By Scott Stephens
ABC - The Drum
May 19, 2010
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/05/20/2904369.htm?site=thedrum
 |
| Cardinal George Pell will soon succeed Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re as the prefect of the Congregation for Bishops. Photo by Paul Miller |
At the height of the Global Financial Crisis, Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz likened the attempt by the US government to re-capitalise the banking system without dealing with the subprime mortgages that underpinned - and undermined - it, to a doctor giving a mass blood transfusion to a patient suffering from internal haemorrhaging.
The same might be said of the Catholic Church's attempts to establish its credibility in the face of the revelations of clerical sexual abuse that have consumed it over the past 12 months.
The Church can claim, with some justification, that the processes it has put in place since 1996 - of which the Australian Catholic Church's Towards Healing is one of the more commendable examples - have both stemmed the incidents of sexual abuse and increased the number of reported cases.
It can also argue that the vast majority of instances of sexual abuse that were reported after 1996 took place in the 1970s and 80s, and were committed by an uncommonly vile cabal of paedophiles, pederasts and other deviants whose numbers among the clergy inexplicably swelled in the 1960s and 70s.
And it can point to the way it has clarified the relationship between canon law - particularly the confidentiality of its internal disciplinary process, enshrined in the now notorious 1962 instruction Crimen Sollicitationis - and the civil requirement to report all incidents of sexual abuse to the police, following John Paul II's 2001 apostolic letter Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela.
But none of these measures addressed the ecclesiastical body's underlying condition, the source of its internal haemorrhaging. To do so would have meant - shifting the medical image slightly - sterilising the septic clericalism which for decades has fostered a culture of secrecy, patronage, and an almost incestuous self-regard.
It is to the great shame of the Catholic Church that its bishops have more often been the custodians of this clerical malaise than its cure.
Catholics can at least take heart that the current Pope has demonstrated his resolve to address this crisis at the level of the bishops themselves, and not simply by establishing more stringent child-protection procedures. Nowhere has this resolve been more evident than in his dealings with the Irish bishops.
So, in a bold gesture that angered many in the Church, Benedict XVI wrote an open letter to Irish Catholics in March publicly chastening the bishops for their "serious mistakes" and "grave errors of judgement" which have undermined their "credibility and effectiveness" and that of the Church.
He went on to urge bishops to see that "only decisive action carried out with complete honesty and transparency will restore the respect and good will of the Irish people... This must arise, first and foremost, from your own self-examination, inner purification and spiritual renewal."
The Pope's call for spiritual renewal within the episcopate has been matched by his relentless purification of the episcopate. The fallout from the current crisis has cut a swathe through the Irish bishops. Just yesterday, Benedict formally accepted the resignation of the sixth Irish bishop, Willie Walsh, even as calls are growing for the resignation of Cardinal Sean Brady over his role in the protection of Brendan Smyth.
But while Benedict's determination to reform the bishops has been one of the few saving graces amid the Vatican's rather more sclerotic and uncoordinated tangle of responses to the sexual abuse crisis, it may not be solely his struggle much longer.
According to Italian journalist Andrea Tornielli of Il Giornale, Cardinal George Pell will soon succeed Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re as the prefect of the Congregation for Bishops. If so, not only would Cardinal Pell be able to exert considerable influence on the Catholic Church's 5,000 bishops world-wide, he would be entrusted with the responsibility of overseeing the selection of bishops, including those replacements in Ireland and his own replacement in the archdiocese of Sydney.
Cardinal Pell's appointment to the Vatican could not come at a better - which is to say, worse - time. For his first official duty would surely be to strip disgraced Cardinal Sean Brady of his diocesan authority by appointing a coadjutor (or assisting bishop) to take the helm.
The episcopal appointments that would necessarily follow would be critical in dismantling what the Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has recently described as "the narrow culture of clericalism" that has corrupted the Irish Catholic Church.
But, as Ruth Geldhill of the Times has written , "Pell knows the English and Irish scene better than possibly any prelate from outside the UK. Ireland, never mind the rest of the Catholic world, needs a priest of his gifts heading the bishops."
But what would surely be Cardinal Pell's next task - the appointment of his replacement in the archdiocese of Sydney and his general oversight of Australian bishops - was just made much more difficult by the stories that aired on ABC1 on Monday.
Particularly damning were the revelations concerning the Archbishop of Adelaide, Philip Wilson, who has just been re-elected President of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference and had been widely tipped to succeed Cardinal Pell in the event of his Vatican appointment.
Lateline's reporting of sexual abuse that took place in the diocesan manse where Wilson was living as a junior priest in Maitland was not as compelling as Tim Palmer's story on the The 7:30 Report about the Church's failure to prevent known paedophiles from performing ministerial duties - despite the Towards Healing protocol that abusers will permanently be removed from ministry - and its failure to provide meaningful pastoral care to their victims.
But the implications of Stephen Crittenden's and Suzanne Smith's story are far more disquieting. For either Philip Wilson was wilfully ignorant of the abuse being committed by Father Jim Fletcher, who lived under the same roof, or he was so immersed in the culture of clerical secrecy fostered under Bishop Leo Clark that he never thought to ask.
Either way, this situation reeks of the same stagnant clericalism that Benedict has sought to address in Ireland.
If Cardinal Pell's expected appointment to the Vatican is to continue the Pope's renewal of the bishops, then he and Archbishop Wilson may well be destined for a very uncomfortable conversation.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.