Tamar Hennessy, Dorothy Day's Daughter: Patron Saint for Lapsed Catholics

In 2002, the Vatican named Dorothy Day a Servant of God--the first step on Dorothy's road to sainthood. Pope Francis put in a kind word for her when he spoke before Congress in 2015; and Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, called her "a saint for our time." Some day, Dorothy will surely be canonized.

Catholic saints are often designated as special patrons for particular groups of people. St. Thomas More, for example, is the patron saint of lawyers. St. Adrian of Nicomedia, I am told, is the patron saint of arms dealers; and St. John Vianney is the patron saint of priests. Dorothy Day, when she is canonized, might become the patron saint for the homeless.

As far as I know, no saint has ever been designated as the patron for lapsed Catholics--or recovering Catholics, as former Catholics sometimes call themselves. Surely, lapsed Catholics deserve their own patron saint--someone who will intercede for them before God concerning their special difficulties and afflictions.

And so I hereby nominate Tamar Hennessy, Dorothy Day's daughter, to be the patron saint of lapsed Catholics.  Tamar, who left the Catholic Church, never to return, is the perfect holy person to intercede for Catholics who have fallen away.

Tamar's life was deeply tragic. She was born to Dorothy Day and Forster Batterham in 1926, but her mother and father never married. Batterham was an atheist who did not believe in the institution of marriage. In fact, he left Dorothy after she baptized Tamar as a Catholic and then became Catholic herself.

Tamar did not have an easy childhood. She grew up amidst the hurly burly of the Catholic Worker movement and shared the life of poverty that her mother Dorothy embraced.  The Catholic Worker houses of hospitality collected an assortment of oddballs and eccentrics, and these were the characters who peopled Tamar's childhood.

In fact, Tamar wound up marrying one of those Catholic Worker oddballs. While still an adolescent, she met David Hennessy, a troubled young man with a loose affiliation to the Catholic Worker movement.

Thirteen years Tamar's senior and with a disfigured ear (damaged in some sort of gun incident), David was no great catch. Nevertheless, at the age of 16, Tamar made up her mind to marry him.

Dorothy did not want Tamar to marry David. As David's daughter Kate Hennessy wrote years later, everyone knew he was trouble. But Dorothy fumbled in her effort to break the bond between David and Tamar as the couple waited patiently for Tamar to reach the marriageable age of 18.

Tamar had nine children with David Hennessy--no birth control for Catholics. Unfortunately, David was never able to support his huge family. Although he operated a sketchy mail-order book selling business, he rarely held a steady job. Moreover, he was an alcoholic and verbally abusive to his young wife. Long before Tamar gave birth to her ninth child, her relationship with David was in tatters.

The couple separated when Tamar was in her mid-thirties. They did not divorce; they were Catholics after all. But Tamar never formed a relationship with another man. And years later, after David died, his daughter Kate revealed that David Hennessy was probably a homosexual.

The Catholic Church glorifies the sanctity and indissolubility of marriage; but surely even Catholic hardliners like Cardinal Raymond Burke would admit that the union between Tamar and David Hennessy was miserable and unfortunate.  Or maybe not. Cardinal Burke might say Tamar will get her reward in heaven--at  least if she remained Catholic.

But Tamar did not remain Catholic. She and her children became more and more disaffected by Catholicism; and one by one, they all left the faith. (One daughter, Martha, later returned to the Church.)

Tamar was often asked to explain why she left the Catholic Church, but she rarely talked about her decision.  "I had been trying to be a good Catholic," she told one inquirer. "The kids and I gave up on it and feel much better for it."

So Tamar became a lapsed Catholic and a bitter one at that. "One of my greatest accomplishments," she told daughter Kate, "is that none of my children is a practicing Catholic."

But Tamar Hennessy led a sanctified life--a life of sacrifice, sorrow, and simplicity. She adopted a semi-subsistence lifestyle on a Vermont farm, sometimes relying on public assistance to make ends meet. She suffered from depression and from the tragic deaths of two children and a grandchild.

Throughout her life, she was generous to anyone in need--very much in the spirit of the Catholic Worker movement. Her daughter Kate said Tamar seemed drawn "to all things broken," including people. Perhaps it was her husband's brokenness that drew Tamar to David Hennessy when she was a teenager.

Surely, Tamar Hennessy is a worthy saint for lapsed Catholics, all those millions of people who left the Church because in their minds at least the Church had nothing to offer them--no solace for their suffering, no sacraments to salve their pain.

Tamar Hennessy, Servant of God, pray for us that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

References

Kate Hennessy. The World Will Be Saved By Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother. New York: Scribner, 2017).

Divorce survivors and the Catholic Church: "When bitter memories freeze the tongue and songs of love are left unsung"

When burning embers in the darkness
Bring cold comfort to the heart
When bitter memories freeze the tongue 

And songs of love are left unsung

Hot Buttered Rum
Lyrics by Tommy Thompson (sung by Red Clay Ramblers) 

If you have any doubt about how fatuous the New York Times has become, then read Austin Ruse's essay in Crisis titled "The New York Times Loves a Good Love Story." Ruse began his story with this riveting paragraph:

A few years ago, the New York Times told the incredibly moving story of Robert Kennedy Jr. courting a woman who became his third wife but only after he divorced his second wife who later hung herself in the family barn after being harassed by Kennedy apparatchiks. None of this was included in the Times story.

More recently, the Times wrote another gushy story about Michael Ruhlman and Ann Hood, two accomplished writers, who crossed paths when they were younger and finally reunited and got married. However, the Times glossed over the fact that Ruhlman and Hood were both married and had children when they got emotionally evolved.

Ruse used these two New York Times stories as a springboard for his impassioned defense of marriage--marriage as the Catholic Church understands it. And I agree with everything Ruse said. Divorce is a psychological and spiritual disaster, and no divorced person who has children ever gets over it.

And as Ruse said, the harm divorce causes the children themselves is catastrophic and irreparable. "[N]o matter what the situation in the marriage, it is always best for the children for the parents to stay together." Indeed, Ruse writes, "[t]here is voluminous data that supports even the notion that it is better for a child to live in a broken home than to come from one."

But then I read Kate Hennessy's biography of Dorothy Day, titled The World Will Be Saved By Beauty. Kate Hennessy is the youngest daughter of Tamar Hennessy, Dorothy Day's only child; and Kate is Dorothy Day's youngest grandchild.

 The World Will Be Saved by Beauty is a beautifully written book. After reading only a few pages, I could see that Kate had inherited her grandmother's gift for writing.  As I turned the pages I began to see that the book is as much about Dorothy's daughter, Tamar, as it is about Dorothy.

As Kate Hennessy relates, Tamar was immersed from childhood in the Catholic Worker movement, which was started by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. Although Peter and Dorothy called for a radical Catholic response to social injustice, they were both orthodox Catholics--orthodox in every way.

When she was 15 years old, Tamar met David Hennessy at the Catholic Worker farm in Easton, Pennsylvania. David was 13 years older than Tamar, and Dorothy would not allow her daughter to marry until she was 18. David waited patiently, and the two were married in 1944.

David and Tamar Hennessy lived a Catholic marriage. They had 9 children together and one miscarriage. In fact, for 14 years, Tamar was either pregnant or nursing.

But David Hennessy was a deeply troubled man. Even before he met Tamar, he got into some kind of altercation with his best friend, who shot David's ear off with a .30-30 rifle.  Not long after the wedding, it became apparent that David drank too much; indeed he eventually became an alcoholic. He was quarrelsome and only intermittently employed. He stumbled from one minimum-skill job to another and was never able to adequately support his wife and nine children.

When David got older, his mental health deteriorated and he was institutionalized for a time. Tamar finally left him, although as good Catholics, Tamar and David never divorced.

David died at the age of 92 after having lived for a time with another woman who may have been a prostitute. After his death, Kate Hennessy discovered and read her father's diaries and came to the conclusion that he may have been a homosexual.

Some Catholic marriage!

I have a Catholic Catechism in my home. I haven't read it all, but I agree with the Church's stance on marriage, family life, and the dignity of human life in all stages.

But I came from a family that did not live by Catholic values. In fact, my parents suffered from severe mental health problems and were physically and psychologically abusive to their children.

I see friends--good and decent people--who are struggling with all kinds of serious life issues: divorce, drug addiction, alcoholism, unemployment, mental illness, alienation from their children, cancer, and even violence.

God help me, but I don't think the Catechism is very useful for dealing with the harsh realities of life in postmodern America. Jesus didn't operate from a catechism. Basically he just called on us to respond with love and kindness to the human suffering we see around us every day.

But a lot of scholars, theologians, priests, and bishops disagree with me. So what in the hell do I know?

Dorothy Day and daughter Tamar

References

Kate Hennessy. The World Will Be Saved By Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother. New York: Scribner, 2016.

Austin Ruse. The New York Times Loves a Good Love Story. Crisis Magazine, May 5, 2017.

Hypocritical scholars criticize Amore Laetitia and Pope Francis: Jesus and the Pharisees

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites."

I have perused several scholarly critiques of Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis' apostolic exhortation about marriage and divorce.  Frankly, most of what I read comes across to me as pharisaical.  

Some old dudes in Brazil, who call themselves the Plinio Correa de Oliveira Institute,  published a turgid document (95 footnotes) claiming that Pope Francis' papal exhortation "Opens the Gates of the Church and Society for a Programmed Demolition of Marriage and the Family." Managing to be both hysterical and utterly boring at the same time, the document compares Pope Francis' pedagogical model to Jean Jacques Rousseau (!) and calls on the Pope to revoke Amoris Laetitia outright.

Father Regis Scanlon, writing in Crisis Magazine, says the document "has many Catholics thinking they are living in a nightmare." Father Scanlon asks his readers to reflect on a seventh-century doctrinal controversy during the papal reign of Honorius I, which he thinks might  help Catholics weather the Amoris controversy. 

Honorius, it seems, got too cozy with the Monothelitists; and he got a theological slap on the wrist by his successor, Leo II. Honorius, Leo charged, "did not illumine this Apostolic Church with the doctrine of the Apostolic tradition, but allowed it, while immaculate, to be stained by profane betrayal."

Thanks, Father Scanlon, for sharing that story with us. I'll bet you give great homilies!

Then there's Richard A. Spinello, a research professor at Boston College, who laments the fact that the church hierarchy is unwilling to speak out against Pope Francis's blow to "doctrinal integrity." Spinello ends his essay in Crisis Magazine by saying it is up to the laity "who must face reality and speak with candor about the deficiencies of this alien papal teaching." 

Let me get this straight, Professor Spinello. Are you saying it's Joe Six-Pack's job to tell Pope Francis what to do?  Good luck with that!

In another Crisis essay, Spinello sums up his view of Amoris Laetitia by saying: "At best, this is an imprecise work that needs clarification; at worst, it is a subtle repudiation of Veritatis Splendor and two thousand years of Catholic moral Tradition." 

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

God knows I am no theologian, but I was raised a Methodist so I can read the Bible. And this is what Jesus said in the Book of Matthew:

Woe to you, scribes and pharisees, you hypocrites. You lock the kingdom of heaven before human beings. You do not enter yourselves, nor do you allow entrance to those trying to enter.

Woe to you, scribes and pharisees, you hypocrites. You traverse sea and land to make one convert, but when that happens you make him a child of Gehenna twice as much as yourselves.

As I said, I am no theologian, but that passage reassures me that Pope Francis was on the right track when he wrote Amoris Laetitia. It is, after all, a message of love and mercy.

 But then what do I know? I'm just a back-pew lay Catholic who lives in Louisiana, and I know absolutely nothing about Honorius I and those wretched Monothelites.

References

Plinio Correa de Oliveira Institute. 'Amoris Laetitia' Opens the Gates of thke Church and Society for a Programmed Demolition of Marriage and the Family, September 29, 2016.

Fr. Regis Scanlon, O.F.M. CAP. What History May Tell Us About Amoris Laetitia. Crisis Magazine, January 26, 2017.

Richard A. Spinello. Debate Continues Over Amoris Laetitia. Crisis Magazine, May 25, 2017.

Richard A. Spinello. On Rocco Buttiglione's Defense of Amoris Laetitia. Crisis Magazine, August 9, 2016.

Divorced Catholics are the illegal aliens of the Catholic Church. Perhaps they will all go to hell along with the priests who denied them communion.

I lived in Houston for six years--a lovely city. During my time there I got to know several undocumented immigrants--or to use a less politically correct term--illegal aliens. Every illegal immigrant I knew was a hard-working, law abiding individual. Several were practicing Catholics and some had families.

But an undocumented immigrant's life is different from the life of a citizen. A traffic stop, a minor misunderstanding, an encounter with an unsympathetic police officer--any small incident can turn an illegal immigrant's life upside down and trigger the process of deportation.

If you want to visualize just how tenuous an undocumented immigrant's life is, watch The Visitor, a terrific movie starring Richard Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman, and Danai Gurira.  Sleiman plays Tarek, an undocumented Syrian living in New York City. One minute everything is fine and then Tarek is wrongly accused of jumping a turnstile in a New York subway station. Two plainclothes police officers arrest him, and he is whisked away to a detention center. Eventually he is deported back to Syria.

Although I wouldn't press the point too strongly, divorced Catholics are the undocumented aliens of the Catholic Church. According to Catholic doctrine, divorced people may not receive the sacraments of the Church unless they live a celibate life.

Divorced Catholics who wish to remarry or divorced persons who wish to become Catholics must have their marriage annulled by a diocesan tribunal, an expensive, time-consuming and humiliating process. Unless they are able to prove their prior marriage was not a true marriage at all, their annulment application will be denied.

The annulment process is truly bizarre, a throwback, one might say, to the Spanish Inquisition. I am told a majority of annulment applications are denied, but I have heard stories about people getting an annulment simply by writing a large check to the Catholic Church. And I know it is possible to get a marriage annulled even if there are children from the union.  One woman I know got an annulment of her marriage even though she and her husband had been married more than 15 years and had four children together.

Most Catholic skip the annulment process altogether and continue to receive the sacraments--or at least the Sacrament of Communion. Sympathetic priests sometimes counsel there is a "local solution" to divorce and that Catholics can receive communion if they make a good confession. Other priests say this is nonsense; and no bishop, as far as I know, endorses the idea of a local solution.

Thus, divorced Catholics reside in the Catholic community like undocumented immigrants. Year after year, they attend Mass, make financial contributions, and volunteer in Catholic works of charity.  Just as undocumented immigrants begin to feel like American citizens, divorced Catholics begin to feel they are Catholics in good standing. Indeed, sympathetic parish churches might be described as"sanctuary cities" for divorced Catholics.

But then one day, a priest of the old school finds them out and tells them they are forbidden to receive communion or go to confession unless they obtain an annulment.  Much like Tarek in The Visitor, they are whisked into  spiritual detention; and for all practical purposes, they are kicked out of the Church.

It would be pleasant to believe that the priests who condemn divorced Catholics are the Church's best priests;  but in fact, they are the worst.  The priest who denied me the sacraments was one of the priests who tried to cover up child rape by a fellow priest years ago.

I know many divorced Catholics who have left the Catholic Church because of the Church's harsh official stance on divorce. They come to realize that for many priests and bishops, the thief on the cross, the woman at the well, the adulteress Jesus forgave--all those Bible stories are simply tales for the nursery.

In fact, in the minds of many Catholic priests and prelates, the Catholic Church is not the Bride of Christ. Rather, it is an exclusive civic organization, much like the old whites-only country clubs where only the "best people" were allowed to play golf.

Pope Francis would like to bring divorced Catholics back into the Community of Faith, but even Pope Francis, a truly holy man, cannot overcome the mean-spiritedness of a large segment of the Catholic clergy,

Monsignor Richard Mouton was the spiritual cop who tried to deport me from the Catholic faith. I imagine he believes I will burn in hell for going to communion more than a thousand times before I got picked up in a random traffic stop in a communion booth.

And perhaps Monsignor Mouton is right. If so, the most frightening aspect of this prospect is the sure certainty that I will share a cell in Hades with Monsignor Mouton himself.

The Visitor

Great Falls-Billings Diocese files for bankruptcy to settle clerical abuse claims

This week, the Great Falls-Billings Diocese filed for bankruptcy to settle sex abuse claims against diocesan priests. Great Falls-Billings is fifteenth Catholic diocese to take this step and the second diocese in Montana to do so.

According to an attorney for some of the plaintiffs, the diocese will try to hold on to some of its real estate and cash, arguing that these assets are held in trust for local parishes and are not actually owned by the diocese. Good luck with that.

A spokesperson for the diocese, who will take charge of negotiations with some of the abuse victims, put the best face on this disaster. "Reaction of pastors and the laity has been largely a kind of 'What can we do to help?'" he said. "There is a feeling of we are in this together from our smallest parishes to our biggest ones."

But of course we are not all in this together. For nearly half a century, laypeople faithfully went to Mass, made their weekly cash donations, and listened to their priests and bishops. And all the while, Catholic priests were raping little boys while the Catholic hierarchy covered it up and someone washed the sheets that were stained with blood and semen.

As a Catholic convert who has loved the Church for over 20 years, I am beginning to feel like one of Hitler's camp followers who were huddled in the bunker with the Fuhrer as the Russian army crept closer, block by block. "How in the hell did we get in this mess?", those people must have asked themselves.

Christ can heal the suffering, we are told. No wound is so ugly that it cannot be salved by the Savior's blood. But we know for sure that child abuse victims never recover. They never recover. They never recover.

And so, returning to my bunker analogy, I ask myself: Is it is time for me to slip away through the rubble, leaving the fools who created this mess to their fate? I've stopped contributing to the Catholic Church altogether, sending my financial donations to a homeless shelter in Houston.

I would feel much better if the Catholic Church paid a real penance for all this suffering--if just one of the son of a bitches who covered up child rape was put in the slammer. But that has not happened and it will not happen.

Monsignor Richard Mouton

References

Dan Morris Young. Great Falls-Billings Diocese becomes 15th to file for bankruptcy. Catholic Reporter, April 3, 2017.

New Ulm Diocese files for bankruptcy to settle clerical abuse claims: What if some Catholic bishops had gone to jail?

Earlier this month, the Catholic diocese of New Ulm, Minnesota announced it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in order to settle clerical abuse claims.  St. Ulm is the  third Catholic diocese in Minnesota to file for bankruptcy because of sexual abuse claims against priests.

This is the list of American Catholic dioceses that have filed for bankruptcy so far---all triggered by revelations of sexual abuse by Catholic priests:

• Portland, Oregon
• Tucson, Arizona
• Spokane, Washington
• Davenport, Iowa
• San Diego, California
• Fairbanks, Alaska
• Wilmington, Delaware
• Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• St Paul & Minneapolis, Minnesota
• Duluth, Minnesota
• Gallup, New Mexico
• Helena, Montana

And of course, several other dioceses were stained by clerical abuse that didn't file for bankruptcy: Boston Archdiocese, for example, and the Diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana. Clearly this scandal rocked the Catholic Church in every region of the United States.

It is perhaps too easy to lump this enormous tragedy into an easily summarized phrase: clerical abuse. But we should remind ourselves from time to time that we are talking about crimes against children. In fact, almost all these abuses involved a priest who put his penis in a little boy's mouth or rectum.

The psychological literature--not to mention our own life observations--confirm that these rape victims will never recover from what they experienced no matter how much counseling they receive or how much money they are paid. Some have committed suicide.

In my view, this shameful episode is not behind us and won't be behind us until the Catholic Church pays an enormous penance--and I don't mean money.  The bishops, diocesan administrators, and brother priests who covered up the scandal should be in jail--and not some fancy federal prison that has a golf course and ping pong tables.  I'm talking about a prison like Angola.

Just yesterday, Timothy Curley and Gary Schultz, former officials at Penn State University, plead guilty to child endangerment for failing to follow up on a report that Jerry Sandusky was in a shower with a small boy. They received that report in 2001, and it took 16 years for them to face justice.

Curley and Schultz have not been sentenced yet, but I fervently hope they both do hard time. I do not say this in a spirit of vengeance. Rather, it will take a harsh dose of justice to convince people they cannot shut their eyes to child rape.

Cardinal Bernard Law, who covered up clerical abuse in the Boston Archdiocese, is a prime example. Cardinal Law should be eating his daily oatmeal in the Massachusetts state prison in Shirley, not dining in some quaint little trattoria in Rome.  

All 50 states have child abuse reporting laws and child endangerment laws; and Catholic officials flagrantly violated those laws many times when they didn't turn sexual predators over to the police. Until some of these birds are jailed and publicly humiliated, the Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandal is not over and will never be over.

Cardinal Bernard Law: This guy should be eating oatmeal in Shirley, Massachusetts

References

Lori Falce & Shawn Anarelli. Schultz, Curley plead guilty in Sandusky scandal. Centre Daily News, March 13, 2017.

Amy Julia Harris. Several Catholic dioceses declared bankruptcy on eve of sexual-abuse trials. Minnpost.com, February 2, 2015.

Phillip Martin. In search of Cardinal Bernard Law. Huffington Post, August 7, 2016.

New Ulm Diocese to file for Chapter 11 protection. The (New Ulm) Journal, March 4, 2017.

Should Pope Francis Hire a Food Taster? Holy Simplicity v. Diehard Judgmentalism of Conservative Clerics

A few nights ago I had dinner in Houston with a group of friends. All are Catholic, all are near the end of their academic or professional careers, and all are unreservedly supportive of Pope Francis.  Listening to my friends speak about the Pope, I could see that my friends'