UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Michael Sean Winters | May. 8, 2014 Distinctly Catholic
First, congratulations to Grant Gallicho and Matthew Boudway at Commonweal for scoring an in-depth interview with Cardinal Walter Kasper and, more importantly, for doing their homework and asking really smart, well-prepared questions. Second, kudos to Cardinal Kasper for inviting all of us to think more deeply and with greater nuance about a host of issues. Whether one agrees with all of his conclusions or insights, his is a powerful and faithful mind.
Of course, the key comments of Kasper’s that will warm the hearts of liberal Catholics are his various insistences on the need to ask the question: Where is the mercy for people in this situation? This is a question Christians must always be prepared to ask. It is always a relevant question. But before this line of thinking leads us to a general and unspecific suspicion of legalism and canonical concerns more generally, let us modify the question a tad: Where is the mercy for priests who sexually abused minors? Surely, God’s sacrifice on Calvary redeems them too, does it not? Nor is it enough to observe that if the Church shows mercy to priests who abused minors, the Church does an injustice both to the victims of clergy sex abuse and to the 95 percent of priests who have never touched a minor inappropriately. No, we must face the question head-on, and it is not an easy question. The best I have come up with? It is a strange form of mercy that permits a priest who abused a child to return to a way of life that will continue to give him a unique type of access into other people’s intimate lives, where the temptation to commit the sin and crime again will manifest itself anew. It is akin to putting an open bottle of scotch in front of someone struggling to stay sober. I confess I am not entirely satisfied with that answer, but, as I say, it is the best I have been able to come up with. The larger point is this. Yes, we must always ask how we can be vehicles of God’s mercy, but balancing mercy with justice, as Cardinal Kasper suggests, cannot be a smokescreen for laxity. Similarly, in hearing some commentators chastise Cardinal Kasper for threatening the Church’s approach to the issue of divorce and remarriage, one has the suspicion that they get some kind of thrill by appearing to be rigorists. Rigor is to be avoided as much as laxity.
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