MELITA THEOLOGICA James F.

Keenan*
Journal of the Faculty of Theology
University of Malta
68/2 (2018): 129-142
??-??

Vulnerability and Hierarchicalism

T hough this is a paper on the vulnerability and the abuse of power, I have
structured it according to the four weeks of the Spiritual Exercises. The first
half of the paper is strong; it is the first week, sin. The second week, which is on
vulnerability, has at its heart the life of Jesus. Toward the end of the paper we
consider the passion of Jesus. Finally, we are left with the fourth week, to live out
what we have seen and heard.
The first wave of the sexual abuse crisis broke in 1985. In May, Fr Thomas
Doyle, Fr Michael Peterson and Ray Mouton presented a 92-page document to
a committee of the U.S. Bishops’ Conference, warning them to handle pending
cases well, defend victims, and be transparent with authorities and the public.
In June, the National Catholic Reporter published a story based on Jason Berry’s
reporting of the case of Fr Gilbert Gauthe of Lafayette, La., who ultimately
served 10 years of a 20-year sentence for molesting children. The lengthy story
and accompanying editorial was the first national story concerning sexual abuse
in the Catholic Church in the United States.
Between 1985 and 2002 when the second wave occurred, the bishops of the
United States knew what very few other people knew, the horror and the extent
of the crisis. There were eruptions across the country, however. For instance, in
1992, there were three isolated reports. The diocese of Dallas paid $31 million
to 11 victims who accused Fr Rudolph Kos of molesting altar boys from 1981 to

* James F. Keenan S.J. is the Canisius Chair and Director of the Jesuit Institute at Boston
College. As the founder of Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church (CTEWC), he
chaired the international conferences in Padua (2006), Trento (2010) and Sarajevo (2018).
Recently he wrote University Ethics: How Colleges Can Build and Benefit from a Culture of Ethics
and has just finished editing two books, Building Bridges in Sarajevo: The Plenary Papers of
Sarajevo 2018 and Street Homelessness and Catholic Theological Ethics. Both books are due out
shortly.

129
130  MELITA THEOLOGICA

1992. In Boston, Fr. James Porter admitted to abusing more than 100 boys and
girls in several parishes; he was sentenced to 18-20 years in a maximum-security
prison and died in 2005. Finally, a Hartford newspaper reported that former
students had accused Fr Marcial Maciel Degollado, Mexican-born founder of the
Legion of Christ, of sexually abusing them.
In January 2002, a Boston judge compelled Cardinal Bernard Law to handover
over 10,000 pages of archdiocesan records that the Boston Globe began to report
on. Thus, the second wave commenced then. Now the public learned what the
bishops had covered up from 1985 to 2002.1
From my vantage point, let me tell you how the second wave affected me.
In 1991 I moved from Fordham University in the Bronx to begin teaching at
Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge MA, where I taught students
preparing for ordained and lay ministry. In 2002, the second wave began with
the story of Fr John J. Geoghan who molested 130 children. I remember to this
day reading The Boston Globe on January 6, 2002, as it reported about the many
women who had complained to the Boston Chancery about the priest. One
woman stood out, a devout lay woman, Margaret Gallant, who had repeatedly
written to the Boston chancery about Fr Geoghan because she knew he had
already molested 7 of her nephews. Here is an excerpt:
The files … contain a poignant — and prophetic — August 1982 letter to Law’s
predecessor, the late Cardinal Humberto Medeiros, from the aunt of Geoghan’s
seven Jamaica Plain victims, expressing incredulity that the Church to which she
was devoted would give Geoghan another chance at St Brendan’s after what he
had done to her family. “Regardless of what he, or the doctor who treated him,
say, I do not believe he is cured; his actions strongly suggest that he is not, and
there is no guarantee that persons with these obsessions are ever cured,” Margaret
Gallant said in her plea to Medeiros. “It embarrasses me that the Church is so
negligent,” Gallant wrote. Archdiocesan records obtained by the Globe make it
clear why Gallant wrote her irate letter two years after the abuse: Geoghan had
reappeared in the Jamaica Plain, and been seen with a young boy. The records
note that the next month, “Another letter from Mrs Gallant. “Why is nothing
being done?”2

1
“Timeline of a Crisis,” National Catholic Reporter July 6, 2015 https://www.ncronline.org/
blogs/ncr-today/timeline-crisis
2
Michael Rezendes, “Church Allowed Abuse by Priest for Years,” January 6, 2002, Boston
Globe. This article narrates the numerous attempts by women to get the clerical authorities to
stop giving the infamous Fr Geoghan access to boys.
 Vulnerability and Hierarchicalism - James F. Keenan  131

All through the year we would learn of one more horrendous account of
abuse, coupled with an even more disturbing account of episcopal cover-up. The
case of Geoghan catalyzed an investigation and Geoghan himself was sentenced
in February 2002 to 10 years in prison for molesting a 10-year-old boy.3 Then, on
August 23, 2003, Geoghan was strangled and stomped to death by a fellow inmate
in a maximum-security prison.4 These, and hundreds of other narratives, were
regular stories from 2002-2003 in Boston alone. By the end of 2002, Cardinal
Bernard Law had so betrayed children, the people of the Church of Boston, and
his priests, that 58 priests, myself included, publicly wrote a statement calling for
his resignation. The Cardinal resigned shortly afterwards and moved to Rome
where he was made archpriest of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.
This account in 2002 would play out later around the world: a person trying
to stop a particular priest from serially abusing children would inform hierarchy
who, in most instances, actually decided to ignore the complaints. In more
recent times we have heard not only of children of all ages as objects of sexual
abuse, but also of vulnerable adults, whether people with intellectual disabilities,
or employees or subordinate religious, or seminarians. These newer categories
are emerging as decidedly more significant than we previously recognized and
highlight further the problem of predation throughout the world Church, a
problem erupting as we learn frequently of more stories from India and Africa of
nuns being assaulted by bishops, or of seminarians being assaulted by Cardinal
McCarrick or others like him.
I think, however, that any account about the abuse scandal cannot start
anywhere but, as I have done, with the victims. I think that that is where any
account of trying to respond to the crisis must begin. We did not protect the
vulnerable. The vulnerable in our care were assaulted and harmed irreparably.
They were children. The scandal is not simply that priests assaulted children: it
was/is that many priests and their bishops simply were more concerned about
the image of the Church than they were with these vulnerable children or their
parents and family members who, in their vulnerability, came to us.
The first concern is to see with more clarity and confidence that there are,
and need to be, directives in every diocese and throughout the world Church for
protecting children and overviewing any claim of sexual assault. As one coming
from Boston, where Cardinal Sean O’Malley has dedicated his life to responding
to the crisis since arriving in Boston in 2003 and then becoming first chair of

3
http://archive.boston.com/globe/spotlight/abuse/geoghan/
4
http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/08/23/geoghan/index.html
132  MELITA THEOLOGICA

the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors in 2014, I find in him,
despite mistakes, a true model bishop for our time.5 In no less measure, Archbishop
Scicluna’s outstanding record of responding to the crisis has also shown us how
a bishop pursues truth and justice, restoring the faith and instilling confidence.
It is a great honor for me, a theologian, to present this paper as a response to his
request for it. Like others, we look to see the procedures that the Vatican will
develop in the aftermath of the February 2019 meeting to address negligence,
procedures that will couple well those of the motu proprio, “As a loving Mother.”6
They will be appreciated or critiqued by all vigilant church members for their
effectiveness because as we now know, the whole world is watching.
As those procedures take effect I want to note that in the aftermath of the
second wave of the abuse scandal, that is, the one that began in 2002, the concept
of clericalism immediately arose as a helpful concept. Clericalism is that culture
which created the climate where Catholic men and women of conscience were
routinely unable to be heard or understood, but where the self-preserving power
of clerics was given sanction. In 2002 in a brilliant essay for America magazine
entitled, “Farewell to the Club: On the Demise of Clerical Culture,” Fr Michael
Papesh named, described, and exposed the pervading, but hidden culture among
the clergy.7
This word “culture” is used quite often and in a recent article reflecting on
clerical culture, another priest, the Canadian moral theologian, Mark Slatter
explained what a culture is:
A culture is a network of personal meaning and valuing. Clerical culture hinges
on leaders attracting similarly disposed persons through the laws of social
attraction, evoked in different ways since Plato as the principle of ‘like seeks
after like.’ The psychology engenders webs of kinship among priests, bishops and
similarly disposed lay groups, bishops and cardinals, wealthy lay Catholics and
think tanks. They always find each other through family resemblance, whatever
that happens to be.8

5
On Cardinal Sean O’Malley, see Emma Green, “Why Does the Catholic Church Keep
Failing on Sexual Abuse?” The Atlantic February 14, 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/
politics/archive/2019/02/sean-omalley-pope-francis-catholic-church-sex-abuse/582658/
6
https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_letters/documents/papa-francesco_
lettera-ap_20160604_come-una-madre-amorevole.html
7
Michael L. Papesh, “Farewell to the Club: On the Demise of Clerical Culture,” America
(May 13, 2002). https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/372/article/farewell-club
8
Mark Slatter, “Clerical Crisis: Flock and Pasture Can’t Tell Shepherd Who He Is,” National
Catholic Reporter (March 11, 2019). https://www.ncronline.org/news/accountability/clerical-
identity-crisis-flock-and-pasture-cant-tell-shepherd-who-he
 Vulnerability and Hierarchicalism - James F. Keenan  133

Today clerical culture is routinely identified. Pope Francis has used clericalism
as a contrast device distinguishing the servant leadership of the priest from a
clericalism that seeks its own goods. In his address at the opening of the recent
Synod, Pope Francis commented on the deep problem of clericalism.
It is therefore necessary, on the one hand, to decisively overcome the scourge of
clericalism… Clericalism arises from an elitist and exclusivist vision of vocation,
that interprets the ministry received as a power to be exercised rather than as a
free and generous service to be given. This leads us to believe that we belong to
a group that has all the answers and no longer needs to listen or learn anything,
or that pretends to listen. Clericalism is a perversion and is the root of many evils
in the Church: we must humbly ask forgiveness for this and above all create the
conditions so that it is not repeated. We must, on the other hand, cure the virus of
self-sufficiency and of hasty conclusions reached by many young people.9

Recently two American lay theologians teaching in seminaries, C. Colt

Anderson and Christopher M. Bellitto, have proposed a helpful list of reforms
for shifting the formation of men away from a clerical culture to one for a culture
of servant priests.10 In the interest of time, let me name each of their proposals.
1. Until diaconal ordination, seminarians should dress as and be treated as
they are, lay men.
2. Seminarians’ classes of theology should be held with other lay and religious
men and women.
3. The professional opinions of religious sisters and lay professors,
professionals, and supervisors must be taken into real account when
deliberating on whether a seminarian will proceed in formation and to
ordination. These deliberative processes cannot be singularly in the hands
of the clergy.
4. A seminary’s board of trustees must have lay members who, again, have
deliberative and not simply consultative votes.

9
Address by his Holiness Pope Francis at the Opening of the Synod of Bishops on Young People, the
Faith and Vocational Discernment (October 3, 2018). http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/
en/speeches/2018/october/documents/papa-francesco_20181003_apertura-sinodo.html
10
C. Colt Anderson and Christopher M. Belllitto, “The Reform Seminaries Need,”
Commonweal (April 8, 2019). https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/scarlet-fever See also
Boston College Seminar on Priesthood and Religious Ministry for the Contemporary Church,
“To Serve the People of God: Renewing the Conversation on Priesthood and Religious
Formation,” Origins 48. 31 (December 27, 2018) 484-493. https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/
bc1/schools/stm/continuing%20education/encore/pdf/To%20Serve%20the%20People%20
of%20God.pdf
134  MELITA THEOLOGICA

5. We need to end the practice of moving unfit men from seminary to seminary
until they find one that will testify that they are worthy of ordination.
We are now in the midst of a third wave of the crisis, one that began in 2018
and this wave brings a rather different focus of concern. Rather than naming
predatory priests, these scandals focus mostly on the episcopacy. Witness
Cardinal George Pell, Cardinal Ted McCarrick, Cardinal Philippe Barbarin,
Cardinal Donald Wuerl, Archbishop Robert Finn, the Chilean Bishops, Indian
Bishop Franco Mulakkal (accused of raping Indian religious women), etc. I think
it would be a mistake to identify their actions as stemming from the ubiquitous
“clericalism.” For this reason, I have identified the exclusive power culture of the
episcopacy as “hierarchicalism.”
I came up with this distinction between clericalism and hierarchicalism11
when I found in Slatter’s essay this comment: “Hierarchical culture is the gold
carrot for those predisposed to its allurements.” Slatter is right to give that culture
particular attention. That culture of the hierarchy is even more problematic and
unknown than clerical culture. Just as clericalism is different from a culture that
promotes servant priests, similarly hierarchicalism is different from the culture
that promotes servant bishops.
What most priests and bishops know well is that the formative pathways for
future bishops are generally speaking different from those for average priests.
Early on, future bishops do not do most of their theology studies in their local
or regional seminaries. Rather, they are sent to Rome for theology and examined
in Rome in a variety of ways and there, in their national colleges, they are offered
hierarchal “allurements” that most priests do not receive: dinner with visiting
bishops, meetings with other bishops, the possibility of being appointed the
bishop’s contact in Rome, receiving the bishop’s confidences, being welcomed
back whenever returning home. There is a “grooming”12 that happens that is
radically different from anything that happens to other seminarians. They are
being selected for another club.
Hierarchalism is that culture then precisely emerging at the centre of the
more recent sexual abuse scandal. Just as clericalism emerged as a source for the

11
See Tom Roberts on my use of hierarchicalism, “A Mensch, a Church in Recovery, and
Hierarchical Culture Examined,” National Catholic Reporter (March 26, 2019). https://
www.ncronline.org/news/accountability/ncr-connections/mensch-church-recovery-and-
hierarchical-culture-examined
12
See Emily Reimer-Barry, “Does Catechism Class Groom Young People for Sexual Abuse?”
The First (April 1, 2019). http://www.catholicethics.com/forum-submissions/does-catechism-
class-groom-young-people-for-sexual-abuse
 Vulnerability and Hierarchicalism - James F. Keenan  135

scandals from 2002, hierarchicalism emerges today. But we would be wrong to

think that hierarchicalism is giving us only the third wave. The scandal of the
third wave finally exposes the real source of this crisis: Hierarchicalism in all its
brutality and profound lack of accountability. We now see how the hierarchical
culture has exercised its power and networking capabilities in the cover-up
of their own actions. What we are only beginning to see is that hierarchalism
and its lack of accountability and ability to act with impunity will be harder to
dismantle than clericalism and in fact will guarantee the survival of clericalism,
for the former is the father and promoter of the second.
We need then to distinguish the two, not because clericalism is not problematic,
it is, but because we have to better understand the problems of the culture more
isolated and protected than the clergy’s and certainly more complex, insidious,
and driven than we know or acknowledge. We have to look at how we place
young men on different preparatory trajectories away from their own dioceses
and into Rome where all men ambitious for episcopacy live.
Still, in light of the third wave, I think our mindfulness of this episcopal
culture, what I am calling “hierarchicalism,” that is not ordered to service
ministry is already having an impact. Let me offer this consideration, as being
someone from Boston. While Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
gave Cardinal Law the appointment of archpriest of the Basilica of St Mary
Major’s in Rome in 2004, as a true indication of the face of hierarchicalism, even
after his own priests publicly called for his resignation, one could never imagine
such a consolation prize being awarded in 2019 to any bishop, archbishop or
cardinal for similar negligence, lies, cover-up, and gross abuse of power.
As an alternative to these two cultures, that dominate not only its own member’s
lives but also the life of the Church, I would like to propose another culture, a
culture of vulnerability. I think in order to get to a servant priesthood or to a
servant episcopacy we must pass through and live out a culture of vulnerability.
There is a profound graceful irony in this: for it is precisely vulnerability that our
clerics and hierarchs ignored throughout this scandal.
Still, throughout theology, philosophy, and ethics today, the concept of
vulnerability is receiving a level of attention internationally that is, I think, very
helpful as we consider the life of the Church as we respond to the scandal. But
first, to convey vulnerability, let me tell you a story.
In the twenty-first chapter of T. H. White’s wonderful The Once and
Future King,13 we read a memorable account of creation that captures human

13
T. H. White, The Once and Future King (New York: Ace Books, 1987).
136  MELITA THEOLOGICA

vulnerability beautifully. God gathers all the embryos of each and every species
of animal life and offers each embryo a wish for something extra. The giraffe
embryo gets a long neck for tree food, the porcupine asks for quills for protection,
and so it goes for the entire animal kingdom. The last embryo is the human who
when asked by God what he wants, responds, “I think that You made me in
the shape which I now have for reasons best known to Yourselves, and that it
would be rude to change…. I will stay a defenceless embryo all my life.” God is
delighted and lets the human embryo have no particular protection, to be the
most vulnerable of all newborns and says, “As for you, Man… You will look like
an embryo till they bury you.”
White’s vision of the human embryo as the bearer of human vulnerability
is remarkable, for behind this decision is the assumption that we are made in
God’s image and that if we are vulnerable, so is God. And so White concludes his
account with God disclosing to the human, “Adam,” “Eternally undeveloped, you
will always remain potential in Our image, able to see some of Our sorrows and
to feel some of Our joys. We are partly sorry for you, Adam, but partly hopeful.”
In 2005 Irish moral theologian, Enda McDonagh, introduced us to the
theology of vulnerability in a book called Vulnerable to the Holy: In Faith,
Morality and Art.14 McDonagh begins his treatment on vulnerability not with
the human, but with God. God reveals to us God’s self as vulnerable by the birth
of Jesus in Bethlehem, his life in Nazareth, and by his death on Golgotha. Thus,
sounding like White, McDonagh writes that to be made in God’s image is to be
made vulnerable.
Thinking first of God as vulnerable is a remarkably important theological
foundation for in becoming vulnerable to the Holy, we become prompted to look
for the vulnerability of God in the Scriptures. And here I would suggest we look
at two of the most famous parables, the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan.
To appreciate the first, I would like to further develop the idea of vulnerability
and then make a distinction between precarity and vulnerability.15
On vulnerability, the American Philosopher Judith Butler has developed an
entire ethics, reflecting on the prior work by Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah

14
Enda McDonagh, Vulnerable to the Holy: In Faith, Morality and Art (Dublin: Columba
Press, 2005).
15
See for instance, Judith Butler, “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of
Cohabitation,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26/2 (2012): 134-151; See on a different
platform, Clara Han, “Precarity, Precariousness, and Vulnerability,” Annual Review of
Anthropology 47 (October 2018): 331-343. I want to thank James Hanvey for introducing me
to the importance of this distinction.
 Vulnerability and Hierarchicalism - James F. Keenan  137

Arendt. In her own developed work, she writes, “ethical obligation not only
depends upon our vulnerability to the claims of others but establishes us as
creatures who are fundamentally defined by that ethical relation.”16 That is,
vulnerability is what establishes us as creatures before God and one another.
Butler adds:
This ethical relation is not a virtue that I have or exercise; it is prior to any
individual sense of self. It is not as discrete individuals that we honor this ethical
relation. I am already bound to you, and this is what it means to be the self I am,
receptive to you in ways that I cannot fully predict or control.17

Vulnerability is our nature. She writes:

You call upon me, and I answer. But if I answer, it was only because I was already
answerable; that is, this susceptibility and vulnerability constitutes me at the
most fundamental level and is there, we might say, prior to any deliberate decision
to answer the call. In other words, one has to be already capable of receiving the
call before actually answering it. In this sense, ethical responsibility presupposes
ethical responsiveness.18

To put it another way, “the ought is made capable by the is.” Approaches to
vulnerability emerged in literature, theology, and philosophy, but also in psychology.
Years ago, in 1988, in reflecting on gender and domination, the psychoanalyst and
feminist theorist, Jessica Benjamin reflected on infancy and mutual recognition
among infants. Mutual recognition is that central experience of infants among
infants. Benjamin writes, “Mutual recognition is the most vulnerable point in
the process of differentiation.” She adds, “In mutual recognition, the subject
accepts the premise that others are separate but nonetheless share like feelings and
intentions.”19 In this work Benjamin sought to explore ways of restoring mutual
recognition as a defining key for understanding right relationship between the
genders. In particular she was concerned with gender and the problem of why
men turn to domination. She found, that males, as children, are taught to abandon
their own vulnerability and to develop instead a need to dominate. The process
to develop domination is a two-fold alienation. First, the male becomes alienated
from his original vulnerable self. Second, he looks to dominate others, often
women. In a more recent work in 2017, she turns again to mutual recognition and

16
Butler, 141.
17
Ibid., 141-2. Emphasis mine
18
Ibid., 142.
19
Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of
Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988) 53.
138  MELITA THEOLOGICA

among other matters finds the language of vulnerability key for recuperating and
restoring the experience of mutual recognition.20
These two scholars help us to appreciate more the reconciling and humanizing
traits of vulnerability, helping us to see it, not as a liability, but as something
which establishes for us as human beings the possibility to be relational and
therefore moral.
Too many people think of vulnerability as a liability because they confuse it
with precarity. Butler notes that “Precarity exposes our sociality, the fragile and
necessary dimensions of our interdependency.”21 Therefore, we must be careful
to recognize the difference between vulnerability and precarity. Certainly, in
being vulnerable, we have the capacity to encounter and respond to another
whose vulnerability is precarious, as in the Prodigal Son parable where the
son’s own precarity exposes him to “the fragile and necessary dimensions of our
interdependency.” In that parable, while the beginning of the story focuses on the
younger brother’s precarity, the centre of the parable focuses on the vulnerable
one, who is the Father who recognizes his son in the distance, embraces him,
re-incorporates him, and works to restore all that was unstable, threatened,
exposed, and jeopardized. The same Father remains vulnerable to his older son
who does not really suffer from precarity but from resentment.22 The stability in
the story is the vulnerable Father, as the precarious son returns and the resentful
one leaves; the centrality of the story is the enduringly vigilant, attentive, and
responsive Father who is so because he is vulnerable.
Vulnerability plays itself out even more so in the parable of the Good
Samaritan (Lk 10: 29-37). It is important for us to remember why Jesus tells this
parable. He has just given the commandment to love one another. In response,
one of the Scribes asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” A close reading of the
story reveals that Jesus is offering a very surprising answer to the question. At
the beginning of the story we are thinking that the answer to the question “who

20
Jessica Benjamin, Beyond Doer and Doing to (New York: Routledge, 2017). See also her interview
on Psychology’s Feminist Voices Oral History Project ( July 7, 2006). https://www.feministvoices.
com/assets/Feminist-Presence/Benjamin/JessicaBenjaminOralHistoryTranscript.pdf
21
Butler, 148. See also her, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (Brooklyn:
Verso, 2004). On Vulnerability see Vulnerability in Resistance, ed. Judith Butler, Zeynep
Gambetti, and Leiticia Sabsay (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). Also, see Vulnerability:
New Essays on Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, ed. Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and
Susan Dodds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
22
See James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment (New York: Crossroads, 2001). Alison suggests
that the two brothers are but two sides of the same reality: a person who knows he needs to be
forgiven and who thinks he does not. See pp. 17-20.
 Vulnerability and Hierarchicalism - James F. Keenan  139

is my neighbour?” is the man lying wounded on the road, that is, the precarious
one. But by the end of the story we are no longer looking for the neighbour as
the precarious one but at the vulnerable one who is acting. The Scribe rightly
answers that the neighbour is the one who shows mercy.
Like the surprise ending, many of us forget that this parable was never primarily
a moral one. Throughout the tradition many preachers and theologians saw in
the story of the Good Samaritan the narrative (in miniature) of our redemption
by Christ. Starting with Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-ca.215), then Origen
(ca. 184-ca.254), Ambrose (339-397) and finally, Augustine (354-430), the
Good Samaritan parable is the merciful narrative of our redemption. Later on,
from the Venerable Bede (673–735) to Martin Luther (1483-1546), preachers
and theologians have appropriated and modified the narrative.
The basic allegorical expression of the parable was this: the man who lies on
the road is Adam, wounded (by sin), suffering outside the gates of Eden. The
priest and the Levite, (the law and the prophets), are unable to do anything
for Adam; they are not vulnerable to him. Along comes the Good Samaritan
(Christ), a foreigner, one not from here, who vulnerably tends to Adam’s wounds,
takes him to the inn (the Church), gives a down payment of two denarii (the two
commandments of love), leaves him in the inn (the Church) and promises to
return for him (the second coming) when he will pay in full for the redemption
and take him with him into his kingdom. The parable then is first and foremost
not a moral story about how we should treat others, but rather the central story
of our own redemption, that is, what Christ has done for us. We are called, if you
will, to a mutual recognition, of seeing in Christ the one who became vulnerable
for us so that we might be saved.
Like the parable of the Prodigal Son, the parable of the Good Samaritan is
about the scandal of our redemption, not how bad we are, but how vulnerable
God in Jesus Christ is. In realizing how vulnerable God is, we recognize our own
capacity for vulnerability, and therein discover the capacity and the call to go
and do likewise.
But let us now make a final return to theological ethics as we move to our
conclusion. A great deal of ethics has lately focused on vulnerability. The French
moralist Vincent LeClerq, who is also a doctor specializing in AIDS, wrote his
first book about those who volunteer to work with patients suffering from AIDS.
He developed an ethics of vulnerability for such doctors entitled Blessed Are the
Vulnerable: Reaching Out to Those with AIDS.23

23
Vincent LeClerq, Blessed Are the Vulnerable: Reaching Out to Those with AIDS (Worcester,
MA: Twenty-Third Publications, 2010)
140  MELITA THEOLOGICA

This past year, Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church held its
third international conference in Sarajevo with 500 theological ethicists from
80 countries. Linda Hogan, of Trinity College Dublin and an original chair of
CTEWC gave the final plenary proposing an ethics of vulnerability for a divided
world.24 Following a host of moral theologians and philosophers, like Levinas,
Arendt, McDonagh, Butler, LeClerq, but also Isabella Guenzini25 and Roger
Burggraeve,26 she describes “vulnerability as a way of being, as the ground of our
relationality, and as mode of social engagement.”
She finds promise in vulnerability and asks, “Can this existential experience
of vulnerability be deployed in the service of a politics that unites rather than
divides? This depends on whether this recognition of vulnerability can generate
a new kind of conversation: about how we act in the world; about our ethical
obligations towards each other; about how to oppose the conditions under
which some lives are more vulnerable than others.”
She concludes: “Mutual dependence, shared vulnerability, these are elements
of human experience that have rarely featured in the ways in which politics
is constructed or ethical theories are framed. Indeed, much of our politics
and ethics seems to be intent on foreclosing this recognition. And yet shared
vulnerability and mutual dependence may be precisely the qualities that have a
resonance with the individuals and communities world-wide who are struggling
to find the grounds for the hope of shared future in a world divided.”
Let me close, as Hogan did, by making a proposal for vulnerability.
Why could not we develop an ecclesiology based on the risk-taking
vulnerability of God? Right now, as we muddle through trying to rebuild our
Church, should we not look precisely at vulnerability, a reality that we overlooked
as our bishops turned deaf ears to vulnerable parents, about vulnerable children
and vulnerable adults who were horrendously violated? Has it not been precisely
vulnerability that we evidenced no concern or defence of ? Could not a lesson
from these twenty years of reckoning yield an alertness, a vigilance, a resonance
to vulnerability? Is it not time for us to embrace it?

24
Linda Hogan, “Vulnerability: An Ethic for a Divided World,” Building Bridges in Sarajevo:
The Plenary Papers of Sarajevo 2018, ed. James Keenan, Kristin Heyer and Andrea Vicini, co-
edited with L. Hogan (Marynoll: Orbis books, forthcoming, 2019).
25
Isabella Guenzini, Tenerezza. La rivoluzione del potere gentile (Milan: Editore Ponte alle
Grazie, 2017).
26
Roger Burrgraeve, “Violence and the Vulnerable Face of the Other: The Vision of Emmanuel
Levinas on Moral Evil and Our Responsibility,” Journal of Social Philosophy 30/1 (1999): 29-45.
 Vulnerability and Hierarchicalism - James F. Keenan  141

And what would it look like? Remember how Benjamin specifically found
in vulnerability the opposite and corrective of domination27 and does not that
juxtaposition invoke in us the very stance of our Lord, who stood before those
who accused and judged and murdered him. Think here too how Our Lord, on
the night before he was betrayed, relinguished his garments and washed the feet
of his disciples, conveying the very vulnerabilty that he displayed in his passion
and death. Do we not see in our Church that we could follow in his steps as a
servant leader who opts for vulnerability instead of domination, or clericalism or
hierarchicalism?
But what would the formation of our clergy and episcopacy look like if its
emphasis was not on dominance but on vulnerability? How would we be with
the laity and in particular with women? Would we, in our vulnerability, be able
to be who we are, as we are, attentive though to those whose vulnerability has
been long overlooked or whose precarity is now most at risk?
Let me make two concrete suggestions that I cannot develop here. First, bishops
and the rest of us must make bishops accountable. Archbishop Scicluna helped
me to understand that accountability keeps leaders vulnerable but impunity
destroys vulnerability. From 1985 until 2018, we have seen bishops who have
been bound by hierarchicalism rely on impunity to avoid any accountability.
That impunity is at the root of the comfortable space called hierarchicalism. It
must be rooted out. I will develop this argument in a later paper.
Second, if I had further space to develop this ethics of vulnerabilty, I would
obviously begin with mercy, the first virtuous expression of divine vulnerability,
as we saw above. The mercy of the Samaritan (which is here akin to hospitality)
is different, however, from the reconciling mercy of the Father who forgives and
restores the prodigal while trying to cultivate and reconcile the older son. These
different expressions of mercy highlight the inevitable need that mercy has for
prudence, the virtue that offers us the concrete guidelines for the right realization
of virtue. Without prudence, we could never rightly express mercy. Mercy is
always coupled with justice. Most of justice is not tempered by mercy, but rather
moved by mercy: mercy prompts justice to realize what is due to those on the
margins, to those who have not yet received justice, as in bringing justice to the
widow, the orphan, and the poor. Finally, we are called to a fidelity or a solidarity

27
Lisa Sowle Cahill highlights this dominance in male clerical violence over against human
vulnerability in her essay, “Power, Sex and Violence: Where Do Catholics Go from Here?”
This essay was delivered on 30 January 2019 at Dequesne University. It was sponsored by the
Department of Theology and McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts of the
same University.
142  MELITA THEOLOGICA

with those whom we serve by mercy, prudence, and justice, so that we, in our
vulnerability, remain faithful to them in theirs. However, I shall be developing
this on a later paper on human dignity, vulnerability and virtue ethics.
I think that after these twenty years, we priests and bishops have really, and
rightly, taken a beating: everyone has a programme, a judgment, a claim, a
strategy for us; but I think behind each offering, each proposal, each critique,
there is a hope that our defensiveness and that our guard come down and we
become what we really are: vulnerable, “as a way of being, as the ground of our
relationality, and as mode of social engagement.” If we gave it a chance, if we let
the vulnerability of our God enter into our seminaries and into our chanceries,
maybe we could put away some of those allurements that we already know are
as banal as they are compromising. If we learn the lessons of vulnerability and
mutual recognition, we might be able to discern with the rest of the Church
that is waiting for us, already in their vulnerabliity, how precisely we should
reform our seminaries, our chanceries and of course, the Vatican, but it will be by
vulnerability and not by the smoke and mirrors of hierarchical domination that
has already taken the life out of so many.

James F. Keenan, S.J.

Theology Department
Boston College
140 Commonwealth Avenue
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467
617-223-1591
USA

james.keenan.2@bc.edu