EXCERPT:
Now that Benedict XVI is sending Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley to manage the sex scandal in Ireland, it is clear that those dismissing this problem as a media invention or minimizing it as an “American problem” were wrong all along.
But even as the scandal widens to a global scale, some good news is emerging. A parish case from Boston last week triggered an old memory for me which suggests that even horrifying scandal may produce some hopeful, if unintended, consequences.
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The Moral Of The Story. If we compare these cases, we find a radical shift from secretive mismanagement (in the old case) to a more transparent approach (in the new case)
In the older case, the obsession with secrecy dominated everything else, for the Boston hierarchy under Bernard Law consistently infantilized the laity, assuming they could not handle any bad news.
In the new case, they reported criminal behavior to the police. They knew the Boston Globe would cover the story, but they no longer regard the Globe (which won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the sex abuse crisis) as a troublemaking enemy. They knew people would learn of evil-doing in church operations, but they now believe that laity are mature enough to acknowledge such human imperfections but cannot tolerate official subterfuge to keep them from knowing about it. They now realize that no one expects the institutional Church to be perfect, but everyone expects it to be accountable.
The moral of the story, then, is that even the most horrific scandal can have beneficial, albeit unintended, consequences.
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