TORONTO (CANADA)
National Post
March 4, 2019
By Philip Mathias
The governance of the Catholic Church has to change — that’s the real lesson arising from the priest pedophile scandal. For a thousand years, the Church has been run like a medieval monarchy with a “king” at the top — the Pope — who is surrounded by princes (the Cardinals and bishops), all of whom are guided by God. The pedophile scandal deflates that model, making it more wishful thinking than reality, by revealing the Church’s leaders as very ordinary men, who have buried harm to children by priests to cover the Church’s failures. A new model must be developed, one that makes the oh-so-fallible rulers of the Church accountable to the faithful, as much as to their monarch, the Pope.
The heart of the scandal is not that perhaps as many as 10 per cent of Catholic priests have molested children. There are pedophiles in other churches, other institutions, and in all walks of life. The scandal is that bishops all over the world have left the wicked priests in ministry, and moved them to new parishes where they could commit their crimes all over again, and then tried to browbeat their little victims into silence. This vile conduct appears to have been universal and may have been secretly ordered by the Vatican to avoid scandal. If that is the case, the “Bride of Christ” has promoted an evil practice. If not, that evil practice was endemic in a Church that teaches others the highest morality.
Now, civil authorities in the United States (and elsewhere) are trying to identify more pedophile priests. Clearly, this scandal will continue, perhaps for decades. Meanwhile, the recent Vatican conference to address child abuse produced little in the way of concrete, enforceable measures. Pope Francis tried to take pressure off the Church by saying that child abuse is widespread in society, with 69 per cent of it within families, according to one study. He said the Church must confront this evil throughout society, as well as within the Church, which will employ unspecified “disciplinary … processes.” But he condemned those who constantly attack the Church (presumably the unrequited victims) as friends of “the Devil.”
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