Guilty!

The 21st Century American Catholic
June 23, 2012

http://the21stcenturyamericancatholic.blogspot.com/2012/06/guilty.html

Yesterday, a church official was convicted of the crime of endangering children. Msgr. William Lynn, of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, can serve from 3-l/2 to 7 years in prison.

The archdiocese released a statement apologizing to the victims and then saying that from now on they will work to make the church safe for all people. I don't believe them.

Everything happens in a context. The only reason that the church officials want to make the church "safe" is that they got caught. They got caught covering up priests' sins and crimes against children. So, what they really mean is that they will do everything possible not to get caught again. The pressure on the church is coming from the outside, from the world that bishops and the pope consider a place of secularism and sin, "the culture of death"--a world that ordinarily they ignore or condemn.

Inside the church, the context is different. Lynn was convicted of obeying his archbishop, Cardinal Bevilacqua. Obedience is built into the church structure. At ordination a priest promises obedience to his bishop, and a bishop promises obedience to the pope. When a Cardinal receives his red hat from the pope, he promises never to publicly express anything that will make the church look bad.

I know many Philadelphia priests. I count them among the finest men I have had the privilege to know. And I know they are personally grieving for the children. They are also grieving for their perpetrator brothers and for the church. I don't know Archbishop Chaput, so I don't know how he feels personally. In any case, it doesn't matter. It doesn't officially matter. The priests and Chaput are divided men, separated from their personal feelings by the official structure that runs their lives. It is reported that some priests attended Lynn's trial and applauded him while ignoring the victims who were there to testify. As I note on the, THE SPIRITUALLY MATURE PERSON page, a spiritually mature person is a whole person. As spiritual as these men may personally be, they are officially not whole persons.

So when the archdiocese issues an apology and a "promise" to do better, they may personally mean it but they don't officially mean it. And, "officially" is what counts. What counts is the church organization, and its authority/power structure that is at the heart of this calamity. If the official church really cared, it would change its power structure. But it is not about to do that. As I posted earlier, in Ireland Pope Benedict XVI publicly stated that the whole sexual abuse situation is a mystery to him. No bishop said, "Hey, Joe, it's no mystery at all. We're working in a spiritually corrupt structure."

But they kept quiet. And Benedict is keeping quiet. Surely, he has expressed his personal sorrow to the victims. But when it comes to changing the structures that helped create those victims, he is silent, deadly silent. And so the bishops are obediently silent, despite Vatican II's teaching that they run the church with the pope. So nothing will change except that the archdiocese will try harder not to get caught again by the civil authorities. A dawning bright note is that through cases like the Lynn case, the Spirit of truth is cleansing the church of what is not of God. In the meantime, we cannot trust anything the authorities officially say.

And also in the meantime, we have a society to uplift and transform, as well as we personally can, individually and with others, in the Spirit of Christ. People are suffering. Waiting is not an option.