BALTIMORE (MD)
The Baltimore Sun
November 15, 2018
Baltimore Sun Editorial Board
If any truth emerged from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting this week in Baltimore, it was surely Archbishop William E. Lori’s observation that the priest sex abuse scandal “ is going to be with us for a long, long time.” The church covered up the widespread abuse of children and adults by priests for a long, long time. It denied and deflected public outrage for a long, long time. And now, when a Pennsylvania grand jury report revealed the breadth of the abuse, and the fall of former Washington Archbishop Theodore McCarrick demonstrated that it extended to the top rungs of the Catholic hierarchy, the church is waiting longer to take even the most obvious of steps to restore its parishioners’ faith.
The crisis now facing the Catholic church is born not just of the abuse by priests but also of the willingness of the church’s leaders to step in to protect the clergy at the expense of the abused. Pope Francis’ call at the beginning of this meeting for the American bishops to delay any action until after a Vatican synod on the matter this winter thus looks not like a sign that the church is finally ready to address the matter at the highest level but that its old habits of deferring to clerical rather than civil or moral authority and papering over abuse remain intact. The church once moved abusive priests from parish to parish, now it is shuffling the fallout from meeting to meeting.
The bishops go back to their dioceses for a reckoning. They have faced pointed questions if not outright defections from the pews since the Pennsylvania and McCarrick scandals broke, and now they must own up to their impotence in addressing them. Before the meeting began, Archbishop Lori published an op-ed in The Sun in which he concluded that one of the factors that worsened the crisis was a “deep-seated culture of clericalism, which fostered unhealthy notions of entitlement and exclusivity, as well as the distorted view that the priestly state puts those who abused minors, as well as those who protected them, beyond reach of civil law and authority.” Yet when the opportunity came to demonstrate a break from that past, the bishops again folded in the face of clerical authority. They could not even muster a vote to encourage the Vatican to release documents related to the investigation of Mr. McCarrick.
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