Op-ed: in the Pews, We Wait for the Church to Exorcise Its Dysfunction

By Lisa Van Dusen
Ottawa Citizen
February 11, 2013

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/faith-ethics/pews+wait+church+exorcise+dysfunction/7949115/story.html

About 24 hours before Pope Benedict XVI shocked the world by announcing he’d retire from a job men have so rarely retired from, I’d been sitting in a pew in a church, whiffing pancakes from the basement and marvelling at just how badly the Catholic Church needs a re-brand.

Most Catholics, lapsed or not, have had plenty of occasion to ponder the same issue in the time since Pope Benedict was elected in 2005. On this occasion, I was listening to a clearly talented priest wax nostalgic about the days when nobody ate meat on Fridays and wondering why it is that scrambling to hold onto any filament of an already overtaken status quo is so often the last redoubt of organizations in crisis.

Pope Benedict had a tough act to follow in what are arguably the toughest days the church has faced in modern times. He made the papacy more accessible with his own Twitter account, reassured some and offended others with his public pronouncements and showed perhaps his most convincing concession to the demands of modernity in recognizing that these days, being pope is a younger man’s job.

In the eight years since Pope John Paul II died, there have been more abuse scandals; almost uniformly, avoidably ultrascandalous for their component of coverup. There has been much debate and as much pushback on the nagging questions of female priests and open homosexuality in the clergy as opposed to the shushed-up and tarnished kind, and there have been gagging scandals over the attempted silencing of dissident priests and uppity nuns who dare to want to change the church they love.

In Ireland, which has become a vivid microcosm of all these issues, Father Tony Flannery has been targeted by the Vatican for his outspoken criticism of the church’s handling of the sex abuse scandals. Father Flannery, author of six books and an eloquent proponent of reform, has refused to comply with the Vatican’s restrictions on his ministry under threat of excommunication. In a recent interview with CBC Radio, he expressed mystification more than anything at the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the re-branded Inquisition ... seriously) who’ve refused to meet with him to discuss his case.

Father Flannery told the CBC’s Michael Enright that his problems are mainly with governance, secrecy, centralization of power and, “The fact that they are not facing up to some of the massive issues that the church is trying to deal with.” He fears it will all end in the inevitable math problem of no gay priests, no women priests, no married priests, no priests at all.

In the pews, there seems to be the kind of leaden apprehension that comes with adhering to any organization in the midst of a narrative whose worst days may or may not be behind it but whose actions don’t seem to be cleaning the slate.

In the realm of organizational rehabilitation, it’s a given that decades of covering up corruption and intimidating critics has never been dispensed with through more of the same. Meanwhile, so many good people want the church to exorcise its dysfunction but haven’t yet seen the positive headlines or heard the concerted leadership to take heart.

Re-branding, cliched as it sounds, is always a dodgy proposition for any organization, especially if it’s deployed as an easy alternative to authentic reform. The Catholic Church has been around too many centuries through too much history, internal and external, to be able to solve these problems in one year, one decade or with one pope.

But aside from everything else it is, the Catholic Church is a global network, and in this small, interconnected world, we’ve seen that networks can be used for feeding the hungry, healing the sick, helping the poor, contaminating the housing market or fixing the Libor rate.

Sit in any pew on any Sunday, and contemplate the enormous power to communicate that lies with whoever stands and speaks from that lectern. Then contemplate the power, trickled down in the gold and filigree behind them, of the church itself. Then ask, to coin a phrase, in all seriousness and in a whole other sort of political context; “What would Jesus do?”

Lisa Van Dusen is a former international news editor in Washington, D.C., former international news writer at ABC News in New York, and former Sun Media Washington bureau chief.