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	On Catholic Church Abuse Scandal, Rome Has Simply Fiddled Charlotte Observer July 20, 2010 http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2010/07/20/1572073/on-catholic-church-abuse-scandal.html If the Vatican is trying to restore the impression that its moral sense is intact, issuing a document that equates pedophilia with the ordination of women doesn't really do that. The Catholic Church continued to heap insult upon injury when it revealed its long-awaited new rules on clergy sex abuse, rules that the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said signaled a commitment to grasp the nettle with "rigor and transparency." The church still believes in its own intrinsic holiness despite all evidence to the contrary. It thinks it is making huge concessions on the unstoppable abuse scandal when it's taking baby steps. The casuistic document did not issue a zero-tolerance policy to defrock priests after they are found guilty of pedophilia; it did not order bishops to report every instance of abuse to the police; it did not set up sanctions on bishops who sweep abuse under the rectory rug; it did not eliminate the statute of limitations for abused children; it did not tell bishops to stop lobbying legislatures to prevent child-abuse laws from being toughened. There is no moral awakening here. The cruelty and indecency of child abuse once more inspires tactical contrition. All the penitence of the church is grudging and reactive. Church leaders are merely as penitent as they need to be to protect the institution. After the Belgian police bracingly conducted raids on the church hierarchy, inspired in part by the horrifying case of a boy molested for years by his uncle, the bishop of Bruges, a case that the church ignored and covered up for 25 years, the pope did not applaud the more aggressive tack. He condemned it. A Times story recently debunked the spin that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had been one of the more alert officials on the issue of sexual abuse: "The future pope, it is now clear, was also part of a culture of nonresponsibility, denial, legalistic foot-dragging and outright obstruction. More than any top Vatican official other than John Paul, it was Cardinal Ratzinger who might have taken decisive action in the 1990s to prevent the scandal from metastasizing in country after country, growing to such proportions that it now threatens to consume his own papacy." Stupefyingly, the new Vatican document also links raping children with ordaining women as priests, deeming both "graviora delicta," or grave offenses. Clerics who attempt to ordain women can now be defrocked. Letting women be priests - which should be seen as a way to help cleanse the church and move it beyond its infantilized and defensive state - is now on the list of awful sins right next to pedophilia, heresy, apostasy and schism. In The New Republic, Garry Wills wrote about his struggle to come to terms with the sins of his church: Jesus "is the one who said, 'Whatever you did to any of my brothers, even the lowliest, you did to me.' That means that the priests abusing the vulnerable young were doing that to Jesus, raping Jesus. Any clerical functionary who shows more sympathy for the predator priests than for their victims instantly disqualified himself as a follower of Jesus. The cardinals said they must care for their own, going to jail if necessary to protect a priest. We say the same thing, but the 'our own' we care for are the victimized, the poor, the violated. They are Jesus." Maureen Dowd is a columnist for The New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018-1405.
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