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Author Fr. Donald Cozzens, who in several book-length treatments has provided invaluable analysis of the clergy culture, wrote a disarmingly frank response to the question of why priests in Cleveland remain silent in the face of so much distress in the Catholic community there over the closing of parishes generally deemed spiritually and financially viable.
His op-ed piece appeared today in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
In his response, Cozzens writes: “We priests have remained silent because it is our way of life...we have been educated and formed in a quasi-militaristic, quasi-feudal clerical society,” in which loyalty is the prime virtue and questioning authority is seen as disloyalty, “a capital sin” in both church and military.
