Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
By utterly failing to address the church's sex abuse scandal this week in Rome, the Catholic aristocracy demonstrated its complete irrelevance.
Apr 26, 2002 | Ordinary American Catholics bear a wisdom within them that was hauntingly absent in their cardinals as they announced on Wednesday, to the melancholy taps of an uncertain trumpet, their unfinished plans to deal with the church's roiling sex abuse scandal -- a plague that they do not understand, although it has long afflicted their people, whose advice they have not sought. There is something poignant about good men bumbling solemnly in public, as travelers with 19th century tickets might on finding themselves on the concourse of the 21st century -- what place is this, what is that noise overhead, what are those devices people murmur into as they hold them to their heads?
The American cardinals' stunned out-of-synch surprise at finding themselves standing in postmodern Rome in medieval robes convinces everyday Catholics that the current crisis is not of the church as a great religious faith but rather of the church as a hierarchical organization -- clanking, clumsy and good only for museum display. This is how we lived in the days of the divine right of kings.
Average Catholics retain their faith in their church but they have lost their confidence in that church's leaders. Is there any wonder, after the utterly depressing Wednesday night presentation by these seemingly good and gentle men, as they proceeded to shred the flag of their own authority with their bewildered, belated, and finally benighted effort to get out front on an issue that they have been behind for 20 years?
This presentation by these crimson-clad princes of the church may be compared with the funeral of Edward VII -- the last gathering, in 1910 London, of crowned heads and monarchs who rode their royally caparisoned mounts in the solemn spectacle, uncomprehending the fate that awaited them and their hierarchical tradition in the muddy wasteland of the First World War. What is left of the departed era of kings on top and commoners on the bottom wheezes now in a combination of soap opera and waxworks as a tourist attraction in Great Britain.
The cardinals assembled in Rome seem just as uncomprehending of the fate they called down upon themselves like doomed mythic gods, as they proposed a garbled answer to a question they were unable to ask clearly about a subject they were unable to define at all. That most of the cardinals did not bother showing up to explain themselves at the final news conference, pleading "other engagements," offered another pathetic footnote to their already moldering claims to live and rule from ecclesiastical sky boxes high above and well beyond the expectations that bind ordinary humans who live so far beneath them.
Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, speaking for his brethren, was hard pressed to explain why there was no mention, in the vague propositions his confreres had authored, of these ordinary people. They were in there last night, he said, unable to voice what he may have suspected -- that the cardinals had been so busy worrying about keeping their balance on their high perch that they failed to look down to that level where the ordinary people, whose sons and daughters had been plundered by priests, suffered, lived and, miraculously, still believed. Only hierarchy-induced vertigo explains why the church elite had lavished so much attention on the victimizing priests and so little on those they had victimized.
Let me see if I've got this right. These grown men traveled thousands of miles across the Atlantic to Rome to find out from the pope that the sexual abuse of minors is both a crime and a sin? I am not making this up.
The cosmos conspires against hierarchical structures in the space/information age. The first impulse of hierarchs is to control everything from that peak where they feel they have been placed like immaculate chess pieces by the hand of God himself. In the Loyola University study of bishops done by Dr. Mary Sheehan and Dr. Frank Kobler, we learned that these men suffer the hierarchical syndrome, for which no cure has been found. They believe as earnestly as Eagle Scouts that they have been chosen from all eternity to be successors to the Apostles, that it was in the plan all the while -- royal blood is royal blood, why fight it? -- that they were destined to be placed above others with power and privileges more sumptuous than the virgins in a terrorist's dreams. As one responded when named a bishop, "It humbles me to be raised above my brother priests."
All this sad self-importance revealed itself in the two-day exercise in Rome, when the cardinals' main goal soon became apparent: They want to make sure that the pope approves of what they do. So they took their lead from the pope's hard line about there being no place in the church or religious life for those who abuse children. That's it, by God or by John Paul II, whichever comes first, one strike and you're out of the priesthood, chalice, Roman collar and big car, too. The great problem, as some of them soon realized, is that the cardinals could not define the strike zone -- is it a serial predator or a guy who slips once? Does the clock start now or do we make a sweep through the files to net more of the dead, the demented and the forgotten? Well, never mind, we can wait until June, when the American bishops convene in Dallas, to sort it all out -- we pray.
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