VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Buffalo News [Buffalo NY]
October 9, 2023
It is not often that church doctrine rises to the level of broad and obvious public interest, but such is the case today as Catholic bishops from around the world assemble at the Vatican to discuss issues that are highly sensitive, at least within the church. Among them are the ordination of women, marriage among priests and the blessing of gay couples.
None, however, is more important than the ancient church policy demanding celibacy among priests. This is not merely an issue for the church but, based on history and credible research, a matter of compelling public concern. The reason: The requirement helped enable the terrible abuses some clerics committed against children, here in Western New York and around the world.
That was the conclusion of the late Richard Sipe, a former priest, researcher and psychotherapist who became a leading expert on the subject of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. His research produced two primary conclusions:
– 6% to 9% of priests were sexually involved with minors, with many of them molesting young boys.
– Only half of priests were actually celibate (though the church disputed that figure).
The two factors, he concluded, were intertwined: They created “an atmosphere of tolerance of behaviors” – you keep my secrets and I’ll keep yours. And with that, it became easier for pedophiles within the church not only to go publicly undetected, but for their sexual abuses to continue over years, victimizing untold thousands of children.
As Buffalo learned, those abuses victimized children in Western New York, sentencing them to decades of pain and suffering. They led to the Buffalo diocese’s declaration of bankruptcy and to the dismissal of a bishop, Richard J. Malone, who was not accused of any such misconduct, but whose hesitancy in confronting those evils cost him the faith of many local Catholics.
The church appears to have learned important lessons in recent years, though its willingness to change, it’s fair to say, came only after its secrets had been involuntarily bared. In that, it shows that any organization composed of flesh-and-blood humans is prone to weakness, regardless of its spiritual mission. In this case, the weaknesses were terrible.
Change is possible. Here’s an analogy: America’s Founding Fathers, determined to shed the abuses of monarchy while understanding the frailties of human nature, crafted a governing system that recognized those problems and was, to some extent, self-monitoring and even self-correcting.
For the church, the task of recognizing the frailties of human nature includes learning the hard lesson of the unnatural demand for celibacy. As bishops gather at the Vatican, they should be ready to consider shedding that requirement.
And, to extend the analogy, the admission of women into the priesthood would go a long way toward establishing a de facto system of self-monitoring. Does anyone think the assaults on children would have been allowed to continue so long if women had been woven more deeply into church culture?
No church is supposed to be a place to bury secrets. It can’t be restorative if its own policies encourage deception. It is clear that that has been the case for the Catholic Church and that it helped pave the road to decades of child sexual abuse.
Change is never easy – not for people, and especially not for organizations as enduring and as entrenched as the Catholic Church. But with the assembly at the Vatican, already underway, bishops should take the time to examine the possibility of adopting new and healthier policies.
Some still-suffering Buffalonians would surely celebrate that acknowledgment of reality. So might children yet to be born.