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	Church's Cover-up Leaves Many Catholics Fuming; Including Me By Julie Mack Kalamazoo Gazette April 10, 2010 http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2010/04/churchs_cover-up_leaves_many_c.html During my three years at a Catholic elementary school, followed by nine years of catechism classes, I learned much about the importance of doing the right thing, even if it’s hard; about protecting the most vulnerable in society, whether it be the poor or the unborn or people on death row; that one of the biggest lessons in life is that it’s not all about me. The lessons of my Catholic upbringing have stuck with me, and are a reason my children were brought up as Catholic. It’s also what makes the ongoing sex-abuse scandal in the church so frustrating, so hard to understand. And it’s not just me; every Catholic of my acquaintance is disappointed by the hierarchy on this issue. There are really two scandals here. One involves the priests who engaged in sexual conduct with children or teenagers, and this one is the easier scandal to forgive, really, because every organization has its rogue operators, every religion has had its share of sex-capades. There is no reason to think that Catholics would be an exception. But the real scandal, the one much harder to fathom, is the cover-up — how the bishops and cardinals and the Vatican protected and harbored molesters by swearing victims to secrecy and moving pedophile priests from parish to parish with nary a heads-up to congregations involved. It’s true that the American Catholic Church has undergone major reforms on monitoring and reporting sex abuse since 2002, after the scandals first broke in Boston and spread nationwide. But now a similar wave of scandals is engulfing the Catholic Church in Europe, and the Vatican has gone back into a defensive crouch — stonewalling, blaming the media, acting as if the church is under attack for no good reason. Please. In its handling of sex-abuse cases over the decades, the Catholic hierarchy has violated its core values. Secrecy and rationalization have trumped doing the right thing. Image has proved more important than protecting children. Self-preservation rules. The more the Vatican tries to minimize the scandal, the more it erodes the trust and fuels the outrage of everyday Catholics. We’re not stupid. It’s especially infuriating because the church can be so inflexible about casting judgment on others, from homosexuality to divorce to birth control. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. How can the Vatican justify its protection of child molesters while excoriating politicians who support abortion? How could it keep pedophiles in the priesthood while rejecting women as unsuitable for the post? It’s unnerving to think how for decades the church denied communion to divorced Catholics, all the while taking a sympathetic approach to priests who abused altar boys. It’s true that most of the abuse cases happened in the long-ago past, but that doesn’t let the Vatican off the hook. While the church has finally taken action against priests who committed abuse, there haven’t been any sanctions of church bishops and administrators who were part of the cover-up. The Vatican needs to stop defending the indefensible and take full responsibility for its leaders’ actions and the pain that that’s been caused over the decades. Church leaders need to stop acting like they’re the victims, because they aren’t. This scandal is very much of their own making. The danger here isn’t that people will leave the church. But I do see that Catholics, more than ever, are making a big distinction between their faith and the institutional church. The clergy is losing its moral authority, and that’s not a small deal in a top-down religion headed by a supposedly infallible leader. What Catholics want is a church hierarchy that lives by its own standards — and right now, that’s not happening. Julie Mack’s column appears in Saturday’s Kalamazoo Gazette. She can be contacted at jmack@kalamazoogazette.com or call (269) 388-8578.
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