Today's New York Times has an op-ed by John L. Allen, Jr., correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter. He acknowledges that bad things happened on the pope's watch as archbishop in Munich and that he has to bear overall responsibility, even for what he was not directly aware of. However, the main point of the article is that, beginning in 2001 then Cardinal Ratzinger began to be part of the solution as the Vatican official responsible for handling all reports of abuse in the church worldwide. Allen writes:
The experience gave him a familiarity with the pervasiveness of the problem that virtually no other figure in the Catholic Church can claim. And driven by that encounter with what he would later refer to as “filth” in the church, Cardinal Ratzinger seems to have undergone a transformation. From that point forward, he and his staff were determined to get something done. . . .Under his guidance cases began to be handled more expeditiously and with compassion for the victims. After becoming pope, he made the abuse cases a priority, he disciplined high-profile clerics who had previously been protected at the hightest levels, and he was the first pope ever to meet with victims. Allen continues:
What we are left with are two distinct views of the scandal. The outside world is outraged, rightly, at the church’s decades of ignoring the problem. But those who understand the glacial pace at which change occurs in the Vatican understand that Benedict, admittedly late in the game but more than any other high-ranking official, saw the gravity of the situation and tried to steer a new course.
Be that as it may, Benedict now faces a difficult situation inside the church. From the beginning, the sexual abuse crisis has been composed of two interlocking but distinct scandals: the priests who abused, and the bishops who failed to clean it up. The impact of Benedict’s post-2001 conversion has been felt mostly at that first level, and he hasn’t done nearly as much to enforce new accountability measures for bishops.
That, in turn, is what makes revelations about his past so potentially explosive. Can Benedict credibly ride herd on other bishops if his own record, at least before 2001, is no better? The church’s legitimacy rests in large part on that question.
And from an editorial in the same paper:
“No longer can the Vatican simply issue papal messages — subject to nearly infinite interpretations and highly nuanced constructions — that are passively ‘received’ by the faithful. No longer can secondary Vatican officials, those who serve the pope, issue statements and expect them to be accepted at face value. . . . We now face the largest institutional crisis in centuries, possibly in church history. How this crisis is handled by Benedict, what he says and does, how he responds and what remedies he seeks, will likely determine the future health of our church for decades, if not centuries, to come. It is time, past time really, for direct answers to difficult questions. It is time to tell the truth.”
That is strong stuff coming from a Roman Catholic newspaper, albeit one that calls itself "the independent newsweekly." While the church folks figure out what they're going to do, I pass along the advice of a psychoanalytic expert on trauma, my friend Mickey Nardo. (See his 1boringoldman.com web site.) The Vatican should consult Mickey on this. He understands what they need to do:
In treating people who were sexually abused as children, there’s one wish that emerges in almost every case, a fantasy of a confrontation - not a confrontation with the perpetrator, but a confrontation with the "silent witness." The "silent witness" is the person in their life who "knew" but did nothing, or the person in their life who "should have known" and did nothing, or the forces that gave them an unprotected life. Such confrontations sometimes occur, but they rarely offer the anticipated relief. The reason is something deeper in the mind, the reparative fantasy of almost every abused child. The only solution would be that the abuse never happened in the first place. That’s the only thing that would ever make things right. Revenge, retribution, reforms are nice for the people who come in the future, but not the victims of the past.
What’s happening here isn’t really about the Catholic Church. It’s about what happened to those children. And it’s about our awareness that something really bad happened in that Church, something that went on for a very long time, and nobody did anything about it. The Church speaks incessantly about forgiveness through confession followed by genuine remorse and acts of contrition - not a bad policy. But, as these articles point out, that’s not what the Church itself is doing. We are entering Holy Week, the celebration of Christ’s crucifixion - an act of contrition for "the sins of the world." But what we’re going to read about during Holy Week this year are the sins of the Church, and their defenses against these obviously true accusations.
It is irrelevant that an old retired, non-christian, psychiatrist says these things. What would be relevant would be for the Pope to be saying them himself.
Ralph
I wonder if the Catholic Church finds itself in an untenable position because it is looking at this as a legal problem. If the Pope steps down, that could be interpreted as an admission of guilt, and you would see lawsuits fly. If the Pope maintains his position, the lawsuits might be contained at the local levels. If the Church looked at this as what it is, a horrendous moral outrage, the only recourse would be for the Pope to say mea culpa, and step down. That would be an incredible example to give for the Church. The Pope, like Christ, could 'accept' the sins of all the people and sacrifice himself for the good of all. Let himself be crucified. That is the only way I see to salvage this.
ReplyDeleteBut because the Church is a corporation, too, corporate policy will trump issues of faith.
richard