UNITED STATES
Valley News
Randall Balmer
For the Valley News
Saturday, September 26, 2015
Pope Francis’ triumphant visit to Cuba and the United States this week calls to mind the visit of John Paul II to America early in his papacy. In 1979, the charismatic new pontiff celebrated a Mass at Living History Farms outside of Des Moines, Iowa, and utterly charmed his audience, estimated at 350,000. “You’ve got a pope,” an Iowa farmer said to his Catholic neighbor, “who really knows how to pope.”
Despite the inevitable parallels between Francis and John Paul — the charisma, the disarming candor, the vigor that contrasted with their predecessors — a more accurate comparison, in my view, is with John XXIII. The cardinals chose both men, John XXIII and Francis, to be caretakers of the papacy. Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, the primate of Venice, was elected to the papacy in 1958 on the 12th ballot and took the name John XXIII. His fellow cardinals figured that this mild-mannered prelate wouldn’t make a lot of waves and, considering his age, 76, they could revisit the matter of church leadership in a few years. …
Francis has a full agenda. Some studies suggest that fully 10 percent of Americans identify themselves as former Catholics, and a shortage of clergy here in the U.S. and around the world raises questions about clerical celibacy, which has been a requirement for only a millennium or so — a relative short duration for an institution that marks time in centuries. Regarding the ordination of women, the pontiff apparently feels blocked by the statements of his immediate predecessors. So far he has said, “That door is closed,” although the Irish Times has reported that Francis was considering the appointment of Mary McAleese, the former president of Ireland who has studied theology at the Gregorian University in Rome, to the College of Cardinals. (There is no gender-specific requirement for cardinal; the appointment is the pope’s alone, and apparently John Paul II once considered naming Mother Teresa to the College.)
The mention of McAleese brings us, finally, to the pope’s most pressing issue: the pedophilia scandal. When McAleese, then the president of Ireland, stopped in Boston during a state visit to the United States in 1998, she was browbeaten for her support for the ordination of women by none other than Bernard Law. The archbishop of Boston, McAleese recounted later, told her that he was “sorry for Catholic Ireland to have you as president.”
Law, however, was even then shielding pedophile priests in his archdiocese, shuffling them from one assignment to another. According to Spotlight, the recently released motion picture on the scandal, 294 priests under Law’s care have been identified as pedophiles. The tally of their victims now tops a thousand, and the archdiocese so far has doled out more than $85 million in settlements.
Law was forced to resign in 2002, whereupon he was named head of Santa Marie Maggiore, one of the most significant basilicas in Rome. He retired from that post in 2011 and, according to WGBH in Boston, lives a very comfortable life within the confines of the Vatican.
In 2012, Robert Finn, the bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph, was found guilty and sentenced to two years’ probation for failing to report one of his pedophile priests to the authorities. The Vatican allowed Bishop Finn to continue in his post until his resignation from the diocese earlier this year. He remains a bishop.
Francis has begun to address the issue. He appointed a 17-member commission early in his papacy and established a Vatican tribunal in June. Still, as the very existence of the tribunal itself suggests, the Vatican clearly prefers to handle matters of sexual abuse internally rather turn them over to secular authorities.
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