Roman Catholic Church: A Study in How Absolute Power Corrupts

Just when you think that things cannot get any messier for the Nazi Pope, new information explodes about the late Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, who despite many reports of abuse of young men was protected by the less than saintly John Paul II and up until 2006 by Benedict XVI as well. Marceil was finally barred from public ministry by Benedict XVI in 2006 because the dirt was just getting too hard to cover up. Now it seems, based on a Boston Globe story, that Marceil also had at least one child with a woman with whom he was having a relationship. Marceil personifies the problem within the Church in terms of sexually dysfunctional clergy - caused by an unholy obsession with demonizing sex - and the resulting sexual abuse of minors:

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Most psychiatrists and psychologists, however, say that sexual abuse against minors is not so much an indication of sexual orientation--whether homosexual or heterosexual--as much as it indicates a stunted or malformed sexuality overall.

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What does this mean on a bigger picture scale? It means that due to the dictatorship weilded by the last two Popes within the Church, needed discussions and honest evaluations simply have not and do not occur and that the absolute power these two failable and unsaintly men have exercised is a recipe for long term disaster. Andrew Sullivan has a very insightful post that examines this destructive phenomenon. Here are some highlights:

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There is, it seems to me, a connecting thread between all the various depressing bits of Catholic news this past week, beginning with the clueless, insular outreach to reactionary SSPX anti-Semites and culminating in the latest revelations about the serial child rapist protected by John Paul II, Father Maciel. That thread is not sex or anti-Semitism. It is the abuse of absolute clerical power.

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In their panicked reaction to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and its expansion of lay and episcopal power within a more inclusive church, the last two Popes relied on raw papal power to get their way. They did not persuade many on, say women priests or contraception or the "objective disorder" of homosexuals. But it became pretty clear after a while that persuasion was never the point. When the Pope simply declared certain topics undiscussable - and when he enforced that silence within the Church by policing dissent and appointing generations of docile flunkies as bishops and cardinals - he was telling us that he was restoring hierarchy.

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And so Holocaust-deniers slip through the cracks because the Pope sees them first of all as his ideological and theological allies, and does not subject them to the same scrutiny as his opponents within the Church. And a monster like Marcial Maciel can be protected by Wojtila and Ratzinger for years and years, even as the evidence of his corruption and rank abuse of power is overwhelming.

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The authoritarian, unaccountable, reactionary hierarchy that the last two Popes have constructed is beginning to collapse in on itself. It has solved no core questions; it has advanced no deeper, lasting ideas; it has led to the implosion of the Church in Western Europe and forced many American Catholics into a provisional relationship with their own church authorities. Maciel and Williamson are symptoms of this disease. But John Paul II and Benedict XVI are its enablers.