VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter
by John L Allen Jr on Jun. 14, 2012 NCR Today
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Civilità Cattolica is usually described as a “quasi-official” or “semi-official” Vatican organ, because although the bimonthly journal is published and edited by the Jesuits, it’s read by the Vatican’s Secretariat of State prior to publication.
While that doesn’t mean that every word carries a stamp of approval, it does suggest that in a big-picture sense, Civilità Cattolica is usually a reliable guide to the thinking of officialdom.
That makes an essay in the June 16 issue especially interesting, published under the deliberately provocative headline, “Is the Church’s Hierarchy Abusive?”
The essay, by Jesuit Fr. Giandomenico Mucci, is not a reflection on specific alleged abuses by the hierarchy, such as its handling of the sexual abuse crisis or the Vatican’s recent crackdown on a nuns’ group in the States. Instead, Mucci argues that the hierarchy of the Catholic church necessarily attracts scorn and resistance, quite apart from its specific policy choices, because it cannot help but seem “abusive” to the basic presuppositions of the post-modern world.
The result, Mucci asserts, is that the media is fascinated by dissent, and exalts the dissenters as the “true, mature Catholics,” as opposed to the church’s power structure.
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