UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism
Jerry Slevin
Pope Francis is entering the most critical period of his papacy. He meets soon with all of his Cardinals and his “go slow” abuse commission under Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley holds its first full meeting shortly. And in a matter of a mere several months, the pope holds his Final Synod (without any women as full participants, incidentally), as he then moves into his 80th year, on one lung no less.
Francis is surely a remarkable person . Yet by now he must know what the ex-Pope’s sudden quitting really signified. Popes now cannot save both the Catholic Church and the Vatican for the reasons discussed below. Francis’ Christmas attack on Vatican officials perhaps confirmed this. Francis appears, however, to have chosen mainly to protect the Catholic hierarchy, a losing proposition, and likely has as a result set the stage for an accelerated division into various Church factions.
Pope Francis is quite old and yet is working non-stop. He appears, unfortunately, to be surrounded by some men who seem to be oblivious to the Vatican’s precarious position. Francis faces at least three major scandals involving priest child abuse, sexually repressive teachings and officials’ financial corruption, while his hierarchy debate arcane matters like “graduality” and most of the media still focus on counting papal “tweets” and other irrelevancies.
The scandal that has changed everything for the previously “untouchable” Vatican is the child abuse scandal. The pope clearly has not done nearly enough here. And his efforts to change the sexually repressive teachings are facing strong resistance from conservative Cardinals as discussed below. He is almost out of time. While the pope has made a start, in Rome at least, on curtailing his hierarchy’s financial corruption, he still has a long way to go.
Pope Francis’ response to date on the most sensational scandal, the abuse cover up, seems to be mostly more of the same half measures used by his failed predecessors. Bishops are still not required under Church rules generally to report child abuse claims to the police, for example, and accused clerics are investigated secretively by other clerics mainly. Francis has not acted to improve priest selection by expanding the selection pool to include married men and women, and he has not acted on predatory priest management oversight by making bishops accountable.
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