NOTE: Since I’ve gotten a number of inquiries about the current situation in our West Chester, Ohio parish, I decided to blog some of my thoughts here on Quidlibet. Below you can find “School Dazed,” the longer article I wrote on the subject last month.
I AM WRITING this installment from our seminary in Brooksville, Florida, where this year I’m teaching a course on the psalms. The psalms express all the different moods of the soul before God. Some psalms refer to events in the history of the people of Israel, and some were even written at the very time those events occurred.
On Monday, we studied Psalm 62, which King David wrote to lament the conspiracy of his son Absalom, who sought to depose David and seize his kingdom.
To subvert David, Absalom sought out complaints against his father and encouraged them, telling complainers “thy words seem to me good and just.” Unfortunately — Absalom would add — the king appointed no one to hear your legitimate complaint. Now, if I were judge over all the land, everyone could come to me, and I would do justice. Thus, Scripture says, “he enticed the hearts of the men of Israel.”
This (I could not help thinking) was the method that Father Markus Ramolla followed in his one year with us.
Seek out all possible complaints, sympathize with them, encourage them, and then present yourself as the savior who could make everything right. Telephone, text, e-mail, visit, whisper, confer in the parking lot and multiply “spiritual direction.”
Let all past offenses committed in church, school and seminary — whether real, imagined, or just simple misunderstandings — be brought up in person and on the Internet, and then hurled perpetually at the targets. Make long, numbered lists of accusations. Circulate calumnies and vile insinuations.
Camouflage a campaign of hate in a cloak of virtue: Save the children! Prevent child abuse! Transparency! Expose evil!
Where there was once a half-forgotten injury, sow — not love or pardon — but hatred. Where there was confidence, sow doubt and suspicion. And where there was peace, sow war.
Thus a priest, ordained to be a peacemaker, becomes instead a hate whisperer.
In this case, as in the story of Absalom, there were spies and fellow hate-whisperers who were in on the conspiracy.
But among laymen who got tangled up in Father Ramolla’s web, there are no doubt many who (as scripture says of those deceived by Absalom) are “going with simplicity of heart, and knowing nothing of the design.”
May we priests who have served you for these decades one day be able to rejoice (with the words of David in Psalm 62), “because the mouth is stopped of them that speak wicked things.”