KANSAS CITY (MO)
National Catholic Reporter
March 6, 2019
By Jamie Manson
For decades we’ve heard countless opinions of what has caused the clergy sex abuse crises in the Catholic Church: clericalism, celibacy, bad seminary formation. But on the closing day of the bishops’ summit on the protection of minors, we heard a new theory: the devil made them do it.
That’s what Pope Francis suggested multiple times and in various ways in his speech at the conclusion of the Meeting on the Protection of Minors in the Church.
“Consecrated persons, chosen by God to guide souls to salvation, let themselves be dominated by their human frailty or sickness and thus become tools of Satan.” Francis claimed.
It wasn’t, of course, the first time Francis’ has spoken about Satan and blamed him for personally engineering the destruction of the church.
In his book The Tweetable Pope, author Michael O’Loughlin writes that “Francis has tweeted about the devil so often that he’s had to ascribe different names in order to keep Satan and his different forms relevant within the Twittersphere.”
Francis sees cosmic battles happening all over the face of the earth and now he has made the sex abuse crisis into a metaphysical battle between Satan and the church. In his concluding speech, he mentioned Satan twice and evil 13 times. The word clericalism was uttered once.
Perhaps the pope thought overblown language and imagery would somehow express the profundity of his horror at this situation, but the speech — which may have been the most crucial of his papacy — ended up being a melodramatic avoidance of the truth.
The truth is there are some very sick men in the priesthood that need very serious help and there are some men in the priesthood who are so psychosexually immature or damaged that they have no place in ministry. And the closed, secretive, all-male power structure of the church protected these men and gravely exacerbated the situation.
Satan did not swoop in and use these men as his tools to destroy the church. These men destroyed it all by themselves by enforcing a warped view of sexuality, making the preservation of their patriarchal rule their first priority and trading in cover-ups, lies and institutional blackmail.
But while Francis set out to boldly slay metaphysical dragons, his army of prelates slouched through a four-day slog.
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