December 05, 2005

The basilica of denial

Boston Globe

By James Carroll | December 5, 2005

LAST WEEK'S Vatican ''instruction" restricting admission to the priesthood to heterosexuals was an exploitation of prejudice about homosexuality aimed at drawing attention away from the real crisis facing the Catholic Church.

If any one group ''caused" the priest sex-abuse scandal, it was not gays, but rather the bishops themselves, who now scapegoat gays. The truly scandalous fact remains that, while a small percentage of priests abused children, the overwhelming majority of bishops knowingly protected the abusers instead of the abused. And as periodic news reports demonstrate, this pattern continues, with the uncovered secrets of deal-making, plea-bargaining, asset-protection -- and the vengeful punishing of priests who dared to challenge bishops on the issue.

What the scandal reveals is the moral bankruptcy of the entire Catholic clerical culture, but in order to deal with that, basic questions about celibacy, women's ordination, the role of the laity, and repressive authority would have to be asked. Obviously, those are questions the Vatican is desperate to deflect, and that is the purpose of this new ruling.

The instruction is the second large signal that the Vatican has no real interest in reckoning with the priest-abuse catastrophe. The first signal was in the Vatican's own reiteration of the preference of abuser over abused when it appointed Cardinal Bernard Law to the prestigious position of archpriest of Rome's Basilica of St. Mary Major. Cardinal Law, recall, not only sponsored some of the most lecherous abusers, repeatedly sending them out among the defenseless young, but he betrayed the church's own most sacred traditions when, for example, he tried to use the seal of confession as a way of protecting the secret of abuse.

Posted by kshaw at December 5, 2005 04:19 AM