NP Heaven Help the Cardinals

[Doug Millison]

It's more about power than sex, I think (including the crimes of sexual
abuse -- as we see in the case of the abuse of Enzian in GR) .  Garry Wills
has written several good articles on the topic, including this in the
current issue of NYRB:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15633


The New York Review of Books
August 15, 2002

Review

The Bishops at Bay

By Garry Wills
Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church
by the Investigative Staff of the Boston Globe
Little, Brown, 274 pp., $23.95
Conclave: The Politics, Personalities, and Process of the Next Papal Election
by John L. Allen Jr.
Image/Doubleday, 231 pp., $12.95 (paper)

The conduct of the bishops leading up to this meeting reminded me of lions
in the similes of classical epic. Beset by dogs and hunters, crouching
under the spears thrown, the lions draw back from one covert to another,
lashing their tails, making swipes in the air with their claws, showing
their teeth half in snarl and half in grin, steadily giving ground. [...]

Appleby and Steinfels, though they did not write their statements in
concert, agreed nonetheless on three main points:

(1) The crisis in the American Catholic Church is not confined to the
single matter of sexual abuse, and cannot be allayed simply by addressing
that problem. It is, said Appleby, just one manifestation (though a grisly
one) of "a closed clerical culture that infects the priesthood," a
priesthood that has "been made vulnerable to the unstable and to the
immoral."

(2) The crisis is caused by a total breakdown in accountability of the
hierarchy to the laity. As Steinfels put it:

The dam has broken-a reservoir of trust among Catholics has run dry. This
scandal has brought home to lay people how essentially powerless they are
to affect its outcome-and virtually anything else to do with the church.
When we ask, "What can I do?" what lay person isn't brought up short in
realizing, forty years after Vatican II with its promise of consultation
and collaboration, that our only serious leverage is money? That in itself
is a scandal.

(3) This breakdown stems from systemic corruption in the hierarchy, a
corruption caused by secrecy, denial, clerical self-protectiveness, and
docility to Vatican directives that ban openness. Steinfels castigated a
"lack of candor, honesty, integrity," a "silent and passive acquiescence in
Vatican edicts and understandings that you know to be contrary to your own
pastoral experience." Appleby urged the bishops "to formulate policies that
make the most sense of this [American] environment, without anticipating
how the Vatican might respond."

[...]
Catholics are right to wonder if these men, chosen for docility to the role
assigned them from Rome, have the nerve to stick by the pledge they made in
Dallas. [...]
For many reasons, the glow is going off this Pope. When Canadians were
asked in May if they were anticipating the pontiff's upcoming trip there,
less than 40 percent expressed any interest at all, and 60 percent of the
Catholics said that he should have resigned by now.[21] The agenda of the
Second Vatican Council, on hold during the term of John Paul II, will be
resumed after his death or resignation, making for more accountability in
the Church. The American bishops have come to recognize this fact. That is
the long-term meaning of the Dallas Charter.

-July 18, 2002
[...]