UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Michael Sean Winters | Jun. 7, 2016
The fact that we, as a Church, are still wrestling with how to confront the crime of clergy sexual abuse of minors invites all manner of emotional and programmatic responses. This weekend’s release of a new motu proprio on episcopal accountability makes those invitations clamant.
Some people, as we know, have left the Church: The rise of the “nones” among Catholics in the Northeastern part of the United States is largely attributable to the clergy sex abuse crisis, although this cause melded with the rise of the Religious Right and its involvement with politics. Others, including some leaders of victims’ advocacy groups have become fatalistic about reform: Understandably suspicious, each additional revelation of clergy sex abuse and, even more, of bishops covering that abuse up, only feeds their suspicion that the leaders of the Church will always be more concerned with institutional self-preservation than with protecting children. Still others think the crisis only confirms their suspicions about the hierarchic organization of the Church more generally, that this issue, like all issues, is really only about power.
There is no doubt that the Vatican curia is a unique subculture. I recall many years ago a friend who worked there explaining to me that the curia did not exist to help the Holy Father govern the universal Church, but to get red for the more talented among its employees. I doubt there is more ambition there than one finds at the summit of any large organization, but ambition has less competition: For example, curial cardinals do not have to worry about the kids, as most members of Congress do, nor about advances in technology as captains of industry do.
The Vatican curia, and the episcopacy more generally, have also been operating at major cross-currents to the ambient culture for a couple of hundred years. The dominant fact of political life for the last two centuries has been democratization, while the Church has seen the burial of Gallicanism, the great ideological opponent of Roman centralization, and the separation of Church & State yielding yet more control over local churches by Rome than could have been imagined previously. While monarchies fell, the Church embraced the doctrine of papal infallibility.
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