MY JOURNEY BACK TO A BROKEN CHURCH

WASHINGTON (DC)
Sojourners

Oct. 7, 2019

By Sonja Livingston

It’s not an easy time to be Catholic. In fact, I hadn’t regularly attended Mass since the 1990s, but like many lapsed Catholics, I still kept tabs, feeling gutted with every new scandal and disclosure of abuse. Things began to look up with the arrival of Pope Francis in 2013. Even so-called cultural Catholics like me could feel hopeful. With Francis, the church played to its strength, which has always been love. “Who am I to judge?” Pope Francis famously said, and even my most cynical friends responded in kind. “Maybe, I’ll go back to Mass.” All such talk ended by 2018, when a Pennsylvania Grand Jury alleged that more than 300 priests had abused 1,000 children across the state, setting off a flurry of subsequent revelations and horrors.

For years, the church has refused to budge on issues the culture has largely accepted, especially related to issues of sexual morality and gender. How long could the voter who supported reproductive rights, the man in love with his boyfriend, or the divorced mother continue to warm the seats? Catholics began abandoning their pews decades before the first wave of scandals broke in 2009, though the sexual abuse crisis certainly ushered more out the door.

In an essay calling for the abolishment of the priesthood in The Atlantic this past June, author and former priest, James Carroll describes a church crippled by clericalism and misogyny, racked by predatory behavior and the much more insidious culture of looking the other way. The message of Carrol’s article was clear: If it’s to survive, the church’s clerical structure must be eliminated. “The very priesthood,” Carroll wrote, “is toxic.”

Meanwhile, my home diocese of Rochester, N.Y. filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 12, making it the first of New York State’s eight dioceses to do so. When the state’s Child Victims Act extended the statute of limitations for survivors of child sexual abuse this past August, a one-year window opened to file claims. More than 600 lawsuits were filed statewide in the first month alone, with the bulk naming Roman Catholic dioceses for past abuse by priests. Like many communities throughout the northeast, New York’s cities have been plagued by lagging attendance and church closings for the past few decades. In other words, Rochester’s bankruptcy was less of a shock than a sign of the times.

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.