Catholicism seems unable to move on from scandal

ordinations nor adult conversions dramatically declined. As an institution, the Roman Catholic Church seemed to weather the storm better than might have been expected. The Catholic belief that the sacraments are more important than the sins of the men responsible for offering them was tested — and seemingly endured.

The question hanging over American Catholicism today, as it endures a second purgatorial experience with scandal, is whether this time is different, whether the church’s peculiar post1970s mix of resilience, stagnation and decay can survive a second agony.

The question was sharpened by the recent fiasco in Baltimore at the General Assembly of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, where the American Church’s shepherds were supposed to vote on some kind of plan to handle malfeasance within their ranks — only to have their intentions swatted down at the last minute by the Vatican’s insistence that any accountability measures be hashed out in Rome some months hence.

The fiasco was not surprising — the tone-deafness and self-protectiveness of the Roman intervention, the bafflement and internal divisions of the American bishops and the liberal-versus-conservative arguments that followed were all characteristic of Catholicism’s crisis under Pope Francis.

But it was still revelatory. When the sex-abuse scandals broke in 2001, it was possible to imagine that they were just about sex abuse — that the church could simply stop treating predatory priests with therapy, start defrocking them, and move forward chastened and renewed.

Seventeen years later, with neither the American bishops nor Francis able to muster an adequate response to the revelation that a famous cardinal was a predator whose sins were known even as he rose, it’s clear that this was wrong.

It is clear that there is festering sexual and financial corruption in the hierarchy; it is clear that there are problems in the way the church trains priests and selects bishops. But the church’s theological factions are sufficiently far apart that each would rather do nothing than let the other side lead reform — because the liberals think the conservatives want an inquisition, the conservatives think the liberals want Episcopalianism, and there is some truth in both caricatures.

The result, as in secular politics these days, is stalemate and confusion, with a church increasingly unsure of what it teaches, led by men who can’t agree on how it might be cleansed.

Recently two Catholic journalists I know, Damon Linker and Melinda Henneberger — one a convert drawn to the church despite his doubts, the other ‘‘a true-believing, rosary- and novena-praying graduate’’ of Catholic schools — have written pieces about how the new scandals are pushing them from practicing to lapsed, Catholic to ‘‘ex-Catholic.’’

Someday soon (maybe for Advent or Christmas) I will write a column about why this leave-taking is a terrible mistake. But for today it’s enough to raise the possibility that Henneberger and Linker are representative of many wavering Catholics who stayed with a compromised leadership in 2001 but won’t stay with a hierarchy that seems bankrupt in 2018.

I think the bishops meeting in Baltimore know that this is a possibility, that they may be responsible for the loss of churchgoers, the loss of souls. I think many have genuinely good intentions, a genuine desperation to figure out what must be done.

And I think their impotence is a lesson, all too literal, in the road that good intentions often pave.