Is Catholic Church Crisis about Sex Abuse or Leadership, USA Today, April 5, 2010

Is Catholic Church Crisis about Sex Abuse or Leadership?

USA Today
April 5, 2010

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/Religion/post/2010/04/sex-catholic-church-media-crisis-/1

UNITED STATES -- It's back.

The sexual abuse crisis that dominated U.S. headlines in 2002 is back, with an international focus this time. And with it comes the parallel attacks on media that brought news of the crisis to light. And, now, as then, the Vatican has defensive -- as if this were an attack on faith, not on human failings.

Photo by Peter Muhly

The faces at the top of the Catholic hierarchy are different than in 2002. The headlines, for the most part, come out of Ireland or Germany. But the fundamental call from the public and media is the same: Accountability.

USA TODAY's editorial today notes:

In case after case, the church has faced choices between protecting children or protecting itself. It has consistently chosen the latter, and in doing so has protected neither.

On CNN's Reliable Sources Sunday, media reporter Howard Kurtz interviewed Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times, whose coverage of a Wisconsin predator priest brought the crisis back to the front pages of U.S. papers last month.

(The Orlando Sentinel has the full transcript.)

Photo by Arturo Mari

One exchange highlights why the religion reporter burrowed in to the case of the deaf community in Wisconsin pressing for the Vatican department, headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict, to defrock a priest who abused 200 children decades earlier...

Goodstein: It came up in the course of looking at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. That's the office in the Vatican that used to be headed by the man who is now Pope Benedict. We were looking at how they handled cases from bishops around the world that came to the Vatican. This was one of them. I found this one by, you know, calling many sources. And spoke to an attorney who has handled a lot of lawsuits against the church.

Kurtz: Short answer: old fashioned reporting.

Later in the interview, Goodstein wraps up by saying:

It's not just 50s, 60s, and 70s. By the 1980s you had a very big scandal. It began (with) a priest in Louisiana. From that point the American bishops and also the Vatican began reconsidering how to confront priest abusers. So they have had an awfully long time at which they said at several points, "Now we have it under control. No -- no need to worry."

And so its been an awfully long time for them to figure out how to manage it in a responsible way.

Bob Schieffer at CBS' Face the Nation blew off calls for the Church to fix up its public relations (with prominent Vatican voices making major gaffes during Holy Week). Schieffer says the failure is not theology but bureaucracy.

And in today's Washington Post, an essay by Timothy Shriver very elegantlyplaces the scandal in the larger context of the eternal truths and daily good service to humanity Shriver sees offered by the best of his Catholic Church. It is a church rooted in Jesus, served by "heroic and dedicated" priests and nuns, and bringing "the gospel to life for billions," he writes.

We were raised to love the gospel, to seek the truth, to serve justice, to grow in the bosom of the sacraments. But we will not do it under (these bishops) leadership unless they change.

What's needed is a conversion of the bishops and the pope himself. That's right: It's time for the pope and the bishops to convert their culture to one that is centered on loving God from the depths of their souls and to leading a church that is as much mother as father, as much pastoral as theological, as much spiritual as doctrinal. It is time for them to listen to the deep and authentic witness of the people of faith, to trust the spirit that blows where it will, to abandon their defensiveness of their positions and trust only the gospel, and not their edifice of control. Conversion is a total experience -- letting go of the old and putting on the new.

And the editorial of the latest issue of the Jesuit weekly, America Magazine, spells out the steps they think the Church must take: "See out the victims... Come clean... Be accountable... Empower the laity" It concludes:

Humility should be a virtue for all to embrace just now, but especially for church leaders in seeking the guidance of the faithful.