This piece in the National Catholic Reporter is one of the best summaries outlining some of the most horrible scandal and hypocrisy that Americans only know a small part of from the demi-reality of movies like Spotlight. It is a look at the international scandal of child sex abuse and the cover-up that made it even worse than it was, the corrupt priests, bishops, cardinals and Popes and wealthy Catholics, corrupt institutions like the Legionaries of Christ under the utterly corrupt and stomach churning cult figure Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado and the utterly corrupt Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the - I'll say it - corrupt papacy of John Paul II, a man who allowed flattery, cold-war politics and neo-medieval predilections and his thirst for centralized power and his own cult of personality to make all aspects of the scandals entirely worse. I totally disagree with the canonization of John Paul II, he was a terrible pope who, in his long papacy, did not embody heroic virtue.
I am left newly and totally disgusted that even as the bishops meet in Rome for the much announced meeting over the pedophile and other abuse scandals that Pope Francis has not acted decisively enough to end the scandal. I am beginning to think he knows that if he does what he needs to do, to make the radical change required, the rich establishment which has been a part of the worst of the corruption will split from the Church probably taking some of the most reactionary bishops and cardinals as their leaders but if he doesn't act to radically change the governing structure of the church, taking the power out of the hands of the clique of allegedly celibate and even more allegedly chaste men, diluting their influence with women and married Catholic men and women, nothing will change. That ability to bring radical change is, apparently in his hands, now:
But for a reform agenda to succeed, Francis needs a policy on the issue he has identified, in sometimes scalding rhetoric: clericalism, the pursuit of power by the clerical culture at the expense of laypeople. The calcified power structure of men covering up for men will not change itself. One way to begin that change is to install women reformers in the College of Cardinals, further breaking from Italian hierarchs, who have controlled the Roman Curia for generations. The pope has the power to elevate women as cardinals if he so chooses; John Paul offered a seat to Mother Teresa, who declined. That is a power Pope Francis should forcefully use.
The other route is to change the mandatory celibacy law. Celibacy does not cause men to abuse children any more than incest can be blamed on marriage. But the clerical culture that has lost huge numbers of men since Paul VI's 1967 encyclical praising celibacy as the church's "brilliant jewel" turned into a huge closet for gay men. Many are honorable priests who loyally serve the church; but the psychosexual maturity issues of many others, leading them to abuse teenage boys, are a key part of the crisis. Shifting the balance of power to a married clergy will take time, but ultimately drive a larger change toward a genuine, sorely needed theology of family.
While Francis has certainly been better at handling the crisis than his predecessor, Pope and Cardinal Ratzinger, that was a mighty low bar to have to jump over. I do think the article is fair in giving Ratzinger some credit for at least making a try at reigning in the corruption that blossomed under JPII, but he was rather ineffectual. Pope Francis should look at the cost that the timidity of Benedict XVI and, yes, the timidity of Paul VI which have both led to the scandal and the terrible crimes that are the cause of that scandal and others.
If Francis is afraid of an overt schism, dividing the church there is already one which is hidden by its informality which has led to millions of people across the world disassociating themselves with a church which is filthy with hypocrisy and which has, through the pedophile and other scandals, destroyed its own its credibility. Some have said this is the worst scandal since the Reformation but I think it's actually more like the scandals of the late middle ages around the time when Francesco di Bernardone had a vision in an abandoned, derelict chapel of being told by Jesus to build his church. It's time for this Francis to be as bold as the saint whose name he took. If he fails, the thing will crumble into a total ruin for vermin to live in. He doesn't have much time to prevent that.
No comments:
Post a Comment