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	In Defense of a Cardinal Who's Trying By Andrew Greeley Chicago Sun-Times March 24, 2006 http://www.suntimes.com/output/greeley/cst-edt-greel241.html A careful reading of the two reports on sexual abuse that the archdiocese recently commissioned persuades me that the cardinal's problem is not that he attempted a personal coverup but that he was unable to control his bureaucracy -- a not uncommon problem in corporate organizations. In fact the Defenbaugh report says quite explicitly in an opening paragraph the cardinal did not know all he needed to know about the priest in question because he was not advised of the information available to his staff. Since the buck stops on his desk, it was proper for him to assume responsibility for the failure and to apologize for it. I must relate some personal history as a credential for this position. In 1986, in the paperback edition of my book Confessions of a Parish Priest, I warned the church that the sexual abuse of young people by priests was a ticking time bomb. Since then I've written at least 20 columns for this paper on the subject, in one of which I outlined a reform proposal which was quite similar to the one Cardinal Bernardin implemented in the early 1990s. Two of my books on the subject, one fiction, one sociology, are currently in the bookstores. I am and always have been on the side of the victims, though not of the victims groups. My fellow priests in Chicago have never forgiven me because I washed dirty linen in public. I write in defense of the cardinal not because I like him (though I do, except when he disagrees with me) and not because he has anything I want, but because I am appalled by the subtle campaign to get rid of him. I apply to him, as I tell him, two Irish compliments -- "He's not the worst of them" and "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know." That he does not practice cover-ups is evident from the case several years ago when a young man alleged sexual abuse by a litany of church and political figures, for example Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Cardinal Edward Egan and this columnist. Cardinal George, as he should have, passed on the accusations to the state's attorney's office. All were subsequently cleared. It was probably the only time in our lives that my fellow Oak Parker (Cardinal Egan) and I ever appeared in the same paragraph. A man who will not cover up for a fellow cardinal will not cover up for a 37-year-old priest. The Bernardin reforms have worked quite well for the last decade and a half and have been imitated in many other dioceses. The problem is not with the reforms but with the clerical culture that permeates the archdiocese's Pastoral Center and its affiliates. The Defenbaugh and Childers reports reveal almost unimaginable blindness in such agencies as the seminary system, the Office of Catholic Schools, the Office of Vicars for Priests and the monitoring systems that supervise men who have been removed from active ministry but not yet excluded from the clerical status. One wonders in what world the people responsible for the behavior described in the reports live. Are they deaf, dumb and blind? Do they not know what harm abusing priests have done to the church? Haven't they read the letters and manuals from the cardinal? Do they not know about the circling vultures from the victims' groups and the torts bar? Do they not comprehend that enemies would bankrupt and destroy the church because people like them have caved in to the clerical culture norm of always protecting the priest? Evidence that clerical culture is alive and well can be found in two resolutions submitted by groups of priests, both concerned about the rights and privacy of priests and neither concerned about foul-ups in the Pastoral Center bureaucracy. Priests (many of them anyway) are like the Bourbon kings -- they never learn anything and they never forget anything. In adopting the recommendations of the two reports, the cardinal has clearly committed himself to the needed reforms. However, he will have to push many of his staff, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century. Presumably he has learned by now that no executive can take for granted that his subordinates have learned the folly of self-defeating behavior. The struggle against the narrow self-pity, the passive-aggressive narcissism and the blind folly of clerical culture can be won only by vigilance and persistence and men around you who understand, as the French writer put it, "Clericalism, THAT is the enemy!"
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