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	Keeping the Blinkers on By Janice Kennedy Ottawa Citizen June 10, 2010 http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Keeping+blinkers/3134065/story.html Last June, the head of the Roman Catholic church decided that his priests deserved an extended pat on the back. In declaring a "Year for Priests" -- winding up this week with ceremonies in Rome -- Pope Benedict XVI observed that Catholic priests represent an "immense gift, not only for the Church, but also for humanity itself." Once upon a time, such a comment would not provoke immediate outbreaks of wry rejoinders, sardonic smirks and outright guffaws. But that time is not now. Yet Benedict, culturally tone-deaf and about as isolated from reality as a medieval hermit, keeps flailing about, tossing one ineffectual response after another into the chaos that is today's church. The institution, rife with disaffection, is on the verge of schism. If it doesn't discover that reform is not a bad word, it stands a real chance of transforming itself exclusively into a temple of irrelevance, home to diehard conservatives who revere tradition more than the imperatives of their own faith. That's if it doesn't disintegrate entirely first. And the crux of the problem is -- duh -- the issue of priests. The bad ones. The untold but vast numbers of them who preyed on kids, preyed on trust and left ruination behind, devastation so massive it transcends normal religious boundaries. When the crime of pedophilia is institutionalized, as it has apparently been in the Catholic church, its fallout affects all of society. So what has Benedict done? Well, he's prayed for the victims, and offered so many apologies they've become a cliche. He's expressed his genuine anguish, repeatedly. For Ireland, where a history of breathtaking physical and sexual abuse is now out in the open, and where Catholics are attaching "former" to that designation in droves, he's sending out a team of heavy hitters -- foreign bishops, but with Irish names -- to look into the Irish church's handling of the situation. (A curious move, given that all the bishops come from dioceses that have also had reported cases of sexual abuse by priests -- a worldwide phenomenon in any case. How the foreigners are supposed to do better than the Irish is anyone's guess. In Ireland, however, there is widespread belief that the team of bishops, a foursome that includes Ottawa's conservative Terrence Prendergast, is being sent to tame the rampaging beast of secularization and get the Irish church back on the strict traditional track. So-called reform, says the Irish Independent's John Cooney, will be "in the clericalist conservative image of Pope Benedict.") The other thing the Pope has done to address his church's crisis, apart from declaring a celebratory Year for Priests, is the thing he's best at, going back to when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and orthodoxy enforcer for John Paul II. He has stopped up his ears. He refuses even to hear those voices that suggest much of the problem lies in two fundamental areas: celibacy, and the exclusively male priesthood. While certainly not all priests are pedophiles, it's safe to say that all priests have struggled with celibacy. That's because sex is a human imperative, as natural and urgent as eating or sleeping. Deny it as an institution, twist men into an unnatural way of living, and a multitude of rebellions are inevitable. But Benedict won't discuss it, not even when he's faced -- as he was recently -- with an open letter denouncing mandatory celibacy and signed by a group of women who have had relationships with priests. He won't even talk about it when he's faced with the global evidence of rebellions of a more perverse nature, pedophilia on a mass scale. He also won't talk about the idea of women priests, which, as Ratzinger, he declared a "clearly erroneous" position incompatible with the Catholic faith. Jesus was a man, as were his 12 apostles. Ergo... And yet such thoughtful, caring Catholics as Charles Curran, a liberal American priest who has been out of Vatican favour for decades, say that admitting women is crucial. As he wrote last week in Newsweek, along with eliminating mandated celibacy (which dilutes Catholicism), welcoming women into the priesthood would be the beginning of real reform in the face of real crisis. Among other things, studies show that pedophiles are overwhelmingly male. Having a gender-balanced priesthood could only be an improvement. But when members of the Women's Ordination Conference protested this week at the Vatican, calling for inclusion, "rather than hierarchy, hypocrisy, exclusion and scandal," they were, of course, dispersed. Plus ca change. In what feels like an unwinnable game for all sides, the Pope keeps shuffling the same cards from the same deck. The sad thing is, he thinks everyone will keep playing. Janice Kennedy writes here on Thursday.
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