by The late Richard John Neuhaus used to emphasize that the Catholic Church’s priest sexual abuse scandal was about “fidelity, fidelity, fidelity,” and George Weigel makes the same point now. At one level, I agree. On another level, though, “fidelity” is too simplistic. Most of my sins stem less from a deliberate lack of faithfulness, and more from a failure to come to grips with my own tendencies to justify my behavior through mental gymnastics that in the end amount to self-delusion. Giving myself a pep talk every morning about “being more faithful” only goes so far. That’s why relationships of accountability are so important.
My guess is that most of the bishops who ended up facilitating abuse by keeping serial abusers secret, mobile, and working as priests would never have identified their decisions as a failure of fidelity. They may have been naive, but a clearer focus on faithfulness to their calling would not have done a whole lot to avoid the crisis. I think it’s important to identify the blind spots that allowed the bishops to mistake their decisions for fidelity, and to persist in that mistaken belief for years and years without correction. Yes, it is about evil decisions that individual priests made. Yes, it is about horrible decisions that individual bishops made. But it is also about the entire Church — not in the sense of playing “gotcha” journalism to try and bring down Pope Benedict – but in the sense of asking, what are the Church’s blind spots, how did those blind spots contribute to this crisis, and do those blind spots continue to compromise the Church’s witness to the world?
A few more specific questions come to mind along these lines: 1) in an age of greater institutional transparency, to what extent does a continued emphasis on secrecy threaten the Church’s witness and the well-being of its members? What are the implications and limitations of a more transparent Church? 2) if women bring a complementary set of gifts, inclinations, and sensibilities to our shared life, what is the cost of excluding them from leadership roles in the Church — i.e., might these abuse cases have turned out differently if women were part of the conversation? and 3) why was the Church slower than much (but certainly not all) of the rest of society in recognizing the gravity of child sexual abuse and the limitations of therapy? Are there other areas where Church practices fall behind the sociological and scientific reality?
Thoughts? Other questions that need to be asked? (I posted this on Mirror of Justice. I do not normally cross-post, but I’d love to get some insight from non-Catholics. Feel free to comment here or there.)
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