Psalm Offering 2, Opus 7
Prayer Intention: the Victims of Clergy Sexual abuse
Scripture passages: (for the victims) Children and infants collapse in the streets of the town. They cry out to their mothers, “Where is bread and wine?” As they faint away like the wounded in the streets of the city, As their life is poured out in their mothers’ arms. Lamentations 2: 11b-12.
(for the Church) Your prophets provided you visions of whitewashed illusion; They did not lay bare your guilt, in order to restore your fortunes; They saw for you only oracles of empty deceit. Lamentations 2:14.
I began this composition in August of 2016 and completed it on January 1, 2017. For the past 26 years I have been involved in assisting families who have suffered from domestic violence. As ugly and criminal as domestic violence is in the family, exacting horrible tolls on its victims, nothing ever prepared me for the having to deal with the same damnable offence in the Catholic Church. Many children and adolescents suffered unspeakable horror from the very people in whom they bestowed their love and trust. Over the last two years, having been immersed in the tragic history of many children abused by priests in the decades of the 1940’s and 1950’s by both diocesan and religious order priests, and having read in detail the horror they experienced by these priests, as bishops, other clergy, and even the victim’s own family members looked the other way, has led me to compose this Psalm Offering for the victims.
THE MUSIC: I composed this music in the time honored musical form of the Prelude and Fugue. The Prelude is in the form of a through composed melody often used in church hymnody. The melody is stated simply and then repeated with some eighth note musical ornamentation in the left hand. At this point, the melody breaks into the Fugue with the first part of the hymn melody used as the subject of the fugue. The fugue subject weaves through the higher, middle and lower registers of the piano, subsiding and then quickly building to discordant chords in both hands. An abrupt return to the original setting of the hymn tune leads to the conclusion of the song.
The relentless key area of E minor and restating over and over again of the hymn melody is purposely done. My intent behind this relentless repetition is a musical metaphor that sexual abuse in the Catholic Church has never been isolated to the last 30 or 40 years, but has been pervasive throughout the history of the Church.
While the majority of those who have served as priests have been exemplary people, there is that underbelly of the Church in which priests who have sexually abused have been protected and shielded from exposure for their crimes. This was often done to save face for the Institutional Church. When the leadership of the Church acknowledges their own part in fostering an environment that provides abusing clergy the opportunity to abuse perhaps it will finally cease. This will call for Church leadership to reexamine its own theology on sexuality and work toward a more positive view of human sexuality. This will hopefully lead the Church to open the way once more to a married priesthood. It will also call Church leadership to end the view of the priest as a cultic icon that has led to a perverse sense of clericalism that has prevailed over the past 30 years, and return the priesthood to that of being servants of Christ.
