What the Catholic Church Still Doesn’t Get about the Sex Abuse Scandal, by Anthony Stevens Arroyo, Washington Post, May 18, 2011

What the Catholic Church Still Doesn’t Get about the Sex Abuse Scandal

By Anthony Stevens Arroyo
Washington Post
May 18, 2011

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/catholic-america/post/what-the-catholic-church-still-doesnt-get-about-the-sex-abuse-scandal/2011/05/18/AF6JcY6G_blog.html

There is something rotten in Philadelphia – and it’s not the sports teams.

Ana Maria Catanzaro, the chairwoman of the Archdiocesan Review Board for clerical pedophilia has gone public with how the church has systematically violated its own stated policy. The issue here is not that there is clerical abuse of children, but that even after putting corrective policies in place, the official church hierarchy covered up such abuses. Catanzaro said that the whole board contemplated resigning en masse in March, but did not “because we had nothing to be ashamed of, and because we felt we still had a lot to contribute.” Her stance is more courageous in defense of the church than the kowtowing to the hierarchy in all matters because Catanzaro cites the Constitution of the Church, Lumen Gentium , that the laity is “equally responsible for building God’s kingdom on earth.”

The detail offered by Catanzaro in Commonweal magazine is worth a direct reading. It merits attention because the problem is not found only in Philadelphia. Church officials insisted on monitoring the procedures of the board and at the same time withheld key information and prevented direct interviews that are normal procedures in United States’ jurisprudence. Cardinal Rigali of Philadelphia has a well-deserved reputation for good administration. Rigali, it will be remembered, used both diplomacy and hard-headed decision-making for the retirement of former Scranton Bishop Martino and was quick to retract previous claims when faced with a recent grand jury indictment of wayward priests. He is also one of the most powerful of U.S. prelates in the naming of bishops. So his “mistakes” are important because they disclose the thinking at the apex of American Catholicism, an issue not directly addressed in the latest John Jay report that downgraded the role of homosexuality or celibacy as causes of abuse.

The issue is neither the cardinal’s sincerity nor his acumen: both are spoiled, I think, by his theology. Like many bishops, Rigali has a top-down concept of church. Instead of trusting decision-making by legal professionals in the laity, the cardinal withheld information that would likely have produced evaluations so clear he would have been forced to accept the conclusions.

One key problem cited by Catanzaro was how current U.S. legal definitions are replaced with jargon from canon law. The criminal code, for instance, classifies “grooming” of children to gain their confidence before sexual activity as culpable. The archdiocese, instead, insisted on wording like “the Sixth Commandment of the Decalogue” and imposed the age of 16 from canon law as the measure of adulthood rather than the U.S. code’s age of 18. I have little confidence that the latest instruction from the Vatican on how to run such review boards has fundamentally altered the power structure that allows the hierarchy to side-step local law and lay competence.

Resolution of the on-going scandal to Catholicism will not come by repeating the apologetic cant of the Catholic League that “everybody else does it,” pointed out in national and local media. The real issue is that the moral authority of the church depends upon meeting a higher standard. The cover-ups by bishops made worse what an individual cleric once did. Moreover, it is unavailing to call the media “anti-Catholic” and to disparage the faith of protesting Catholics. As Catanzaro suggested, it is time “for bishops to accept that their attitude of superiority and privilege only harms their image and the church’s.”

These are difficult times for all Catholics. If you believe that the Holy Spirit is working among us, then you might hope – as I do – that the end is at hand for the clerical mentality that views all decision-making in the church as top-down. News flash: laypersons are empowered by Baptism to provide leadership to the bishops because Holy Orders do not confer infallibility. Perhaps, as the new Vatican guidelines (III:f) suggest the laity “cannot substitute” for the authority (potestas regiminis) of individual bishops: but only a fool would say that our input can never improve the bishops’ decisions. Let them be humble and ask our advice: we also are the church.