UNITED STATES
Daily Beast
August 18, 2018
By Candida Moss
One central dogma has protected the church through all kinds of clerical scandals.
The news of sex scandal in Pennsylvania is truly sickening. Thousands of victims, hundreds of predatory priests, and what can only be described as a systematic conspiracy to conceal the crimes of those accused. All of which raises the question: How can the Catholic Church survive such a scandal? In fact, in light of previous revelations about sex abuse, how has the church survived so far?
To be sure, church attendance and vocations (the number of men joining the priesthood) have fallen, but to the external observer the ability of priests to maintain authority is baffling. Protestant leaders have been destroyed by smaller scandals, so how does the Catholic Church escape? Given the New Testament’s focus on personal morality and ethics, how can church leaders maintain any kind of authority and status when so many are complicit? Is it just sheer size and economic health that has preserved the church so far?
This is not, unsurprisingly enough for any organization, the first time that the church has encountered scandal on a large scale. Of course there have always been individual priests who have embezzled funds, kept secret families on their estates, and even ordered hits on their ecclesiastical rivals. For the Borgias this was all very much business as usual. But the precedent for how to deal with a widespread crisis of confidence in church leadership was set even earlier: as part of a schism in the church that took place in late antique North Africa.
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