WASHINGTON D.C.
National Catholic Reporter
October 12, 2018
by Michael Sean Winters
“Antistite nostro Donaldo.” For more than 10 years, from the time of his installation as Archbishop of Washington in 2006, until my moving out of the archdiocese in 2017, every Sunday at Mass, I softly repeated these words as the priest said them in the Roman Canon. “For our bishop Donald,” I prayed them on the days I could not borrow a car to get to the 10 a.m. Latin Mass at St. Matthew’s and I had to walk to the suburban church near my house. Over that time, those words went from something rote and obligatory to something personal and powerful, though still obligatory. We Catholics pray for our pope and our bishop at every Mass. The Communion at the altar is intrinsically related to the communion of persons that is the church, indeed they are two faces of the same reality, the Body of Christ.
Today, the Body of Christ in the United States is bruised and bloodied. The depredations of former-cardinal Theodore McCarrick and the grim and gruesome details of clergy sex abuse revealed in the Pennsylvania grand jury report both conspired to place the abuse of children by clergy back at the center of the church’s consciousness and public image. Cardinal Donald Wuerl was a link between the two scandals, having succeeded McCarrick in Washington in 2006 and been a bishop in Pennsylvania for 18 years.
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