We Are All Joe Biden

I was watching Mass online this past Sunday (a COVID thing) when I started thinking about the word scandal. It is not a word you hear very much in secular society but it has become popular among the chattering clerics that are the Roman Catholic bishops in the United States and Canada these days. Members of the USCCB accuse Joe Biden of bringing scandal on the Church because he holds public office and is not trying to overturn Roe v Wade (the theology of the Church, distilled, thusly). In Canada, a Cardinal told Justin Trudeau, another Catholic politician trying to live his faith, that his suggestion that the Church start taking responsibility for the scandal of Church-run residential schools was “unhelpful.” Apparently, irony is not taught in seminary.

These men have missed the critical point; they no longer hold moral authority over those of us in the pews, real or virtual. Decades of putting the needs of abusive priests ahead of the parishioners they were anointed to serve document the priorities of the bishops. That some bishops and cardinals would embrace a man who embodies the Seven Deadly Sins as the Second Coming of Christ and favor him over a practicing Catholic for President of the United States shows their corruption. That some would reward William Barr for vigorously reinstating the US federal death penalty smacks gobs. Hundreds of Aboriginal children buried in unmarked graves. It invokes Titus 1:16, “They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works. They are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work.”

As for the people in the pews, we are all Joe Bidens. We come to the Church for moral guidance, for theology that will help us navigate through this secular world on our way to Christ. The teachings of the Church are what draw us, the answers it is supposed to give for the difficult questions of life. Like Joe, we are looking to the Church for leadership, for the interpretations of Christ’s message that are applicable to our circumstances. 

The bishops relinquished their moral sway over the rest of us when they chose abuse over service. Unfortunately, the bishops don’t grasp that yet. They still think a wag of their finger sends shivers through the sheep in the pews, who, after all, are there to support them in the style to which they have become accustomed. They think they can behave how they want behind the ecclesiastical walls that they have erected to shield their malfeasance from sheep-view, protecting and assisting where necessary priests in peril through their own fault. The rules apply to the sheep, not to “us men”.

The rest of us are on our own to find our way to Christ. The men who favored Forty-Five over the Catholic Forty-Six, the men who rewarded a manic schedule of US federal executions, the men who allowed their peers to prey on us, bury us, yes, us, for decades, think they can pontificate on matters of morality. They burned that pulpit. 

We, those of us who still call ourselves Roman Catholic, we do not recognize our Church in these bishops. They are there to serve themselves at our expense. Like Joe Biden, we keep trying to find our Catholic Church amidst the ruination inflicted by their clerical church. 

We are all Joe Bidens. The Bishops who rebuke him are themselves condemned by the systematic abuse perpetrated by their clerics on our Church. 

We are the Church. The ones the clerics abused or buried into obscurity.

We are the Church. Joe Bidens, all. 

The scandal is not Joe Biden’s or ours. It is theirs.