This week I am going to continue to summarize Bishop Robert Barron’s book, Letter to a Suffering Church: A Bishop Speaks on the Sexual Abuse Crisis (which will be released on July 22), by looking as just one part of his second chapter, “Light from Scripture.”

There are many perspectives for analyzing the current crisis. It has been looked at from the cultural, sociological, psychological, criminal, and interpersonal perspectives. All of these provide important insights that hopefully will help heal those who have been so profoundly wounded, and for the Church and society to develop methods to stop such abuse in the future.

However, Bishop Barron makes the wonderful point that as a Church, the problem of sexual abuse will not be adequately investigated until we look at it in light of Scripture – the Word of God. It might surprise some people, but the Bible is not opposed to sex and bodiliness. The first command that God gives human beings is to be fruitful and multiply. Marriage is the metaphor most commonly used for describing God’s passionate, faithful, and life-giving love for his people. In the Bible, trouble arises when human sexuality is wrenched out of the context of love and God’s plan.

Bishop Barron goes through several sections of both the Old and New Testaments of how distorted sexuality becomes a vivid countersign of the divine, but I am only going to look at one. It is recounted in 1 Samuel 2:12-36. This is prior to even the first king of Israel, during a period known as the Time of Judges.

Eli, a descendant of Aaron, is now the high priest, and his two sons, Hophni and Phineas, are assisting him in the liturgical work. As we will see, there is an eerily anticipation of many of the features of the clergy sex abuse scandal we are facing today. It is over a 100 years prior to the Temple being built, so the Tabernacle, or Meeting Tent, is pitched at Shiloh.

The story begins with Eli not showing any pastoral care by yelling at Hannah, a woman who has come to the Tabernacle to beg that the Lord would give her a child. Eli sees her praying, but thinks she is drunk and scolds her. She explains what she was doing, and Eli weakly apologizes. God answers Hannah’s prayers, and she gives birth to Samuel. When he is still a child, in thanksgiving to God for her child, Hannah donates Samuel to God, to serve as Eli’s assistant. Samuel will go on to be the last Judge, and the one who will anoint the first two kings of Israel.

In contrast to Samuel who is faithful to God, we have Eli’s two sons, Hophni and Phineas, who we learn are abusing their position of power. When people come to the Tabernacle to make an offering to God, they are taking the best meat from the animals sacrificed. They are also sexually abusing the women who work at the entry of the Tabernacle. When this is brought to Eli’s attention, the high priest responds with very strong words towards his sons, basically telling them to stop, but when they continue, Eli takes no further action. So God takes action, saying that he is going to condemn Eli and his family.

I mentioned that Samuel is the contrast to Eli and his sons. In 1 Samuel 3:9, there is the famous account of young Samuel sleeping in the Tabernacle and God calling him several times. After first thinking that it was Eli calling, Samuel finally realizes it is God, and he responds, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” It should be noted, that apparently God had stopped speaking to Eli, the high priest, for we were told earlier that “a revelation of the Lord was uncommon and vision infrequent” (1 Sam. 3:1). What is cut out of the Lectionary reading of Samuel’s call, is what God says to him when he says, “Speak, Lord,….” Here is what God says, “I am about to do something in Israel that will cause the ears of everyone who hears it to ring. On that day I will carry out in full against Eli everything I threatened against his family” (1 Sam. 3:11-12). While the crimes of Hophni and Phineas displeased the Lord, what really aroused the divine ire was Eli’s refusal to act when he found out about his sons. The thing that God did that “caused the ears of everyone who hears it to ring” is a disastrous defeat of Israel by the Philistines. They had taken the Ark of the Covenant into the battle, as they had done in the past to ensure victory, but this time not only were over 30,000 Israelites killed, including Hophni and Phineas, but the Ark was captured by the Philistines, who took it to the temple of their false god. When Eli heard the news of the defeat, death of his sons, and the loss of the Ark, he fell over backwards, breaking his neck and died.

The story of Eli and his sons are a biblical icon of the sexual abuse scandal that has unfolded over the past 30 years. We hear of priests abusing people, both sexually and financially, and when complaints were brought to bishops and religious superiors, strong words were used, promises made, but then there was no decisive action to stop the abuse. Now the truth is coming out, and while at times it may seem that there is also some anti-Catholicism on display by the press covering the scandal, faithful Catholics with a biblical frame of reference should not be surprised: just as God handed over the old Israel to the Philistines for purification, the new Israel, the Church, has been handed over to its enemies, precisely for the sake of purification.