December 19, 2004

Struggling to keep the faith

UNITED STATES
USNews

By Bret Schulte

Nearly three years after a series of staggering revelations of sexual abuse by its clergy, the Roman Catholic Church is still working its way through the fallout, with equal amounts of pain and hope. In Boston, where the story first broke, the archdiocese faces financial ruin. More than 80 churches are slated to be closed as church authorities fight a $10 million annual deficit, brought on by dying parishes and a 50 percent decline in donations since 2002. Yet for all their anger, area Catholics seem to be clinging even more tenaciously to their faith, with many parishioners fighting to have the closings reversed. That would include people like Ian Driscoll of St. Anselm in Sudbury, one of eight parishes staging 24-hour protest vigils. Ian is 12. After school, he goes home to eat, do his homework, and practice the trumpet. Then he goes to the church, where he sleeps every night, usually accompanied by his mother. He made plans to skip a Boy Scout trip last weekend so he could spend the night at the church as part of a celebration marking the vigil's 100th day. "When you have something, you don't care about it as much," he says. "But once you're going to lose it, you like it more."

A lot of American Catholics are reacting like Ian. In Boston, an $85 million settlement with more than 500 victims exacerbated an existing crisis for an overextended archdiocese in need of an overhaul. A mountain of pending lawsuits has forced three dioceses to declare bankruptcy this year, and in Los Angeles, a record settlement may be in the offing. As a result of the sex scandal, the American Catholic Church is no longer governed solely by all-powerful bishops. Sex-abuse victims, police investigators, attorneys, prosecutors, and insurance companies have forced a new openness in the church and unbolted the door to lay Catholics clamoring to get involved.

Reform. For a church that thinks in centuries rather than years, all the change has come as a bolt of lightning. While the scandal was still producing headlines, U.S. bishops convened in Dallas in June 2002 to create codes of church conduct and enacted a "Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People" that includes a controversial "zero tolerance" policy for priests who commit sexual abuse. Bishops understood that "the priority of the church now is to restore trust and heal hurt," says Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson. After some initial skepticism, Pope John Paul II endorsed the policy. The charter also opened up the church to lay supervision by creating a national review board of prominent Catholics to oversee reforms and an Office of Child and Youth Protection to implement the new "safe environment" program for children. At the local level, review boards are being created while pastoral and finance councils, stocked in large part by lay people, are being rejuvenated. "The Catholic Church is going to be the safest place for children in the country sometime soon," says the Rev. Thomas Reese, editor of the Jesuit magazine America .

Posted by kshaw at December 19, 2004 09:02 AM