The Grandiloquence of Church Rhetoric

By Ed Palm
Kitsap Sun
January 11, 2019

https://www.kitsapsun.com/story/opinion/columnists/2019/01/11/ed-palm-grandiloquence-church-rhetoric/2518469002/

Readers may recall that I wrote a couple columns in 2018 about the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal. As a Catholic school survivor of the late 1950s and early 1960s, I wasn’t surprised to learn that most of the abuses occurred between 1960 and 1980. I suspect that many — if not most — of the priests and bishops involved in these scandals came up through the largely-discarded high-school seminary system of the past.

Thinking they had — or may have had — a vocation, these 13- or 14-year-old boys agreed to be semi-cloistered at a time when many young boys are still unsure about their sexuality. Some may have thought that their disinterest in the opposite sex, or disinterest in sex in general, was a sign of their election — an indication that they had been called to the celibate life. Others probably overestimated their ability to suppress the sex drive as they matured. And some, as we now know, later realized they were sexually attracted to children. The high-school seminaries were schools for scandal, and I am still waiting for an enterprising investigative journalist to determine how many of the abusers did begin to prepare for the priesthood at high-school seminaries.

What brought this to mind was an AP report reprinted recently in the Sun (Jan. 2) about how the Vatican stepped in at the 11th hour to stop the U.S. Conference of American Bishops from voting at their November meeting on a “code of conduct for bishops” and on the creation of a lay-led sex-abuse commission. Cardinal Marc Ouellet, a Vatican official, ordered the American bishops to await the guidance that will presumably come out of a “global summit” Pope Francis intends to hold next month on “preventing sex abuse by priests.”

I can understand why the Vatican would not want American bishops to preempt the Pope on this issue. I can further understand that the Church needs to formulate a set of consistent and coherent policies regarding sex abuse. And for better or worse, as the article reminded readers, “The Holy See alone has exclusive authority to investigate and discipline problem bishops.” But, aside from disregarding abuse survivors’ demands for decisive and swift action, what bothers me about the Vatican’s delay is something that has bothered me from my earliest experience with the Church — the tendency to couch controversial decisions, doctrines, and dogmas in grandiloquent language.