Thursday, April 17, 2008

Further Thoughts on the Papal Visit

Deepak Chopra has a post on the Washington Post that reflects on Benedict XVI's visit and correctly concludes that the Pope and the institutional hierarchy are too tainted to turn around the Church's decline in America. Benedict is attempting to shift responsibility for cleaning up the mess to bishops, yet many of these men are part of the problem and, if they had any true decency and morality would resign from their positions. Archbishop Mahoney of Los Angeles is a case in point. Instead of cooperating and coming clean, prosecutors described Mahoney and his minions as worse to deal with than organized crime figures. Such actions do not evidence shame or remorse. Rather, as is always the case with the bishops, cardinals and Pope, the real story is about power and money. The bottomline is that the Church leadership will give lip service to being contrite, sorry or whatever adjective springs to mind, but their actions will tell the true story. At the same time, they will continue to persecute gays most of whom have more integrity and morality than the self-style abiters of morality. Here are highlights from Chopra's comments:
The public was outraged at the leniency of the Church toward child abuse in the priesthood, their policy being to quietly whisk the offenders off for rehabilitation through prayer and counseling. The secular position was that these priests were criminals who should be punished with long prison sentences. . . . pedophilia was a legal offense, and expectations for any kind of rehabilitation were low, given that pedophiles obsessively repeat their actions over and over, sometimes hundreds of times. The psychopathy was well documented, and priests were no exception.

We know how this current crisis is going to keep unfolding. Lawyers and prosecutors will hound the Church, more lawsuits will be filed and won, more victims will come forward, and the Church will try to hold on to as much of its money and property as possible. As for the general decline in church attendance, there's no reason to feel that this trend, now decades old, will be reversed. Yet the Pope clings to the notion that lack of faith is the core problem and regaining faith the ultimate solution. How can he think otherwise when that is the very foundation of the Kingdom of God? The tragedy is that the mystery of the two worlds affects us all, and the Church has become too tainted by scandal to offer answers that might satisfy a new generation of seekers.

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