Church Vocal in Face of Scandal, by Michael Valpy, Globe and Mail, October 8, 2009

Church Vocal in Face of Scandal

By Michael Valpy
Globe and Mail
October 8, 2009

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/church-leaders-vocal-in-face-of-scandal/article1317794/

This time – with the disgrace of former bishop Raymond Lahey drenching the news media – the hierarchy of Canada's Roman Catholic Church has not stayed silent.

In what one senior church official on Thursday called a light-years' shift from a generation ago, bishops have preached in their cathedrals and written open letters about their anger and disgust with Rev. Lahey and the child pornography charges he faces.

Rev. John Sharp, the Vicar General and the Moderator of the Curia for the Diocese of London, walks through St. Peter's Basilica in London
Photo by Geoff Robins

The national Catholic television station Salt and Light TV has devoted much of its blog to the story. And the Pope's representative in Canada this week told theology students in Toronto that the Canadian church had been wounded.

"The church in Canada has made every effort to establish safe environments and protect children and young people," said papal nuncio Archbishop Luigi Ventura. "Yet we can never underestimate the destructive power of sinfulness and evil that tears apart the fabric of our community."

Twenty years ago, church leaders hunkered behind a wall of silence as a horrendous narrative of sexual abuse surfaced in Canada – rape charges against a bishop in British Columbia, sodomy by members of a Catholic lay order in a St. John's orphanage, indecent assault by priests of altar boys elsewhere.

But guidelines put in place soon afterward by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops to deal with allegations of priestly sex abuse changed the culture in the church, said Rev. Thomas Rosica, CEO of Salt and Light TV.

The Canadian bishops were the first in the world to institute protocols, Father Rosica said. It placed them far ahead of the U.S. church and fostered a climate of transparency, rigorous investigation and instant suspension for suspected wrongdoing.

Except, as the papal nuncio told theology students, the destructive power of sin can't be underestimated.

Father Rosica said Thursday: "When something happens like this, we all suffer. We just don't say this is a problem of a wayward bishop. We all suffer, we all feel the shame. We can move beyond the rage, the shame and the shock, but we all share this."

Rev. John Sharp, 68, has had responsibility in the Catholic diocese of London, Ont., for the past three years for dealing with the dozens of victims of convicted pedophile priest Charles Sylvestre.

The Sylvestre case changed his life, said Father Sharp, who is also the vicar-general of his diocese.

He has sat across the table from the victims, some of whom couldn't bear the sight of his priest's collar, some of whom made him the target of their anger. He has listened to their terrible stories and tried to reach through to their immense pain.

He described himself as attending a meeting in London and being "hit" by the news of the charges against Father Lahey, and feeling instant anger himself.

"You are working in the church and this hits you," said Father Sharp. "Your colleagues on the committee you're working on, you realize that you're all hurting. We can't say the church is blameless. We're the church. We're the church who knows about sin, okay?

"Within an hour, I felt the pain of separation and within another hour the experience of unity and support."

He explained that at first he felt a heaviness in the room and a need by most of the people in the room to talk. But he heard one voice saying, "Let's get out of here, let's get away from this" and his own voice replying, "No, we've got to stay with this."

That was the separation.

The unity came at the end of the meeting, when his colleagues told him, "This is going to make your job more difficult."

The next Sunday, Father Sharp preached in St. Michael's Catholic Church in London. He heard people saying they didn't want to come to church any more because of Father Lahey.

So in his homily, he spoke of his own pain about Father Lahey, mentioning the former bishop of Antigonish by name.

"Some people were walking out in tears afterwards," Father Sharp said. "Some people said, 'I needed to hear you say that today. That's healing.'"

Father Rosica said there's no formal church policy on how to respond to the Lahey charges.

"We respond to the issues as they come up. But the bishops are together in dealing with this. We're all working at it together."