KANSAS CITY (MO)
National Catholic Reporter
January 25, 2019
By Robert McCabe
A month before the start of a global summit in Rome on the sex abuse crisis, a prominent church historian and theologian said last week that the issue poses the biggest challenge to the church in 500 years.
“This is not like the Protestant Reformation; it’s not,” Massimo Faggioli, a Villanova University professor, said in a talk at Immaculate Conception Church in Hampton, Virginia.”But in my opinion, it’s the most serious crisis in the Catholic Church since the Protestant Reformation.”
In an hour-long presentation, Faggioli set out to show how and why this particular moment in the history of the church has become so critical and what the crisis is telling Catholics about the state of the church. The talk was sponsored by the Bishop Keane Institute, a ministry offered by the parish, which brings prominent Catholic speakers to southeastern Virginia.
While the crisis has gone global, said Faggioli, one strain of it is peculiar to the United States, where it is inseparable from such hot-button issues as sexuality, homosexuality and gender. The scandal in the United States has resulted in a “theological crisis,” he said. The crisis is also being used by some, according to Faggioli, to mount a campaign opposing Pope Francis.
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