See no evil

Catholics want to admire and love their cardinals, but their affection is as sorely tested by this maladroit performance as a child's is when his father comes home drunk on Christmas. Ordinary Catholics are disappointed that these men, so knowing about achieving lofty office, seem so clueless about understanding human problems. Catholics do not ask much of their bishops and other church leaders. They are dismayed rather than angered when they get so little in return about a problem that the bishops have spoken about, getting themselves in deeper and failing a little more, in a succession of languages.

First it was the language of law and insurance to protect corporate assets; let's take this case by case, diocese by diocese, fight it all the way. But wait, the public told them, you're pastors who should be protecting your flocks not your flanks. So then they shifted to the forked tongue of public relations. Sentences containing passive-voice phrases, as in "mistakes may have been made," were troweled into place by P.R. experts. "Here's how you handle it, Bishop, in that tight spot when they ask you to tell the truth about what really happened." And lately, they have started talking the talk and walking the walk of criminal justice, turning in reams of names, sometimes of the dead, sometimes of men with unproved accusations -- it's like throwing babies off the sleigh in Russian novels, anything to keep the wolves from devouring us.

Catholics don't think it's rocket science, or even heavy theology, for bishops to understand what they know so simply in their hearts. Truth and falsehood differ, as do openness and evasion, disclosure and coverup, the elements that the robed monarchs seem to feel it is their right to mix and match with divinely granted impunity. Average worshipers also understand that their designated leaders had two decades, not just two days, to come to grips with a scourge that has damaged so many innocents -- including the thousands of generous priests who live in the shadow that has been lengthened by the cardinals, who are more intent on protecting themselves and being approved by the pope than on taking care of their people. Why is it, ordinary Catholics ask, that they still don't get it?

We have attended -- no flowers, please -- a funeral, not Edward VII's, but of anachronistic religious royalty, that gilded pyramid on the point of which we find more bishops clustered than angels on the heads of pins. Just below are the higher clergy, right over there, your excellency; and below them, the priests -- are you comfortable, Father? -- and on the bottom, bearing the whole creaking structure on their backs, are the ordinary Catholics, whose children were offered up to the insatiable gods of the immature and unhealthy.

Catholics need weep no tears at this death of this hierarchy. It was an inside job, a victim of its own overstuffed pride, a Titanic that missed the iceberg but sank under the weight of the first-class passengers. The church has not been assaulted by progressive theologians or pro-women clerical activists. Nor has it been undone by homosexuals or by the eroticized culture of America. This decaying aristocracy did not go out with a bang but a whimper, that slow, sad exhalation of breath coming from the cardinals. They self-destructed not by taking some grand risk to reveal the truth, but by just standing there blankly, passionlessly -- their faces, like those of the citizens of Pompeii, fixed in the expressions of eternal puzzlement with which they presented themselves to their people at a grave moment.

Catholics also understand that they, not the crimson-robed cardinals or the gold-ornamented buildings, are the church. This tragic episode allows the faithful a moment to clear away the marble debris that lies scattered around the pedestals from which the cardinals once reigned. In a profound rhythm of Catholic life, this destruction will be followed by resurrection -- a rebirth that will come not through the church's present timid and fearful leaders, but through the undying spirit of its everyday believers.

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