Editorial: Archbishop’s Life like a Tragic Hero

ABQ Journal
January 27, 2012

http://www.abqjournal.com/cgi-bin/decision.pl?attempted=www.abqjournal.com/main/2012/01/27/opinion/archbishops-life-like-a-tragic-hero.html

Archbishop Robert Fortune Sanchez was interred Thursday, ending a chapter in New Mexico history that featured both great hope and a great fall.

The life and death of Sanchez in many ways mirrors Aristotle’s tragic hero, like Oedipus of ancient Greece or Samson of The Bible. Remember that a hero in this sense does not mean a superman, but the protagonist of a story.

Though from humble beginnings, Sanchez rose to a position of high status and responsibility. He was not perfect, and his downfall involved both errors of judgment and character flaws. His fall was not based entirely on his own actions and his punishment was great — loss of position and a life of solitude, ending in death in a place in Albuquerque for people with Alzheimer’s disease — though some would argue his punishment should have been harsher.

While many were seriously harmed, the outcome was not without seeds of hope: The Archdiocese of Santa Fe pioneered a serious policy for dealing with a problem that had been swept under the rug by the Roman Catholic Church in many places — though the problem is in no way unique to the church. And the scandal increased awareness of the problem of child sexual abuse in America.