SB 5280
Thank you to everyone who contacted your legislators about the bill which would have required priests to violate the seal of the confessional. The Senate rejected the House version (with the offending amendments), and so the bill died before the end of the legislative session. That is not exactly the result the Archdiocese wanted: we think clergy should be mandatory reporters, so we did want to see this bill passed, just not at the expense of the confessional. I am hopeful that a version of this bill will pass in the future, without violating clergy-penitent privilege.
Archbishop’s Visit
I am writing this column just before our Confirmation Mass at which the archbishop is presiding. As a priest of the Archdiocese, I think a lot about my relationship with the archbishop. The temptation, of course, is to think of him purely as an administrator and to judge him as I would a politician, based purely on his stances, policies, and actions. And even in that temptation, I really like this Archbishop: I think he is a very competent administrator, and I appreciate his willingness to make hard decisions and tackle hard problems. But there are also some important issues on which I disagree with him, too, and it is in these that I need to drop that political lens and remember that my relationship with him is one of communion. Unlike with politicians, I cannot just take what I like and reject what I don’t. The archbishop is a successor to the Apostles, who makes apostolic authority (an authority first and foremost oriented to the preaching of the Gospel) present in our midst. He is a vicar of Christ. Even in his imperfect humanity, the office he holds is a deeply special one. To remove myself from communion with him, or even to endanger that communion for my own perspectives, is to threaten my communion with Christ and those Christ chose to carry his message out into the world. Over the last of couple years, I have really come to appreciate how this relationship of communion between myself and my Archbishop is good for me and my personal holiness, and how seeking compromise with his perspectives makes me a better person and priest. That said, it occurs to me that I’m just reiterating a dynamic that every married couple already knows about intimately. 😉
In the Church’s law, there is not one universal Church with branch locations in different cities. Instead, “the Church” is actually thousands of truly independent local churches, each under the authority of their own Apostle (bishop). We make up “the Church” because all of these bishops are in communion with each other and especially with the Pope in Rome. Which means that we are connected to world-wide Catholicism primarily through our Archbishop. His visit is an opportunity for us to renew our connection to our local church (all the other parishes in the Archdiocese of Seattle) and the universal Church (all of the other bishops of the world).
Fr. Moore 