Cardinals to Display Their Colors
Based on a preliminary count of complaints
lodged within each archdiocese, new skullcaps were issued to the
assembled cardinals before they were dismissed from the Vatican.
"Brace for more bad news. I take 25 calls a day
with people naming names," says former priest A.W. Richard
Sipe, a psychotherapist who spent nearly four decades as a
counselor for clergy and lay Catholics. He has been an expert
witness in 56 sexual abuse cases settled by the church.
The toll of victims may be
uncountable.
After telling the top U.S. bishop he had
"deep sympathy" for the troubled American church, Pope John
Paul II took the extraordinary step Monday of summoning all 13
U.S. cardinals to a meeting in Rome.
The agenda, experts suggested, covered a lot
more than the pain caused by sexual predator priests but also the
deep distrust and anger expressed by Catholics over their
leadership's "ignorance, incompetence and mismanagement of the
problems," says John Allen, Vatican correspondent for the
National Catholic Reporter, a weekly Catholic
newspaper.
Bishops' promises of "zero tolerance" of
priestly misconduct have been drowned out by a drumbeat of
fresh allegations, traumatic memories revived by the blast of
news, and old cases that draw new attention as victims throw
off the gag orders on settlements reached years ago. Based on
his studies since 1960, Sipe estimates 6% of priests have had
sexual involvement with youths 17 and under.
The nation's top two cardinals, who, by
virtue of their seniority, powerful personalities and
prestigious dioceses might be expected to trumpet ways to
restore health and integrity in the institutional church,
haven't been able to focus on the spreading scandal.
Cardinal Bernard Law, 70, of Boston, who
has been accused of transferring, hiding and even promoting
serial sex offenders, refuses to step down despite an
onslaught of pressure from parishioners, priests, politicians
and several major newspapers.
Cardinal Roger Mahony, 66, of Los
Angeles, has been distracted by allegations of personal
impropriety, which police said Thursday were unfounded.
A poll last week by Quinnipiac University
in Hamden, Conn., finds 43% of Americans — and the same
percentage of U.S. Catholics — say the mistaken policies and
coverups by church leaders have "done more to hurt the
Church's reputation" than "the sexual abuse of young people by
priests." But 29% of 1,347 adults surveyed in the national
poll and 31% of 326 Catholics surveyed said the priests'
actions caused the most harm to the church's reputation.
Among Catholics, 83% say the sex scandal
has not shaken their faith in their religion or in their own
parish priest (86%). But 32% say this mess is rattling their
confidence in their cardinals and bishops.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
plans to have five priests write a new proposed national
policy for dealing with sexual abuse, but the plan is already
under fire. Three bishops appointed to the panel are named in
lawsuits for participating in reassigning or hiding
information about sexual predator priests. They are John B.
McCormack of Manchester, N.H., (whose early career was in
Boston as an auxiliary to Cardinal Law), John Gaydos of
Jefferson City, Mo., and James Quinn of Cleveland.
Milwaukee's Archbishop Rembert Weakland,
who oversaw the creation of one of the programs mentioned by
some as a model for bishops to deal with sexual misconduct, is
under fire now for disguising a parish priest's history of
molesting children.
The head of the U.S. Council of Catholic
Bishops, Wilton Gregory, Archbishop of Belleville, Ill., often
holds up the archdiocese of Chicago as another model.
In Chicago, the late Cardinal Joseph
Bernardin in 1993 established a new procedure, which includes
an independent review board and guidelines for dealing with
sexual abuse of minors. The board cleaned up a 40-year mess
involving 50 cases and an undisclosed number of priests. The
archdiocese has paid out approximately $10 million to victims,
according to the Rev. Thomas Paprocki, the archdiocese's
representative on the board.
But not everyone thinks Chicago should be
held up as a role model. "Chicago is long on talk, short on
action," says David Clohessy, co-director of Chicago chapter
of the national Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.
"They have outstanding PR but are poor on performance. The
written policies are essentially meaningless. There's no
enforcement. It's like a speed limit without a cop."
And Gregory and the bishops conference
have no power to impose the Chicago model on the other 188
dioceses across the nation. The conference is a network where
bishops mull over mutual problems, propose projects and act as
the voice of Rome to the USA, and the voice of Americans to
Rome.
"Every bishop is an apostle of Christ,
charged to teach, sanctify and govern his diocese," says the
Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, editor of the religion journal
First Things.
Gregory went to the Vatican last week for
annual meetings, with the announced intention to seek an
"action plan." He initially came away from private meetings
with John Paul II with little more than the pope's active
sympathies and a comment that the scandal had "touched him
deeply."
But just as Gregory was headed home to
Belleville, the Vatican announced the meetings set for next
week. Even with this unusual session planned, experts say
Americans should not look to Pope John Paul II to spell out a
plan for the world's 1 billion Catholics tailored to fit the
U.S. legal system.
"The pope is the first among equals, the
bishop of Rome, successor of Peter, but he's not the sheriff
or Interpol or the FBI," says Neuhaus. "He's not the CEO, and
the church is not his company."
The pope exercises the ultimate teaching
authority on faith and morals, in consultation with cardinals
and bishops, but Rome won't intervene in operations that are
the bishops' prerogatives or make a blanket rule on how any
bishop should deal with civil or criminal authorities at
home.
"The pope could mandate anything he
wants. But even if he mandated something, it's no guarantee it
will happen," says the Rev. Thomas Reese, author of Inside
the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic
Church.
After documents emerged last week
revealing Boston Cardinal Law's direct involvement in covering
up for more than one predatory pedophile priest, there were
off-the-record rumors that the Vatican would push him to
resign or accept reassignment.
The Vatican is well aware, lawsuit by
lawsuit, of the escalating scandal, says Allen. But the curia,
the vast and cumbersome international bureaucracy that governs
the institutional operations of the Roman Catholic Church, is
annoyed and suspicious of the frenzied atmosphere in the USA
and the characteristic demand for a quick fix, he says.
"The thinking from Rome has been that
this problem should be handled on the local level. The
American legal system is very different than the European
system. American ideas about sexuality, power, and
accountability for officials are different as well. Europeans
see Americans as having an exaggerated puritanical hysteria
over sexuality," Allen says.
The signifying characteristic of John
Paul II's papacy has been his teaching authority. He has
systematically reined in Catholic thinkers, writers,
theologians and clerics to the most conservative theological
understanding of Catholic doctrine. He has repeatedly called
on the bishops, particularly those caught in the undertow of
the USA's permissive culture, to stand firmly for the
authority of the church in every aspect of life, birth to
death, and all relationships personal, political and
social.
In the ordinary measurements of action in
a crisis, the 2,000-year-old Catholic Church doesn't move in a
New York minute.
It took three years for Pope John Paul II
to remove an Austrian cardinal after allegations that he
molested young boys. It took four days for him to accept the
resignation of Palm Beach, Fla., Bishop Anthony O'Connell, who
stepped down in March after admitting he abused a young man
and signed a secret settlement in Tennessee before accepting
the Florida post.
One of the church's fiercest defenders in
the popular culture, William Donohue, president of the
Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and editor of a
newsletter covering anti-Catholic bias in society, calls this
church's self-inflicted wounds "indefensible." He says he will
stand up for the glorious teachings of his faith but won't
rally support for failed leaders.
Donohue and others see only one road out
of the scandal — the high road of faith.
"People are desperately looking for an
antidote to the toxicity that afflicts us right now," says
theologian Thomas Groome, author of What Makes Us
Catholic. (HarperSanFrancisco, $23.95)
"We will find it not in the individuals
who make up the church," he says, "but in deep spirituality
and the rich sacramental tradition of Catholicism. We have
allowed the church to take the place of God in our lives. This
crisis in human leadership could return us to a deeper
faith." |
