Sunday, July 18, 2010

What would Jesus do?

In her op-ed in today's Sunday Times, Maureen Dowd rightly castigates the Roman Catholic church for its weird equation of female ordination and pederasty. She concludes, however, with a somewhat strange image, derived from another person of Catholic heritage, the historian and journalist Garry Wills:

"In The New Republic, Garry Wills wrote about his struggle to come to terms with the sins of his church: Jesus “is the one who said, ‘Whatever you did to any of my brothers, even the lowliest, you did to me.’ That means that the priests abusing the vulnerable young were doing that to Jesus, raping Jesus. Any clerical functionary who shows more sympathy for the predator priests than for their victims instantly disqualified himself as a follower of Jesus. The cardinals said they must care for their own, going to jail if necessary to protect a priest. We say the same thing, but the ‘our own’ we care for are the victimized, the poor, the violated. They are Jesus.”"

A logical deduction, I suppose, though perhaps (how shall I say?) somewhat Jesuitical.

Still this observation opens up a new perspective on the perennial question. Faced with such an assault, what would Jesus do?

UPDATE. Since writing these lines a few minutes ago, I was privileged to receive an etheric channeling from the ubiquitous and irrepressible Joan Rivers. Here is what I think she said. "Wayne, you dumb faygele, of course we know what he would have done: turn the other cheek!"

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