy to listen to me, hear my voice, acknowledge my pain and empathize with me.  Bishop Cozzens has been that person for me.”

The bishop, she said, “has been the conduit God has chosen to use to bring me back into a free and even deeper relationship with Jesus Christ and His Church.”

“Eucharistic adoration is where I have received the majority of my healing,” she told CNA.

“Bishop Cozzens helped get me to a place to be able to go there and ask Jesus the hard questions and to sit and wait and listen for the answers. That’s the awesome thing about Jesus, if we ask, if we wait, He will speak to us.”

Barthel explained that Cozzens’ role in her life has been invaluable.

“When I first started meeting with him, I was terrified of praying; especially using my imagination which had always been my greatest source of delight in prayer and way of connecting to Jesus through the stories in Scripture. He never pushed, but would give me little tidbits of spiritual encouragement/advice that I could bring with me to Eucharistic adoration. This is what I needed. Someone who could walk with me and understood the danger and risk I was taking to pursue a life of prayer again.”

Cozzens told CNA that he’s learned, through his pastoral relationship with Barthel, what pastoral ministry to victims of abuse requires.

“One of the things that victims of abuse struggle with is going to Church. It’s really hard for them to go to Church. But if you’re a Catholic, you might think that you’re committing a mortal sin, but you just can’t do it because it’s so emotionally difficult for them. So to be gentle and to let them know that God understands the pain they’re going through, and the Church understands that too,” Cozzens said.

“Just to help people walk through that and let them know it’s ok that it takes time, and that God understands what they’re going through. To do that you have to be willing to go through ups and downs with people, because they go through their good moments and their bad moments. But gradually – and it takes time – but gradually the good moments outweigh the bad moments,” he added.

Barthel said she appreciated that understanding.

“Particularly in the beginning, coming back to the sacramental life of the church and prayer was excruciatingly painful, adding the regular breaking news reports of clergy abuse and cover up, there were so many times I wanted to throw the towel in and leave the Catholic Church altogether. While he never encouraged me to leave, he also never tried to convince me to stay. This gave me so much freedom and reminded me that the choice was mine. I needed that freedom and I believe it had a big part in helping me choose to remain Catholic,” she told CNA.

“I just wanted to be heard. I am hurting and I need someone to listen to me, and it needed to be somebody in the Church that I felt like cared.” “And I needed therapy,” she added. “Obviously, like I still go to therapy. “

For his part, Cozzens told CNA that many bishops, in the midst of the Church’s current sexual abuse crisis, have built pastoral relationships with the victims of abuse. But he also acknowledged that some bishops and priests, apprehensive about litigation or negative publicity, have been nervous about their engagement with victims of clerical sexual abuse.

“For me, you just have to put the person ahead of the situation…working with someone who has been hurt…they could turn on me, or be angry with me, or say bad things about me, but that’s the risk we all take if we’re going to be part of Christ’s healing. So I think we all need to be willing to take that risk.”

The bishop said Church officials should be confident about openness to relationships with the victims of abuse, despite the fact that bishops have faced, and continue to face lawsuits, for the Church’s handling of abuse allegations.

“We can’t see these things simply as liability issues. Because you have to see the people who God puts in front of us.”

“Anyone who has been wounded by a priest needs to learn to separate, in their minds, the distinction between what priest did and who God is, and what God does, and how God works. And that’s a very difficult things, that’s why I think priest abuse is the worst kind of abuse, because it can separate a person from the source of healing, who is God,” Cozzens said.

“So we have to try and help them make that distinction. And that usually requires patience and trust.”

Cozzens knows there are many Catholics in pain over the sexual abuse scandals, and that healing does not come easy. That it comes one person at a time. And that bishops have to be willing to walk alongside those hoping to be healed.

Gina Barthel knows her healing journey is not complete. But, she says, she is grateful that Bishop Cozzens is walking alongside her.

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