And as a follow-up to what I just posted about the obvious need for systemic reformation of the Catholic church, a selection of articles commenting on the challenge of achieving such reform—and the systemic problems that both demand reformation and make it exceptionally difficult to achieve:
As a recent National Catholic Reporter editorial notes, the abuse crisis is first and foremost a crisis created by the abuse of power. At its heart, the current worldwide crisis of the Catholic church is not about sex. It’s about power—how it’s allocated and how it’s used. And most of all, how it’s abused:
The sex abuse crisis is actually a hierarchy crisis, it is a crisis of a culture that can no longer maintain its superiority by dint of office or by claim of some ontological difference from the rest of humankind. The overwhelming evidence shows that from parish priest to pope, those charged with protecting the community, on hearing that children were being sexually abused, acted first to protect the institutional church.
A central, sad truth runs through the story that has been unraveling for the past 25 years: When the community most needed its leaders to act as pastors they chose instead to act as princes, ignoring the problem all around them while employing every means available to spare the realm.
Historian and former Jesuit Michael Walsh would seem to agree. As Aidan Lewis notes in a recent BBC report on the current crisis of Catholicism, in Walsh’s view,
The real problem is an abuse of authority, the duty of care that pastors have to their flocks. This has been abused and that is the greatest scandal - that's what is systemic, rather than sex abuse.
As Catholic apologists like to point out, sexual abuse of minors is an endemic problem in many institutions and in all societies. What stands out in the Catholic church’s response to this endemic problem, however (and this is something that apologists prefer to ignore), is, Lewis notes, “the cover-ups and other alleged shortcomings in the way abuse was dealt with.”
To address the real problem—the abuse of power—one must address clericalism, Walsh argues. And the phenomenon of clericalism can be addressed effectively only with a change of regime, because the current regime is deeply entrenched in a clericalist understanding of the church: as Walsh notes,
To address the real problem—the abuse of power—one must address clericalism, Walsh argues. And the phenomenon of clericalism can be addressed effectively only with a change of regime, because the current regime is deeply entrenched in a clericalist understanding of the church: as Walsh notes,
That is why I think it’s [i.e., the current crisis] such a threat to the Church and it can only be changed by a regime change, a change at the top, because the Vatican's model is this authoritarian approach to Catholicism and the priests just pick it up.
Dominican priest Tom Doyle, a fierce (and fearless) advocate for survivors of clerical abuse, offers an analysis of the root problems exposed by the current crisis that concurs with Walsh’s. As Doyle notes in a statement published at Voice from the Desert’s website in March (which continues to circulate in recent weeks), the most cogent explanation for the culture of sexual abuse of minors within the Catholic priesthood and for its cover-up by the hierarchy is clericalism: the problem “lies in the clerical culture which forms priests and bishops.”
And that problem is not going to be fixed by the current “pathetic collection of mitered wonders” in either the Catholic church of the U.S. or elsewhere. It’s not going to be fixed by the mitered wonders because they are the problem:
And that problem is not going to be fixed by the current “pathetic collection of mitered wonders” in either the Catholic church of the U.S. or elsewhere. It’s not going to be fixed by the mitered wonders because they are the problem:
The “problem” is not going to be fixed by the pope, the bishops or anyone who works for the institutional Church. Why? Because they are the problem. The light at the end of the long tunnel will remain way out of reach until the very system that produced the dysfunctional clerics and their equally dysfunctional bishops is ended and somehow replaced with not another monarchy but something that one can readily identify with the Body of Christ.
Eugene Kennedy appears to agree. In his latest essay on the current Catholic crisis at NCR, he employs the metaphor of seeing to analyze the lack of effective institutional response to the crisis: what lay Catholics (and the rest of the world) see clearly, the Catholic hierarchy and its defenders appear curiously unable to see. Why is that, he wonders?
The problem, as with any case of limited vision, is a problem of obscured perspective: those inside the system can’t see its woeful faults clearly, because they are inside. They are enmeshed in the system that occludes accurate vision:
The problem, as with any case of limited vision, is a problem of obscured perspective: those inside the system can’t see its woeful faults clearly, because they are inside. They are enmeshed in the system that occludes accurate vision:
The pope has spent much of his career inside the Eiffel Tower-like hierarchical structure of the temporal Church and, with his eyes fixed on Trent, he cannot see what is transparent to believers -- that the hierarchical system was the Petri dish for the incubation and growth of the foul scandal and that it cannot treat or contain the infection that it bears within itself.
Hence the strange phenomenon that many Catholics and most people of good will can see clearly where the problem lies and how to resolve it, but no effective resolution occurs—because institutional power lies in the hands of those unable to see the problem and resistant to its systemic resolution:
Catholics see that there is something seriously wrong in the official way of dealing with a scandal too deep for the tears that have been shed by the innocent. It is only a question of time before everybody sees through the defenses of the hierarchical style by which its clerical supporters try to prop it up. With sadness spreading like a plague from the almost daily diagnosis of heartbreaking problems Catholics should not accept a newly invoked form of transparent hypocrisy.
If bishops want to help the beleaguered pope, let them lead the way back to the collegiality that was the original structure of the church instead of criticizing the media for reporting the tragic story whose end is not in sight. Collegiality is healthy, it preserves the pope at the center of the church, and recognizes its members to be a People of God in this world. That kind of health is the only cure for the corrupt style now calling in a cracking voice for truth, transparency and credibility.
Eugene Kennedy’s analysis is absolutely correct, I think. If there’s to be any effective or authentic reformation of the Catholic church at this point in history, it has to be spearheaded by both the laity and bishops, through a return to the venerable, traditional model of collegiality that Vatican II tried to retrieve.
But that retrieval was thwarted precisely by the current pope and his predecessor. Who have appointed the vast majority of mitered wonders who are, Kennedy observes, essential to the solution of our current crisis.
And those mitered wonders are hardly intent on reforming a system that has chosen them to rule the church, precisely because they have given heart and soul to the system so desperately in need of reform. So Kennedy’s conclusion seems to me both an apt description of what the Catholic church absolutely must do to reform itself, and of the well-nigh impossibility of effecting that reform within the confines of the regime now in place.
And those mitered wonders are hardly intent on reforming a system that has chosen them to rule the church, precisely because they have given heart and soul to the system so desperately in need of reform. So Kennedy’s conclusion seems to me both an apt description of what the Catholic church absolutely must do to reform itself, and of the well-nigh impossibility of effecting that reform within the confines of the regime now in place.