Baltimore Archbishop William Lori must go
“A day of reckoning and a day of accounting.”
Those are the words of Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown in the wake of the release of his office’s report into the abuses of the Catholic Church in the Archdiocese of Baltimore. From a legal perspective, Attorney General Brown is, of course, correct.
How many times, though, have we been here before? How many times has a law enforcement office come forward, laid bare the unbelievably disgusting details of the abuses of a local diocese; the bishop or archbishop taken public responsibility; promised never again, and the world moves on? Then we all pretend to be shocked when it happens again.
As a victim of clerical sexual assault in another state, I say to all of those in power: Stop talking. Stop talking this minute, and start doing. Do what the Maryland legislature did, and make the Church accountable. Penetrate the veneer of the Catholic Church as a mystical entity and make its very temporal leaders responsible in this world, for the sake of victims and the Church they profess to love.
Catholics have been taught, for centuries, that the priest in front of them is holy, that he is descended from the ancient prophet Melchizedek, the high priest, and that during Mass, they stand in persona Christi — literally as a substitute for Christ. Taking a 24-year-old seminary graduate and telling him, “by the way, you stand in for the Savior of the World every Sunday …” what could go wrong? Remember the invincibility of your youth? Imagine if someone in a position of authority reminded you constantly that you were mystically, spiritually different from everyone else. Think about the starkness of that statement.
The release of this report has to be the inflection point — it is now or never. The Catholic Church has to take public account and be held accountable, or this will never end. Baltimore Archbishop William Lori has to go — right now — into retirement. Lori is legendary in the Church hierarchy supposedly as a no-nonsense policy wonk. Well, the evidence says otherwise. If, when Lori took his seat in Baltimore he audited the Archdiocese of Baltimore; turned everything over to A.G. Brown’s predecessor, Brian Frosh; and moved forward, then he would be a bona fide leader.
He did nothing like that, and he knew everything. He waited for the audit, and meekly apologized. Lori is a failure. The Vatican is not going to do anything, and so the people of the Archdiocese of Baltimore must demand that Lori resign. Law enforcement has to ask him the questions they ask all other mortals: What did you know? When did you know it? What did you do about it? If Lori is found to be devious, then he simply must be charged, and treated without fear or favor under the law.
This cannot go on forever, or so we would think. However, it will go on forever unless someone does something. It’s time for a consent decree between the Maryland attorney general and the Archdiocese of Baltimore because they cannot, under any circumstances, police themselves. The Catholic Dioceses of the United States — not the Catholic faith, but the mere mortal men in power — have become an organized danger to their community. That much is plainly and painfully obvious. Victims for years have been cowed by the political power of the Catholic Church in America. The party’s over. It’s time for them to face the music of the awful symphony they wrote through their arrogance, their perceived invincibility and their cruelty. We should have no sympathy for these men, for they are impervious to true regret. Ironically, their only hope is providence itself.