By Margery Eagan
Boston Herald
March 28, 2010
http://news.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view/20100327why_pope_benedicts_got_to_go/srvc=home&position=also
UNITED STATES -- The Pope should resign. He should offer himself up to authorities for prosecution, like the sacrificial lamb he's supposed to represent here on earth.
Long ago he should have opened the secret church books on priestly abuse. He hasn't. Courts finally forced that in Boston almost a decade ago and, oh, what horrors we found. Remember? The Vatican hierarchy then blamed our scandal on a decadent American culture. Now the same priestly disease has swept Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, on and on across Europe and beyond. So was all the world, from the 1950s on, just one huge, decadent Gomorrah? Or was the Catholic hierarchy, from the '50s on, run like an international crime organization aiding and abetting child abuse, then covering up its cover-up?
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| HIS HOLINESS: Pope Benedict XVI has come under fire for recent allegations he might have known about pedophile priests and in one case transferred one back to work with children. |
A few years back, former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating caused an uproar by comparing secret-keeping American bishops to La Cosa Nostra.
He was but ahead of his time.
Were truth and light really foremost on the Vatican's list, the Pope would've forced resignations of bishops who, even post-Boston, knew about abusing priests yet demanded secrecy. A small number of priests have been prosecuted. Any bishops? I can't find any. Neither can I find a single bishop who actually called police when a serial child molester was reported to him. And now we learn that one serial molester is believed to have tormented more than 200 deaf boys.
"You're dreaming." That's what Carmen Durso, who's represented dozens of priest abuse victims, told me Friday when I offered him my list of "shoulds" and "woulds."
"It's just not in their DNA. They don't appoint popes who they think will start apologizing. Just like corporate executives do dishonest things to rise in the ranks, higher-ups in the church do dishonest things to protect the organization. And that will go on until there is a total restructuring of the Catholic Church."
Now I think Carmen Durso is dreaming. But even if such a restructuring does happen, neither he nor me - nor most of you - will see it.
Yet all this is not necessarily horrible for the shrinking ranks of still-practicing Catholics beginning this most holy week of the Christian season. This hierarchy's continual half-baked repentance - apology followed by inaction - bodes worse for bishops: They appear increasingly ridiculous and irrelevant, issuing moral directives when so morally compromised themselves.
Recall last week when the bishops opposed the health-care bill to cover 30-plus million uninsured Americans. Even typically obedient Catholic nuns raced in to point out the hypocrisy: the bishops' ever more shrill crusade for unborn children vs. their campaigning against the health needs of children already born. And then, of course, came the inevitable juxtaposition of their failure to protect those children tormented by priests bishops knew to be monsters.
The hierarchy's loss of moral authority has been wonderfully liberating for some Catholics now free to ignore, with good conscience, bishops' various directives on gays, birth control, divorce and remarriage, etc. I know many who've been able to separate their bedrock faith from Catholic leadership. Such Catholics support what's good in the church (their parish, parochial schools, Catholic charities, etc.) and not what's compromised (their archdiocese and the Vatican itself).
In the envelope provided yearly for Cardinal O'Malley's appeal, one woman I know inserts a note explaining why she won't contribute a dime.
"I refuse to let a bunch of corrupt old men drive me from the church I love," she says, adding that she sometimes feels almost sorry for bishops. "It's like that childhood fairy tale. The emperor who was so big and powerful is the last one to know he has no clothes."
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