A papal apology is not an action plan
Problems in the church go well beyond latest revelations, Janice Kennedy says.
The elephant was there, right where it’s always been, huge and inescapable in the middle of the room. And once again, no one saw it.
By “no one,” I mean the Pope. And the bishops. And the priests. And a good chunk of those Catholic faithful who confuse faith with belief in an institution, even when that institution has forfeited most of its credibility.
The latest papal apology, in the wake of the horrific abuse scandal exposed by a Pennsylvania grand jury report, was overflowing with shame and regret.
“We showed no care for the little ones,” wrote Pope Francis sorrowfully — perhaps forgetting about the teenage boys brutally sodomized by priests they trusted, or the young women raped as they sought counsel, or the young families now squirming away from the church, or the seniors questioning lifetimes spent in what now feels like a terrible sham.
(All this has been underscored by one of the recurring themes of priests’ criminal abuse, which involves parodying Catholicism itself. In Pittsburgh, priests took pornographic photos of a naked young boy posing as Jesus on the cross. Canada’s Bishop Raymond Lahey had pictures of adolescents engaged in sexual acts while wearing crosses and rosary beads.)
It is indeed heartbreaking to think of “the little ones” — but just as heartbreaking to think of all the other victims of a betrayal so profound it knows no depths.
But the Pope has apologized, again. And along with calls for prayer and fasting, he has vowed that the horrors of the past must never be repeated. To this end, he wrote, “no effort must be spared.”
Except maybe the effort of noticing that elephant in the room. And the effort needed to get it out of there.
Various diocesan Safe Environment Offices, which essentially offer directives on how to prevent any priest from ever being alone with any kid, lull church officials into believing they have thwarted the predators. Vows to report crimes to police and no longer hide offenders lull them into thinking they are taking action.
They are not. The problem goes miles beyond the crimes, violence, degradation and perversion, miles beyond the toleration of misconduct and the cover-ups. But church leaders don’t want to take that journey. They don’t want to ask the one question that needs to be asked: Why?
In a world where there are deviants and predatory pedophiles across society, why is it so disproportionately worse in the Catholic Church? Just because there are no easy answers doesn’t mean there should be no hard questioning.
Yet such issues as the role of obligatory celibacy (which some experts have estimated is observed by only half of all priests, implying a kind of enforced hypocrisy at the very least) and the exclusion of married people and women — these are dismissed as distractions.
Really? Given a centuriesold culture of abuse, why dismiss anything that might conceivably provide insight?
Is it possible the church’s fraternity of nominally celibate male-only clerics, unburdened by normal human relationships, attracts misfits — even perverts — in disproportionate numbers? Or creates them? The official church doesn’t know, because it doesn’t want to ask.
So the questions remain untouchable, victims of the institution’s innate clericalism, which demands that priests be treated as lords and the unordained as serfs. Francis rightly condemned such clericalism — but said nothing about how the church might start serving its people more (and its priests less) by adopting a course of courageous honesty to examine this ongoing march toward self-destruction.
Maybe he isn’t even to blame. With a hierarchy that tilts sharply to the right, the slightly more open-minded Francis is already viewed as a near-commie. Hands tied, he knows he can’t win if he tries anything revolutionary.
So he won’t.
The overwrought handwringing will continue, another Catholic ritual.
And the elephant? It will continue to sit, huge and unmoved, right in the centre of the room.