KANSAS CITY (MO)
National Catholic Reporter
May 3, 2019
The Catholic University of America decided to give the final guest speaker spot in its commendable series of four programs examining the priest sex abuse crisis to George Weigel. That was unfortunate, because his long-discredited narrative about the causes of the scandal and his illusory ideas about how to deal with it do a great disservice to the Catholic faithful in this moment when so much of the church is finally squaring up to the awful truth.
Weigel has for decades pushed a script, embellished from time to time, that defies logic, that at a minimum misrepresents data, that distorts and even falsifies verifiable history, and that engages in shameless deception to protect his principal enterprise — a gilded portrayal of the hastily sainted Pope John Paul II.
If the case he makes is so flawed, why bother spending any time on it? Precisely because Weigel can still command center stage at signature Catholic settings. He has long been an unabashed apologist not only for a pope but for the clerical and hierarchical culture now under scrutiny. He has an important perch as Distinguished Senior Fellow and William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, and a pulpit at First Things, a magazine that initially helped fashion his misconceptions. He is a regular traveler with Timothy Busch’s Napa Institute, an organization espousing extreme libertarian views and increasingly a gathering point for those opposed to Pope Francis. This year’s Napa Institute main speaker is Cardinal Raymond Burke, a leader of the Francis opposition.
Weigel has been preening hierarchical feathers for years. He is backed by big money. He is a Catholic to be reckoned with.
And so it is imperative that one also reckon with the fact that on the clergy sex abuse crisis, his analysis is terribly defective.
It is an important reckoning, too, because after nearly three and a half decades of public scandal, some at the highest levels of church leadership as well as Catholic lay leaders — some of whom were also represented on the CUA stage — have finally come to accept the truth. This is no time to turn back.
Weigel has most recently targeted, as a way of calling into question the matter of the wide culpability of church leaders, Pennsylvania attorney general Josh Shapiro and, by extension, all other attorneys general and the growing number of state investigations underway into the church’s handling of abusive priests. The church is being unfairly attacked, Weigel argues. The events of decades are being “telescoped” to appear that all of the abuse is occurring in the present, he says. And the oldest deflection: abuse is happening everywhere else, so why is the church being singled out?
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