Critics Turn Lent Slogan Back to Vatican: 'The Light Is on for You', USA Today, April 7, 2010

Critics Turn Lent Slogan Back to Vatican: 'The Light Is on for You'

USA Today
April 7, 2010

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/Religion/post/2010/04/sex-abuse-catholic-pope-benedict-critics-anti-catholic/1

As the sexual abuse crisis continues to rage, with new reports, new criticisms and new Vatican defenses daily, we keep hearing calls for "transparency."

Back when I was a kid reporter in the Sunshine State, we called efforts to push back-door politics into the public eye as "sunshine laws." Same idea.

Victims of clergy sexual abuse want the Church to name names and parish postings of the priests who damaged young people and the bishops who appointed, protected, even sometimes promoted these priests. Put the facts out into the sun and let us see what happened.

Photo by Matthias Schrader

In Germany, where bishops opened a hotline for reporting abuse -- a lesson learned in the USA eight years ago -- Associated Press reports:

... nearly 2,700 people called the church's sexual abuse hotline in the first three days it was operating, a Catholic church spokesman said Tuesday.A team of psychologists and other experts have spoken with 394 people so far, ranging from several minutes up to an hour. Trier Diocese spokesman Stephan Kronenburg said, "Most callers reported cases of sexual abuse.".

Stalwart believers in the church want their hierarchy to "come clean," as editors said in America, and wipe away this mess once and for all so the focus of the faithful can be, as it should be, on the unblemished Christian truths they find in Catholicism.

And people watching from outside the Church, on the everyday streets where protesters sometimes linger, wonder when Vatican leadership and its critics will take it all outside in the sunlight where what is pure can shine and what is dross be scrubbed away.

Last week, Archbishop of Washington Donald Wuerl did just that, in his own distinctive way. On Good Friday, sex abuse victims were conducting a protest by praying the stations of the cross outside, instead of within, St. Matthew's Cathedral. According to MyFoxDC (hat tip here to CathNews)

Archbishop Wuerl crossed the street to join them, arriving just in time to hear the story of David Lorenz.

"It took me until I was 33 years old before I could tell anyone. I wanted to. I didn't know how. How do I tell you that I was abused?" said Lorenz.

Through the 14 stations or the last hours of Jesus before his crucifixion, the protest followed a theme. Asking for justice, praying for victims too ashamed to come forward.

As the stations came to a close, Archbishop Wuerl sought out David Lorenz, telling him that "I came just to show some solidarity."

And the National Catholic Reporter says Pope Benedict XVI may have the same opportunity to step out into the sunlight, into the public eye, and stand with victims:

Two of the five sex abuse victims who met Pope Benedict XVI during his April 2008 visit to the United States, and who pledged at the time to "hold his feet to the fire," have announced plans to stage a "Day of Reformation" for the Catholic church in Rome on Oct. 31, amid a mushrooming crisis which threatens to engulf the pope himself.

Bernie McDaid and Olan Horne, who met Benedict XVI on April 17, 2008 -- the first-ever meeting between a pope and survivors of sexual abuse -- said today that they intend to gather thousands of victims, along with church reform activists and ordinary "people in the pews," in Rome on Oct. 31. They're asking that Benedict XVI participate, and that the event be simulcast to Catholic churches around the world.

For the past few years, many dioceses across the USA have run ads during Lent inviting fallen away faithful back to reconcile with their church. The slogan is: "The light is on for you." It was a call to return and to reconcile, to remember that this sacrament is always there for them.

Now, victims and the faithful critics -- those who say they are not anti-Catholic but anti-abuse and anti-clericalism that puts hierarchy ahead of justice -- are turning that slogan back to the Vatican. The light is on for them ...

What more, or different, do you think the U.S. Catholic leadership, which faced the crisis eight years ago, can do to bring the lessons they learned to European bishops -- and the Vatican? And do you think U.S. bishops have really done enough here?