c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph, published by St. Martin Press.)

UNDATED _ The most disturbing event in a week of midsummer madness is not that the president’s sex life has gone public. He, after all, made manifest what he now calls his dalliance with Gennifer Flowers.

No, President Clinton cannot claim malign forces have violated his privacy. The president authored the advertisements for his sexual self, forcing them on us as he has apparently forced himself on women beyond numbering over the years. Singlehandedly, he may have made the White House into the Whitened Sepulcher.

The real news of the week, hardly noted, is that religion has forsaken its public role to act as if it were a totally private matter. Hardly a voice from any of the great religious institution has been raised to illuminate the moral or spiritual crisis that runs far deeper in the Clinton matter than any constitutional crisis it may have triggered.

It is not the bad example of public figures that scandalizes the young. There has been plenty of that going around for generations.

It is the lack of good example, as described and reinforced by public religious institutions, that scandalizes everybody. Our religious leaders seem themselves adrift on an indifferent sea; they have forgotten how to box the compass or even look up at the North Star. As a result, they seem unable to locate where we are on this moral voyage, nor able to tell us how to find our way through this storm.

Religion is not a solely or wholly private staging area where we stand related only to”our God,”that wonderfully vague site to which it is remanded by politicians who want to neutralize its moral imperatives. If religion accepts that assignment, mute as an animal herded into a stockyard, its leaders end up in meaningless supporting roles, offering grace at banquets and invocations at conventions.

The churches have spoken out on serious public matters throughout American history. The Roman Catholic bishops were not cowed by the Reagan administration’s pressures to go easy when they wrote pastoral letters on nuclear war and the economy 15 years ago. Religious leaders have led the discussion about public policy on abortion, school vouchers, and other issues. Dying on his feet, the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin argued eloquently at Georgetown University on the church’s right to speak out on matters connected with the public order.

It cannot be, therefore, that the great religions have nothing to say about the public order and its violation by lying or the thousand lesser deceits of a culture driven by the public relations wind machine. The irony of religion’s going private while moral degeneracy dominates the public imagination constitutes an enormous tragedy.

The inability of religious leaders to say much of anything in public, except those graces before meals, is the shadow scandal of the moment. It is akin to the shadow self Carl Jung described as the”other,”a lesser self in which we find our compromised personalities.

A generation ago, Karl Menninger wrote a book asking”Whatever Happened to Sin?”Religious authorities are expected to identify sin, to distinguish it from the rationalizations that accompany it, and to make clear that moral standards still exist. The worst of all sins, Jesus said, is to ignore sin, to find a quick, easy fix to soothe the ache of moral choice. He condemned as hypocrites the cunning leaders who split hairs to justify their moral behavior under the surface appearance of righteousness.

Here’s where sin is in the summer of ’98: in the public square itself. Ordinary persons know it but they need the reinforcement of their religious traditions to continue to live good lives when evil is so easily excused.

Our present discomfort is related at least in part to official religions’ passivity and shyness about carrying out its primary obligation _ to distinguish between right and wrong _ when we stand in a moral crisis. That they do not suggests either that they cannot, or that they think it is not their business, or, worse still, that they themselves can no longer tell the difference between right and wrong.

DEA END KENNEDY