SEX, THEOLOGY AND MISOGYNY
Jerry Harkins
Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for such is the kingdom of God.
Mark 10:14


My intention here is not to make fun of the church’s teachings on sex or its current dilemma arising from the concupiscence of its priests. I have done all that elsewhere and have decided that it is too much like shooting sitting ducks. Over a period of some 2,000 years, a whole corpus of teachings—a magisterium—evolved from what I take to be the morbid fantasies of elderly celibates. If the current crop of hierarchs now scurry about the darker recesses of the Vatican talking in worried whispers about the unspeakable erotic perversions of priests, well, who will say anything other than that they are hoist on their own petards?

No, here we address a more serious question, to wit, how can the church extricate itself from its very grave crisis? The short answer is it probably can’t and, if it fails, it will wither away regardless of what Jesus said about the gates of hell (1) and his promise to be with it, “all days until the end of the world.” (2) It is already difficult to credit an institution whose preachings about sex are routinely ignored by all but a small if vocal minority of its members. Sadly, until recently, the church was led by an exhausted old man who was not in full possession of his faculties and by an inbred cadre of his loyalists. John Paul II, in a long and eventful reign, tried to perpetuate and, in some cases, amplify a variety of foolish and harmful theories that will be hard for a successor to undo. But the church is decaying and time is short. If there is to be any hope of a solution, it must begin with a clear definition of the problem.

The root of the pedophilia crisis, simply stated, is sex itself and sex is divided into two problems of long standing. First, the church does not approve of it because it is seen as a mortal danger to one’s hope of salvation. Just as the moth knows that, for all its danger, the flame brings light into the world, the church knows that sex is necessary to fulfill God’s first commandment to, “Be fruitful and multiply.” (3) But it is determined to extinguish any non-reproductive expression of sexuality and strictly control what it does accept as a necessary evil. It has never been successful and has never learned from its failures. Second, the prelates don’t have a clue as to how to respond to a crisis when there is no prospect of burning their enemies at the stake or even of excommunicating the malefactors. All they can think to do is issue anathemas from the pulpit, failing to notice that the pews are empty. They have not yet adjusted to the humanism of the Renaissance so it is not surprising that the sexual revolution has thrown them into a tizzy.

Intercourse—within a lawful marriage and open to reproduction—is the single exception to the overall teaching that any sexual expression is morally disordered. Even within marriage, intercourse is permissible (5) only if the couple takes no direct action to impede conception, and foreplay is acceptable as long as pleasure is not an end in itself. (6) Unfortunately when God created sex, he or she created a vast range of pleasurable possibilities of which “licit” sex is only a tiny sample. After nearly two thousand years of trying, the church realized that it could not extricate pleasure from reproduction but it has done its best to correct the rest of God’s mistakes.

The specific prohibitions that derive from the church’s revulsion are comprehensive and stringent: fornication, masturbation, pornography, prostitution, homosexual acts, bestiality, the donation or use of sperm or ova, surrogate pregnancy, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, cloning, adultery, divorce, polygamy, incest, abortion, contraception, and the sexual abuse of children are all explicitly condemned. (7) The church is not alone in all these prohibitions but it has allowed them to metastasize beyond all reason. Adultery has come to include necking by teenage couples. The church regards in vitro fertilization as seriously disordered, not because it gives pleasure but because the procedure does not use all the embryos it cultures and is, therefore, tantamount to abortion. A similar logic leads the theologians to declare that embryonic stem cell research of every description is evil. The Bible condemns homosexual intercourse which it defines as a man lying with another man as with a woman. To the church however it also includes two men holding hands. The Bible makes no mention of lesbians (8) but the church regards female homosexuality with horror. This radiation of prohibitions is a reflection of its underlying fear of and revulsion to carnality which, in turn, flows from a profound misogyny. Sex is seen as corrupting and woman, ever since Eve, is the temptress. Woman is a constant and dire threat, an “occasion of sin.” The female excites male passion and renders the will incapable of exercising restraint. The male is in immanent danger of either being seduced or committing rape. This loss of control—the very idea of being dominated by a force greater than reason—is simply too much to contemplate.

Now you can understand why Mary had to have been a virgin. (9) As Thomas Aquinas, following Augustine, explains, it would not have been fitting for him who came to free us from corruption to have been the cause of unleashing Mary’s sexuality by “corrupting” her virginity. (10) But the mainstream theology has always taught that Jesus was fully human and fully divine without contradiction. It has never explained how a person conceived without half the required chromosomes could be fully human. It was a miracle, an event said to be above reason but not contrary to it. If a virgin birth is not contrary to reason, it is only because the believer, like the Red Queen, is making up the rules of reason. Of course, even Joseph did not believe Mary’s story until an angel came to him in a dream. (11) But the point is that only by preserving Mary’s virginity can the church make her an exception to its misogyny.
The church is obsessed with virginity. In the modern era, this manifests itself in the teaching, “How great is the dignity of chaste wedlock.” (12) But it began with and evolved from the doctrine enunciated by Paul of Tarsus. He allows sex between husband and wife “as a concession, not a command” but wishes that “all men were as I am” which is to say, unmarried. “But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn.” (13) His preferences are clear:

So then, he who marries the virgin does right, but he who does not marry her does even better. If anyone thinks he is not treating his daughter properly, and if she is getting along in years, and he feels she ought to marry, he should do as he wants. He is not sinning. He should let her get married. But the man who has settled the matter in his own mind, who is under no compulsion but has control over his own will, and who has made up his mind to keep the virgin unmarried–this man also does the right thing. So then, he who gives his virgin in marriage does right, but he who does not give her in marriage does even better. (14)

This is the line of thought that will gradually mutate into full blown misogyny. In the Book of Revelation, it is said that only 144,000 people will be saved and that these will all be celibate men “who did not defile themselves with women, for they kept themselves pure.” (15) Tertullian shared Paul’s views and took them a step beyond in his admonition to women to dress modestly:


You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that [forbidden] tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert—that is death—even the Son of God had to die. (16)

You see the power of woman: the devil himself was afraid to confront the magnificent god-like Adam who could be seduced only by Eve. Tertullian famously thought of woman as “a temple built over a sewer,” a metaphor Augustine explicated in referring to the female genitalia as “inter faeces et urinam nascimur.” (17) Given such an excretory fantasy, it is not surprising that he welcomed the advice he got from a voice in the clouds declaiming, “It is good for a man not to touch a woman.” Augustine’s contemporary Jerome, Doctor doctoris, suffered from vivid erotic dreams through much of his life and became fixated on virginity. He wrote a letter on the subject to Eustochium Julia who was sixteen at the time. He told her that the only reason he approved of marriage was that, without it, there would be no new virgins. He tells Ms. Julia:

I do not today intend to sing the praises of the virginity which you have adopted and proved to be so good. Nor shall I now reckon up the disadvantages of marriage, such as pregnancy, a crying baby, the tortures of jealousy, the cares of household management, and the cutting short by death of all its fancied blessings. Married women have their due allotted place, if they live in honorable marriage and keep their bed undefiled. (18)

That last phrase is cubile immaculatum in Jerome’s Latin, literally an unstained marriage bed, one that has not suffered the indignity of a bleeding hymen. Shortly after this letter was written, Jerome, Eustochium, her sister and her mother Paula went off to live in the desert with a full retinue of female disciples. For a person with such a rich fantasy life, it had to be an ever-present temptation to Jerome but somehow all four of them became saints.

In the aftermath of the fall of Rome, the debate about sex turned to the question of whether or not priests should be and remain celibate. The ecumenical Council of Nicea (325) had declined to rule on the subject but succeeding local councils enacted every imaginable barrier, if not to marriage itself, then to sex within marriage. Eventually, the Council of Pavia (1018) even ruled that the wives and children of clergymen should be enslaved. (19) Such strictures were, however, widely rejected and clerical marriage and concubinage persisted well into the middle ages, even or especially among the hierarchy. In 1492 Rodrigo Borgia engineered his own election as Pope Alexander VI. He already had several children by various mistresses and his dalliances did not cease with his elevation. He appointed his daughter Lucrezia’s son Giovanni to the College of Cardinals. It was said at the time and is still believed by many historians that Alexander was Giovanni’s father which would make him simultaneously the lad’s grandfather. (20)
What the church said and what its priests did were getting further and further apart. The two ecumenical Councils of Lateran (1123 and 1139) had taken a number of steps designed to institutionalize misogyny. Canon 27 of the Second Lateran (21) went so far as to forbid mixed choirs of nuns and monks. Soon the church extended this to a prohibition against all singing by women in public, and by 1600, they were castrating young boys so men could sing the soprano parts required by the new polyphonic music. Even by the standards of the time, this was blatant child abuse and it went on for a long time. The last castrato died in 1922. There were several reasons for the persistence of this policy of mutilation. First, of course, it meant not having to sing with women thereby exposing oneself to eternal damnation. Second, it was doing the Lord’s work by fulfilling Jesus’ admonition, “For some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and others have made themselves eunuchs because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it." (22) In spite of all this, what is most interesting is the fact that Deuteronomy prohibits castrated males from entering the “assembly of the Lord.” (23)

Misogyny, then, is the basis of both priestly celibacy and the exclusion of women from the priestly class. The resulting all male, celibate, woman-fearing clergy provides fertile ground for distorted thinking and perverse dogmas. The perversions include the church’s socially repugnant politics pressed on behalf of censorship and against sex education in the schools. It adds significantly to the sum total of misery in the world by opposing divorce in all circumstances and through the disfellowship of divorced persons who remarry. In the name of its eccentric understanding of chastity, it has turned generations of Catholic adolescents into Clintonian hair splitters fretting about the exact boundaries of its fire and brimstone morality. It makes mockery of both logic and ethics by ranting against any use of condoms, preferring to expose people to sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies and abortion. Its argument is that anything that makes sex safer also increases the incidence of what it considers illicit sex. (24) It invokes medieval sorcery, equating a blastocyst with a human being, to lobby for laws criminalizing life saving stem cell research. Worst of all, it encourages extremists to harass vulnerable women trying to enter abortion clinics. Then it is offended when it is said that the priests approve of bombing the clinics and assassinating their doctors.

The church is by no means alone in all this foolishness, nor is it unique to religious institutions. (25) Misogyny is a prominent feature of all the Abrahamic religions (26) and, in each case, the more orthodox the cult the more dogmatic is its hatred of women. Christianity was supposed to change all that and, therefore Christian misogyny is not only immoral in itself, it is also hypocritical. The message of Jesus Christ was supposed to be love and tolerance. He told his followers to “…love one another as I have loved you” (27) and Paul took it a step further by teaching that of all the virtues, “…the greatest of these is love.” (28) To the consternation of the Pharisees, Jesus said, “If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” (29)

The message of love evolved very gradually through the Old Testament and, when it blossomed in the teaching of Jesus, it seemed truly revolutionary. It sought to replace the tooth-and-claw, might-makes-right basis of the primitive social contract with a gospel of cooperation and mutuality. Remember, the God of Genesis was vengeful and brutal. By the time of Job, though, he was beginning to learn that he and his creation are interdependent and that mutual forgiveness is essential to a decent relationship between them. When David sinned egregiously against the Mosaic commandments prohibiting adultery and murder, God did not destroy Israel as well he might have in Genesis. He punished the king by killing Bathsheba’s first born but he ultimately responded to David’s prayer for forgiveness. Of course, no one would suggest that killing an infant son for the sins of the father is anything but psychopathic. But it is at least not as capricious as what he had done to Job merely for the sake of winning a whimsical bet with Satan. (30)

Judged by the historical behavior of the institutional church, the gospel of love was a failure. For every Francis of Assisi, there were a dozen Joans of Arc (31) burned at the stake; for every John XXIII there were a score of vicious, bloodthirsty popes preaching genocidal crusades. As a matter of fact, John XXII was immortalized by Umberto Eco as the Pope who put down the Franciscan Spirituals by burning their leaders at the stake for preaching the gospel of poverty. What happened? Specifically, how did the teachings about sex stray so far from the actual texts and how did the standard of love become so disfigured? How did an institution defy the obvious dictates of natural law and produce a repulsive, anti-intellectual theology of necessary evil to explain away the goodness of one-half of the human race? The answer is complex and controversial. It begins with the fact that Jesus himself was not without ambiguity. (32) This is usually glossed over by saying he hated the sin but loved the sinner. He protected and forgave the woman “caught in adultery.” (33) But then, in the Sermon on the Mount, he said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (34)

Now the commandment that Jesus was “fulfilling” already had a long history of emendation. In addition to adultery which is the only sin explicitly prohibited, the Law had also come to ban coitus interruptus, (35) incest, (36) bestiality, (37) homosexuality, (38) and cross dressing. (39) Jesus explicitly added only male ogling to the list of abominations. A careful and sympathetic reader would be embarrassed by such blatant nonsense. But the church has concluded that if the son of God felt that strongly about ogling he would certainly have been opposed to necking and petting. (40) Which is logical—a logical extension of an inanity. To compound the cruelty, it went on to embroider a fiction based on what Jesus didn’t say. Had he intended to banish the misogyny of the Old Testament, their logic went, the Sermon on the Mount gave him the perfect opportunity. Since he did not take advantage of it, the Church, as we shall see, felt justified in extending its own doctrine to place the blame on women. This logic, of course, is seriously warped. And they know it. (41) But they are reasoning to a foregone conclusion. They realize that it is an incendiary conclusion, so they lie about it by engaging in the worst kind of double talk. Consider what John Paul II said in his 1995 “Letter to Women:”

As I wrote in my Apostolic Letter Mulieris Dignitatem, the Church "desires to give thanks to the Most Holy Trinity for the 'mystery of woman' and for every woman—for all that constitutes the eternal measure of her feminine dignity, for the 'great works of God', which throughout human history have been accomplished in and through her…I know of course that simply saying thank you is not enough. Unfortunately, we are heirs to a history which has conditioned us to a remarkable extent. In every time and place, this conditioning has been an obstacle to the progress of women. Women's dignity has often been unacknowledged and their prerogatives misrepresented; they have often been relegated to the margins of society and even reduced to servitude…And if objective blame, especially in particular historical contexts, has belonged to not just a few members of the Church, for this I am truly sorry.

Misrepresented? How about trampled upon? Members of the church? How about official church doctrine? Mulieris Dignitatem is full of empty rhetoric stressing the glorious role of women throughout history. At great length, the Pope traces the church’s thinking on women to Eve, a sinner, and Mary, a virgin. When he comes to explaining God’s punishment of Eve (“Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” (42)) however, he betrays himself:

… This "domination" indicates the disturbance and loss of the stability of that fundamental equality which the man and the woman possess in the "unity of the two": and this is especially to the disadvantage of the woman…[But] even the rightful opposition of women to what is expressed in the biblical words "He shall rule over you" (Gen 3:16) must not under any condition lead to the "masculinization" of women. In the name of liberation from male "domination", women must not appropriate to themselves male characteristics contrary to their own feminine "originality". There is a well-founded fear that if they take this path, women will not "reach fulfillment", but instead will deform and lose what constitutes their essential richness.

Okay, here’s the payoff:

It is indeed an enormous richness. In the biblical description, the words of the first man at the sight of the woman who had been created are words of admiration and enchantment, words which fill the whole history of man on earth. (43)

There you have it. The essential richness of woman is her attractiveness to man, and this must be preserved over all other values, even including equality. This richness is so important that the Pope resorts to an obvious lie about what the Bible says to reinforce it. It’s all right, he seems to be saying, to be upset about the injustice done by an avenging God but, if you fight it, men will no longer ogle you. The Pope struggles to say something good about women, the sex he will later declare to be a sacerdotal nullity. But all he can manage is a warning against the temptation of feminism. Whatever does he mean by “masculinization?” Exactly what male traits does His Holiness regard as abominable in a woman? Intelligence? Assertiveness? Facial hair? The ability to pee standing up? How does he reconcile the attraction the woman has for the man which he says is good, with the attraction that constitutes a constant occasion of sin which, of course, is bad? To ask these questions is to answer them: the Pope is merely betraying the ugly stereotypes that substitute for reason in Vatican Think. His misogyny is so deeply ingrained that promoting it trumps any desire to be logical or reasonable or even truthful.

Misogyny is not a monomaniacal rejection of everything female. It is, as has been suggested above, very much like the moth and the flame; the misogynist is simultaneously and irresistibly attracted and repelled. Both the Marquis de Sade and Jack the Ripper were misogynists who nonetheless craved heterosexual gratification. The church’s preference for virgins suggests that it recognizes degrees of misogyny, virgins being morally superior to non-virgins. From the time of Paul, the church’s favorite metaphor for itself has been “Bride of Christ,” surely a virgin bride. (44) Writing to the church at Corinth, Paul says, “I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him.” (45) This is truly sick imagery on many levels (46) but it is consistent with what Paul recommends to husbands and wives as models for their private relationships. “Wives,” he enjoins, “submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.” (47) Husbands, of course, are told to love their wives for the simple reason that, “no man ever yet hated his own flesh.”

If the church’s teachings on marriage constitute a mockery of the sublime, its position on altar girls belongs to the ridiculous end of the spectrum. Ever since Vatican II, the Curia has vacillated about girl servers although, at the moment, Cardinal Ratzinger’s (48) dictum is ascendant. He essentially condemned the practice on the theory that boys, being as misogynist as he is, will not want to serve with girls. Thus, the church will be denied one of its best sources of future priests (at least if one disregards the possibility that girls might be just such a source). The prelates are not ashamed to say this as bluntly as I have, but they are equally capable of obfuscating it in theological double talk. Joseph Fessio, a Jesuit, the self-styled “Warrior Priest,” and a former student of Ratzinger, says the same thing this way:

The Church only becomes the Body of Christ in the mystery of the two in one flesh by which, initially bride, by being joined to her Groom she becomes one body with the head. The Eucharist, the center and summit of the Sacraments, involves a sacred place, a sacred time and a sacred person both symbolically setting apart the orders of grace and redemption from the order of creation and making really present the Divine Person of Christ in Word and Sacrament. For this reason, many theologians (e.g., de Lubac, Von Balthasar, Bouyer) hold, in keeping with a long and unbroken ecclesiastical tradition, that there is an absolute prohibition of women as recipients of the Sacrament of Holy Orders. (49)

Say, what? Ignore the surrealistic imagery about the Body of Christ being also the Bride of Christ which is, after all, exactly what Paul was saying. Assume that the business about her (the church’s) body becoming one with the head is nothing more than an especially opaque metaphor. Grant that the Eucharist is a sacred mystery. But pay attention to the phrase, “For this reason…” How can even a Jesuit conclude that girls can’t be priests from these two statements? The answer is, he can’t. If this paragraph means anything sane, it is the exact opposite of what Fessio says it means. The bride is the female part of the mystical union. Therefore it is the human female who is exclusively qualified to exercise the priestly function. Of course, such babbling is equally mad. In fact, what you have here is another of those foregone conclusions being dragged around by an inane metaphor and an irrelevant theory. It is, in short, the perfect Christian fallacy. Florynce Kennedy observed that if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. To which I add, if a woman could be Pope, people like the John Paul II, Joe Ratzinger and Joe Fessio would be correctly labeled as heretics.

There are some within the church who are quite ready to descry the excesses of the clergy and even look forward to changes they are sure will come in the next generation. There are others who think the problem can continue to be managed without outside help and without cooperating with secular authorities. (50) There are some, too, a substantial majority I would think, who place the blame on the sinners and think the institution itself remains pure and beyond error. If there is a context for the sins, it is not something rotten within the church, but in the modern world with its licentious pursuit of pleasure. This is often seen in apocalyptic terms as a sign that the end of days is upon us. What all these Christians share, however, is belief in the immutability of the church. “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word shall not pass away.” (51) This and other divine promises assure the Catholic fundamentalist that the institution is safe. And so it has seemed for 2,000 years. The current crisis is not the first challenge the church has faced and not even, from a moral perspective, the most threatening. It survived the early heresies and the Great Schism, the Crusades and the dynastic wars of the Holy Roman Emperors, the Protestant Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, the slow death of the divine right of kings and the rapid emergence of the middle class. It has even survived the last fourteen Popes who, with a single exception—two if you insist on including Leo XIII—were disastrous as theologians and pastors, and who spent their energies declaring themselves, against all evidence, infallible, tilting at such bogey men as modernism and freemasonry, and averting their eyes from genocide and pedophilia. The institution has to be strong to suffer such insults. But today that strength has been drawn down and the institutional church is weaker than it has ever been and is getting weaker every day.

The church tries to compartmentalize the scandal. It is one of several discrete agenda items for meetings of bishops in countries where it has escaped from its hiding place under the rug. Rome treads gingerly, managing the problem with circumlocution, evasion and self-deception. No one dares tell the prelates that this is different. People understand what has been going on and realize that it is not new and is not confined to a few Bacchanalian districts. Worse, they know that it exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of institutional Christianity—the betrayal of the gospel of love. It is a fatal cancer in the process of destroying the whole edifice. And the fools in charge don’t know it yet.
In North America, the church is in financial ruins. Of 194 dioceses, only a handful are showing an operating surplus and not a single one has access to significant liquid capital. (52) Three have already declared bankruptcy, the first three dioceses to go broke in two thousand years. Schools are being closed, vocations have been in free fall for 30 years, and the average age of priests is now 65 and climbing. Seminaries are attracting only the most rigid young men. There is no doubt that strong emotional bonds remain between the laity, the local parish, and the abstract ideal of “Catholicism.” But the laity are irrelevant. They are, in the phrase of another beloved metaphor, the “sheep of the flock.” Which is to say, they are good for fleecing. But no longer good enough to insure solvency. Already, Catholics contribute less as a percentage of income than do adherents of any other religion, at least in America. As pedophilia settlements approach the billion dollar range, there is no hope of paying the victims. Real estate fire sales and bankruptcy protection will wreak havoc with operations and only the universities and some of the hospitals are likely to survive. The American church will look nothing like its old self in just a few years. Self-governing, loosely federated parishes may continue to function in the Baptist fashion, but Martin Luther’s revolution will be triumphant. And as the American church goes, so goes the universal superstructure that depends on it. The Vatican is likely to be a theme park within the lifetime of people now living. Time is short and the river is rising.

Is there any hope of redemption? As I said at the outset, the short answer is not much. Surely not as long as the hierarchy persists in its Wonderland fantasy, as long as it fails to get a grip on reality. In its legal responses to the pedophilia crisis, it typically invokes the allegation of contributory negligence. This is a common tactic in tort law. It says, “I may bear some of the responsibility, but so do you.” The plaintiff almost always calls this blaming the victim. The problem in these cases is that the victim is often six years old. As for the child’s parents, their only negligence was in trusting their child to the care of a priest. The church’s position, then, is not only immoral, but, in arguing that parents should not trust priests, it is terrible public relations. This is both immoral and suicidal.

The failure of the American hierarchy ultimately became apparent even to the Vatican apparatchiks who summoned the American Cardinals to Rome for a dose of woodshedding. (53) Unfortunately, the Americans could not agree among themselves, one faction supporting the popular “one strike and you’re out” policy and the other favoring strict due process and forgiveness for a single past misdeed. Among lay intellectuals, Garry Wills supported the former policy while William F. Buckley favored the latter, citing the gospel of Luke to the effect that there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine just men. (54) Buckley, however, seriously misreads one of the New Testament’s most profound messages. The line is an exaggeration used to introduce the Parable of the Prodigal Son which is a remarkable disquisition on forgiveness. As the father explains to the older son, “…this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” (55) The father has no choice but to forgive the son, even when the sinner may not merit forgiveness, seek it or even desire it. The reason is because forgiveness is the only way to restore the father himself to wholeness. In the current situation, then, forgiveness is the province of those who need to be made whole again—the victims—and whatever the bishops decide to do as a matter of discipline is entirely irrelevant. But these men are hopeless. As they gathered in Dallas to plot their strategy, their best idea was to arrange a 48 hour continuous adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, not for themselves, but for the victims who came to picket the hall. They published a 48-page booklet of vigil prayers, the first of which was the Fifty-first Psalm. This is David’s classic plea for forgiveness, the one that Bill Clinton alluded to at the height of Monicagate.

Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your unfailing love;
according to your great compassion
blot out my transgressions.
Wash away all my iniquity
and cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is always before me.

So while the bishops communed with each other, they recommended that the victims should pray for forgiveness. Is anybody home?

The Declaration of Dallas was a bitter pill and many credited the bishops for taking a strong stand. Others thought that coming out against pedophilia did not require a heroic amount of moral courage. And a few cynics figured the bishops knew the Vatican would bail them out. Which, of course, is exactly what happened. True to form, Rome said the bishops had raised some concerns that needed further study by a committee to which it would name half the members. Ultimately, the committee merely reasserted the primacy of Rome and something it called “the rights of the accused” which would be hard to argue with except, in the whole history of the church, it has never before been known to be solicitous of any rights but its own. Ultimately the church has dug itself into a hole without an exit strategy. Its first impulse was to do nothing and hope that the hole would go away before the rains came. Better minds blamed the shovel. The most righteous seem ready to learn to love the hole.

The hole is not pedophilia which, at worst, is the sin of a degenerate minority. (56, 57) The hole is not the much larger percentage of oath-breaking fornicators and statutory rapists. Nor is it the bishops who have sired children by long time mistresses or have purchased the silence of gay lovers with church funds. The hole is misogyny. It is a sick view of women that attracts sick men some of whom inevitably seek other, less threatening outlets for their sexuality. It should not surprise anyone that some of these men are gay. The incidence of warped sexuality among gays and straights is probably identical. (58) The priesthood disproportionately attracts warped men, straight and gay. (59) It also attracts men, straight and gay, who remain celibate because they think it will somehow bring them closer to God, or free them to give of themselves wholly to their flock, or, of course, simply because they fear sex. Even if you think any of this is laudable, it is by no means normal. The priesthood does not attract normal men and it never will as long as its defining characteristic is freedom from women. (60) Abnormal psychology is a mark of the Roman clergy and it persists as priests become bishops become cardinals become popes. It is, therefore, impossible to expect them to judge one another and unlikely in the extreme that they will change their minds.

The church tries to ban gays from becoming priests in the first place but, until the pedophilia crisis, this rule was honored more in the breach. In the new environment, the Vatican is taking steps to enforce the ban rigorously even against gays who are celibate. As usual, the prelates are poorly informed and self-destructive. Reverend Donald B. Cozzens, former President-rector and professor of pastoral theology at St. Mary Seminary in Cleveland, has written that, “…the priesthood is or is becoming a gay profession.” But the theory is said to be that seminaries are all-male environments which pose a special temptation to gays. This is nonsense of course but, even if it did have a shred of respectability as an argument, the solution would be to admit women or, given the demographics of vocations, to bar straight men.

Sadly, the Pope has taken the issue of women as priests off the table. (61) His favorite Inquisitor, Ratzinger, wrote that the Pope’s musings on the subject are as close to being infallible as a disciplinary ruling can be. Together they have tried to slam the door on change forever. The only light coming through the cracks is the light of a laity that ignores the rantings coming from Vatican City, and the light of the decent priests, straight and gay, on the front lines of the struggle against darkness.

Afterword

It has been the argument of this essay that the church’s current pedophilia crisis is one of the direct results of its historical attitude toward sex which, in turn, is based on its dogmatic misogyny. There are two obvious problems with this analysis. First, women have always been the church’s most stalwart, most loyal and most selfless supporters. Second, the church has always been seen, by its communicants and its enemies, as itself feminine. Holy mother the church. Bride of Christ. But it goes well beyond language into the extremely fraught arena of gender identity. Most people, I think, perceive most priests as effeminate—not necessarily homosexual, but characteristically (or, if you prefer, stereotypically) female in dress, demeanor and values.

It cannot be denied that women have been complicit in their own subjugation. (62) The same can be said about patriarchy generally: that it wouldn’t work unless women let it work. Such an idea is well beyond the scope of the present paper. But I suspect that feminism and misogyny can co-exist on different conceptual levels. Certainly for the individual it is possible and even common for a macho self-image to co-exist with a despised or suppressed feminine “side.” And certainly also, there is value for women in promoting any institutional force that may occasionally temper the power of men. But whatever combination of forces may be working here, the end result is almost identical to that of the Stockholm Syndrome in which, over time, hostages come to empathize with the objectives and even the tactics of their abductors. And therein lies a resolution sufficient for present purposes: the psychology may be complex but the morality is not—the victim remains a victim, the abuser an abuser.

Which leaves us with the gender identity of the church itself. Why would holy mother the church persecute her daughters? Any realistic answer must begin with a restatement of the obvious: we are dealing here in the realm of abnormal psychology. It’s like asking why a psychotic bangs his head against the wall. My own guess is that the church, like a psychotic, compartmentalizes its metaphors and its fantasies. It obviously enjoys its role as the bride of Christ and the behaviors—for example, cross-dressing—that let its priests act out the metaphor. All the while real women remain mysterious and fearful. I may be wrong about this but the fact on the ground remains that, over 2,000 years, the morality of the Catholic Church with respect to women has been no better than the morality of the tyrant, the bondsman or the terrorist. God forgive them.

Notes

1. Matthew 16:18.

2. Matthew 28:20.

3. Genesis 1:28.

4. Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2000, Paragraphs 2351 and 2366.

5. Permissible should not be taken as an enthusiastic endorsement. In contemporary pronouncements, the Church seems to have discovered that sex has a “unitive” in addition to a procreative purpose. Not to put too fine a point on it, the Church is saying that sex brings people together. As obvious as this is, it does represent a step forward insofar as it suggests that intercourse may be licit for a couple that cannot conceive for biological reasons. Still, the act must be theoretically “open to” procreation, which is to say that the act could lead to conception, however improbable. But, if an elderly man contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion, he could not use a condom to protect his elderly wife.

6. The precise boundaries of “foreplay” are hard to discern except that the couple must intend it to lead to vaginal intercourse. If orgasm occurs by accident before intercourse can take place, the absence of intent to sin renders the act morally neutral. If it occurs intentionally and intercourse does not follow, it is clearly sinful. What is the case, you may wonder, if it occurs intentionally but licit intercourse follows after a brief respite? Or if licit intercourse is attempted but fails? Or was intended but not attempted? Moral theology is a subtle discipline and amateurs are well advised to act with extreme prudence.

7. Catechism of the Catholic Church , Op. cit. Paragraphs 2352, 2353, 2354, 2355, 2359, 2376, 2377, 2380, 2382, 2387, 2388 and 2389.

8. In Romans 1:26-27, Paul comments unfavorably on pagan women who have substituted unnatural for natural intercourse and men with inadequate imaginations have always assumed that this must refer to lesbianism. It may but it is equally probable that he is referring to oral or anal sex or masturbation. Whatever he is talking about, however, is clearly defined as meriting punishment meted out by God.

9. In addition to its sexual meaning, the word virginity is generally associated with such traits as docility, malleability and sweetness. One is, therefore, not surprised at the vast majority of titles Mary is given in her Litany: mother most amiable, mystical rose, comforter, queen of peace. But she is also called virgin most powerful, and it has been pointed out to me that, for a short time before the Renaissance, it was this power that attracted the attention of leading artists. Giotto, for example, depicted Mary as a stern, uncompromising and very powerful personage in “Madonna in Glory” (c. 1311). I do not know why this was so although it may be related to the terrible harshness of life in the middle ages.

10. Summa Theologica, Volume III, Question 28, Response 2. Aquinas, the supreme rationalist, had a great deal of trouble with sex. Consider, for example, his explanation of why incest is condemned. “Since the intercourse of man and wife carries with it a certain natural shame, those persons should be prevented from such intercourse who owe one another a mutual reverence on account of the tie of blood. And this is the reason touched on in Leviticus 18” (Summa Contra Gentiles, Book III, Question 125). The “natural shame” associated with sex may be acceptable between husband and wife but not between people who must revere each other. The Angelic Doctor is so flustered that he invents his reference to Leviticus 18 which says no such thing. Nor does he pause to contemplate the blasphemy involved in postulating a God whose “increase and multiply” commandment must be implemented by an inherently shameful act.

11. Joseph was not a virgin, having fathered six children by his first wife, Melcha. He is said to have been 90 when he married Mary. It is easy to accept his initial certainty that the baby was not his, but harder to understand why he believed a dream rather than the rational conclusion—his original conclusion—that his wife was pregnant by another man.

12. Pius XI, Casti Connubii, 1930. In fairness, the Pope may have meant something different than you do when he used the word “chaste.” The official Catechism says, “Chastity means the successful integration of sexuality within the person and thus the inner unity of man in his bodily and spiritual being” (Paragraph 2337) and, if that helps, God bless. But you have to wonder how the priest integrates his sexuality. Is he not chaste?

13. See I Corinthians 7:9. Some modern translations render the last phrase “burn with passion” but there is no hint of this in the Vulgate. At this early date, the church did not worry about replenishing the stock of humanity because everyone thought the Second Coming was imminent. Paul presents problems for all Christian apologists. Some have taken to interpreting his pronouncements on sex as a sort of proto-feminism in the sense he was trying to subvert the ancient custom of early arranged marriages. But, seen in the light of his attitude toward women—that they should keep the hair covered and their mouths closed in church, for example—this is a hard opinion to sustain.

14. Ibid 7:35-38. As is often the case, Paul’s prose is better than his logic. If it is better for a man not to marry a virgin, his choice is narrowed to widows and wantons. (In case it is not clear already, I have a great deal of trouble with Paul whom I regard as a heretic and a fool. He spent entirely too much time contradicting Peter and the other eye witnesses to Jesus’ teaching. His foolishness derives from his unshakeable conviction that the Second Coming was at hand. The real disciples thought so too but didn’t make such a fetish of it.) Still, this did become the official position of the church. Pope Gregory the Great, a patrician who became a monk in his thirties, wrote that, although sex between married people is not technically sinful, carnal pleasure cannot be blameless under any circumstances.

15. Revelation 14:4. The idea that God would create billions of people destined to suffer eternally in the fires of hell is truly the fantasy of a madman. But this remarkable verse was taken quite literally by John Calvin and other reformers although it is not so much emphasized today. It should be noted that predestination itself is mentioned or implied in many Biblical passages which suggests that this vale of tears is nothing but a futility.

16. De Cultu Feminarum (Concerning the dress of women), Book 1, Chapter 1. This and many other writings of the early Fathers will be found on the remarkable web site: www.ccel.org. Tertullian is regarded as one of the Ante-Nicene Fathers even though he became an apostate late in life. He joined the Montanists, the fundamentalists of the late Second Century and left them to found his own even more rigorous sect.

17. “Fittingly situated between the feces and the urine.” One cannot gainsay Augustine’s importance but his enthusiasm for Plato led him to propound certain extreme and rigid doctrines such as predestination. More importantly, he taught that the domination of flesh over soul would be absolute without the grace of God. Man is naturally sinful and can do nothing to save himself. Woman is the source of much of that sinfulness. This formulation would seem to be at odds with Genesis 1:27 which tells us, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Did God err, or is she as bad as Augustine says her creatures are?

18. “De Custodia Virginitate,” (“The virgin’s profession” also known as Ad Eustochium) Part IV. See: Select Letters of St. Jerome, translated and edited by F.A.Wright, Harvard University Press, 1933, Page 57. Wright translates immaculatum ambiguously as undefiled, implying perhaps free from adultery. But there is perfectly good Latin word for adultery, aduterium. When the church speaks of the Immaculate Conception, it is referring to the belief that Mary herself was conceived without the stain of original sin. Jerome was slightly more liberal than Augustine. Even while he railed against Pelagius, he found it hard to embrace predestination.

19. It should be noted that the Council fathers were more concerned with the possibility that the widows and children of clerical marriages might actually inherit church property.

20. This story is irresistible. Lucrezia was six months pregnant with him when it became politically expedient to have her declared a virgin which was promptly done by a papal scientific panel. She had conceived the little bastard during an interval she was staying in a convent during her divorce from her first husband. It was said that the father was the Pope’s messenger Perotto who was killed before he could deny it. Alexander later issued not one but two papal bulls, one claiming that he himself was the father, the other that the father was his brother Cesare. Some kind souls said this was only a little white lie to make the child legitimate and therefore eligible to become a duke and a cardinal. Which, in the fullness of time, he did. Those of us who are committed to papal infallibility believe Alexander was the real father even if only retroactively. We also believe poor Giovanni could not have been legitimate whoever his father was since his mother was not married at the time.

21. Called mainly to clean up the mess left by the antipope Anacletus II, this council that was exercised by clerical marriage as a sort of sidebar. Canon Six clearly stated that the reason for its opposition was that marriage and sin are evil. “We also decree that those in the orders of subdeacon and above who have taken wives or concubines are to be deprived of their position and ecclesiastical benefice. For since they ought to be in fact and in name temples of God, vessels of the Lord and sanctuaries of the holy Spirit, it is unbecoming that they give themselves up to marriage and impurity.”

22. Matthew 19:12. Garry Wills (Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, Doubleday, 2000, p. 125-127) reads this passage very differently, giving it a much kinder interpretation in arguing that it cannot possibly apply to the ministry. My view may be overly harsh and excessively literal and I would agree that it does not apply only to ministers. But those in the third category are “called [to it] by God” and only they have an option to accept it or not. They can always say no to God I suppose, unlike my castrati who were made eunuchs for God by order of the church. It should be noted that the church did not itself perform castrations. Rather, it extended a loving welcome to those who swore that they had lost their testicles in an accident. Such accidents were arranged by upwardly mobile parents who knew they and their sons would be taken care of by the local bishop. I worry about my interpretation because Professor Wills knows more about the Bible and church history than I do. Still in this instance I think my reading has the virtue of parsimony and should be treated in accordance with Ockham’s Razor.

23. Deuteronomy 23:1.

24. The church also insists that condoms do not protect their users against AIDS, thereby hoping to avoid precisely the criticism leveled here. This, of course, is a lie, deliberate and blatant. It is reminiscent of the tobacco companies saying there is no evidence that smoking causes cancer. Just as the politician promotes the clearcutting of trees and calls it forest fire prevention, it is based on a fundamental dishonesty and total disrespect for the audience at whom it is aimed. As Garry Wills says, Vatican moral theology is based on “structures of deceit.”

25. One secular institution that comes to mind is the United States Air Force Academy where the official policy seems to be that any female cadet who complains of being raped is not suitable material for an Air Force commission. It is at least arguable that this sort of attitude would be less prevalent in a society whose churches believed, preached and practiced the equality of the sexes.

26. Just why this is so must remain speculative. It is tempting to say that it started with the patriarch himself who abused both his first wife Sarah and his concubine Hagar. His grandson Jacob didn’t do much better by either his two wives or their slaves.

27. John 13:34. The members of The Jesus Seminar believe this passage (a) applied only to the apostles, and (b) was not a commandment of Jesus but a later embellishment of his followers. They also think that the commandment to, “love they neighbor as thyself” (Matthew 22:39, et al.) is of questionable attribution. Paul, on the other hand, had no doubt whatsoever about its authenticity (see, Romans 13:9). If the doubters are right, it remains true that Christianity is marked by the gospel of love. To the point that this gospel was the result of an evolutionary literary process, the same commandment will be found in the writings of Hillel, the father of Talmudic Judaism and a contemporary of Jesus. Ref: Funk, Robert W. and Roy W. Hoover, The Five Gospels, Macmillan, 1993.

28. I Corinthians 13:13.

29. Matthew 5:39. See also Luke 6:29. This injunction is part of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is moderating here the old law of an eye for an eye. The Jesus Seminar claims all of this also postdates Jesus.

30. I realize this sounds like I think there is a sentient God who acts in history. I do not. What was really happening in the Old Testament was that the Jews were refining and humanizing the idea of monotheism that they had borrowed from the Babylonians.

31. Joan of Arc is the perfect illustration of the church’s misogyny. Its dealings with her were in every important respect driven by politics not theology. In 1431, French inquisitors convicted her of a variety of crimes and ultimately turned her over to the English to be burned at the stake for what amounted to cross dressing. About twenty years later, it occurred to the French that if she had been a witch and a heretic, then Charles VII whom she had crowned could not be a legitimate king. She was therefore “rehabilitated” by the church in 1457. In the Nineteenth Century, the church-state conflict in France led both sides to claim her as a national hero and an effort was begun by church authorities to have her canonized. After obtaining Queen Victoria’s permission, the Vatican instituted sanctification proceedings but the Congregation of Rites rejected her because they said she was not entitled to be called a maid. In other words, it considered her a whore. The church ultimately overcame this problem in a deal involving the restoration of diplomatic recognition between France and the Vatican. With no objection from the English, it canonized her on May 16, 1920. In case you’re wondering why the church needed Queen Victoria’s permission, you have to understand that, technically, the Inquisition was not authorized to burn people. It therefore turned them over to the secular authorities who, in this case, were the English.

32. There is an ancient belief that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and that they had at least one child, a daughter. This story has been resurrected recently by the author Dan Brown in his best selling novel The DaVinci Code. The church suppressed the Magdalene story in part by making her out to have been a prostitute, a slander that has no support in the Bible. It seems unlikely that such a celebrity marriage could go largely unnoticed for so long. Judging from Jesus’ behavior, it is at least equally tenable that he was gay. However, some respected biblical scholars believe that Mary was in fact the “beloved disciple” described in the Gospel of John and that she was the real author of that gospel. The Gospel of Mary Magdalena is part of the Gnostic library discovered at Nag Hammadi but it casts little light on the question of her relationship with Jesus except that it was obviously a close one.

33. John 8:11.

34. Matthew 5:27. In the same vein, the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” was expanded (5:21-22) to include being angry with one’s brother.

35. Genesis 28:8-10. Contrary to what you may have thought, this was the sin of Onam.

36. Leviticus 20:11.

37. Exodus 22:19. See also, Leviticus 18:23.

38. Leviticus 20:13.

39. Deuteronomy 22:5.

40. That ogling is serious business is evident from what Christ’s words say to Pope John Paul II (The Theology of the Body, p. 338). “Christ did not stress that it is ‘another man’s wife’ or a woman who is not his own wife, but says, generically, woman… Even if [a man] looked in this way at the woman who is his wife, he could likewise commit adultery in his heart.” Only in Christian Wonderland, can a man commit adultery with his wife.

41. Leo Jozef Cardinal Suenens of Belgium was one prelate who knew it and regarded church doctrine on the subject as stupid. Suenens was no lightweight radical. John XXIII had entrusted to him the writing of the agenda for Vatican II, and Paul VI had made him one of its four proctors. He literally begged Paul not to release Humanae Vitae which extended the church’s prohibition of contraception. He also believed that the church was wrong on both the ordination of women and the question of married priests.

42. Genesis 3:16.

43. This is ahistorical bullshit and a blatant lie. All Adam said was, “Now this at last: bone from my bones, flesh from my flesh! This shall be called woman for from man was this taken.” (Genesis 2:23). This. My bones. My flesh. And he was talking to God. There is no record in the canonical Bible that Adam ever said anything to Eve or even about her other than the line just quoted. There is no hint he found her attractive. In fact, as long as they were in Eden, they did not experience sexual attraction. The Pope here is worse than Bill Clinton in thinking he could get away with perverting the truth. Why did he try? Well, according to Garry Wills (see Note 21), the Vatican has erected “structures of deceit” to protect the eternal validity of each and every one of its doctrines. It should be noted that there are two non-canonical Books of Adam and Eve and even in these Adam has little to say to Eve that is not an admonishment of one sort or another.

44. On March 16, 2002 a Vatican congregation led by Jorge A Cardinal Medina Estévez sent a lengthy Recognitio to the group that drafted up a common text of the Roman Missal for the English speaking world. It raised a host of issues, many of them objecting to “inclusive” language. It did not want to substitute mankind for man in translating the Latin homo. It objected strongly to referring to the church as it instead of as “our mother and Christ’s bride.”

45. II Corinthians 11:2-3. In fairness, Paul characterizes this fantasy as “foolishness.”

46. In his recent book (Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, Doubleday, 2000, p. 105), Garry Wills explains the logic of this metaphor as follows: “…to signify the mystical marriage of Christ with his church, the priest must play the male bridegroom, representing Christ, while the church is the female bride…[But] the priest also represents the church, the female partner…and therefore, the priest can only be the bridegroom even when he is the bride.” You have to love the kind of double think represented by that therefore. Why must the priest “play” the bridegroom? And if he is the groom, what role does Jesus play? And why does the need to play the bridegroom necessitate playing also the bride (that therefore)? All metaphors limp but this one is truly crippled unless you want to imagine a marriage of hermaphrodites.

47. Ephesians 5:22. At various periods of its history, the church has encouraged a cult of Mary featuring papal proclamations of new titles for her. Several of these have positioned her as the intercessor between Christ and the church using the metaphor “neck of the body.”

48. At the time this was written, His Eminence was Prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, the arbiter of theological orthodoxy. This organization was founded in 1542 as the Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition. Ratzinger later became Pope Benedict XVI.

49. This quotation refers, of course, only to women as priests, not explicitly to altar girls. However, the context of what Father Fessio was saying is that, since females can’t be priests, they can’t be altar servers either and he goes on to bemoan the fact that most American parishes are in direct defiance of the Holy Father on the altar girl issue. Fessio may be the most conservative Jesuit working in the vineyards of the Lord today, and most of his colleagues probably think he’s bonkers. If so, he is heir to the niche of Leonard Feeney, SJ, another warrior priest who was willing to be excommunicated for his belief that there is no salvation outside the church. Fessio publishes widely and his work appears, perhaps without his approval, on an obscure apocryphal website called, The End Days: Catholic Prophecy on the Coming Chastisement and Personal Salvation. Among other things, the site’s authors believe that modern history is a Communist conspiracy financed by the Rothschild family and its shock troops, the freemasons. It is not clear what is meant by the Coming Chastisement which is said to be either World War III or a great comet, the so-called Ball of Redemption which Jesus prophesied on June 18, 1986. The Virgin Mary had a different take on it in her prophecy of November 20, 1978. "666 is Lucifer [and his army], with five powerful demons plus Lucifer is six; and the six days of terrible suffering from the Chastisement; and the six that will be punished—Lucifer and his hordes, his ogres, for their terrible atrocities upon mankind."

The three theologians Fessio cites in support of his pathetic idea that there is an absolute prohibition of women serving at the altar are considerably more competent scholars than he. Perhaps one or more of them really did think what he claims, but it is hard to imagine three less likely people engaging in trivial pursuits. All three were traditionalists, associated with the post-war French Jesuit réssourcement movement but they lived on a much loftier plane. Henri Cardinal Lubac, SJ was actually a liberal who actively supported Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ when that remarkable paleontologist and mystic was silenced for the last 35 years of his life. Lubac was also a mentor to the young Father Fessio. Charles Bouyer, an Oratorian priest, was an arch conservative who usually found himself in opposition to Lubac. The Swiss theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar is an ex-Jesuit who specializes in the nature of grace and who was a reliable supporter of Lubac. Fessio wrote his doctoral dissertaion on Balthasar under the direction of Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

50. See: Goodstein, Laurie, “A Vatican Lawyer Says Bishops Should Not Reveal Abuse Claims,” The New York Times, May 18, 2002, p. A1

51. Matthew 24:35.

52. It has been estimated that the Church in America has about $790 million assets, almost all of it in real estate. This probably does not include such assets as universities and hospitals almost all of which are controlled by independent boards. It is also not clear what part of the remaining assets might be available to settle law suits. The Archdiocese of Portland, Oregon filed for protection under the federal bankruptcy law in July, 2004. It maintains that it itself does not own any parish assets under canon law but that such assets are owned by individual parishes. On the face of it, this seems to be an absurdity and the petition does not spell out the relevance of canon law to a federal legal proceeding. Given that dioceses open, close and consolidate parishes all the time with or without the consent of parishioners, clergy or board members suggests that Anglo Saxon common law will have no trouble identifying the owner of Our Lady of Perpetual Health’s assets.

53. The Vatican’s PR operation has treated the whole pedophilia affair as if it were an American anomaly in a desperate effort to protect the rest of the family. Of course this is pure fantasy. There are similar scandals all over Europe, including England, Ireland, Poland, Austria and France. In Africa, priests have had to abandon their prostitutes because of the AIDS epidemic. For several years, they have been taking their sex with nuns.

54. Luke 15:7. Buckley’s position was explicated in a letter to the Editor of The New York Times published June 11, 2002, p. A28. It is classic Buckley. Citing the divine joy over a single penitent, he refutes Wills’ argument and ends, “God, meet Garry Wills.”

55. Luke 15: 24 and 31.

56. Indeed, this is the favorite excuse of Cardinal Ratzinger and other ostriches among the hierarchy. It is technically true but is misleading in that it ignores an important aspect of the horror, the fact that priests are in positions of power and trust. Moreover, it is not such a small minority. The Attorney General of Massachusetts conducted a comprehensive review of church records and concluded that at least 789 children had been abused by at least 237 priests between 1940 and 2000 (The New York Times, 7/24/03, p.1). The Times (1/12/03, p. 1) had previously tried to document all allegations of abuse in the U.S. and found 1,205 accused priests and 4,268 alleged victims. It calculated that the incidence of pedophilia among priests is about 1.8%. Assuming that two-thirds of cases go unreported, these figures would imply 3,615 abusers, 12,805 victims and a rate of 5.4%. The truth is likely to fall between these two estimates. [After this paper was written, the American church published statistics prepared for it by researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. They were able to document 10,667 victims of 4,392 priests between 1950 and 2002. On the assumption, again, that two-thirds of cases go unreported, that would imply more than 32,000 crimes committed by 13,189 priests. This would be an incidence of 16.2%.]

57. “Degenerate” is a term of anger more that a scientifically accurate diagnostic characteristic. The sexual abuse of pre-pubescent children is widespread but there is a distinction to be made between true pedophiles and opportunistic offenders. Epidemiological data are notoriously unreliable, especially with respect to opportunistic crimes which are less likely to be reported. Data regarding true pedophilia (defined in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 1987 as, “recurrent, intense sexual urges and sexually arousing fantasies of at least six months’ duration, involving sexual activity with a pre-pubescent child") suggest that, among pedophiles, heterosexuals outnumber homosexuals by about 2 to 1. This suggests that the incidence is higher among gays who constitute considerably less than 1/3 of the population. However, it must be borne in mind that homosexual offenders are probably more vulnerable to detection and exposure simply because many people consider them deviant in the first place. This is a common problem for crimes committed by all minorities.

58. An interpretive report prepared by an appointed panel of lay people at the time the John Jay study was done claimed that a large majority of the reported incidents, rising to 86% during the 1980’s, were homosexual in character. This, however, does not mean that 86% of the perpetrators were gay. As the Jay researchers pointed out, priests have more access to adolescent boys than girls and, like prison inmates, they take their sex where they find it.

59. Celibacy also attracts women who are sexually warped although perhaps not in the same numbers. What are we to make of the abuse of orphans and other children by both the Christian Brothers and the Sisters of Mercy in Ireland. These victims suffered unspeakable violations in conditions that can only be defined as slavery. Nor were such crimes confined to Ireland. Similar stories have come out of Nazareth House in Brisbane, Australia, the Boston School for the Deaf in Massachusetts and, most infamously, the Hospital de la Miscericorde in Montreal. There virtually all the boys were christened Joseph and the girls Marie. They—there were at least 3,000 of them—were fraudulently declared mentally ill and used not only for sexual gratification but also as guinea pigs in medical experiments involving the use of chlorpromazine, the so-called “chemical lobotomy” drug. His Eminence Jean-Claude Cardinal Turcotte, the Archbishop of Montreal, has declared that these abuses were not systematic.

60. In an op-ed piece he wrote for The New York Times (March 3, 2004), Father Andrew Greeley argued that celibacy, far from causing pedophilia, is something priests say is not a problem at all. The basic problem he says is priestly incompetence which is fostered by, “…an envy-ridden, rigid and mediocre clerical culture.” Well yes, that too. But it is hard to see how incompetence causes pedophilia. As much as priests might cherish celibacy, it is by no stretch of the imagination the sexual norm. Sadly, Greeley falls back on Ratzinger’s defense that the sinners are a tiny minority (4%). But see Note 57 above.

61. In his encyclical Sacerdotalis Ordinatio (1994), this is what he said: “…in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance…I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women, and this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.” No authority? What about Matthew 16:19? “And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Whatsoever seems broad enough to cover almost anything the church wants to do. Whatever. A definitive judgment is not an infallible pronouncement unless it regards a matter of faith and morals.

62. In the United States, for example, there is an organization called Women for Faith and Family which is active in supporting the traditional Vatican view of Catholic life. It’s 1984 Affirmation says, “…we recognize that the specific role of ordained priesthood is intrinsically connected with and representative of the begetting creativity of God in which only human males can participate. Human females, who by nature share in the creativity of God by their capacity to bring forth new life, and, reflective of this essential distinction, have a different and distinct role within the Church and in society from that accorded to men, can no more be priests than men can be mothers.” As usual, the logic of repression is fatuous. Men cannot be mothers because they lack the necessary anatomy. Women cannot be priests because the church has changed its original rule. You simply cannot say in one sentence that only human males can participate in the begetting creativity of God and, in the next, that females share in the creativity of God by their capacity to bring forth new life.

LOUIS AIELLO—A LIFE IN ART
How Is It That Even An Exceptional Artist Can Remain Unknown?
Jerry Harkins

In the spring of 2004, my friend and former father-in-law, Louis Aiello, died at the age of 92. Lou was an outstanding artist who had produced hundreds of paintings and sculptures, primarily abstract. In the nearly forty years I knew him, he and his work remained almost completely unknown even though he showed and sold it regularly, occasionally in major New York galleries. It may be that anonymity was what he wanted but I always wondered why the world failed to make a beaten path to his door. Eventually, I came to realize that Ralph Waldo Emerson was wrong. It is never enough to build a better mousetrap, especially if you live far off the beaten path. You need also grit, determination, good marketing and a little bit of luck.

Lou had been one of the young people who had congregated in New York in the 1930’s to advance the frontiers of modern art. It was an exciting time, a time of intense theoretical discussion and passionate experimentation. These were the artists who sowed the seeds of what would become the New York School after World War II. Many of them would go on to have distinguished careers in painting and some two dozen of them would ultimately become canonical. They knew each other; they constituted a real community devoted to developing a new art that would go beyond the cubism and surrealism they had inherited. They felt, among other things, that art had to respond to the insights of Freud and Jung and to the radical weirdness being taught by Einstein, Heisenberg, and the other physicists. The overriding idea was to develop a new language in order to depict their own emotional lives. For some of the Americans among them, there was a parochial subtext. They set out to create a specifically American idiom, redeeming Emerson’s hundred year old assertion that, “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.”

Lou Aiello was one of the youngest members of this community. He was still learning to draw from life at the Art Students League and to sculpt as a student of the cubist William Zorach. Like many of his older friends, he did not break finally from representation until later in his career. But he absorbed the revolution that surrounded him in all the arts as practiced in Greenwich Village and Provincetown. His career followed a trajectory that closely paralleled those of many of the first generation: a solid foundation in the basics, a faltering, hesitant break with tradition and a sudden emergence of the abstraction he had been working toward for years. Like others of this school, he was prolific both in completed work and in pieces rejected at various stages.

Eighty odd years later, his obscurity is, in part, the result of choices he made. In part also it is due to the enduring conceit of critics and curators that nothing important happens outside their ken. Of course, for much of history, anonymity was the default condition for painters, sculptors and other artists—think of the stone masons who decorated the Gothic cathedrals or the monks who copied and illuminated the sacred texts. During the Renaissance, artists became more prominent but it was still the fate of most painters and sculptors (and writers, poets, and musicians) to remain unknown outside a small circle of friends, patrons and acquaintances. Before the great museums were formed in the Nineteenth Century, the audience for most artists could be numbered in the hundreds. Even when their works were exposed to public view, their names were not. It is instructive that we know almost nothing about someone as important as Giotto. Artists might sign their work as a nod to posterity but Leonardo never did and Michelangelo signed only the Pietà, and that only after the young sculptor overheard it being attributed to someone else. The otherwise flamboyant Caravaggio signed only his masterpiece, The Beheading of Saint John.

Some artists did strive for recognition and acclaim only to be disappointed. Some were entirely innocent of any ambition other than food and shelter. Whole classes of artists—women and people of color—were routinely ignored. Others actually courted or at least accepted anonymity. A few of the unknowns, Vermeer and Van Gogh for example, did become posthumously prominent.

Examples could be multiplied and explanations sought but the conclusion must be that even genius does not always out. It may be hard to believe that there is or was an unrecognized Beethoven or Shakespeare but it is certain that a great deal of human talent has been born to “waste its sweetness on the desert air.” As Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” The question is not so much why talent goes unrecognized. There are many reasons all of them obvious enough. Rather we need to understand how the work of some comes to public attention and how fewer still manage to achieve a degree of broader recognition and even celebrity. Talent is a given. A lack of talent may be no barrier to temporary notoriety in a celebrity obsessed culture, and fashions are fickle but enduring fame is rooted in extraordinary artistry. Such talent is not uncommon but, by itself, it is not sufficient. My friend Lou had talent to spare. But there are at least four other conditions that need to be met if an artist wants to become prominent, and, to one degree or another Lou did not meet any of them.

First, you need to be driven. Art is not a casual undertaking. Creativity is difficult to evoke and nearly impossible to sustain. The next idea is often more difficult than the last one. What the artist wants to express is elusive and this can make execution more frustrating than rewarding. The whole process requires courage and persistence. The art must come first even, if necessary, before putting food on the table. Lou had different priorities. He often said, “You do not live to work but work to live.”

Second, as they say on Wall Street, “You gotta be there.” If you want to be hit by lightening, you are well advised to place yourself in the middle of a golf course during a thunder storm. In the case of the abstractionists, “there” was New York in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s. The city was home to the important museums, galleries, connoisseurs, collectors, critics and, most importantly, other emerging abstractionists. New York was the world capital of art and virtually all the first generation abstractionists were there. Lou abandoned the city just at the moment modernism was entering the mainstream. Others—Pollock and de Kooning among them—moved out physically but never spiritually. Lou rarely returned. He was like Thoreau. He traveled widely in rural Killingworth, Connecticut, the small town to which he had decamped with his wife and four children.

Third you must be PR-friendly. You need to be a story and to sell yourself and your work to people some of whom you do not like or respect and most of whom have no idea what it feels like to translate an idea into paint on canvas. Many artists venturing out of the studio become strangers in a strange land. Some thrive on self-promotion and even sensationalism. Others, like Lou, are too private, too reticent, too independent and sometimes too arrogant to subject themselves to the marketplace.

Finally, there is the price of even modest fame. In addition to suffering fools gladly, the artist must constantly make the transition from a deeply private pursuit to a life in which there is no privacy and little security. Dealing with a judgmental world is not easy for anyone in the public arena. The artist is especially vulnerable to the fear of failure because art requires exposing one’s innermost self. It is not surprising that people tend to think of artists as psychologically fragile. Among the first generation, depression and its variants were endemic and it got worse as they became better known and more accepted. Lou enjoyed a reputation as an eccentric but usually seemed too busy to be depressed. Then there is the element of luck but luck is nothing more than the remorseless working of probability which is indifferent to everything but itself. There is little of substance to distinguish between, say, pop art and comic books except that the former hangs on museum walls and the latter is displayed on newsstands. The difference in their reception is rooted in the complex interactions of many known and unknowable variables.

Lou was different. For one thing, he created very little art after he left New York until he established a modicum of economic stability in the mid-50’s. Until then, I suspect he might have said he was an artist meaning he had certain talents and skills with which he might earn a living. During the Depression, he had carved memorial busts for gravesites. During the war he had a job making molds for aircraft components and he and his wife designed fine jewelry and tchotchkes. As a master mold maker, he was able to design and produce rubber hands for store mannequins as his principal source of income for thirty years. All these involved his artistic skills but were not art. His notebooks suggest he never lost interest in art but little was produced between 1940 and 1955.

Neither his artist friends nor the dominant theoreticians of the abstract movement shared his utilitarianism. The critic Clement Greenberg wrote, “…artists can, and have, and do, work in disregard more or less of all the larger events and circumstances and conditions of their time. In many cases they can, and have, and do, proceed in disregard of personal circumstances.” This is the conventional stereotype of the artist as monomaniac. Lou’s great teacher, the sculptor William Zorach, had an even loftier view that nonetheless amounted to much the same thing. He wrote, “Art is the expression of mankind, a universal and cosmic expression of the soul of man, an expression of the realness of the universe and life. Art is the soul of man, ever striving, ever straining toward some fulfillment, some consciousness of itself and life.” This is the artist as high priest. Abstract Expressionism was, at its core, a self-consciously intellectual movement. Lou was an intellectual but of a different sort. As a teenager, he had been attracted to both the idealism of Alfred North Whitehead and the empiricism of William James. Like Gertrude Stein, another of his intellectual mentors, he saw no contradiction between them and he could be comfortable even with James’ operational mysticism. To him, art was not a grand pilgrimage. It was a natural and essential part of life but no more esoteric than other aspects of the examined life. For many years, it was a job, a way to make one’s way in the world. (Willem de Kooning believed much the same thing, adding only that the pay was lousy.) When he did return to it, he pursued it the same way he pursued everything else.

The late social activist, John W. Gardner, spoke about the equal importance to society of excellence in plumbing and philosophy. Lou lived that idea. He sought perfection in everything even while he knew that a man’s reach exceeds (and should exceed) his grasp. Whether making spaghetti sauce or building a stone studio, his commitment never changed. He ground many of his own pigments and spent years developing a translucent cobalt blue in a shade as deep as ultramarine. He worked hard to create an intense cadmium yellow, which ultimately he used only to add color to epoxy resins. At one point, he built the ideal bomb shelter for a family of seven. The rubber hands he cast were elegant and so was his process for making them. Over the years, he mastered the chemistry of latex, the porosity of plaster, and the calculus of expansion and contraction at different temperatures.

To me, Lou was a sweet and gentle soul. I was not unaware, however, that he was by no means a saint. As husband and father, he could be self-absorbed and sometimes quite remote from the lives of people around him. He had a well cultivated sense of the absurd and an acerbic wit that sometimes seemed excessively cynical. Still, if anyone had asked him, I think he would have laid claim to a happy life and his family and friends were happy to know him. Part of this was the fact that everyone who encountered his work liked it and respected him. So in a sense it is not important that fame and acclaim eluded him. He might have welcomed a wider audience if only the costs had not seemed so high. Periodically, he would travel to Manhattan to see what was in the museums and galleries. Invariably he liked what he saw and knew whereof he spoke. For a working artist, he was a pretty good art historian. Once, at a Guggenheim show of minimalists, he explained how the Russian non-objectivist, Olga Rozanova, was the “mother of us all.” At the end of these trips, he might be melancholic but nonetheless convinced that he had made the right decision. He seemed to be reminding himself that the brass ring of celebrity was, in fact, made of brass.

Does the obscurity of a single artist mean anything? Probably not a great deal. But the certainty that obscurity is the natural condition of artists speaks to the supply and demand for art and thus illuminates our value system. College and professional sports teams field thousands of scouts who search the remotest hamlets for promising talent. Corporations sponsor science fairs for similar reasons, and there is an entire industry devoted to discovering the next generation of fashion models. But in America at least it is hard for painters and sculptors to have their work shown, for poets to be published, for musicians to be heard. It seems unfair and wasteful.

Even with an audience, an artist can remain obscure. A case in point is Frederick Hart, unquestionably a genius and the finest figurative sculptor of the last half of the Twentieth Century. He made a very good living as an artist and his work is placed in prominent, prestigious places where it is seen by millions. Yet he was virtually unknown until he became embroiled in the controversy surrounding the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. He had won the commission to “add” a figurative element to Maya Lin’s stark minimalism. Before a compromise was reached, the rhetoric on both sides soared. Ms. Lin accused Hart of “drawing mustaches on other people’s portraits.” And the veterans who were opposing Lin’s design, in what may be one of history’s worst artistic judgments, claimed the names on a long black wall drained the war of all emotion. After his death, Hart became once again an obscure artist, largely ignored by critics, curators and the art media. He still has supporters and opponents but their disagreements are not about his art but about the alleged conflict between abstract and representational sensibilities, an esoteric and bootless war of words. Hart himself remains what Tom Wolfe called him, The Invisible Artist.

And then there is the Piccirilli family. Giuseppe, a sculptor and stone mason, and his family immigrated to the Bronx from Carrara, Italy in the 1880’s. He set up a studio which quickly became the largest such business in America. By 1910, it was being run by Attilio and his five brothers. They were master carvers to the most important American sculptors of the era. They carved Daniel Chester French’s Seated Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial, George Grey Barnard’s pediments and Edward Clark Potter’s lions for the New York Public Library, and John Quincy Adams Ward’s pediment of the New York Stock Exchange. Several of the brothers, most notably Attilio, were important sculptors in their own right. Attilio did the Maine Monument on Columbus Circle, the Firemen’s Memorial on Riverside Drive and the Marconi Memorial in Washington, D.C. They were as well known as all but the most famous artists of their time and were part of a circle of friends that included Fiorello LaGuardia and Enrico Caruso. Various of the brothers still have works in major museums and private collections. During their lives, they were well known within the world of working artists but then as now they were unknown to everyone else. Even the family grave is marked by Atillio’s marvelous Fortitude but is otherwise unmarked with so much as a name. The paths of glory…

Even the most celebrated artists are not household names. There are no living artists as widely known as, say, Paris Hilton. Possibly the only artist in all history in the same league as Ms. Hilton was Andy Warhol who knew a thing or two about the vicissitudes of fame. Among the twelve men who constituted the Famous Artists School, the only familiar name is that of Norman Rockwell. Yet, to be invited to participate, an artist had to have an annual income of at least $50,000 in 1948, the equivalent of $436,000 in 2006.

Is our obsession with celebrity a symptom of cultural decline? Not at all. Celebrity happens because, as a society, we need both fifteen minute mass obsessions and enduring paragons of our values, both the Paris Hiltons and the Abraham Lincolns. Both help define us as a community by giving us a common history. Only rarely does it happen to someone who does not court it. The suitor must then encounter the star-making industries that are indispensable to both momentary and lasting fame. In fact, it is rare for the simple reason that if it were commonplace it would not work for either the celebrity or the society. We do our best to make celebrities in smaller and smaller ponds: celebrity journalists, celebrity cosmetic surgeons, celebrity hair stylists and, of course, the celebrity artists who are important to those who care about art. For every Andy Warhol, though, there may be a hundred Frederick Harts, a thousand Attilio Piccirillis and an unknowable number of Lou Aiellos. An artist falls into one of these categories not because of his or her value as an artist but for his or her value as a celebrity. It matters little as long as we bear in mind that achievement is no guarantee of celebrity and that it is the former that ultimately defines and writes the history of culture. A tree that falls in a forest where there is no one to hear it nonetheless makes a noise and troubles the universe. Ars longa, indeed, and vita brevis.

RETHINKING MOSES SMITH

Jerry Harkins



Don’t you just hate it when somebody reads something you wrote and says, “Yes, but are you aware of [something any idiot should have been aware of]?" I once wrote a term paper about Alexander Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard without knowing that they had been real, not to say famous, lovers. Fortunately, the professor was so upset that any student of his could think Pope ever wrote anything but doggerel that he didn’t realize that said student literally didn’t know what he was talking about.

Some years after I wrote “Assassination by Niggling: The Curious Case of Moses Smith vs. Serge Koussevitzky,” I came across “The Koussevitzky Case,” by the brilliant American composer and critic Virgil Thomson. [1] It is embarrassing to report that Thomson’s take on Smith’s biography of Koussevitzky is pretty much the dead opposite of my own. Given our respective credentials, readers will be forgiven for preferring his version.

And yet.

I knew, of course, that everyone who had known him liked Moses Smith and respected his work. Indeed, the point of my essay was to wonder how such a person could write such a nasty book. “By any reasonable standard,” I wrote, “the book is a hatchet job, an early example of a now familiar genre, the attack biography.” Like Thomson, I believe Koussevitzky was one of the great musicians of the twentieth century, and that he was ill-advised to file a bootless lawsuit against Smith. Unlike Thomson, however, I do not agree that Smith’s “niggles” were common knowledge (and by implication, true). Nor do I agree that, “Mr. Smith’s book makes Koussevitzky out to be a very great man indeed, but also makes him human.” Koussevitzky thought and I think he comes off looking like an ogre and a charlatan whose musical talent is very limited. Well, I’ve made that case elsewhere and see no reason to change my mind now.

But why did such a knowledgeable person as Virgil Thomson think Smith’s book was the fair, objective and positive (!) product of a scholarly mind? What am I missing? Or could it be that Thomson was simply defending a kindred spirit? Like Smith, he often damned his targets with faint praise. Consider this discussion of Porgy and Bess:

“Porgy is none the less an interesting example of what can be done by talent in spite of a bad set-up. With a libretto that should never have been accepted on a subject that should never have been chosen, a man who should never have attempted it has written a work that has some power and importance.” [2]

Indeed. Thomson was well known for using his column in the New York Herald Tribune to settle scores with those he thought had somehow “dissed” him. The website virgilthomson.org admits, “He was a bull in a China shop, not geared for making friends. He deflated Toscanini and Jascha Heifetz ("silk-underwear music").” It goes on to report on his problem with Gershwin:

“The Gershwin problem was more obvious. His natural genius was undeniable, he exuberantly and effortlessly exuded music like Schubert. But he had no formal training… and his music lacked structure and form, was not professional. Gershwin's Piano Concerto (1926) was a loose cannon next to Aaron Copland's (1927)…yet the Gershwin composition had the audacity to become an American classic, appreciated by millions, while the Copland, fine as it is, a period piece.”

To the extent this is accurate, it is a perfect example of the priestly rhetoric of music critics. Natural genius simply cannot compete with the holy writ of the standard music curriculum. With a few minor changes, Moses Smith could have written the same thing about Koussevitzky. In fact, he did write that Koussevitzky’s "...lack of a solid foundation cannot be concealed beneath the most ingenious patchwork of talents and random training." [3] Critics generally believe that their discipline is somehow intellectually if not morally superior to its subject. Nicolas Slonimsky, a conductor and critic in his own right (and incidentally one of Smith’s anonymous sources) compiled an extensive history of critical abuse. [4] Thomson was not the only critic who loathed George Gershwin. Here is Lawrence Gilman of the New York Times on Rhapsody in Blue: “trite…feeble…sentimental and vapid…fussy and futile. Weep over the lifelessness of the melody and harmony so derivative, so stale, so inexpressive!” On Porgy and Bess, he found the songs “sure-fire rubbish.” His colleague Herbert Peyser of the Telegram wrote that American in Paris “…is nauseous claptrap, so dull, patchy, thin, vulgar, long-winded and inane…” Oscar Thompson of the Evening Post called it “musical buffoonery…blunt banality…ballyhoo vulgarity.” Elsewhere I have proposed a law requiring a five-day waiting period before a critic can purchase a thesaurus.

So there remains the possibility that Thomson was wrong (and wrongheaded) and I am right. (By the way, I was surely right about Eloisa to Abelard. It is a great poem even if Pope didn’t make the story up. And Pope was right in his Essay on Criticism when he wrote about critics, “For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.”)

Notes

1. Reprinted in Richard Kostelanetz (ed.), Virgil Thomson: A Reader, Routledge, 2002, pp. 132-135.

2. Anthony Tommasini, Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle, W.W. Norton, 11997, p. 302.

3. Moses Smith, Koussevitzky, Allen, Towne & Heath, 1947, p. 35.

4. Lexicon of Musical Invective, University of Washington Press, 1963.

ASSASSINATION BY NIGGLING
The Curious Case of Moses Smith vs. Serge Koussevitzky

Jerry Harkins [1]



Anyone familiar with the life of Serge Alexandrovich Koussevitzky (1874-1951) knows two big things. First, although now largely forgotten, he was probably the most broadly influential classical musician of the Twentieth Century and the godfather of many seminal works of modern music. Second, more than fifty years after his death he still lacks a serious biography. Three attempts were made during his lifetime. Two are frankly hagiographic.[2, 3] The third is a vicious attack on his competence and integrity by the critic Moses Smith.[4]

The story of the Smith opus and the lawsuit it sparked [5] have been well documented elsewhere. By any reasonable standard, the book is a hatchet job, an early example of a now familiar genre, the attack biography. When the court ruled that its “…many depreciatory statements [are] invariably followed by ameliorative observations of unreserved praise,” it displayed not only a penchant for circumlocution but also an appalling insensitivity to rhetoric. It seemed to miss Smith’s subtle sarcasm and his skill at damning with faint praise. He employs innuendo, indirection and “niggling” or nitpicking [6] to paint a portrait that is both personally and professionally venomous. A few examples will illustrate these practices:

- On Page 35, Smith says that, as a student, Koussevitzky “…made rapid progress in the art of conducting, and his mastery grew steadily through the years.” However, “…the lack of a solid foundation cannot be concealed beneath the most ingenious patchwork of talents and random training.” The missing foundation included musical theory and composition. The idea that the Moscow Philharmonic Conservatory provided something that might be called “random training” is nonsense. Worse, on Page 13, Smith had already questioned whether Koussevitzky had been awarded the diploma of a Free Artist.

- On Pages 343 and 344, Smith characterizes the Boston Symphony under Koussevitzky as having “…superlative tone, often too beautiful, too intensely expressive at times that require simplicity.” Moreover, “…at the slightest suggestion of lyricism, [its] rhythm is likely to fall apart.”

- Throughout his career, Koussevitzky was widely regarded as the definitive interpreter of the Russian masters, especially Tchaikovsky.  Smith, however, has a very different view.  “The music degenerates into a nonsensical series of animal-like spasms.” Then, in practically the same breath, he refers to Koussevitzky as, “…one of the great conductors of our time. His interpretations have such varied qualities as poetry, sweep, originality and enkindling imagination.” However, when he arrived in Boston, “…he lacked the resourcefulness and technical agility without which no conductor in a third-rate Continental opera house could hope to hold his job. He does not quite have them today when he is past 70.” After thirty-five years of conducting, “…his beats and cues are often deceptive.”

This goes on and on: Koussevitzky was 17, when he left home, not 14 as he often claimed. His memory for scores was terrible. He was a poor accompanist and an inadequate musician.  Then, “Such reservations, however, are perhaps niggling in light of Koussevitzky’s positive achievement…[that] has set him in a class by himself.” It is little wonder that Koussevitzky felt put upon. In his suit, he complained that the book, “…describes me as generally incompetent as a conductor of orchestras, brutal to the musicians in my orchestra, incompetent as an instructor of conducting, and a poseur, deficient in musical education and training.” It did indeed even if it was not libelous.

Libel or not, Koussevitzky is, by default, the most important classical musician of the twentieth century. Thus the question: who was Moses Smith? Why did he dislike Koussevitzky? And, irresistibly, who were his sources?

Smith seems to have been born in Chelsea, Massachusetts on March 4, 1901, one of the five children of Fred and Rebecca Haifetz. There is no record of his birth and no record of a name change but he was Moses Smith by the time he entered Harvard with the class of 1921. The lack of documentation is not uncommon for the time and place. It is consistent, indeed, with other evidence hinting at a poor but hard working Jewish family seeking to cope with discrimination and better its lot. In any event, he graduated with an A.B. in music and subsequently spent two years at Harvard Law School. In time, he married Ethel Singer Robinson and they had two daughters. He became a wholesale shoe salesman and supplemented his income by writing freelance music reviews for the Boston American. In 1934, he succeeded the well known critic HTP (Henry T. Parker) at the prestigious Boston Evening Transcript where his reviews of Koussevitzky’s concerts were generally favorable. He left Boston in 1939 to take a position in New York as Music Director of Columbia Phonograph Company a year after it had been acquired by William S. Paley for CBS. In that capacity, he tried unsuccessfully to recruit Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony away from archrival RCA Victor. In 1942, he became general manager of the Music Press. By that time, he had become afflicted with multiple sclerosis. He retired before the end of the war and devoted himself to completing Koussevitzky and writing a handful of freelance articles. He died in Roxbury, Massachusetts on July 27, 1964, the day after what would have been Koussevitzky’s ninetieth birthday.

Thirty-one years after his death, I placed an Author’s Query about Smith in The New York Times Book Review and received replies from six people who had known and worked with him after 1939. All spoke highly of him, using such descriptors as kindly, scholarly, courageous, compassionate, erudite and delightful. Together their letters make a persuasive case even if his book is deficient in all these traits. The inescapable conclusion is that we are dealing with a work that is out-of-character, a “pen breathing revenge” wielded by a sorely aggrieved human being. Koussevitzky had no doubt deeply offended him, something he was eminently capable of doing.

In his acknowledgments, Smith tells us that most of his sources “…must remain anonymous for obvious reasons.” However, it is not difficult to draw up a short list of suspects. We are looking for at least two people [7] who had access to information and a reason for disparaging Koussevitzky. Moreover, as late as 1947, they seem to have had some reason to fear exposure. The prime suspects I believe are Nicholas Slonimsky and Fabien Sevitzky.

Slonimsky, a man who gave new meaning to the word “polymath,” left what amounts to a confession, albeit an unsatisfying one. “To my horror, Smith intended to use some rather juicy tales about Koussevitzky that could have come only from me. Yes, the facts were there, but I told Smith that he would betray our friendship by reporting them.” Smith replied, “Nicolas, you cannot censor history.” [8] Unfortunately, he does not tell us which tales were his. He only regales us with the one story he was most worried about, the only one he persuaded Smith to withdraw. He fails to tell us why he was so worried about that particular morsel and it is not clear why he still feared Koussevitzky.

The complex relationship between Koussevitzky and Slonimsky is beyond the scope of this essay but it lasted little more than five years from late 1921 to the spring of 1927. Thus, anything said by Slonimsky about Koussevitzky’s life before or after that would have been hearsay filtered through two decades of memory and animus. [9] This might not have deterred Slonimsky who loved gossip and was a world class raconteur, but I suspect that Smith would have drawn the line at repeating it whole cloth. For the more intimate “niggles,” he probably relied on someone closer to the family either Sevitzky or his wife, the Polish soprano Maria Dormont Sevitzky.

Fabien Sevitzky was by no means the lout described by Slonimsky [10] and Maria was no shrew. Both were accomplished musicians, well thought of in their communities. Both had distinguished students. Both, too, were closer to their modest roots than Koussevitzky who had wholeheartedly adopted the manners and mores of his aristocratic in-laws. Over the years, the relationship between uncle and nephew deteriorated until, ultimately, the latter unsuccessfully went to court to challenge the former’s will.

The Sevitzkys arrived in the United States the year before Serge and Natalie, and Fabien seems to have come with a burden of family bitterness far heavier than the usual cause ascribed to it. Serge’s insistence, in 1908 or thereabout, that Fabien shorten his last name may have been inconvenient but it was not entirely unreasonable. Fabien’s father (Adolf I think), seems to have resented Serge’s departure and later success and probably was the original source of the bad-mouthing that was repeated to Smith. Many of the stories are the kind of family mythology that all biographers are familiar with: real grievances multiplied over time by misfortune and repetition. Oral histories compiled by Soviet musicologists tend to support Koussevitzky’s versions of disputed matters.

One can easily forgive Slonimsky who no doubt took a lot of guff from the haughty maestro, and one can readily understand the family foibles that might lie at the heart of Sevitzky’s stories. It is more difficult to understand Moses Smith, gentleman and scholar. Whatever the provocations, he must have realized that his sources were tainted and it must have offended his sense of history to pass on distortions and fabrications. Moreover, he added some mudslinging of his own. He is critical of Koussevitzky for “forgetting” his Jewish origins until the rise of Hitler. There is, however, no evidence that Smith himself was any more mindful of his heritage before or after 1933. (In contrast, one of Smith’s brothers served as President of Combined Jewish Philanthropies, a forerunner of the United Jewish Appeal.)

We are left trying to imagine the psychology that shaped Smith’s hostility, a response so strong that it overcame the habits and values of a lifetime, We are left, too, with Koussevitzky who could be charming but did not always choose to be. He seems to have been driven by his own devils not the least of which was a morbid fear of being judged incompetent. When Koussevitzky’s insecurities came together with Smith’s, the result was a book that serves the memory of both poorly.

NOTES

1. Jerry Harkins is a writer living in New York City. This essay was published in a slightly different form in the Journal of the Koussevitzky Recordings Society, Vol. IX, No. 1, Spring 1996.
2. Lourie, Arthur, Serge Koussevitzky and His Epoch (translated from the Russian by S. W. Pring) Knopf, 1931.
3. Leichtentritt, Hugo, Serge Koussevitzky: The Boston Symphony Orchestra and the New American Music, Harvard University Press, 1946.
4. Smith, Moses, Koussevitkzy, Allen, Towne and Heath, 1947.
5. Koussevitzky vs. Allen, Towne and Heath, Inc. et al. 68 N.Y.S.2d779 (March 4, 1947)
6. Smith himself characterizes at least some of his “reservations” as “perhaps niggling” (Smith, op. cit. p. 339).
7. There must have been more than one because there does not seem to have been any single person whose relationship with Koussevitzky extended from his youth through the 1940’s except his third wife, Olga, who left her own unpublished memoirs.
8. Slonimsky, Nicolas, Perfect Pitch: A Life Story, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 106.
9. Slonimsky is not always reliable when it comes to basic facts about Koussevitzky. For example, he says the maestro was buried at Serenak, his Tanglewood estate, and that his suit against Smith netted him one dollar in “moral damages.” He refers to Olga as his second wife. Koussevitzky lost the suit outright and there is no such thing as “moral damages.” He was and remains buried in the graveyard of The Church on the Hill (Congregational) in Lenox, Massachusetts. Olga who was Natalie's niece was Koussevitzky's third wife. It should also be noted that as Editor of Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (8th Edition, Schirmer, 1994), Slonimsky was nothing but laudatory in his entry about Koussevitzky.
10. In an interview with Tom Godell (Journal of the Koussevitzky Recordings Society, I:1, 1987, pp. 6-13), Slonimsky characterizes Sevitzky as the stupidest conductor and “…the greatest damn fool I ever met.” This is simply not credible. Sevitzky built several fine orchestras including that of Indianapolis, and enjoyed a better reputation among his musicians than his uncle.

POOR ANDREW (GREELEY, PATENTLY)
Jerry Harkins

To say that Andrew M. Greeley is a writer would be an act of supreme lèse-majesté. Since 1961, by my count he has published 140 books—about three a year. Fifty-nine of these have been novels and now, nearing 80, he has at least two more in the works. To say he is a Catholic priest is either obvious or blasphemous, maybe both, for reasons I hope to make clear. In his spare time, he teaches sociology at the University of Arizona, conducts research at the University of Chicago, and lectures at the National University of Ireland. He writes a weekly column for the Chicago Sun-Times and contributes regularly to The New York Times, the National Catholic Reporter, America, and Commonweal. Oh, yes, he also preaches.

Let it be said at the outset: he is not a particularly good writer. His prose is often mannered and there is no writer in English more in need of a proofreader. His fictional landscape is limited to one plotline which involves a fair amount of sex, always in the service of love which is his big theme. Of course, there aren’t very many literary themes and boy-meets-girl is far and away the most popular. But Father Greeley reminds me of Saint Paul. You remember Chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians where he provides a gorgeous but idealized description of love. Reading it, I always get the feeling that Paul is a man who has thought about the subject deeply but has had little experience of the real thing. That describes Father Greeley’s take on sex: too much, too obsessive, too perfect, too merely provocative, in short, too long on imagination and too short on human nature and its discontents. (As a confessor, I suspect he knows all too well the difference between what it is and what it should be and chooses to write only about the latter.) He is also a romantic, not necessarily a capital offense but a trait that offends the delicate sensibilities of refined literary critics. Finally, he is a bit of a mystic. The spirits of those who have gone before have speaking parts in some of his novels and are just offstage in others. His characters regularly encounter poltergeists and, occasionally, even angels. In his book Ecstasy: A Way of Knowing (Prentice-Hall, 1974) he describes what some psychologists call peak experiences that reveal a kind of sudden awareness and a pleasure beyond pleasure. In several of his novels, the central character comes face to face with a guardian angel and experiences an inexplicable but powerful force that connects him ecstatically to the life-giving energy of the universe. In Patience of a Saint (1987), there is a description which gives a good idea of what the author is thinking about. The principal character is standing on a Chicago street corner. He hears a “whooshing” sound:

Then time stood still, the whole of eternity filling a single second and a single second filling the whole of eternity…With [it] there came a love so enormous that his own puny identity was submerged in it…It filled him with heat and light, fire that tore at his existence and seemed about to destroy him with pleasure and joy.

Still another book in this series is Contract with an Angel (1998). The protagonist ultimately dies and goes to heaven where he has a conversation with God, certainly not the God of Job (“Who has a claim against me that I must pay? Everything under heaven belongs to me,”) but more like that played by George Burns in the film Oh, God. Greeley’s God explains, “I create because I love stories, especially love stories. Like all romantics I delight in happy endings.” God, it seems, is not unlike Andrew Greeley.

This is the thinnest of literary ice. Moreover, it simply does not sound like it comes from the same pen that produced a 1962 doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago entitled, “The Influence of Religion on the Career Plans and Occupational Values of June 1961 College Graduates.” A fair amount of Greeley does not sound like Greeley. Except for the sex scenes which are more or less interchangeable. Including the angelic sex scenes.

Having said all that, if the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for work done “in an ideal direction” and bestowing “the greatest benefit on mankind” as it was supposed to, Greeley would surely have won it years ago. But it does not. Embarrassed by its anointing the likes of Pearl S. Buck and Sinclair Lewis in the 1930’s, it explicitly excluded popular (which is to say accessible) literature after World War II. Thus, there is no chance that you will see Father Greeley in white tie and tails accepting a medal from King Carl XVI Gustaf any time soon. Not to worry. As a non-laureate, he joins such worthies as James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Emile Zola, Joseph Conrad, Jorge Luis Borges, D. H. Lawrence, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings and Vladmir Nabokov.

Now the good parts: Greeley is one of the smartest, most humane writers around. He knows pretty much everything worth knowing and a lot of stuff that is not really essential to living the examined life. He is a marvelous storyteller, a worthy pilgrim in the long line of Irish saints, scholars and seanchais. Naturally, he has a point to make as do all storytellers: he thinks that God’s love is, to use a word that comes up frequently, implacable and that passionate sex is a metaphor for that love.
Is he a heretic? Is he on his way to hell? Well, if you were brought up Catholic in the 1950’s and have never recovered from it, the question need not detain you. Similarly, if you were seduced by the false spring of Vatican II, you can skip to the next question. But if you are a fallen Catholic or some other form of rational Christian and are sick of silly old men making hash out of the gospel of love, these are good questions if only because the answers may apply equally to your own salvation.

Father Greeley is a Pelagian as were all the Irish Saints. As you know, Pelagius (c. 354 - c. 420/440) was an ascetic monk and reformer who denied the doctrine of original sin deduced from the fall of Adam and was several times declared a heretic by the various authorities of the church. He was also acquitted several times but his belief system was certainly contrary to the considered opinion of Saint Augustine of Hippo who held that the default condition of the human race is evil. Exactly how Gus convinced himself of such an absurdity is another story but it was attractive to the hierarchs because it gave them exclusive power over the question of salvation or damnation. Even the Protestant reformers, Martin Luther and John Calvin, promoted the Augustinian view, the former in a somewhat softer version than the latter. The problem Pelagius saw was basic: what kind of God would create an essentially evil universe? And, if humans were created in the image and likeness of God, as Genesis claims, is God all evil instead of all good? Now there is a real dilemma here. After all, God is also said to be all-knowing. Knowing everything and going ahead anyway is a pretty strong argument for predestination. So every Augustinian must believe that God has predestined a number—a very large number—of people to hell. In which case, why bother paying any attention to the clergy?

Greeley’s answer begins with the idea that the first and most certain thing Christians can know about God is that God is love which, of course, is also the title of Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est [Note 1]. However, I doubt Benedict means love in the comprehensive sense Greeley does. Instead, he divides it into two distinct manifestations, eros and agape. Although eros can be morally good, it has frequently been distorted and “divinized.” The Pope writes:

The Greeks—not unlike other cultures—considered eros principally as a kind of intoxication, the overpowering of reason by a ‘divine madness’ which tears man away from his finite existence and enables him, in the very process of being overwhelmed by divine power, to experience supreme happiness. All other powers in heaven and on earth thus appear secondary…

That “divine madness” is the crux of the problem. It is true, he says that “…eros tends to rise ‘in ecstasy’ towards the Divine, to lead us beyond ourselves.” But, in the next breath, he asserts that dodim, the Hebrew equivalent of eros in the Bible, suggests a love that “…is still insecure, indeterminate and searching.” It is self-seeking in contrast to ahaba or agape which, “…becomes renunciation and…is ready, and even willing, for sacrifice.” Ecstasy as opposed to renunciation, especially in the male of the species, threatens the church which can’t help thinking of Eve’s seduction of Adam.

I believe Greeley would argue the opposite: that eros, especially in its ecstatic state, heightens our awareness, appreciation and connections to all things heavenly and earthly. In almost all his fiction, he explicitly says that sexual attraction is a metaphor for God’s unquenchable love for his creatures. The metaphor of sex is meant by God to remind us that we sinners cannot escape his love. The church, however, has historically regarded sex as entirely reproductive in purpose although in recent times it has discovered that it also has what it calls a “unitive” function. I think that means it brings people together. If so, it has taken the church the better part of two thousand years to get even a tenuous grip on the obvious. But reproduction is the key for the church in determining sexual morality. Eros is morally acceptable only when it is open or opens the way to conception. It is an execrable means of fulfilling the commandment “Be fruitful and multiply.” If God had consulted the church, humans would reproduce through binary fission.

I think Greeley would resist any alienation or division of love. Rather, he seems to believe that love is a single phenomenon made manifest in many ways including sexual love. Greeley would say that these manifestations are of the same species differing only in their accidentals. The love of double chocolate malteds is on the same emotional spectrum—if different in degree—as the love of a spouse. The feeling is similar, only more or less intense. If agape, as its etymology suggests, is selfless love, how shall we say that eros is necessarily any different? Like any human characteristic, it can be distorted in ways that range from self-absorbed sex to pedophilia. The Pope’s problem is that his list of erotic distortions is too long because it fails to distinguish between practices rooted in love and those rooted in pathology. It is the quality of the love between the lovers not its externalities that determines whether sex is or is not pathological. The markers of high quality are mutuality, sensitivity and commitment which are what we mean by “love, honor and cherish,” “forsaking all others” and “until death do us part.” Quality has nothing to do with race, religion, gender or the alleged permeability of latex.

Pelagius was certainly right about all the main points which means that Augustine and Jerome were wrong. It may be that the church has always known this or, more likely, feared it might be the case. The 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia admitted that, “The gravest error into which he [Pelagius] and the rest of the Pelagians fell, was that they did not submit to the doctrinal decisions of the Church.” In other words, it has little or nothing to do with theology or logic, but only power.

Rome has continued in this vein ever since. At the Synod of Whitby in 664, it insisted that the Celtic manner of dating Easter and the way the Irish monks cut their hair were heretical. In 1431, it burned Joan of Arc for being a relapsed heretic in that she dressed like a man. Such trivial pursuits have nothing to do with heresy. Neither did Galileo’s proof of heliocentricity in 1633. Once the auto de fe went out of fashion, the church has been tongue-tied whenever it has confronted real heresy. In 1962, the Holy Office, formerly known as the Holy Inquisition, denounced Pierre Teilhard de Chardin for his denial of the doctrine of original sin. It reiterated its condemnation as recently as 1981 “…to protect the minds, particularly of the youth, against the dangers presented by the works of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin and of his followers.” As usual, they were not being entirely candid. The Jesuits had already silenced him on the subject in 1925 and he had acceded to the ban. His works were circulating in a form of academic Samizdat limited pretty much to scholars. What the inquisitors were really worried about was that Teilhard’s speculations about evolution might be contagious.

Maybe the Curia is trying to bore its enemies to death. In 1979, the Holy Office tried unsuccessfully to silence Hans Küng for denying the bizarre doctrine of papal infallibility. In 2007, the Pope declared that pro choice politicians should be excommunicated or that they had already excommunicated themselves depending on which Vatican press release you read. In none of the modern cases did they use the word heretical although all three center on the denial of important teachings.

Unlike Pelagius and Teilhard, Greeley does not reject original sin at least in public. I have read more of his books than is good for me and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him mention it. I trust he realizes that eating that apple could not have been a sin because, at the time, poor Adam and Eve had no knowledge of good and evil. The expulsion is a myth meant to teach us that we are incomplete beings who must strive to re-unite with the Godhead. Like all myths, you cannot parse it too closely without quickly running into absurdity. In all the torturous history of biblical commentary, no one has ever explained a thousand non-sequiturs like Luke 13:30, “Indeed there are those who are last who will be first, and first who will be last.” The tortoise will beat the hare. If you read the Bible as anything other than myth and metaphor, you will rapidly descend into a Wonderland of logical chaos and pure nonsense. At the same time, if you fail to take its profound teachings to heart, you will be condemned to an impoverished existence. Worst of all, if you rely on the interpretations of professional religionists, you will be a slave to their self-interest. Take for example, the embarrassing arguments of Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical banning birth control. The biblical citations in that document are adduced solely to bolster the contention that the church has the power to decide these matters. None address the substance of the issue for the very good reason that the Bible says nothing about birth control. Except, of course, for the much-abused story of poor Onan (Genesis 38:1-10) whose crime, whatever it was, merited death. Every single citation that does support the proposition that contraception is evil is referring to some recent papal encyclical, letter, exhortation or speech [Note 2]. In other words, contraception is evil because I say so and my predecessors said so. You cannot trust the hierarchs to be anything other than diligent in defense of their alleged power. So, if you are walking that lonesome valley, and you would like someone to point the way, stay away from the Catholic Church and, indeed, most other forms of modern Christianity.

Unless you find a pastor like Andrew Greeley, a godly man, a humanist, and a person perfectly in tune with the divine sense of humor.

Subsequently

Father Greeley died in his sleep during the night of May 29-30, 2013 in the eighty-sixth year of his age.  He insisted he was only a priest and that all the things he was known for—writing, teaching, doing research and being a partisan of Chicago and its sports teams—were merely his way of being a priest.  He said he wanted his tombstone to read, “A loud-mouthed Irish priest.”  He is missed already.

Notes

1. The first sentence of the encyclical is “DEUS CARITAS EST, et, qui manet in caritate, in Deo manet, et Deus in eo manet.” The official Vatican translation renders this correctly as: “God is love and whoever abides in love abides in God and God abides in him.” Even the Vatican would not mess with this translation which is more a direct quote from the First Epistle of Saint John. No such inhibitions restrain the American bishops. The translation prepared by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops says, “God’s love for us is fundamental for our lives, and it raises important questions about who God is and who we are.” The bishops are better Latinists than that but they don’t want people thinking God is love or, even worse, love is God. So they make up a little fib.

2. There is one exception, a reference to Chapter 8 of the Catechism of the Council of Trent (1545-1563). This deals with the sacrament of matrimony and makes no reference whatever to contraception.

RE EX NIHILO
Jerry Harkins


In 1974, the young American sculptor Frederick Hart won the commission to create a suite of works to be installed as part of the main entrance to the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. The work, in six separate pieces, was dedicated in 1990. It includes free-standing, larger than life portraits of St. Peter and St. Paul [1], a large carving of Adam that serves as the front of the trumeau (the post that separates the doors of the main entrance), and three high relief carvings representing the creation of day, the creation of night, and the emergence of mankind. The latter, “Ex Nihilo,” shows eight human figures, four male and four female, appearing to emerge from what Genesis calls the void and what theologians have long referred to as nihilo, nothing.

Most Christians believe that before God created the heavens and the earth, there was nothing except God who then, by an act of will, became the uncaused first cause. Mr. Hart, with just a touch of artistic ambiguity, said that “Ex Nihilo” represents the “…state of rebirth and reaffirmation of all the possibilities in being human.” Of course, there is no reaffirmation of anything if the figures are emerging from nothing. He later said, “That might mean that the eight figures represent eight Christians in the act of being born again.” If so, the work is an elaborate metaphor for the cleansing waters of (adult) baptism. The soul’s release from the chains of original sin is seen has having been pre-figured in the creation of the world. Had this interpretation occurred to him before he began work I suspect he would have given the work a different title, perhaps something taken from Galatians 5, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” He would also have had to change the background as neither chaos nor nothingness is a good metaphor for the law from which St. Paul says Christ is freeing us. Mr. Hart’s life was marked by a remarkable intellectual pilgrimage as his Christianity became progressively more orthodox. His explanation may reflect this process more than it does his original intent. At a minimum, it suggests that he was aware that the sculpture has nothing to do with the biblical story of creation.

I see “Ex Nihilo” as a commentary on the relationship between the human and the divine. The title of the piece is nothing more than an afterthought. The figures appear to emerge from chaos [2], which is not nothing. Elsewhere Hart called the background “the majesty and mystery of divine force in a state of becoming.” The last phrase about mystery and majesty clears some of the fog but leaves the question: What that is divine is or ever has been becoming? Divine simply is. As God said in introducing himself to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you.’” [3]

Frederick Hart was arguably the greatest figurative sculptor of his generation and together with Daniel Chester French and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, one of the greatest of the many Americans who have worked in the classical tradition. He was not, however, by any means a literalist. His “Awakening of Eve,” for example, clearly depicts a navel she could not have had. And “Ex Nihilo,” in spite of its title, is not a representation of the Genesis story. The first two verses of the biblical account read: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” It does not say the heavens and the earth were created out of nothing. On the contrary, it is saying that at the time God started his creation, the heavens and the earth already existed but the earth was empty. This is made explicit in Young’s Literal Translation [4] where the line is rendered, ‘In the beginning of God's preparing the heavens and the earth, the earth hath existed waste and void…” The recent translation of Robert Alter [5] has the same line as, “When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste…” And Everett Fox [6] has it, “At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth, when the earth was wild and waste…” The author of Genesis almost certainly would have been thoroughly befuddled by the concept of absolute nothingness. The ancient idea that creation involves making something out of nothing was seized upon by medieval theologians many of whom resorted to mysticism to confront the emerging empiricism of Roger Bacon and the nominalism of William of Occam. In any event, nothing is not what Mr. Hart meant by nihilo even if that is what both the word and the theologians mean.

You have to look at the work carefully. Four adult men and four adult women are emerging from a chaotic background suggestive of primordial energy. This then is certainly not Day 6 of Creation because on that day only Adam was created. Indeed, Hart’s scene takes place sometime after the “creation” of Eve for neither she nor Adam are depicted. Even biblically, these eight people could not have emerged from nothing. Since Hart was both thoughtful and religious, it is necessary to conclude that the figures represent all of us and the background—the nihilo—is not literal but metaphoric. Perhaps, like E. E. Cummings, he is saying we humans are “lifted from the no / of all nothing.”

For more than a hundred years, it has been clear that the facts of evolution make a literal reading of Genesis impossible. Thinkers like the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, have pointed out that God and evolution are perfectly compatible but this idea has gained little traction within the Catholic church [7] and is actively opposed by Fundamentalists and Evangelicals. Hart is known to have been influenced by Teilhard and it seems likely he set out to promote his own similar view. What is important is not how God created us, but why. Teilhard did not say so, nor does Hart, but one answer is that God created us because he had no choice. He was incomplete without something to love and to be loved by. Contrary to what John Milton claimed, God most certainly did need man’s active love. [8] And, of course, vice versa. This is a radical idea because an omnipotent God should need nothing and should not be subject to compulsion of any kind. Which, of course, is the message of Job. But not of Mary. Miraculously pregnant, the Virgin goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth and says, “My soul doth magnify the Lord.” What does this mean if not that her soul makes the Lord greater?

If this is at all close to what was in Hart’s mind, it offers a satisfying explication of the sculpture. We are all creatures of existential alienation, striving blindly away from our sense of emptiness. Upward and outward we strive with our eyes closed. Upward toward heaven and the love of God, outward from the loneliness of self. The figures are incomplete, still in the process of becoming as is all creation until the last trumpet. Their loneliness is a perfect metaphor for the absence of love. Hart is saying what St. Paul was saying: without love I am nothing, only Hart’s version is an affirmation. Love is everything. Perhaps it is.

Notes

1. The official name of the edifice is the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. Both saints are depicted at the moment they accepted Jesus.

2. “The nothingness of chaos” is an oxymoron. Merriam-Webster defines chaos as “a state of things in which chance is supreme; nature that is subject to no law or that is not necessarily uniform; especially the confused unorganized state of primordial matter before the creation of distinct and orderly forms.” Only things can be chaotic and they are so when their arrangement or motion is not subject to the laws of probability. No one has ever found a truly chaotic phenomenon .

3. Exodus 3:14.

4. Young’s Literal Translation of the Holy Bible, Revised Edition, Baker Books, 1995.

5. The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary, W.W. Norton & Co., 2004.

6. The Five Books of Moses: A New Translation with Introductions. Commentary and Notes, Schocken Books, 1983.

7. On October 23, 1996, John Paul II delivered an address to an audience of scientists which was then published as formal statement endorsing the theory of evolution "...as more than just a hypothesis." Subsequently, the International Theological Commission, headed by then Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, seemed to endorse this position by saying, “Through the activity of natural causes, God causes to arise those conditions required for the emergence and support of living organisms, and, furthermore, for their reproduction and differentiation." After Ratzinger’s elevation, however, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna, commented that the Pope’s 1996 statement was “rather vague and unimportant.” He further said, “Evolution in the Neo-Darwinian sense…is not true” and was “invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science.” His Eminence does not know the difference between Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism and does not realize that his enemies care not at all for purpose and design.

As interesting as all this may be, the present writer was the only one who noticed that the pope had chosen to publish his address on the 5,999th anniversary of the sixth day of Creation, according to the calculations of Bishop Ussher. That, of course, was Adam’s birthday and maybe Eve’s too.

8. “On His Blindness” claims that “…God doth not need / Either man's work or his own gifts.” It is not clear whom “his own” refers to. It could mean God and the gifts he has given mankind. Or it could refer to man and the “gifts” that man bestows on God in the form of prayer and sacrifice. The latter reading is perfectly consistent with the great theme of the Reformation: We are not saved by good works but by faith alone.