Omaha's Archbishop: One of the Worst?
In preparing for my message on church leadership this weekend, I was doing some research to try to understand how the city of Omaha views church leaders. By and large, is our city trusting of religious leaders? Or do they have reason to be skeptical?
The bad news is: the gavel falls squarely on the side of the latter. Omaha's Catholic Archbishop, Elden Curtiss, was named by Beliefnet.com ("the largest spiritual website... not affiliated with any spiritual organization or movement") as one of America's Worst Bishops for his (mis)handling of multiple sexual abuse cases.
Any of you former Roman Catholics have some insight as to how this has affected the Catholic segment of our city?
My missional two cents: this will make it harder to gain credibility in our city. And it means that healthy, gospel-centered leadership is part of bringing redemption to Omaha. If we can show the church and the city what humble, godly, Christ-centered, gospel-saturated, strong, biblical leadership looks like, we will be sowing seeds of redemption into a city that has every right to be skeptical.
May we grieve with those who have been hurt by abuse. May God allow us to be agents of His redemption. (And, in the process, may He bring the church of Rome to repentance for its unbiblical understanding of church leadership.)
The bad news is: the gavel falls squarely on the side of the latter. Omaha's Catholic Archbishop, Elden Curtiss, was named by Beliefnet.com ("the largest spiritual website... not affiliated with any spiritual organization or movement") as one of America's Worst Bishops for his (mis)handling of multiple sexual abuse cases.
Any of you former Roman Catholics have some insight as to how this has affected the Catholic segment of our city?
My missional two cents: this will make it harder to gain credibility in our city. And it means that healthy, gospel-centered leadership is part of bringing redemption to Omaha. If we can show the church and the city what humble, godly, Christ-centered, gospel-saturated, strong, biblical leadership looks like, we will be sowing seeds of redemption into a city that has every right to be skeptical.
May we grieve with those who have been hurt by abuse. May God allow us to be agents of His redemption. (And, in the process, may He bring the church of Rome to repentance for its unbiblical understanding of church leadership.)
posted by Bob | 10:08 PM
2 Comments:
Amen, Bob,
The failings of the Catholic church "hurts" the credibility of all churches everywhre. I hurt for my catholic brothers and sisters who are actually trying to practice and live out their faith in the wake of such a horrible scandal.
May God bring us all in contact with many folks who need their concept of church redeemed, and more than that, . .need Jesus.
God bless,
Aaron
I have had some interesting encounters with two of the priests named in that article. My old youth pastor asked me one day if I wanted to go have dinner at the chancery with the Archbishop (Curtiss). I said sure why not. Turned out it was a kind of recruiting dinner of sorts; he wanted us all to be priests. Slightly more interesting, at least to me, I went to a Christian leadership workshop in high school. We had some breakout sessions and one of them was on spiritual warfare and angels and demons and that sort of thing. That session was led by Father Rob Allgaier. None of that really relates to all this in an important way, but I remember feeling violated when the truth came out about Father Allgaier. Granted, I was never abused by him or anything like that. It just made me cringe more than the general public did.
It seems to me that the reason all of the shuffling around and hiding of documents and secrets isn’t done out of shame. It is done out of pragmatism. The fact is there is a shortage of priests, and every time the Catholic Church loses one, it causes serious personnel issues. But perhaps it is deeper than that. It may be an issue of shame because Catholicism is so heavily based on works in lieu of faith. I don’t really know the reasoning for the actions, but the effects of it are pretty blatant. Very few Catholics in Omaha view the Archbishop highly. I mentioned the topic of this post to my mom and she said, “We already knew he was one of the worst.” There is such little respect for the leadership of the church. It seems to me that it is because they don’t care who is a priest. As long as they are male and can pass a seminary class they are in. No leader in the church ever came to me and invested in my soul. They never got real with me. They never really knew me. But they wanted me to be a priest because it was involved. I did stuff. None of them ever knew that I couldn’t believe their doctrine from the moment I could understand it all.
Lots of times I don’t really know what to do with the Catholic Church. My soul longs for it to be healed and have good theology restored. And part of me believes that Christ would want that for His bride and could make it happen. At the same time, it seems they have strayed so far away that God would (or should, at least in my worldly mind) let them be destroyed by all the scandal. But that’s probably just because of sin and resentment and tons of other stuff in my heart. I ultimately believe that God wants to restore his bride to the beautiful state that He has always envisioned for her.
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