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  Graceless: a Vatican Paper on Clergy Sex Abuse Takes Gratuitous Swipe at Women's Ordination

Houston Chronicle
July 28, 2010

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/7129315.html

Week before last, the Catholic Church released revisions of its laws governing the procedures for dealing with sexual abuse by priests. It had been a long time coming.

Almost 10 years after a flood of reports of abuse in the United States, Canada and Ireland, news broke in January of numerous cases in Germany, followed by hundreds more from all over Europe.

In April, the bishop of Bruges, in Belgium, abruptly resigned when his years-long molestation of his nephew was about to be revealed, igniting a firestorm of complaints of priest abuse in that country.

Critics, including many Catholics, have long maintained that the church was more concerned with protecting its priests and the bishops who failed to monitor them than with the victims. In case after case, victims were disbelieved, punished or paid off, and priests were often merely transferred and allowed to continue ministering.

To their credit, U.S. bishops, in 2002, paid millions to victims and dismissed hundreds of priests. They also agreed to dismiss any priest who had ever sexually abused a minor and to report all accusations involving children to civil authorities.

Anyone expecting the Vatican to adopt such zero-tolerance standards must have been sorely disappointed. While extending the statute of limitations and streamlining the procedure of defrocking priests — which is already happening in practice - the revisions stop short of demanding, not just suggesting, that sexual molestation be reported to civil authorities and that bishops and church officials be held accountable for their priests.

But what raised eyebrows, and hackles, about the document was that it also declared any attempt to ordain women a crime equal in gravity to sexual abuse, and one for which a priest would henceforth be defrocked.

The juxtaposition was offensive, to say the least. As reported by Reuters, Vatican officials hastened to parse the difference: Sexual abuse is a crime against morality, attempting to ordain a woman is a crime against a sacrament.

Regardless of the canonical difference, the church had deliberately introduced the topic of women priests into the sordid world of pedophile priests, as if to warn its flock that no matter how horrific sexual abuse of children may be, they shouldn't even think that the ordination of women might in any way ameliorate matters. It's just not going to happen.

And why not? Because Christ had only male apostles, says the church, and that's that.

Nonetheless, a recent New York Times poll showed 59 percent of Catholics favored ordaining women, with 33 percent opposed. And since 2002, about 100 women have been ordained by Catholic bishops, (whose identities are kept anonymous) according to Roman Catholic Womenpriests, a U.S. Catholic organization.

So while the church has the power to bar women from the priesthood, it's obviously a topic of robust activism and debate inside and outside the church. That's a healthy sign. One can only wish the Vatican had had the grace to leave it at that.

As Jon O'Brien, president of U.S.-based Catholics for Choice, told Reuters, "If there is an opportunity for authorities in the Vatican to shoot themselves in the foot, they do so in both feet."

Amen to that.

 
 

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