I have been a professional historian in USA .....published by Cambridge U Press and Stanford U Press
one book was awarded national prize in 1984 for being the best book in USA history by Society of American Historians
now I write for the mass market
living in USA and Italy
a capable literary agent to attend to the publication of an important manuscript
the manuscript is an autobiography exploring the issue of the erotic in the catholic church
I have been part of the process
Brief Summation
of a manuscript by the title of
A Priest Disavows the Church
The Last Chapter of the Investiture Controversy. 1.9.2012
The explosion of media revelations of the erotic within the ranks of the catholic clergy has forced the church to embrace an ambivalent and dangerous strategy: she claims the right to remain the exclusive judge of herself and her priests' behavior while she is forced against her will into state courts as a defendant accountable to society for the damage inflicted on victims by errand priests. In order to manage this inner tension and ambivalence the church ta... View More »
a capable literary agent to attend to the publication of an important manuscript
the manuscript is an autobiography exploring the issue of the erotic in the catholic church
I have been part of the process
Brief Summation
of a manuscript by the title of
A Priest Disavows the Church
The Last Chapter of the Investiture Controversy. 1.9.2012
The explosion of media revelations of the erotic within the ranks of the catholic clergy has forced the church to embrace an ambivalent and dangerous strategy: she claims the right to remain the exclusive judge of herself and her priests' behavior while she is forced against her will into state courts as a defendant accountable to society for the damage inflicted on victims by errand priests. In order to manage this inner tension and ambivalence the church tapped the best resources she could muster and in the process was forced to reveal its very inner institutional dynamics in a way never done before. One by one layers of pretence, secrecy, avoidance, deception, and manipulation of long standing are falling by the wayside, revealing the profile of a tormented institution that for centuries demanded the total surrender of the inner sacredness of countless individuals to promote institutional needs. The institution derived immense benefits from the sacrifice of the personal selves of many dedicated servants, but in the process countless faithful followers died without ever knowing who they were. They had been robbed of their intimacy and with that of their self awareness. As the human spirit never surrenders entirely and with finality to institutional pretences, however, the crisis of the erotic should be regarded as a cacophonous chorus of desperate screams for help uttered often in socially contorted and unacceptable tones.
How did the church arrive to this unprecedented crisis that might be the beginning of an illustrious and final decline?
This question is explored through the autobiography of a man - myself - who grew up from age 12 to 16 in a self proclaimed chaste catholic seminary pervaded, however, by an inner culture of sexual transgression at the hands of an eminent clergyman, father Francesco Tirondola. As a young man I never imagined that my whole life would be controlled and consumed by the legacy of those events. I became a priest and a professional-published historian in the United States - that was my outer biography - but my inner biography was marked by a mysterious inner suffering that therapists kept calling for years "diffuse anxiety", an elegant way to express ignorance of the sources of an abnormal emotional universe. I was 46 when in therapy I discovered that the religious environment that had shaped my life was a distorted world in need of total revision: protracted sexual abuse in a self proclaimed chaste environment can only create contorted personalities and foster abnormal behavior. It was a monumental undertaking. I was able to emerge from the stupor induced three decades before by four years of sexual abuse and recapture my humanity, at least partially. Unfortunately, paternities are forever for better and for worse. The psychological and spiritual paternity that shaped my life was corrosive and perverse. I left the church, but I am unable to perform a total exorcism of the institution from within myself. I will bear some traits of the mark of Cain to the day I die.
My individual saga evolved within the larger culture of a specific religious organization - the Scalabrini fathers - and the overarching institutional settings of the catholic church. As I moved through life, I was accompanied by an ever changing Greek chorus where individuals and groups made their decisions, tried to influence my actions and passed judgment on my compulsions, a process that in the aggregate led me to an understanding of the inner workings of the church. And in the end I came to some conclusions that provided an appeasement and the inner clarity I had been seeking for decades. Now I feel at peace. The Greek chorus is still clamoring, perhaps with more strident tones than before, but it does not affect me in any way. Peace is a place of the soul not the conclusion of a mental process.
As I was unwilling to pass final judgment on such an abnormal past as well as on the most venerable institution of the western world without a first hand confrontation with leading church authorities at the Holy See - my commitment to the church had been unreserved and unequivocal for decades - I relocated to Italy from the United States in order to talk to church officials about my past and the role played by the institution in my life. In addition I needed to revisit the places in Rome where - in my religious fervor as a student at pontifical universities - I had dreamed to be part of the most glorious intellectual tradition in the western world. I was returning as a different man in search for answers through an frank confrontation with the church to whom I had promised lasting loyalty. I was expecting a spirited dialogue.
But that spirited dialogue never took place. There is a counterpoint in the interaction between myself and the institution. I invested virtually all my efforts for years to embrace a path of revision to purge a dysfunctional past induced by the institution, while the institution moved in the opposite direction proclaiming that she had no accountability for any past deed in my case and stonewalled any effort to establish a dialogue of verification. Church officials refused any verification of the past claiming that to them the priest-abuser in question was a holy man - perhaps worthy to be made a saint, I was told - and equally rejected as professionally dubious three altogether reliable reports by mental health professionals from the United States.
This inability of the institution to abide by the most common criteria of social interaction and face any kind of responsibility about a past shaped within her institutions raise the question as to whether the church qualifies as a bona fide human organization. It is highly ironic that an institution which demanded total loyalty from me and the total commitment of my life to her is unwilling to take any responsibility when I as an individual offered such loyalty and in the process - and because of my devotion to the church - was deeply hurt. But such is the very nature of the institution we are dealing with. Terminally narcissistic institutions - like the church and other total institutions - are forever unable to even come to term with the havoc they create with their self centeredness. I only raise the issue here. Other individuals with keener intelligence than mine might have a solution as to how to offset the corrosive influence the church posture is inflicting on society.
As a historian, I tried to find a personal explanation to the anti social behavior of the church by looking at the history of the church. The turning point in the life of the church - which explains the present crisis - has to be found in the council of Trent. To Luther who advocated the central role of an intimate religious experience with the personal contact with the word of God in the bible, the church of Rome opposed the central role of the institutional church, the source and the reference point of everything, and the exclusive authorized interpreted of the word of God. To the encounter between god and man in the humanus advocated by the Reformation, the church of the Counterreformation opposed that such encounter could take place only in the institutional ecclesiasticus, which alone could interpret the otherwise inscrutable will of God. Man was asked to surrender his intimacy to embrace the ecclesiasticus, surrender made mandatory and total for priests. Perinde ac cadaver: this was the program as per Ignatius of Loyola, the champion of the Counterreformation.
The council of Trent started the triumphant march of the church where the ecclesiasticus introduced itself with the traits of the divine. We need only to observe the role to which the Roman Pontiff has been promoted to realize how far the deification of the ecclesiasticus has progressed. A mere mortal is assigned all the attributes that in the history of the early church only the sensus fidelium (the collective consciousness of the believers) embodied, as the church fathers commonly agreed. Trent chose authority over community and individuality. Those who embraced without reservations the new vision of the church were told that to worship God they had to place the church on a divine pedestal. Worshippers were asked to surrender their lives to the institutional church as grains of incense on an all consuming fire.
The crisis of the erotic is the recognition - although poorly expressed - that the only reality on the face of the earth made in the image and likeness of God is the human spirit, not the church. Any intimacy burned like incense for the glory and service of the church is self destructive idolatry that can easily lead to lack of human authenticity which in the end will generate a perversion of the spirit. The church at Trent made herself into a hypostatic reality, a role which her founder never contemplated. The individual comes first in all things and at all times. It is not to be taken for granted that the church will survive. But unquestionably the human spirit will. «View Less
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