David Gibson writing about the Vatican's new rules for handling clerical sexual abuse of minors:
An extensive New York Times investigative story last week detailed Ratzinger's longstanding ambivalence about tackling the scandal of clergy abuse of children and his failure to use many of the tools already at his disposal. Ratzinger and the Vatican only acted in 2001, the Times showed, and only after years of intense lobbying by bishops in the United States and the rest of the English-speaking world to do something.
The future pope, the Times wrote, was "part of a culture of nonresponsibility, denial, legalistic foot-dragging and outright obstruction" in Rome that delayed action as long as possible and then tried to hedge reforms when possible.
Critics will likely interpret the new Vatican rules as falling in the same tradition of almost imperceptible progress.
"Almost imperceptible progress": this is inevitably the tactic used by the leaders of an organization that does not intend to address structural and institutional problems at an effective and transformative level. The initial stage of reaction in such organizations, when its glaring structure or institutional shortcomings become public, is to dig in, become entrenched, and try to shift blame to anyone other than the organization's leaders.
The second stage is to concede that there may be something to critiques of the organization's structure (and of the behavior of its leaders), with the claim that this "something" has already been effectively addressed and we need further changes to enhance the initial response. At this state, the organizational leaders typically engage in tinkering, in image management, in incremental changes attended by loud public announcements designed to convince us real transformative change is taking place.
But since window-dressing impression management never touches the deep structural problems this technique is designed to cover over, those problems continue, and with further outbreaks of negative news, the leaders of an organization finally take one of two steps.
They either dig their heels in and engage in bitter warfare against anyone perceived as the enemy. Or they admit that they have failed as leaders and that their institution needs substantive, and not cosmetic, transformation.
The latter option is not a usual response of organizational leaders--not even in (or perhaps not particularly in) faith-based organizations that claim to be all about transformative change. This option usually requires a determined group of people willing to keep pressing for change, and/or the intervention of the Spirit.
Whither the Catholic church now? The call for transformative change isn't going to go away. Neither is the entrenchment, along with louder and louder defenses of that entrenchment by layfolks who have invested much in seeing the current regime remain in power.
That leaves Sophia. And how She might move in this situation is, I think, anybody's guess.
The graphic is a detail from a medieval church painting of the Trinity, showing the Spirit as Holy Sophia.
