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	Forgiveness Reconciliation Are Necessary for All By Rev. Andrew M. Greeley Arizona Daily Star April 23, 2008 http://www.azstarnet.com/allheadlines/235492 No one except the hard-line haters of SNAP — The Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests — and Christopher Hitchens can find fault with the Pope's response to the sexual-abuse scandal in the United States. SNAP wants the severed heads of many American bishops to be served up on silver platters. The pope's words, we are told, are too little and too late. Hitchens demands that the pope remove Cardinal law from his sinecure at the Church of St. Mary Major in Rome. The hate in some of the victims groups scares me. I gave the keynote address at the founding meeting of SNAP — in those days I was one of the few priests that publicly supported the victims. They shouted hate at me even though I was on their side. "If you attack your friends," I warned them, "you won't have any friends." I was wrong. The tort lawyers seem to be their friends. I escaped from their ire at the end of my talk. Everyone wanted to tell me in raw detail what was done to them. Somehow I had become personally responsible for the corruption in the priesthood and in the church. The victims have much to complain about and solid reasons to hate. Yet hatred and the need for revenge eats up the soul. The words of Jesus and the pope about forgiveness are dismissed. There must be more retribution before one can talk about forgiveness. Forgiveness and reconciliation are psychologically essential as a prelude for getting on with one's life. I am not saying that there should be no more suits, no more challenges, no immoderate language, no more attempts to trump up charges against every cardinal in sight. But rage that never ends and by definition cannot end does not hurt the enemy but hurts only oneself. One must finally give up the need for revenge and move on because it concedes one more victory to the victimizer. The pope must be more careful himself in the future about the men he appoints as bishops. There is no room any more in the church, caught as it is in chaos and anger, for mean-spirited, insecure, vindictive, ill-tempered, repressive and ignorant bishops, especially those who find emotional satisfaction from lording it over the laity and the clergy. Canon law is necessary in the church, perhaps sometimes a necessary evil, but it is not a substitute for the Gospel. If a bishop has lost the credibility of his people, then he must go. Tensions among various factions in the American church are often between those who accept the changes of the Vatican Council and those who want to undo them, with the latter demanding power to purge the former. Thus the so-called Cardinal Newman Society exists to take control of the Catholic faculties and constrain them to teach "orthodoxy," by which they mean the same doctrinal formulae which were in vain pounded into the students' heads before 1960. That is not likely to happen if for no other reason than that is not the way you educate young people today — or ever. It never did work even in the 1950s when the "hit the box, hit the rail" spirituality flourished in the realm of the Golden Dome. Moreover, a sympathetic and restrained approach to students is a far more efficient form of teaching than "hit the box, hit the rail," as the emergence of movements like Aiding Catholic Education proves. Aiding Catholic Education is a group of young people fervently dedicated to the Catholic education of the poor. If the Cardinal Newman Society should take over, Aiding Catholic Education would be dead.
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