Will Wonders Never Cease Part 8

“Virtus Signaling,” The Lamp, April 5, 2024.

In 2020, I was dissatisfied by the initial offerings of the new Catholic magazine The Lamp. Too many contributors seemed focused on evading, instead of facing, the reality of the Catholic Church today. By 2022, however, a subset of that magazine’s writers – including its editor – had shaken off their initial noncommittal airs and started dealing frankly with major issues of the Church (especially Traditionis Custodes). Now, in the April issue of The Lamp, the magazine’s editor, Matthew Walther, in a devastating essay takes aim at one of the most offensive features of the contemporary Church in the US: mandatory Virtus “training” for all those involved in church functions. For those who don’t know it, Virtus is a program supposedly designed to prevent sexual abuse – it is the exact equivalent of corporate training videos on the evils of sexual harassment. Since I had given up my “office” in the Church (serving as an usher) years ago, I have lost touch with the Virtus and its mentality. Others in my family have not been so fortunate.

Walther skewers the mind-numbing blather of Virtus: “its all-encompassing banality is impossible to describe.” By working through preposterous scenarios, Virtus is supposed to enable trainees to recognize the signs of child abuse – and report them. The onus of eliminating child abuse is thus placed squarely on the laity. Yet Virtus dances around the main characteristic of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church – that overwhelmingly the clergy are the perpetrators of abuse.

Walther proceeds from a critique of the program to more profound reflections on the state of the Church. What are we to think when the Church, instead of “insisting on an older moral vocabulary – the language of iniquity, of enormity, of sacrilege in addition to rape” – on the one hand, and “the virtues of chastity, charity, prudence, (and) wisdom” on the other, with Virtus:

“substitutes compliance, bulletins, slides, training, risk aversion and mitigation, liability minimization (and) cost control?”

Is it not obvious that the Church sees child sexual abuse as primarily a problem of protecting its own financial resources? Is the Church then just “one more faceless business entity?”

Further, Virtus makes of the Church a “surveillance state” in which the laity are summoned to view each other – and the clergy too – as potential abusers. Informing is encouraged. Things like Virtus have contributed to this situation:

“(P)riests in the United States today are aloof, isolated in thier parishes or, increasingly, their parish “clusters’ or “collectives.”

Finally, Walther describes a pervasive “randomness and caprice” in the “secular security theater” world of Virtus:

“(S)uch inconsistency is essential to security theater. Far more effectively than any consistently defined regime, arbitrariness underlines the all-pervading quality of semi-occluded authorities while heightening the atmosphere of crisis.“

Walther’s observations resemble my own thoughts on the totalitarian ultramontanism of the Catholic Church under Pope Francis.

“Virtue Signaling” is essential reading!