We All Knew

And speaking of lying and reputations...

Cardinal George spoke to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops at their recent meeting and spoke directly about how they have a tarnished reputation and they too, have a need to reconcile with the Catholic faithful and continue to lead us as Bishops into the next decade.

If there is a loosening of our relationship between ourselves and those whom Christ has given us to govern in love, it is for us to reach out and re-establish connections necessary for all to remain in communion....

Our pastoral concern for ecclesial unity does not diminish our awareness of our own mistakes and sins. There are some who would like to trap the Church in historical events of ages long past and there are others who would keep the bishops permanently imprisoned in the clerical sexual abuse scandal of recent years. The proper response to a crisis of governance, however, is not no governance but effective governance.

Loss of trust, we know, weakens relationships and will continue to affect our ministry, even though clerical ranks have been purged of priests and bishops known to have abused children and the entire Church has taken unprecedented means to protect children and to reach out to vicitms.

In any case, the sinfulness of churchmen can not be allowed to discredit the truth of Catholic teaching or to destroy the relationships that create ecclesial communion.

Amen! We are one church! All of us together in the muck and dregs that we call sin. While we are often all-too-quick to point fingers at the Bishops when it comes to sexual abuse of children, one of the big responses that I heard throughout the abuse scandal was not one of surprise, but one of sadness for a lack of response from those with power.

But if the fact that little and not so little children were abused by clerics were not surprising to us as laity, then why did we not take more rigorous action? We too bear some responsibility here and I'll point the finger back at my own family and myself to start. I hesitate to share this information but the timing is right.

As a teen-ager I was always around the church as an altar boy. A priest, (who I won't name here, and he has indeed been removed from ministry) took an interest in me and in some of my friends. He was friendly and had a humorous tone at all times. I enjoyed his company when we spent time together in the sacristy before mass. I remember at a parish party when he had a few glasses of wine and he put his arm around me and nuzzled his head on my shoulder. I was about 15.

It was then that I got the heeby-jeebies. And more important, so did my mother. It seemed a bit familiar and intimate. While I hug most of my friends and colleagues that I know well, even today, this seemed to be a bit odd.

Fast-forward a number of years, and my mother told me a hair raising story. At the height of the scandal I got word that this priest had been accused and found guilty of molesting many young boys. I called Mom and told her the sad news. She replied:

"Did I ever tell you that "Fr. X" called me and told me that he thought you had a vocation and that he wanted to take you on a trip to Rome? He thought that would have solidified your call to the priesthood."

Yikes! God bless a mother's intuition in not allowing her young boy to go off to Rome with someone she found suspect.

And while she protected me, perhaps she needed to do a bit more? She didn't call a pastor or a bishop (and reports mentioned that his religious order ordained him even though they knew of a past history of abuse). She didn't report the suspicion that he might very well be a predator. Perhaps she had no proof and perhaps it may have fallen on deaf ears, and while uncomfortable, perhaps something more should have been said?

Who knows? Hindsight is always 20/20. But let's face it: We knew Mark McGwire was juicing and we didn't want to let ourselves see that. We knew that some priests were a bit odd and inappropriate with children and perhaps not well sexually integrated, even though they'd say openly that they were straight celibate men. We knew. We all just didn't want to say that we did and were taken aback when some of the bravest amongst us did in fact, make accusations.

And therein we have our conundrum. It is us that want to have heroes, people of repute that we look up to and often, our heroes fall short of the reputations that we'd like them to have. Be they Presidents or Popes, Bishops or Batters, Prophets or Parents, our heroes often fall from grace.

Indeed it is up to us to not merely point fingers but also to help mend fences. How do we point ourselves in new and healthier directions to bring the church out of disrepute and into a place where people see us as honorable and justice-seekers? I think that's where Cardinal George is hoping to lead the Bishops.

And it is my prayer that they lead all of us to embrace that same challenege.

Lying and the Information Overload

Mark McGwire lied.

And his lying was in no way small potatoes as far as the world of baseball is concerned. Because of his deceit, many people, myself included have been unwilling to simply accept his half-hearted apology so that he might be more inclined to enter the Baseball Hall of Fame.

But is McGwire's lying, in the greater scheme of things, more worthy of a scathing backlash than say, lies told by our former President about Saddham Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction which hoodwinked a nation into getting behind a pre-emtive attack? Is McGwire's lying, in the greater scheme of things, more worthy of our continued distrust than AIG exectuives who clearly lied to the American public about their portfolios. How about lying about an alleged affair with an intern in the White House by another former President. What about the lie that Tiger Woods tells us when he pretends to be faithful to his wife but instead has dozens of women on the side? Nixon and Watergate? Hillary and Whitewater? Jimmy Swaggart?

The freeflow of information in today's society places us all in the precarious position of judging what we pay attention to. We all are our own program directors today--setting up RSS feeds to customize the information that we want to receive. The news media has become a 24-7 battle to entertain eyes and ears and not merely to be journalistically solvent. Getting the story on first often takes precedence over getting it right as well because we are constantly moving and news outfits are competing for our clickthroughs.

So when a popular sports star admits that he's a cheat, why does he gain more attention than others who don't admit deceit? While I have problems with McGwire, I wonder why he has incensed my passions more than those who haven't even admitted their obvious deceptions of the American public in far more serious matters than a ballgame could ever hope to capture?

The issue is clear. We care more about being entertained than we do about serious matters that take our time and our energy and that lead many of us to feel helpless to ever seriously think that we can make change in society.

"They're all crooks."
"It'll never change."
"It's not worth my time."

We've all said it. And before it gets worse we should start putting out energies where they really need to be.

Even a blogger like me who jumped the gun on his favorite sport but failed to be as passionate about matters that I should be more inclined to speak boldly about in these posts.

Mea culpa. I might as well ask for forgiveness too...it seems like that's the latest trend.

Mark McGwire's Penance

While he's not exactly breaking a story, Mark McGwire, the baseball-bashing slugger who captivated Major League fans and became the first player to eclipse Roger Maris' single season home run record announced the news that he was a cheater yesterday. I say that intentionally. While playing with the Oakland A's and St Louis Cardinals, McGwire says that he took performance enhancing drugs. Some will say that baseball had no rules in place with regards to the substances he took at that juncture, but let's face facts, McGwire got help and that smacks of insincerity at minimum.

A friend from my radio days spoke to me of an interview he once did with McGwire. McGwire had been an oft-plagued injured player at several points in his career with Oakland suffering from heel and foot injuries. In the interview McGwire mentioned (with a surly attitude, I might add) that he thought that he was a victim of heredity. His numbers were down, he said, because he had bad feet and that it took a long time to recover from those injuries. As someone who also has suffered with heel injuries, I can sympathize, but still, that's not a good excuse for taking roids.

McGwire repeated that song yesterday. He said he felt he owed it to his teammates and to the fans to get back out on the field as fast as he could. He also mentioned that his teams were paying him a lot of money and he felt he owed it to the management to get back on the field. So he took the drugs to try to recover faster. I believe him, to a point but what McGwire doesn't realize is that besides healing faster, the dog days of August often makes the bat a bit heavier because of the long grind of the season that takes its toll on everyone. With steroids, there are no dog days of summer.

Unfair advantage: McGwire.

Some will say that admitting his mistake is admirable. He certainly didn't come completely clean when he testified in congress. Others will say that we all knew he was on the juice back when he was playing and we just didn't want to know the truth. Others will claim that we just don't care about drug use and we all just want to see good baseball. And even others will state my earlier claim: baseball had no rules on the juice then, so McGwire didn't break any rules that were on the books.

And that is a bunch of horsefeathers. And a look to baseball's past tells us why.

A consequence of any sports' season is that players get hurt and that many of them play hurt. I once asked Phil Rizzuto, the hall of fame Shortstop and a character in the broadcast booth for years for the Yankees, if he ever played hurt. He said he played hurt almost every year because he was afraid someone else was ready to take his spot. "I threw some dirt on my leg and moved on. We all did that unless we thought we'd hurt the team."

Rizzuto mentioned a second and more important reason why anybody who played in the non-steroid era should blanch at McGwire's lame-excuses today. That reason is the following statement: "We wanted to make the post-season every year because we needed the money! None of us wanted to have to work in the offseason."

And McGwire took drugs to keep a much larger paycheck. If he was hurt and felt that badly about it he could have done the admirable thing and simply gave the money back--or even donated it to charity--a opportunity that he still can do. I haven't heard one of these roid users even suggest that they might donate or even return all, or even some, of the money they earned during the steroid era because they weren't honest with the fans and have damaged the integrity of the game. McGwire is just another greedy fatcat, who longed to inflate his numbers to gain fame, prestige and of course money.

Why did McGwire come clean? Very simple, he fears that he has damaged his chances of making baseball's hall of fame. He's failed to garner even 25% of the votes of the writers over the last four years. He won't have too many chances left and he needs to boost that total quickly. It's the latest ploy, begging forgiveness in an insincere manner. Much like the rich man who didn't let Lazarus eat scraps from his table, McGwire isn't asking for forgiveness here. He is asking for pity. It's all about McGwire and not about integrity.

Mr. McGwire, I loved seeing you play. How about you return some money to the Cardinals and A's? How about even using your fame to help promote steroid awareness in high schools and colleges because God knows you've caused enough damage to younger athletes already? How about you ask Major League baseball to place an asterisk next to all of your records during the years that you took performance enhancers? How about admitting that you were greedy for fame, money and records that you did not rightfully earn?

If you did that, your request for forgiveness might come from a more sincere place. One of the first rules of going to confession is to admit your sins with honesty and humbleness and then to do some kind of penance. Perhaps that's a lesson that Mr. McGwire needs to recall?