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	Column - Greg Sagan: Church Endures Agony of Secrecy By Greg Sagan Amarillo.com March 30, 2010 http://www.amarillo.com/stories/033010/opi_opin2.shtml TEXAS -- This must be a time of agony for the Catholic church. Locally, we endure the loss of Bishop Emeritus L.T. Matthiesen, who passed away last week. I was privileged to have been acquainted with Bishop Matt for the past dozen years, and I have even received mail from him about my writing. Every once in a while he agreed with me, and when he didn't he was articulate, knowledgeable, sincere and reasonable. He was what I'm sure many would call an elitist, being as he was intelligent, educated and wise, but to me he was a force of God from the moment we met. I miss him. In point of fact, Bishop Matthiesen was to me a persuasive argument in favor of a married clergy. He was, in every sense of the word, a father. The world is less for not having more children raised by him. On the global scale, we have the despicable revelations about sexual abuse of children by priests and others affiliated with the Catholic church. These revelations about abuse in the United States, Ireland, Germany and Italy have prompted various reactions from the Vatican. Pope Benedict XVI issued an apology to Ireland and criticism of the western media for reporting about how high the knowledge of these crimes extended inside the church. But the press is onto a serious question. In the case of Father Lawrence C. Murphy, accused of sexually abusing more than 200 deaf boys in Wisconsin, Pope Benedict, when he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, ordered his canonical trial stopped before it concluded and allowed him to remain a priest until he died a couple years later. Moreover, Cardinal Ratzinger is drawing attention for other decisions he made about priests accused of sexual molestation in which he failed to notify law enforcement authorities about the charges. Such allegations are not new. Over the past decade or so the Catholic church has paid more than $1 billion to settle civil lawsuits arising from predatory priests who were, more often than not, transferred to different parishes rather than defrocked. But now the bright lights being shone on this problem are shining on the Vatican and, indeed, the papacy. I have been struck by the twin stances the Vatican is attempting to manage. On the one hand, the Vatican seems intent on taking responsibility, apologizing and asking sincerely for forgiveness. But on the other hand the Vatican is acting like a politician caught in a scandal that quickly escalates into a cause celebre - denying responsibility and intimating that the press is to blame for the negative attention. America has a lot of experience with scandal. Look under any rock and you can find episodes of the immoral, the base and the shameful. We typically elect people to public office for their superficial appeal - and then watch in embarrassed horror as they do superficial things and lie their butts off about it. So we have a feel for what plays and what doesn't. In America what plays is for men, especially in roles of high trust, to come clean about their actions and the consequences. The more someone obfuscates and maneuvers to avoid responsibility the more responsibility we insist he bear. Cursing the light instead of the dirt it reveals is no way to clean a stall, and we know it. But when you think about it, the Catholic church embraces a culture that makes it easy for priests to prey on children if they are inclined to. The mainstays of the Catholic faith, as practiced by its leaders, are secrecy, discipline and blind belief in its tenets. Given such a culture, whom would you expect it to attract? Yes, it attracts people like Bishop Matt, but it also attracts people like the Reverend Murphy - people who can "sell" the notion that sex imposed on a child by a priest is both holy and unmentionable on pain of forfeiting heaven. It isn't unusual to see children accepting such a distorted proposition. They generally don't know any better. That is a special category of sin, one that deserves to have the lid ripped off and to have the practice exposed dispassionately under the searing light of law - and by that I mean the law of the land, not just of the church. Whether Pope Benedict is innocent or not, chances are excellent that he won't answer for what he may have done. He is a head of state, and in America you can't prosecute one of those. What people can do is leave the church, and that is precisely what the Vatican is maneuvering to avoid. How ironic.
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