Today, the Vatican released its “Report on the Holy See’s Institutional Knowledge and Decision-making Related to Former Cardinal Theodore Edgar McCarrick.” The report answers the questions of who knew, what they knew, and why they failed to act against “Mr. McCarrick, who last year became the first cardinal to be defrocked for sexual abuse, of sexual contact with 17 boys and young men,” as Elizabeth Bruenig reports for the New York Times.
Though there is no justifying “reason” for the highly unreasonable decision to kick accusations of sexual abuse down the road, the report indicates four major sources motivating the decision (or, often, the indecision) to keep the ex-Cardinal “active, traveling nationally and internationally” (12) throughout the papacies of Saint Pope John Paul II and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI: a slavish adherence to bureaucratic norms; a love of money; a concern for the prevention of scandal placed over a concern for justice; and a shallow evaluation of the meaning of the priesthood.
Bureaucracy
Many of the decisions that left McCarrick unhindered applied juridical and technical procedures of determining guilt to situations that needed an intensely personal approach. This is not unique to the priesthood. By its nature, sexual abuse is wrapped in secrecy. It is a violation of intimacy, a corruption of love; a tyranny within those spheres of authority, power and jurisdiction that live and move outside of the purview of the administrative State and easy policing: places of family and friendship, home and bed. As such, sexual abuse does not present itself to clean evaluation from mechanisms of “law” and “procedure.” According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, of 1,000 sexual assaults reported in the United States, only five rapists will be duly incarcerated, a sobering fact for anyone who imagines that the lack of justice within the Catholic Church would be easily eradicated by opening up the Church to expanded and “disinterested” policing.
The McCarrick Report presents a unique insight into the failure of bureaucratic norms to prevent an abuser who operates within the bureaucracy itself: Bishops who did not act because McCarrick was not technically within their power; accusations that were left unanswered because they were unsigned; accusations dismissed because they occurred many years ago; leaders who trusted different levels to act rather than following their own initiative; the obligation shifted upwards and outwards, rather as one would expect from the corporate world and its endless shifting of responsibility towards a “management” that never materializes. At the core of the report is the blisteringly obvious need for actual holiness and saintly action to root out the evil of sexual abuse and punish its perpetrators; for hard work and an earnest, holy Inquisition; not more layers of regulatory mechanism which can themselves be corrupted by the viciousness, folly, and laziness of those who operate them.
Mammon
McCarrick was an ideal prelate, insofar as the Church is conceived in its current American configuration as a large non-profit imitating the structures of contemporary, liberal society. The report describes him as a perfect fit for the United Way or the Red Cross (an organization with similar sexual and financial scandals):
“As he had been for the Archdiocese of New York, Bishop McCarrick quickly became a successful fundraiser in Metuchen. In the Spring of 1983, McCarrick announced “Forward in Faith,” a three-year financial campaign to raise $10 million for projects in the new diocese. The campaign exceeded its original goal by more than $4 million.” (29)
To critique the leadership of the Church for “a love of money” is not to imagine any particular actor hoarding cash, but to point to the structural flaw in the Church’s attempt to imitate the companies of the world. An excess of programs, employees, insurance policies, and investments twists the society of peace into a society of fear. It turns our Mother Church, who fears the loss of our souls, into a mother who fears a good deal more: the loss of salaries and financial security.
The American Church has been structured in such a manner that values other than holiness appear desirable in her leaders. Holiness does not in itself assure the successful running of a large non-profit. A saint does not promise to provide a diocese with enough money to operate its programs, retain its employees, and secure itself against lawsuits. The McCarrick Report shows that the ex-Cardinal was positively valued for his skill as a fundraiser and his knack for large-scale administration; while his personal virtue and faithfulness was largely valued as a negative assurance:
At the time, the Apostolic Delegate in Washington, D.C., received strong recommendations in McCarrick’s favor from bishops and other clerics in the United States. One bishop described McCarrick as “highly gifted, pastorally zealous, and very knowledgeable about the eastern coast” of the United States, and “a superb choice for the office in question.” Another bishop praised McCarrick for his work at the NCCB and stated that he possessed “excellent administrative skills, great pastoral concern and a genuine devotion to the Church and to the magisterium.
As Bruenig points out, such administrative skills are not only unrelated to personal sanctity, they may as easily be the means by which one is a successful predator: “The same understanding of the faith and comfort with its adherents that seem to have made him a cunning predator also gave rise to his special facility with fund-raising and dazzled his complacent superiors.”
As a solution, we would suggest a poorer administrative Church and a more active laity; a vast reduction in official “positions” and a great increase in roles taken up by the laity, not as employees of the dioceses, but as volunteers, sodalities, confraternities, and laity-funded initiatives; a return to the direct pay of priests by the parish faithful rather than our current form of centralized salary; a deliberate appeal to the mendicant orders (beggars) to take positions of authority in the Church; an extraction of dioceses from all investments, especially in stock markets; a criminalization of insurance policies that provide a financial buffer against the effects of sin; and, generally, a pastoral promotion and love for a worldly insecurity and a newfound security in the charity of the Church and the providence of Christ; this, with great difficulty, should undercut our undue admiration for the capacity to raise money, and create a Church that longs for saints rather than savvy and effective administrators, social climbers, and bureaucrats.
Scandal
Another reason that the report gives for a lack of decisive action on McCarrick is a certain reorganization of moral outrage: “A number of factors appear to have played a role in Pope Benedict XVI’s declination to initiate a formal canonical proceeding: there were no credible allegations of child abuse...” (11)
On the one hand, the evil of child abuse is certainly greater than the accusations of homosexual behavior, and even nonconsensual homosexual behavior. But the decision to wait upon allegations of child abuse, as opposed to the abuse of adults and unchasity generally, does not stem from the evil of child abuse, but from the potential for scandal that it involves. As with its love of money and its sketchy reliance on bureaucratic mechanism, this reorganization of moral outrage seems to take its cue from the world, rather than Christ.
Roughly speaking, the world accepts homosexual acts; accepts unchastity, generally; is hazy about what constitutes consent in any given sexual act; and unequivocally condemns child abuse. In its imitation of this value-scale (effected, not by a belief that the world is correct, but by a financially-interested fear of the world’s reaction) the Church seems to have adopted a policy that wars against its own teaching of the interconnectedness of vice, standing by when priests are accused of unchastity, and jumping in once the universally recognized crime of child abuse rears its head. This places “crime” rather than “sin” as the object of the Church’s censure, rendering her rather like the institutions of this world, which, once again, are not motivated by the holiness of their members, but by the survival of the institution as such, which is not threatened by sin, but by lawsuits.
The Priesthood
Finally, the report reveals a horrid naiveté that kept McCarrick in power despite accusations of sexual abuse circling since the early 1970s. The decision not to begin a canonical investigation against McCarrick was motivated, in part, by the fact that “McCarrick swore on his ‘oath as a bishop’ that the allegations were false” (11). Perhaps this belief, that the priesthood and the episcopate could not be fundamentally violated and rudely used, has reached the end of its life. But it needs to be well expressed: The priesthood is not simply open to corruption and perversion. It is uniquely and specifically open to it. This risk of corruption is the object of theological study; it is something belonging to the meaning of priesthood as such.
This fact has been largely obscured by a defense of the priesthood which takes the lame critiques of the world seriously. This defense denies the charge that there is something “special” about the priesthood that makes it prone to abuse, considering it as a part of a larger Western phenomenon. It points out (truthfully) that these acts occur and are covered up in secular institutions like public schools, sports leagues, corporate offices, and within the family, arguing (truthfully) that there is no correlation between the celibate life and sexual abuse. The fact that it is the priest, and not the coach or the teacher, who has been cemented to the epithet “pedophile” is merely a means by which the world is absolved from reckoning with the sexual abuse at the heart of its major institutions, leading to the tragic situation in which “there is a relatively small amount of literature concerning child sexual abusers in institutional settings, with the exception of the Roman Catholic Church,” as the 2016 Royal Commission report on child sexual abuse in Australia argued.
As tempting as this argument is as a defense of the Church, it is simply not the case that sexual victimization is fundamentally unrelated to the Catholic priesthood. Not because the priesthood is celibate. Not because the priesthood happens to be extrinsically related to young people — through schools and youth groups and so forth — which makes it an attractive target for the “professional perpetrator.” Not because the priesthood can be seen to provide a “safe place” for those who want to perform homosexual acts, predatory or otherwise.
Elizabeth Bruenig ends her introduction to the McCarrick report by arguing that “if sacrifices had to be made in the course of serving the Lord, Mr. McCarrick and his many enablers made certain they were human ones.” This is more than rhetoric: The Catholic priesthood is essentially related to human sacrifice.
Sacrifice
Sacrifice — the immolation or destruction of a living victim to the Deity — whether one likes it or not, is at the origin of every human culture. Where there have been human beings, there have been altars. Those who offer sacrifice are considered special and set apart for the task of offering gifts to the gods. The term “priest” indicates this role of offering a victim.
René Girard argued that the reason all primitive human cultures perform ritual killing is because all human cultures found their original unity and togetherness in a real killing — chaos was defeated and the many became one by uniting over a common enemy. In order to repeat, re-present, and re-attain this original unity, men re-live this founding murder through the institution of ritual sacrifice.
This should hardly surprise us. Historians like Jan Bremmer have shown us that human sacrifice existed in most cultures — including “civilized” ancient Greece. Girard would argue that, where we have no direct evidence of its practice, we nevertheless have whispers of the abomination, quieted and covered-up by myths, legends, and the ritual slaughter of animals. Human sacrifice was almost always considered conservative, just, and pious by its practitioners.
The Jewish priesthood banned the practice: “You shall not give any of your children to devote them by fire to Mo’lech.” (Leviticus 18:21) At the same time, it outlawed the performance of sexual sacrifice. We know that the Israelites were surrounded by what the Torah named as kidshah, translated as “cult prostitutes” and “male cult prostitutes” in most English translations. The prophet Hosea speaks generally of the practice as a form of offering sacrifice: “[T]he men themselves go off with prostitutes and make sacrifices with cult prostitutes” (Hosea 4:14). The chroniclers of the corrupted kings of Israel spoke in horror that “there were even male cult prostitutes in the land” because the Israelites, just as they imitated human sacrifice, “imitated all the abominations of the nations” (1 Kings 14:24).
While we know less about the role of the cult prostitute than the child victim, it is clear that large populations of men and women were set aside to re-enact the sexual myths of the gods. Benedict XVI argues that “the prostitutes in the temple, who had to bestow...divine intoxication, were not treated as human beings and persons, but simply used as a means of arousing ‘divine madness’: far from being goddesses, they were human persons being exploited” (Deus Caritas Est, Ch.1, Sect. 3). The Jews rejected this form of worship with the same virulence as they rejected human sacrifice: “No Israelite man or woman is to become a shrine prostitute” (Deuteronomy 23:17). While the Judaic move away from ritual sexual victimization would require its own account, the anger of God for any society founded in a unifying act of sexual victimization is clearly displayed in the destruction of Sodom and the punishment of Lot, who offered his daughters as sexual sacrifice (Genesis 19) and the punishment of the Benjamites who, in an image of Sodom, raped and killed the concubine offered to them by her Levite husband (Judges 19). In both cases, something unique arises in the Jewish priesthood: the attempt to have a social order that is not grounded in violence and the ritualization of victimization, but in the law of God.
Girard reads God’s command to Abraham, that he offer his firstborn son as a sacrificial victim, and His subsequent replacement of the son with a ram, as the Jewish movement away from human sacrifice and towards animal sacrifice. By the book Numbers, the tradition of bloody sacrifice of the firstborn sons had been thoroughly replaced by the non-murderous “sacrifice” of the Levites to serve Israel as priests: "Take the Levites in place of all the firstborn of Israel, and the livestock of the Levites in place of their livestock. The Levites are to be mine” (Numbers 3:45). The Levitical priest is the firstborn son saved from sacrifice. This new priesthood is marked by this new characteristic, this movement away from victimization and towards self-sacrifice.
The mark of Israel becoming “like unto the other nations” is its re-establishment of cultic human and sexual sacrifice, and the two are usually condemned in one breath, as in the powerful critique of Isaiah 57:
Are you not rebellious children,
deceitful offspring—
You who burn with lust among the oaks,
under every green tree;
You who immolate children in the wadies,
among the clefts of the rocks?
Among the smooth stones of the wadi is your portion,
they, they are your allotment;
Indeed, you poured out a drink offering to them,
and brought up grain offerings.
With these things, should I be appeased?
Upon a towering and lofty mountain
you set up your bed,
and there you went up to offer sacrifice.
Behind the door and the doorpost
you set up your symbol.
Yes, deserting me, you carried up your bedding;
and spread it wide.
You entered an agreement with them,
you loved their couch, you gazed upon nakedness.
You approached the Molech with oil,
and multiplied your perfumes...
Like the movement away from human sacrifice, the new priesthood was founded as a rejection of a sacral order grounded in sexual victimization. Conversely, the corruption of that same priesthood meant a return to both the slaughter of innocents and the cult prostitute. In the quintessential story of priestly corruption, the sons of Eli disobeyed the sacrificial laws and “lay with the women who performed tasks at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting” (1 Samuel 2:22).
Self-sacrifice
The nations of Mesopotamia and Egypt fed their gods in exchange for blessings. In Jewish sacrificial law, the emphasis shifts from what God needs to eat to what man needs to give up. The animal victims were perceived by the faithful Jew to be a part of himself. The Jews would renounce this part of their agricultural livelihood, and thus a part of their life, to the Lord.
The Jews often lost sight of the “self” that was involved in the sacrifice, turning back to god-feeding divorced from the internal self-offering that their external rituals signified. Saul, a king who tended to return to the ways of the nations by setting up idols, summoning the dead, and breaking the law, likewise attempted to worm his way out of this new form of sacrifice. He refused to kill the animals of a defeated enemy, arguing that he spared them that they may be used for sacrifices to God. But these animals were not his — parting from them involved no sacrifice. He took the enemy’s animals for sacrifice and spared his own cattle, negating the reason for the law, and earning himself the rebuke of the prophet Samuel, who associates his sin with the idolatry of the nations:
For a sin of divination is rebellion,
and arrogance, the crime of idolatry.
Because you have rejected the word of the LORD,
the LORD in turn has rejected you as king.”
This said, the animal sacrifices of the Old Testament still smelt like the blood of innocents. It is true that the sacrifices of the Jewish priesthood were tamed, ordered, and limited to a time and place. But the slaughter of animals retains a connection with human sacrifice: it is the sacrifice of some other living thing, given to God. But God does not desire some other thing — the Bible reveals that God desires unity with the whole man, the entire person, given in love.
Thus, in the ministry of David, a further purification of the bloody sacrifice begins to develop, an explicit turn from the sacrifice of other things to the sacrifice of one’s self that was already the living spirit of the animal sacrifices transformed by the Jewish law: “For you do not desire sacrifice or I would give it; a burnt offering you would not accept. My sacrifice, O God, is a contrite spirit; a contrite, humbled heart, O God, you will not scorn” (Psalm 51:17). Compared to the technical prescriptions of Leviticus, David’s piety is like a splash of clear water. His sentiments are echoed in the prophets, who prophesy for a God who desires “mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6):
Were I hungry, I would not tell you,
for mine is the world and all that fills it.
Do I eat the flesh of bulls
or drink the blood of he-goats?
Offer praise as your sacrifice to God;
fulfill your vows to the Most High. (Psalm 50)
Jesus Christ High Priest
Only Jesus Christ, Whom the Catholic Church has always called the model of the Catholic priesthood, fully broke from the ritual repetition of victimization. He explains that the words of the prophets banned any shadow of a connection to the priesthood of Mo’lech, to the idea that peace and unity with God come through the condemnation of an innocent: “If you had known what these words mean, 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice,'” He says, “you would not have condemned the innocent” (Matthew 12:7). But unlike the patriarchs and prophets who went before Him, Jesus Christ was the first person to offer a priestly sacrifice to God, not of some other creature, but of Himself. He institutes a new form of offering out of the bread and wine of the Passover meal, transfiguring the sacrificial feast into a feast celebrating His self-sacrifice on the cross. With authority, He unites the Old Testament priestly offering with His death on the cross: “This cup is the new covenant in My blood, which is shed for you.” Christ is priest and victim. Sacrifice is finally redeemed in the gift. All of this is said in the simple truth: Christ died for us.
The apostle Paul provides an analysis of the newness of Christ’s priesthood by linking it to the priesthood “of Melchizedek,” a priest who offered up sacrifices of bread and wine while most men would still have been unashamed to set fire to their firstborn sons. Christ “holds His priesthood forever...He has no need, like those [other] high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for His own sins and then for all the people; He did this once and for all when He offered up Himself” (Hebrews 7:7). Because he is God, he can offer himself for man, giving what no heifer, firstborn son, or cult prostitute could give — union with God. Because He is God before all time, His offering is for all time. Because He offers Himself by His own free choice and for our sake, He formally divorces priesthood from victimization and inaugurates the new model for holy sacrifice: self-sacrifice, the giving of oneself for others. For Paul, and for all of us who follow in the wake of Christ, there is no going back to the victimization of other living creatures. If it was permitted for a time, it was only as an imperfect image of what would come, a remedy, and a slow convincing of humanity to rip off the bandage of peace and unity whose adhesive was the blood of victims, finally replacing it with true peace — adoption into the family of God.
Who, then, is the Catholic priest? The Catholic priest is an image of Christ. He does not attempt to bridge the gap between fallen man and our good God by the sacrifice of new innocent victims. Rather, the Catholic priest represents the once-for-all self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ, under Melchizedek’s signs of bread and wine.
The Catholic Mass, celebrated by unworthy men such as the ex-Cardinal McCarrick, is a ritual that explodes all sacrificial rituals from the inside out. The bloody patrimony of mankind is there — the priest, the altar, the sacrifice, the community that longs to be one — but the meaning of the ritual has been redeemed in and through the self-giving of Jesus Christ, who takes up our violent forms, subjects himself to them, and so totally transforms them. Critiques of high liturgy as containing pagan elements massively miss the point: Participation in the Mass is a ritual unlearning of the victimizing, sacrificial forms that have, for most of human history, served as people’s source of human peace and unity. It offers, for the first time in human history, a new source of unity, a bond of brotherhood that is not solidified over the mutual victimization of some other who is cast out, but a communion in our mutual acceptance-of, participation-in, and thanksgiving-for the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
For though Christ is our eternal victim, we do not offer him at a distance, removed from his suffering as if we returned to the rudimentary sacrifice of slaying the innocent. We offer Christ by joining Christ; by Holy Communion. Paul ends his remarkable description of the renewed priesthood with precisely this call to become living sacrifices in the manner of Christ: Jesus “suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood. Therefore let us go forth to him outside the camp [i.e. leaving Judaic sacrifice once and for all] bearing abuse for him.” This is the model his followers must imitate: participating in his sacrifice at the altar and becoming living sacrifices ourselves.
Priestly Corruption Today
The fact that self-sacrifice has become the only acceptable form of sacrifice to the Western mind shows how deeply the priesthood of Christ has penetrated and undone the priesthood of Mo’lech, Ba’al and all the rest. In the ancient world, self-sacrifice was not merely unknown but considered weak, perverted, and wrong. It is a strong gospel that can so transform the world, transvaluing its values and destroying its gods. But it also means that sexual victimization, which we have suffered so much in recent years, is not incidental to the Catholic priesthood. It is a direct perversion of the achievement of the priesthood; a reversal of the six-thousand year progression from murder to martyrdom. For the priest to sexually abuse a child of God is a reversion to the sacrifice of the firstborn son, to the cultic sexuality of Canaan, to the destruction of an innocent living creature in order to procure goods for oneself. One does not cease in one’s priestly role when one chooses to sexually abuse another. Indeed, this is the psychological myth of the thing, that one is a priest on the altar and something quite else in one’s abuse. Rather, sexual abuse by priests is an exchange of the Holy Altar and its Victim for another altar and another victim.
Obviously, this needs further explanation, because unlike the priests of Ba’al and Ashtoreth, the perverse Catholic priest is not protected by the myths that granted respectability and dignity to child-sacrifice and cultic prostitution. This protective veneer has been stripped off by Christianity’s acidic influence. No one can seriously conceive of a naive return to the victimizing altar. The bad priest is in bad faith. He tries to reverse the irreversible — to offer up an innocent victim for his own gain. He is satanic, not in the sense that he is, subjectively, a Satan-worshipper (this would risk giving these crimes an air of gravitas) but in the sense that satanism is properly characterized by the tardy attempt to invert the inversion of Jesus Christ and to resurrect old methods of attaining human peace. Our modern, aesthetic satanists touch upon this in their rituals, in their rapes or faux-rapes that take place on the altars of the so-called “Black Mass.” The recent desecration of an altar by a New Orleans priest is almost too on the nose. Objectively, they are too late aping the work of Christ by helplessly and haplessly trying to manipulate the very forms of sacrifice that the Jewish priesthood abolished and the Christian priesthood has rendered ridiculous.
Catholics should be angered, but not surprised, to read similar trends in investigations like the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report, which describes acts of sexual abuse which are, quite obviously, cultic in character, blasphemously manipulating the prestige of the priesthood and the sacramentals of the Church to victimize young people. “They have set their abomination in the house which is called by my name,” not by acts incidental and unrelated to the priesthood, but by a perversion of the quintessential and entirely unique Christian priesthood.
There has been much talk, thankfully, of the reason for the consistency of the kinds of abuse that criminal priests commit. And while it has become apparent that networks of men who wish to commit homosexual acts exist in the Church, the focus on homosexuality does not exhaustively explain the kind of victimization that sinful priests seem to enjoy. Rather, the victimization seems to imitate the sacrificial patterns that the priesthood has been established to destroy — the offering up of children, the preying on victims that the old priesthood rites associated with sacrifice (“males without blemish,” the very young, the virgin), the apparent relish of immolated innocence, the blasphemous use of temple spaces, the “grooming” of young people with money and gifts that imitate the offerings made to cult prostitutes, the quasi-ritualized repetition of the crimes — in short, a return to the attempt to immolate the innocent victim for the gain of the victimizer.
This should not be pushed too far, lest one thinks that we are arguing that there is some self-conscious movement within the Catholic priesthood to turn it into a temple of Chemosh. Our criminal priests are cynical — their only god is their appetite. Rather, we are arguing that the priesthood has been structurally established to replace the violent, sacrificial rites that are the default tendencies of humanity with the remembrance of the self-sacrifice of Christ. To pervert the call of the priesthood is, by necessity, to return to old forms of victimization — forms which, to judge by the statistical evidence, are enjoyed by men within a whole diversity of secular institutions. If this is the case, the “cure” for sexual victimization within the priesthood cannot be to demolish structures of the priesthood itself, making it more like a secular institution. Only the reformation and purification of the Catholic priesthood itself, the sacramental sign of the end of victimization and the beginning of self-sacrifice, can keep the old rites at bay.
McCarrick
The sole concern raised against McCarrick’s appointment as Bishop of Metuchen was his “obvious ambition to be promoted in the ecclesiastical hierarchy.” The report is somewhat nonchalant about it:
The terna noted that the issue of McCarrick’s ambition had arisen ever since McCarrick’s first candidacy in 1968, but that “the informants who brought up this defect in him did not pull their vote from the candidate: one wrote to the Apostolic Delegate at the time that it would have been wrong to disqualify him only for this flaw.”
If the Catholic priesthood is the means by which the sacrifice of Christ is realized in the world; the way in which and all sacrifice is either turned to participatory self-sacrifice or condemned as not-yet-Christian, then ambition should be regarded with rather more alarm.
For this sin (an “inordinate love of honor,” as Aquinas calls it), applied to the priesthood, can only be held in and through a fundamental undermining of the Christian transformation of priesthood. "Charity is not ambitious and seeketh not her own," rather, charity only ever seeks offices and capacities so as to more thoroughly give to others. A charitable priesthood is a self-sacrificial priesthood; it exists, not for its own glory, but to give itself away in imitation of Christ who gave himself as our High Priest and Immaculate Victim. To desire the honors of the ecclesiastical hierarchy outside of charity is to direct the essential priestly work of sacrifice to one’s own worldly gain; one becomes a Saul and a son of Eli. It should not surprise us that, from the seed of ambition, the sacrifice of innocent victims grows as an eventual shoot. Outside of charity, which would direct all power-difference to the service of the weak, there is only power directed to the service of oneself, and this direction of distinctly priestly power unto the priest himself results in abomination of the altar, the attempt to have sacrificial offerings for oneself; which, in turn, necessitates the idolatry by which the true Victim of the altar (Christ who gives Himself to us) is replaced by the human victim who cries for justice.
The reformation of the priesthood in charity will, as a matter of definition, not occur by an extrinsic force; one does not give oneself as a sacrificial victim in imitation of Christ because one fears a lawsuit or time spent in jail. Indeed, such worldly fears are simply the negative side of an ambitious priesthood; the pains an ambitious priest seeks to avoid while he strives for the pleasures of honor, salary, and the like. The presence of the police, as necessary as they may be for dragging justice out of a reticent leaders, will not heal the Church; the Church must once again reform itself from within. In the light of the McCarrick Report, we pray that we may be given the strength to reform the Church in such a manner that the worldly ambition of the impious will not be rewarded by the current structure of the Church, but that, in her newfound holiness and poverty, only lovers of holiness and poverty need apply; that the priesthood of Christ, the Redeemer of the Church, will serve as the only model for a new generation of priests who sacrifice themselves in and through the sacrifice of Christ that they communicate unto the transformation of the world into the City of God.
Listen to Marc and Jacob discuss this essay in their podcast: A Discussion of “The Perversion of the Priesthood”