Holy Weeks Unholy Question What Could End Sex Abuse Crisis, by Sinead OConnor, USA Today, March 28, 2010

Holy Week's Unholy Question: What Could End Sex Abuse Crisis?

By Sinead O'Connor
USA Today
March 28, 2010

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/religion/post/2010/03/sex-abuse-palm-sunday-pope-benedict-sinead-oconnor/

UNITED STATES -- This is Holy Week for Christians, the beginning of Holy Week leading up to Easter Sunday. But news coverage of the Catholic Church right now is distracted from the ways believers celebrate the "good news" -- the gospel of Christ -- to coverage of the pope and the sexual abuse crisis now raging.

So why am I thinking about the aftermath of Enron?

Something about reaction to the news coverage reminds me of how the American public just loved seeing the alleged bad boys of that financial scandal arrested and led off in handcuffs.

Photo by Maurizio Brambatti

There was something satisfying about the "perp walk." No matter how the cases were later resolved, there was no doubt those men were being publicly humiliated. That sense of self-righteous retribution lights up our brains, I learned in a recent lecture by a psychology researcher Kathleen Taylor.

Now, it would seem, nothing less than a "perp walk" out of Catholic Church leadership for those bishops who protected pedophile priests and the name of the Church over children who were abused -- will quell the anger rising toward the Vatican and, now, Pope Benedict XVI.

Photo by Brett Coomer

We likely won't see it, here or in Europe.

Church historian Matthew Bunson calculates that 62% of U.S. bishops in place in 2002 when the scandal erupted here have already retired or died. Only one, Cardinal Bernard Law, ever stepped down because he failed to care for Catholic youth, and he resigned as Archbishop of Boston. He was not "fired" by the pope.

In Europe, where the Church has withstood anti-clerical climates for centuries, it's also highly unlikely that the Vatican will see current revelations as anything other than the 21st Century efforts of its enemies to undermine it, writes Frank Bruni, the New York Times former Vatican Correspondent. He reported on this long before it was a worldwide scandal, as co-author of the 1993 book, A Gospel of Shame: Children, Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church.

Benedict is more likely to allow each national bishops conference to tackle this according to its own culture and national legal system, similar to the way special canon law enabled the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to establish a zero tolerance policy that swept credibly accused priests out of ministry, says theologian George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Institute.

So far, however, decentralized approach has only led to a trickle of resignations has come out of Ireland, rather than any dismissals from Rome. The Associated Press reports that,

...the head of the German bishops' conference has said the Vatican was compiling information from various bishops' conferences around the world with the possible aim of setting out new guidelines for dealing with the problem.

That's an approach that takes months, if not years, and a whole lot of headline cycles reporting a steady drumbeat of bad news and rising anger -- among victims, the public, and also supporters of the Pope who see anti-Catholic bias in the news media' failure to put clerical sexual abuse in the larger social context.

Why isn't the New York Times equally interested in abuse cases in the New York public schools, asks The Anchoress blogger Elizabeth Scalia at the conservative Catholic journal First Things.

Archbishop of New York Timothy Dolan called for prayers for the pope at the conclusion of his Palm Sunday Mass in Saint Patrick's Cathedral now that the pope, he says, according to a press release, is the target of "certain sources" who "seem frenzied to implicate the man who, perhaps more than anyone else has been the leader in purification, reform, and renewal that the Church so needs."

Dolan said,

No one has been more vigorous in cleansing the Church of the effects of this sickening sin than the man we now call Pope Benedict XVI. The dramatic progress that the Catholic Church in the United States has made -- documented again just last week by the report made by independent forensic auditors -- could never have happened without the insistence and support of the very man now being daily crowned with thorns by groundless innuendo.

Does the Church and her Pastor, Pope Benedict XVI, need intense scrutiny and just criticism for tragic horrors long past? Yes! He himself has asked for it, encouraging complete honesty, at the same time expressing contrition, and urging a thorough cleansing.

All we ask is that it be fair, and that the Catholic Church not be singled-out for a horror that has cursed every culture, religion, organization, institution, school, agency, and family in the world

Meanwhile, the Washington Post gave prime real estate in it's weekend Outlook section to an Irish woman who claims she was personally abused by the church in a home for wayward girls.