In the confusion within and beyond our Church, I join the millions feeling lost and betrayed, but find hope in Father Bryan Massingale’s call to face without flinching the problems revealed in his study, “Elephants in the Living Room,” which isn’t even a book, but a collection of 12 pages, held together by a single staple. Fragile. Strong. Contained. By now, it has spread through the Milwaukee Archdiocesan of Priests, and all points beyond. A friend gave me a copy this morning. I didn’t weep over the truths found there, too familiar are they.

Gone is the luxury of tears. They’ve been long shed and dried, though only to break forth again and again with each revelation of a blade of hope crushed and abandoned under the hot sun of indifference to the needs of God’s people.

In those comparatively brief pages, in May of 2004, Massingale addressed before the priests’ assembly what it means “to be a prophet for the Church in the midst of transition.” Although the work has never been published, in an underground sort of way, it has spread on the websites of the elephants all over the country.

Who are these elephants? The writer was introduced by Father Tom Lumpkin as Vice-President of the Catholic Theological Society of America and Associate Convener of the Black Catholic Theological Symposium, consultant to the USCCB, providing theological assistance in issues of criminal justice, capital punishment, environmental justice and affirmative action and advisor on African American Catholics, and he describes the elephants this way:

“They are beautiful people. They are some of the most creative people in the Archdiocese of Detroit. They are the intelligencia of the Archdiocese.”

Sounds a bit high-brow, people beyond the ordinary folks on Main Street, but Massingale goes on to call the elephants “members of a prophetic ministry for a Church in the midst of transition.” That’s better. Prophets, we like -- servants who call it like it is for those bound by the chains of what isn’t.

The writer said the paper was delivered in a time of transition for him:

I was in the midst of discerning a change in ministry, moving out of seminary ministry. I was a member of our seminary faculty of at St. Francis Xavier for 13 years, and for a lot of different reasons, thought I needed to move on. But I was also deeply heart-broken during this time. My mother had died that previous September, after a long illness that demanded our daily attention and care, the care of my siblings and me. I also used my sabbatical to take an informal leave of absence from the church.

As I told my friends, I decided during that time to give the Church a time out – much as we give children who don’t behave a time out. I was heartbroken, not only with personal grief, but also with deep frustration at the direction of the Church – frustration over many issues.

So, during my sabbatical, I decided to give the Church a time out. I was trying to decide whether I should stay, and if I stayed, not simply as a priest, but as a Catholic, how could I stay as a man of integrity? So in the midst of this sabbatical, two things happened:

Massingale went on to declare bluntly:

The Church is dying; – a given way of being Church is dying. ...a new Church is being born...And so, if we are going to be prophets for the Church in this moment, it requires that we are hospice ministers for the Church – helping the Church to die well, so that a new Church can come to be.

The question is to decide what is going on in the Church, to judge it in light of God, and then, having the faith and courage to speak uncomfortable, unwelcome, yet life-giving truths.

For the answer, the writer returned to Walter Brueggemann’s work, Prophetic Imagination, which states that prophecy is not so much an action program, as much as it is a mind-set, a consciousness, a way of imagining a scene of the world, that the prophet’s role is to propose alternative visions and possibilities than those that are officially endorsed. The biblical prophet has a two-fold task:

First, in light of God’s word, to articulate the people’s groans, their griefs, their losses, or their lamentations, their wails, their woes.

And then in light of God’s word, to express the peoples’ deepest hopes and lead them to embrace God’s promise of new life. “See, I am doing something new.”

So a prophetic vocation is first to help the faith community to embrace a loss that it does not want to admit and then, secondly, to proclaim to the people a hope that we can’t dare to imagine.

The first groan, probably the most obvious, is the demographic collapse of the priesthood.

A priest shortage is also causing deep transformations in the structures of lay ecclesiastical leadership. ... an explosion in the development of lay ecclesiastical ministry. Among the questions to be asked are the nature of their connection and affiliation with the church and its leadership, and the willingness of the Church to respect and utilize their competence.Related to the demographic collapse of the priesthood, not only are we priests older, grayer and fewer, we are also sick – sicker, as in Michael Moore’s movie, “Sicko.”

... At one of the recent priest council meetings, the Vicar for Clergy gave this report and he said: “ Brothers, I tell you: the wheels are coming off the bus. I spend most of my time dealing with the health concerns of those under the age of 50.”

The next priest who gave a report said he was taking a sabbatical leave in order to center himself, and salvage what was left of his priesthood.

The vicar said he wasn’t at the last meeting because he was clinically depressed and couldn’t get himself out of bed to attend the meeting.

At this point, Massingdale spoke up: You can go around the country, and you can hear stories of priests, priests I dearly love and respect, who are on anti-depressants, who are going through counseling and therapy, often on their own time, in an attempt to cope with the difficulties of this time in the Church.

As one priest in my diocese said, “Commitment and dedication should not result in sickness.”

I sense that at best, we might like our bishop as a person, but we don’t trust him as a bishop. As one priest candidly confessed to his bishop, “We need to know if you are in the boat rowing with us, or in another boat, trying to sink ours.”

Massingdale went on to express a desire by priests for a more frank discussion of human sexuality, that too often gets reduced to pious cliches that “simply evade, hide or avoid the complex, and sometimes messy, reality of human sexual relationships.”

The writer goes on to remark on the growing irrelevance of the Church when it comes to matters of human sexuality. ”...We don’t believe that we’re sinning in every case when we’re not living up to that teaching.”

He goes on to say that the older generation may not like it when the young people live together without benefit of marriage, but they are not going to allow that to interfere with the unity within the family.

Massingdale also warns us against the danger of nostalgia, a strategy of denial. The second danger is despair, seeing faith as no longer possible ...get out while you can; take the next job offer you get.

HOSPICE FOR THE DYING CHURCH

Hospices prepare people to face endings that are unthinkable and yet inevitable, Massingdale tells us:

As hospice workers, we need to stand with the church...we must facilitate honest conversations of sadness, hurt, anger and even rage; for these are the inevitable reactions to death and dying, or any loss.

A prophetic vocation requires the virtues of patience and compassion, and demand deep prayer – contemplative prayer – surrender to that which is beyond us, which we sense intuitively is worthy of trust.

We need to stop waiting for the bishops to do what we could and should be doing for ourselves.

Being a hospice minister requires the courage that we speak the truth that sets us free, even if it sometimes makes some people miserable.

Hope requires the willingness to work for a non-guaranteed future, even in the face of formidable obstacles. That’s hope!

My hope for the future, said Messingale, is also brought in with the unsustainability of the current Church. If nothing else, the irreversible decline in the priesthood means that the Church will change, whether it wants to admit it or not. My hope is grounded in a witness of past and current struggles, and engagement. We also speak of St. Francis of Assisi being a prophet, who answered the call to rebuild the Church. We also speak of St. Teresa of Avila, St. Catherine of Sienna, women who were bold witnesses, who spoke truth to power to bishops, and even the pope, criticizing the institutional wrongs of the Church of their day.

The prophetic vision is to help the community to accept a loss they cannot admit, and to embrace a hope they cannot dare believe.

The writer speaks of betrayal’s being a kind of abusive behavior, a trusted party violates our trust to deliver what we see as necessary for our physical, emotional, financial or religious well-being. ...betrayal unleashes primal intense emotions. Among these are: hurt, bitterness, resentment, helplessness, anger, fear – whenever we are betrayed, it sends shock waves through our very core– the psychic pain is profound; the emotional wounds are deep. They motivate us to get the hell out of Dodge.

They move us to leave the abusive situation. We flee our betrayer; we sever our ties with the abusive institution; we discontinue our association with the offending parties; we find safer people, places and settings from which to meet our needs. Then, he goes on to ask: Right? Right?

If leaving is impossible, Massingale tells us therapists speak of a coping strategy of disassociation, maintaining a relationship with the betrayer, but in ways that are more or less disengaged. People pull back from institutional involvement. We narrow our focus. We look for our own little piece of the kingdom. We tend our own little garden. We focus on OUR parish, or OUR ministry, and we avoid the diocese as much as possible.

Sometimes, he says, people in this situation strike us as lifeless, suffering from low morale. In an extreme case, the one betrayed disassociates by denying that the betrayal ever occurred. And from that event, is depressed, the psychic pain is buried, the deep wound is covered thickly, but remains unhealed.

I may be wrong, but I am somewhat convinced that many Catholics – clergy and lay -- escape the burden of betrayal by turning to the life of Christ, abandoned and betrayed beyond measure.

In the grand scheme of things, union with Christ makes everything else slip into oblivion, not because abuses are not real, but because they are, and the only way to continue on the journey is to walk with Him, Who suffered beyond our comprehension.

Thomas Merton would tell us that we cannot be led out of a desert by someone who has never been there. It is obvious that Massingale has survived many a desert journey, and. for the sake of us, has laid bare his inmost hurts, fears and disappointments. We owe him big-time; we owe Christ no less.

Lord, bless Father Bryan Massingale, as he continues in his ministry as an associate professor of moral theology at Marquette University. Help him when he becomes discouraged, when the difference between the way things are, and the way we would like them to be, appears insurmountable. Bless him abundantly, pressed down and flowing over, for his words of wisdom, for loving the Church to the point of weariness, for loving God’s people, not abandoning them to the confusion of the present time. And bless us , as we continue laboring in the vineyard, with You, the Good Shepherd. Help us to celebrate our faith, and our friendship with one another. Amen.

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