ROME
The Globe and Mail
March 13, 2019
By Michael W. Higgins
Michael W. Higgins is distinguished professor of Catholic thought at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn.
It is a strange and disturbing business to see several cardinals lined up for indictment, censure, canonical sanction, jail sentences and public humiliation. It is not the customary way cardinals deport themselves.
But times have changed. Hans Hermann Groer of Vienna may be deceased, but he ushered in the legacy of shame back in the 1980s when he abused seminarians. As did Keith O’Brien of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, who also retired in disgrace and died before having to return his red hat. Theodore Edgar McCarrick plunged the U.S Catholic Church into a crisis that is still roiling, and when he was judged to have abused a minor, in addition to seminarians, he paid the heaviest price yet: compelled to resign from the College of Cardinals and stripped of his priesthood. And now, Philippe Barbarin – Archbishop of Lyon and Primate of France – is paying a visit to Pope Francis to submit his resignation following a court trial that found him guilty of a clerical sex-abuse cover-up, while George Pell, a senior adviser to the Pope on economic matters and the most powerful Catholic prelate in Australia, has been sentenced to six years in jail for the abuse of two choir boys.
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