#321: Up From The Ashes?

EXCERPT:
The Ash Wednesday story out of Philadelphia was the last straw for me. I am sick of scandal in the church—sick at heart, sick to death.

It feels like I have been living with this tragedy a very long time. In fact, I first faced the specter of clergy sex abuse in 1989, when…1990 and ‘91 my newspaper…By 1994 …In 2000 my father …In 2002, when the dam broke in Boston following the court-ordered release of Archdiocesan files sought by victims’ families, I witnessed not only the public explosion of but also many personal connections to the scandal...But since then outbreaks have occurred in Germany, Belgium, Ireland, Australia—and now again in the US, in Philadelphia among 21 active-duty priests.

Looking back over all of this, I realize that this scandal, spreading its toxic effects like some invisible radioactive material, is proving to have a very long half-life. It simply refuses to go away.

The victims will live with the damage for the rest of their lives; the bankrupt dioceses may never recover their former prosperity; it could take a generation for the institutional church to recover its good name—and the hierarchy may never regain its former control over its flock. In some very basic sense, the Church as we knew it will never be the same.

Could that be a good thing? It can—that is, this awful tragedy could even yield some beneficial byproducts—but only on several conditions.

First, for example, the outcome could be beneficial if the institutional church establishes hierarchy’s accountability to the whole People of God. We may not need to require the dismantling of the hierarchy itself, but we can no longer accept a hierarchy that answers to no one else. When Bernard Law resigned as Archbishop of Boston, it seemed unprecedented and extraordinary; in fact he received barely a slap on the wrist before the golden parachute that made him archpriest of a famous Rome church. Now in Philadelphia we see the first men facing criminal charges for their failures in supervising priest-abusers. In the future, such accountability both within the church and within civil society will have to become the norm, not the exception.

Second, the outcome might be beneficial if we ensure the safety of all children—a heavy moral responsibility on which there has been some progress but requires much more, since there is some evidence that new regulations are not being consistently enforced.

Third, we must include some account of the root causes of the abuse itself. For most of us, the hierarchical cover-up was an even bigger scandal than the abuse itself, but such mis-governance would be moot without the abuse in the first place. Is the rate of priestly abuse (some 7% percent of Boston priests over 50 years, for example) comparable to other service professions? And even if it is comparable, should the priesthood not model more integrity than other professions?
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Fourth, then, the outcome will only be beneficial if we uproot the causes of abuse once we have identified them. I have argued in the past, for example, that making celibacy a mandate rather than an option had the unintentional effect of establishing a ready-made closet where young Catholic men could hide their emotional and sexual difficulties by entering seminaries, thereby ending once and for all the typical questions of parents, relatives, and peers about their plans to “marry a nice girl and settle down.” This had the effect of concentrating men with sexual problems into a small population of service providers with access to children and the power to abuse them. Thus the requirement that 100% of priests be celibate may turn out to have done more harm than good.

Fifth, a beneficial outcome requires that the hierarchy move beyond its recent obsession with sex - - an obsession that has infected much of Catholic life. From contraception in the 1960s to same-sex marriage in the 21st century, the hierarchy has compiled a long string of crusades against contemporary views of sexuality. If the hierarchy is not in reality obsessed with sex, it has at least succeeded in making the general public think so. It’s high time the Church re-brand its public face with higher priorities.

Finally, the outcome might only be beneficial if we avoid the temptation to scapegoat others. If pedophiles are people who are attracted, not to the opposite sex or to their own sex, but to children, then the underlying problem is not gender-preference but the inability to interact with responsible intimacy with one’s own peers. Blaming gay men for someone else’s problems will solve nothing …

Vatican II (1962-1965) preached the modern world’s urgent need to match its high-tech power with an ancient but updated wisdom. But the institution has undermined its own message by failing to marshal the wisdom it needed to control its own power and prevent abuse.

So the fundamental condition for a happier outcome will finally be: can the institution now show the wisdom and the courage to do what must be done? It so, we might somewhere on the horizon see the institution rise from its own self-inflicted ashes. If not, it will prolong self-inflicted hemorrhaging from its own hypocrisy.