I’m about to become a former Catholic
Betrayals on abuse have finally driven me away
For months, American Catholics had been asked to be patient just a little longer. We were promised that the systemic cover-ups of clerical sexual abuse would finally be addressed this week in Baltimore at the biannual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
This wouldn’t be just one more round of forced apologies. It would involve action — maybe even a vote on a new standard of conduct for bishops, and a commission to review violations.
To the astonishment of no one past the age of reason, that didn’t happen.
Instead, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, president of the bishops conference, who has himself shielded at least one predator,said the Vatican had insisted on delaying any action until after a February Vatican summit on the scandal.
Let’s not be hasty, right? It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. Apparently, these men need a code of conduct to know not to shield rapists. And they need time to reach universal consensus on simply asking bishops to promise not to lead a “double life.”
No one can accuse me of being hasty. But after a lifetime of stubborn adherence on my part and criminal behavior on yours, your excellencies, you seem to have finally succeeded in driving me away. I’m not even sure there’s such a thing as a former Catholic, but I’m about to find out.
My hopes for this Baltimore confab weren’t ever high. Fool me 6,000 times, shame on you. But that 6,001st time, well, I’m just all out of willingness to be conned into believing that you — who have so long seen the devastation of innocents principally as a PR problem — will ever change.
Like others who’ve had more than enough of your betrayals and arrogance and perpetual surprise about having coddled child rapists, I haven’t been back to Mass since June. That’s when a man I thought I knew pretty well, a man who amid the abuse scandals of 2002 seemed to understand the depth of the damage done, was himself disgraced.
After “credible and substantiated” allegations that the now former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick had taken advantage of seminarians, assaulted an altar boy in 1971, and even abused the first child he had ever baptized, the accused was shipped off to the quiet of a Kansas friary — thanks so much for thinking of us out here on the prairie! — to pray, repent and, so far, stick to his story that he has done nothing wrong.
In August came the Pennsylvania grand jury report detailing more than 1,000 cases of abuse by more than 300 priests over seven decades. Across the country, other states have launched similar investigations, so all the hiding, stalling, law-and commandment-breaking ends here: Basta.
Already, the Boston Globe and Philadelphia Inquirer discovered that more than 130 American bishops have been accused of failing to deal appropriately with sexual misconduct by priests in their diocese. “I’m shocked by that number,” Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the top clerical abuse adviser to Pope Francis, told the Globe. “It raises a lot of questions in my mind.’’
His shock answers a couple of questions in my mind: After all these years, is this really the level of understanding of how long-running and far-reaching the rot was and is? And if this is the cardinal who is most on the case here, is it any wonder we are where we are?
The men who run the church continue to think so well of one another that I sometimes wonder whether they have met. DiNardo recounted that it happened this way: “In our weakness,’’ he said in Baltimore, “we fell asleep.” Like Rip Van Winkle, and for a century.
When and if the bishops do fully rouse themselves, I won’t be in the pews to hear about it.
I am a true-believing, rosary- and novena-praying graduate of St. Mary’s Elementary School, the University of Notre Dame and l’Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium. I covered the Vatican for The New York Times and was a fellow at the Catholic University of America’s Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies. I never thought it would come to this.