The Record
August 12 2010
http://www.therecord.com.au/site/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1885&Itemid=30
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| Cardinal Godfried Danneels, retired archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, Belgium, arrives at Belgian federal police headquarters in Brussels on 6 July. Police questioned Cardinal Danneels as part of an investigation into alleged priestly sexual abuse in the Archdiocese. Photo: CNS/Stringer via Reuters |
In a new column for The Record, Scalabrinian priest and Perth’s former Vicar for Migrants gives a personal view of recent events in the Church.
A remedy?
The word ‘crisis’ has been mentioned so often in relation to the phenomenon of abuse that it is difficult to avoid mentioning it again.
How often have I seen on television or read the statement following a formal apology by Church authorities that a response “…has not gone far enough, that more has to be done…” etc. Worse still, the recent headline While Rome is under siege, the Cardinals quarrel.
But altercations and quarrels are not only confined to members of the Church.
How wrong or right was William McGurn when, writing in The Wall Street Journal (6 April, 2010) in response to a New York Times article a few days before, he stated: “Back in 2002, he (Mr Anderson, a lawyer), told the Associated Press that he’d won more than US$60 million in settlements from the Church, and he once boasted to the Twin Cities weekly that he’s ‘suing the s-t out of them everywhere’? He’s now trying to sue the Vatican in US federal court.”
How often has the ‘independent’ media highlighted the Church’s backwardness, its monolithic culture?
Lisa Miller, for example, Newsweek’s religious editor, recently wrote: “The problem is that the Bishops and Cardinals who manage the institutional Church live behind guarded walls in a pre-Enlightenment world”.
When uttered by “outside” sources such statements hold, in several cases, an unmistakable crusading tone aimed at demolishing the moral and spiritual authority of the Church.
But can the Church be reduced to the same standards used to determine progress or regress as for any other human organisation?
In spite of its assumed religious or divine roots, its fate and destiny would be downsized to and decided by purely human criteria, drawn from the many lessons of human history.
It is well known, after all, that entire civilisations have disappeared as their spirit collapses and as their inner organisation, cultural, social and religious heritage is disregarded, sidestepped or fiercely destroyed.
That a crisis that is a significant turn-around in the history of the Church and of the world has been recently gaining some momentum in intensity and geographical spread is by now well documented.
While confined for several decades to some nations, particularly the US, Canada and also Australia, it has now spread to many European countries.
A recent blitz by Belgian police resulted in the confiscation of all documents held by the diocese of Malines-Bruxelles and the unnecessary violation of the tombs of two Cardinals (Josef-Ernest Van Roey and Leon-Joseph Suenens) which were allegedly hiding documents. The operation was nicknamed “Church(!) Operation”.
According to media reports, the Church’s involvement has also reached the highest echelons of its hierarchy, with the present Pope featuring prominently in stories in print or broadcast news, according to the Pew Research Center in the US.
During the last few months particularly, and most notably during the last Lenten season, there was a remarkable acceleration of reports, accusations and counter-accusations which tended to create the impression that, unlike any other human or civil entity, the Catholic Church is riddled at all levels by chronic misbehaviour towards minors and adolescents.
In the process of scanning the shady world of pedophilia or the lesser known ephebophilia (homosexual attraction to adolescent males) through various reports from many sources, I felt one had to confront the task, perilous and at times rather unpleasant though it might be, to make any sense of what has been happening.
Suddenly, the Church, usually regarded by the media as an irrelevant and decrepit institution, was appearing in the media, orchestrated in such a way that it would quickly be forced to forget about being salt and leaven today’s world.
Under a barrage of continual negative reporting I felt challenged to find a personal understanding that might give some measure of confidence and steadiness in the midst of a mild earthquake: new cases constantly being unearthed, and calls (as in the case of Auxiliary Bishop Pat Power of Canberra) for immediate total reform of the Church, particularly in the field of human relationships.
I found some answers in recent statistical data and within the inner niches of the history of the Church.
To be continued...
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