I don't read the Washington Post. This morning, an MOJ reader sent me a message
and a column from today’s WP.
The reader's message:
"A question that should be put
to every participant of the MOJ blog, to which no one should not respond if MOJ
intends to have any credibility at all outside Catholic circles: How does Catholic Social Theory respond to
this? I can't think of any more pressing
socio-theological-legal issue confronting Catholics (including American
Catholics) right now or in the future..."
Now, the column:
How the Catholic Church could end its sex scandal
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
How in the name of God can the Roman
Catholic Church put the pedophilia scandal behind it?
I do not invoke God's name lightly.
The church's problem is, above all, theological and religious. Its core
difficulty is that rather than drawing on its Christian resources, the church
has acted almost entirely on the basis of this world's imperatives and
standards.
It has worried about lawsuits. It
has worried about its image. It has worried about itself as an institution and
about protecting its leaders from public scandal. In so doing, it has made
millions of Catholics righteously furious and aggravated every one of its problems.
So instead of going away, the
scandal keeps coming back, lately in a form that seems to challenge Pope
Benedict XVI himself. It was sickening to read Thursday's New York Times story
reporting that Vatican officials "did not defrock a priest who molested as
many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned
them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church."
The priest, the Rev. Lawrence
Murphy, worked at a Wisconsin school for deaf boys from 1950 to 1974. He died
in 1998.
In Germany, the pope's home country,
more than 300 victims have come forward in recent weeks, and Chancellor Angela
Merkel, whose party has Catholic roots, called the scandal "a major
challenge for our society."
In the case of Murphy, the Vatican
did what every institution does in a scandal: It issued a statement putting the
best face on its decisions.
"In light of the facts that
Father Murphy was elderly and in very poor health, and that he was living in
seclusion and no allegations of abuse had been reported in over 20 years,"
the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said, "the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith suggested that the Archbishop of Milwaukee give
consideration to addressing the situation by, for example, restricting Father
Murphy's public ministry and requiring that Father Murphy accept full
responsibility for the gravity of his acts." Murphy, he noted, "died
approximately four months later without further incident."
The statement is representative of
what's wrong with the church's response. It is bureaucratic and
self-exculpatory, even asking us to feel for this priest because he was
"elderly" and "in very poor health."
The spokesman called the case
"tragic," but tragic does not do justice to the outrage here. Yes,
the statement included an acknowledgement of the "particularly vulnerable
victims who suffered terribly from what [Murphy] did," and that he had
violated his "sacred trust." Is this the best Father Lombardi could
do?
During his visit to the United
States in 2008, Pope Benedict started moving toward a better approach. He
seemed genuinely pained and angered by the scandal. He repeatedly apologized
and said he was "deeply ashamed" of the abusive priests who had
"betrayed" their ministry.
But while this was a step in the
right direction, apologizing for the misbehavior of individual priests will
never be enough. The church has been reluctant to speak plainly about the heart
of its problem: In handling these cases, it put institutional self-protection
first.
The church needs to show it
understands the flaws of its own internal culture by examining its own
conscience, its own practices, its own reflexives when faced with challenge. As
the church rightly teaches, acknowledging the true nature of our sin is the one
and only path to redemption and forgiveness.
Of course, this will not be easy.
Enemies of the church will use this scandal to discredit the institution no
matter what the Vatican does. Many in the hierarchy thought they were doing the
right thing, however wrong their decisions were. And the church is not alone in
facing problems of this sort.
But defensiveness and institutional
self-protection are not Gospel values. "For whoever wants to save his life
will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it."
The church needs to cast aside the
lawyers, the PR specialists and its own worst instincts, which are human
instincts. Benedict could go down as one of the greatest popes in history if he
were willing to risk all in the name of institutional self-examination, painful
but liberating public honesty, and true contrition.
And then comes something even
harder: Especially during Lent, the church teaches that forgiveness requires
Catholics to have "a firm purpose of amendment." The church will have
to show not only that it has learned from this scandal, but also that it's
truly willing to transform itself.
[email protected]
Crying Wolf
Created 03/16/2010 - 3:58pm
The Editors
The health-care-reform bill passed despite the
efforts of conservative lobbying groups, most of which are opposed to
reform for other reasons, and the United States Conference of Catholic
Bishops, which supports reform in theory but opposed the Senate bill.
But the debate has been costly for prolife groups.
By the time you see this, the fate of the Democrats' health-care
legislation will probably have been decided. The House of
Representatives plans to vote on the Senate bill a few days after we go
to press. Whatever the outcome, one thing is already certain: the debate
over the bill has left a deep rift—and not only between the two major
parties.
Prominent representatives of the prolife community, including the
Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities for the United States Conference of
Catholic Bishops and the National Right to Life Committee, have rejected
the Senate bill, claiming that it allows direct federal funding of
elective abortion. Meanwhile, Catholic supporters of the bill, including
the Catholic Health Association, have said that it does not. One needs a
good reason to oppose a bill that would cover 30 million uninsured
Americans and greatly improve insurance for those who already have it.
If the Senate bill did clearly authorize the federal government to pay
for elective abortions, prolife Americans might have such a reason. To
conclude the bill does this, however, requires one to believe that every
ambiguity—every possible complication the bill doesn’t explicitly
address—is a ploy by prochoice politicians to sneak abortion funding
into the system. President Barack Obama and his party’s leadership have
promised the bill won’t be used in this way. Their critics instruct us
to presume that they’re lying.
These critics point out that the bill departs from the Hyde
Amendment’s ban on federal support for any health plan that covers
elective abortion. They insist this is the only conceivable way for the
government to subsidize insurance without paying for abortion. This is
false, as the Senate bill itself clearly demonstrates. Under the bill,
anyone who buys a plan that covers elective abortion would have to pay a
separate, unsubsidized premium for that coverage. Such premiums would
be segregated from premiums for all other services in a special account,
which would have to cover the full cost of elective abortions and
couldn’t receive a penny from the government. In other words, the bill
would preserve the Hyde Amendment’s principle without applying its
method.
Critics also claim that the money the bill appropriates for community
health centers is not subject to the Hyde Amendment. No doubt the bill
would be strengthened with the addition of language that clearly imposes
the Hyde rule on any federal money given to health centers. But since
such money will in any case be channeled through the Department of
Health and Human Services (HHS), where the Hyde Amendment obtains, there
is no good reason to suppose that it will be exempt from the
amendment’s constraints. Besides, if HHS really could spend any part of
the new funding on elective abortions, it wouldn’t matter that the Hyde
Amendment keeps it from using the rest of its money for this purpose: as
the bill’s critics never tire of telling us, money is fungible—the Hyde
Amendment works only if it covers everything HHS spends. It’s also
worth mentioning that none of the existing health centers, which provide
care to one in eight children born in the United States, has ever
offered abortion services.
Many of the bill’s most prominent critics are lobbyists, and for the
purposes of lobbying, a plausible falsehood is often as useful as the
truth. But crying wolf is always a dangerous game. If prolife groups
raise false alarms to bully politicians and scare up donations, they
risk being ignored when a real threat arises. Some of the same groups
that are now loudly predicting disaster if health-care reform passes
warned that the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) was sure to be passed and
signed into law if Barack Obama was elected president. People remember
these predictions, and eventually they stop paying attention. If the
Senate bill does not pass, conservative lobbying groups, most of which
are opposed to reform for other reasons, and the bishops conference,
which supports reform in theory, will bear some responsibility for it.
If one wants to claim that no politician who’s really opposed to
abortion can support the Senate bill, it’s not enough to show that the
bill’s provisions are inferior to the House’s Stupak Amendment; one must
also argue that the Senate bill is inferior to the status quo. The
government is already subsidizing group plans that cover
elective abortion by means of tax breaks for businesses that offer them.
Millions of Americans must now choose between accepting such a plan and
going without good health insurance; the only other option, a decent
individual plan, is now just too expensive for them. The Senate bill
would give such people the wherewithal to buy insurance that doesn’t
cover elective abortion, which means that, in addition to its many other
benefits, it would save millions of Americans from having to choose
between their conscience and their health.
