UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
May. 07, 2012
By Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea
COMMENTARY
The Catholic hierarchy from the papacy on down seems to be roiling through a series of manic episodes in which they execute perverted power plays against those perceived as enemies. This kind of mania often is exhibited by large identity groups whose power has been threatened and who are unable to respond adaptively to that loss through a process of healthy mourning.
For decades now, the power of the Catholic monarchy to control the social, spiritual, and political lives of its members has been in decline. While Humane Vitae, the 1968 papal encyclical that upheld the church’s traditional ban on artificial contraceptioin, placed Catholic dissension (or perhaps spiritual maturation) in relief in the late 1960s, the sexual abuse crisis returned it to center stage throughout the past decade. In fact, Humane Vitae was only superficially about birth control and the sexual abuse crisis was only partially about sexual abuse. Both crises were fundamentally about power: who holds it, over whom, to what extent, in what areas of life.
Along with victims and advocates who have aggressively brought the church to task for the crimes of power inherent in sexual abuse, religious women — usually much closer to actual human beings trying to live their lives than are the ecclesiastical nobles — have raised powerful voices exhorting the Catholic community to attend better to the world’s suffering, especially that of the most marginalized. Even more recently, priests in some quarters have assumed a power to insist that attention be paid to the need and the rightness of expanding priestly ministry to the married and the female. In other words, the common citizens of the realm are calling out the royals on their failures to care well for those most in need — victims of hierarchical neglect and abuse inherent in the sexual abuse crisis; priests who cannot meet the needs of the flock; women speaking on behalf of women and children, minorities, the Earth, and the poor.
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