Church Has Lost Moral Authority, by Madeleine Bunting, The Age, March 22, 2010

Church Has Lost Moral Authority

By Madeleine Bunting
The Age
March 22, 2010

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/church-has-lost-moral-authority-20100321-qo2m.html

AUSTRALIA -- THERE is only one conceivable reaction to the fast-spreading crisis in the Catholic Church: horror. After decades of obfuscation, the church has to be called to account for what has happened.

Since abuse allegations first emerged in the early '90s in Britain and Ireland — and later that decade in Australia — the denials, both those of officials and those which ordinary Catholics told themselves, have shifted several times. Initially, the church authorities declared it was just a few bad apples, but last year the Ryan report exposed decades of systematic abuse of thousands of children in Ireland. Another line of defence was that it was a particular Anglophone problem with roots in Ireland's excessively deferential Catholic culture, which had then been exported to the US and Australia.

Digital image by Judy Green

Now this explanation is falling apart as abuse allegations emerge across Europe in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy. Last year, scandal erupted when stories in Spain and Mexico alleged that Marcial Maciel, the Mexican founder of a religious order, the Legion of Christ, and much favoured by Pope John Paul II, was found to have fathered several children. After allegations of child abuse, the entire order — with institutions in several Latin American countries — is under investigation by the Vatican.

Oxford church historian Diarmaid MacCulloch argues that this is as he predicted in his book The Reformation. In 2003, he warned that when allegations of child abuse spread to non-Anglophone countries, the results would be "catastrophic" for the church. Old cultures of deference have succeeded in repressing the truth for longer, but now even they are disintegrating.

Another defence put forward by many loyal Catholics has been that the incidence of child abuse by religious figures has been broadly in line with secular society, but this argument looks increasingly unsustainable.

The current issue of Catholic weekly The Tablet carries a thoughtful article by the head of Berlin's Institute of Sexology and Sexual Medicine, which acknowledges that the church's celibacy requirement may have appealed — misleadingly appearing to offer a solution — to paedophiles' conflicted sexuality. While the debate about disproportion continues, what is increasingly clear is that the church's determination to preserve its institutional power and authority repeatedly involved suppressing the truth — even when that put children at further risk.

This is utterly bewildering to faithful Catholics raised to revere and trust the institution and its priests. But it is equally disturbing for those vaguely anticlerical Catholics who have tended to regard priests as a necessary embarrassment, an unavoidable irritant whom they did their best to avoid while still finding great inspiration in the faith.

The latter position is hard now to sustain; what the crisis starkly exposes is that one of the defining characteristics of Roman Catholicism has been the central role of the priest, and that it is fundamentally flawed for two reasons.

Both are rooted in the mediaeval theology that when a man becomes a priest, his nature is fundamentally changed — he becomes a different sort of human being. As such, he first no longer has the normal human sexual needs and, second, he has a particular authority which deserves (and expects) unquestioning respect. Both assumptions are still widely evident in the Catholic Church today.

Priests belong to a church hierarchy which owes much to the Roman empire. The pattern of obedience to superior authority ensured that there was no system of the checks and balances essential to prevent abuse of power. Nor has there been much tolerance for challenge and debate; an entire institutional culture has increasingly been dominated by the imperative of self-preservation.

Modernity has only exacerbated these tendencies; the Catholic Church became more centralised around a strengthened papacy in the 19th century. The result has been an astonishingly successful global institution in some respects, acquiring millions of new adherents over the course of the 20th century in Africa and Asia. But the necessary impetus for reform has been crippled.

The crisis simply accelerates what is already happening: the drift away from a model of religious experience that younger generations find increasingly unintelligible. Despite all the talk of inquiries to ascertain the truth and "rebuild confidence in the church", such initiatives are very unlikely to achieve that outcome. Inquiries prompt more lurid headlines as they expose further the scale and detail of the abuse.

The church's loss of moral authority is only a part of a bigger picture. Financial ruin provoked by compensation claims is another — as the Boston archdiocese well knows. And one of the most acute and pressing consequences of the abuse scandal is that it exacerbates the problem that the church is running out of priests as vocations collapse; a model of religious practice based on the Mass will be unsustainable in many parts of Europe within a decade or two.

There will be plenty celebrating the Catholic Church's plight, but it is also important to acknowledge that this is more a tragedy than anything else — for the victims, their families, their congregations, and for those causes on which the church has proved a trenchant champion, stirring lazy consciences on the arms race, global inequality and capitalist excess.