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	This Is a Crisis of Clericalism By Austen Ivereigh Guardian April 5, 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/apr/05/religion-catholicism-crisis-future UNITED KINGDOM -- The Catholic church survived the French and Russian revolutions. It will survive this crisis too, but humbler, poorer, and more honest The clerical sex abuse crisis is not the worst for the Church since the Reformation. Remember the French Revolution, which executed clergy and nationalised church property? It was imitated, on the whole less violently, by the states of Europe and Latin America in the nineteenth century which stripped the Church of its land, privileges, funds and autonomy. The relentless media stories fuelled by angry abuse victims stepping forward to remember abuse of 20 or 30 years ago may be excoriating, but they do not compare to what the Mexican, Russian and German states did to the Church and Catholics in the early twentieth century, in the era of totalitarianism. But their effect is in many ways just as dramatic. Unlike those assaults on the Church, the sex abuse crisis is an internal one, a crisis of leadership and governance in which the perpetrators are the priests and the bishops who failed to act against them, and the victims are – or were – powerless adolescents. What makes the crisis especially purgative is that both the abuse and the cover-up are historic, yet their consequences are felt now. They took place at a time of clericalism, a culture which fostered power, privilege and secrecy, when the priesthood of the 1950s-60s saw itself as a caste set apart. The voice of the victims, which did not begin to be heard properly in the media until the 1980s, was suffocated by the need to preserve the image of the institution. That has now changed: not just in the guidelines and procedures put in place in the Church from the 1990s which ensure reporting to civil authorities of any allegation, however old, but in the Vatican's revision and enforcement of its own canon law, whose strictures against abusive priests used to be simply ignored. Although these changes make it impossible for the abuse crisis to recur in the present – in fact, abuse allegations dropped off sharply from the mid-1980s as the cases were investigated and acted on – the crisis will continue for some time yet. It is in the nature of sex abuse that its victims take a long time to step forward, mostly when they are in their thirties or forties and are turning to therapy after suffering depression and shattered relationships. As allegations are made and reported by the media, others are encouraged to step forward, and like a snowball the coverage grows; this is what happened in the US, the UK and in Ireland, and has begun to happen in central Europe. Spain and Italy are likely to be next; then Poland. Each time, the toxic combination of clericalism and blindness to the suffering of victims will be revealed, and the outrageous stories of cover-up and denial will splatter the front pages. As they investigate the allegations, journalists will be sniffing for the "smoking gun", the story that reveals that a Vatican cardinal once took a decision to reassign a priest when he was a bishop. They may, eventually, find one that is more convincing than the ones so far; but even if they did, what would it reveal? The Pope, too, has undergone a conversion typical of the church leaders of his generation, and since at least 2001 has been a key architect of the Church's reform of its procedures. Like all powerful institutions, the Church has little capacity to reform itself, but it can embrace purgation as an opportunity for change. As the crisis spreads from country to country, one after another the hierarchies will be bewildered by the onslaught and anger. Some will blame the media for its often crude and misleading reports, others will retreat more tightly into their bunkers, others will point out (correctly) that clerical abuse has nothing to do with celibacy or an all-male priesthood. Some will have the courage to recognise that it is, however, a consequence of a culture of clericalism which still prevails, an attitude that places concern for a priest's reputation above the welfare of a child, and a mindset that leads to dissident theologians being prosecuted more swiftly than abusers of children. This recognition, gradually, will lead to a new mindset – a humbler, poorer, more penitent Church, which hears the voice of the victims not after the rest of society, but long before it, as Christians should.
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