I do not deny that I am extremely critical of the Catholic Church and its, in my view, utterly corrupt leadership. Why? Because the Church damages so many lives and causes so much emotional and spiritual pain as it clings to viewpoints centuries out of date with reality. In addition, the handling of the sex abuse scandal reveals that most of the Church leadership belongs in prison for criminal conspiracy and crimes against children and youths rather than trying to preach morality to others. Andrew Sullivan has a great analysis of the problem:*
The pattern is clear: homophobic doctrine, arrested emotional development of young Catholic gay boys and adolescents, a high proportion of priests either acting out sexually with boys whose age roughly approximates their own emotional maturity or coping with these pressures through drugs or alcohol. All of which is then compounded by a culture of hierarchy and silence and obedience that impedes airing this clearly, fails to protect children immediately and also allows these screwed up priests to stay in place.
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There has been some progress in accountability and openness. But the core elements that made the Catholic Church one of the biggest pedophile conspiracies in the world for decades if not centuries remain: incoherent, irrational and data-resistant doctrines on homosexual orientation and sex in general; a Western culture in which fewer and fewer straight men are prepared to give up sex and love and marriage to serve the church; and a hierarchical structure designed to instill control rather than openness, and perfectly set up to enable cover-ups.
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Since the church even now seems incapable of treating child abuse as seriously as the rest of society, it seems to me that increased police involvement is necessary.
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Harsh talk. But appropriate under the circumstances. Sullivan is not the only one who sees the need for a radical change. Massimo Franco, a veteran political writer for Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most prestigious daily newspaper, has a new book “Once Upon a Time, There was a Vatican” that looks at the impending end to business as usual whether the Vatican likes it or not. Here are highlights from a review in the National Catholic Reporter:
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“Implosion,” Franco suggests, is the word many Vatican-watchers apply to the current state of affairs. There’s a palpable sense of fin du régime in the Roman air, he says; Franco quotes diplomats accredited to the Holy See comparing themselves to the final ambassadors to the Republic of Venice just before its collapse in 1797.
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Yet Franco applies a different spin to this malaise. The meltdowns of the last five years are symptoms rather than causes, he says, of a much deeper crisis. They’re signs of the end of an epoch, in which the Vatican represented the religious and moral sentiments of Western civilization, and the dawn of a new era in which Catholicism has become a minority subculture. Neither the Vatican nor the hierarchy more generally has figured out how to respond to this new world, Franco argues, explaining the “profound confusion” one detects among all the pope’s men.
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The day of reckoning was held at bay for a half-century by the Cold War, and for a quarter-century by the towering charisma of Pope John Paul II, Franco says, but now the bill has come due.
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What’s now in decay, he argues, is instead a certain kind of Vatican – the Vatican as chaplain of the West, treated with deference by courts and governments, able to shape history by the exercise of its institutional power. Something new has to replace that Vatican, he says, and its outlines are still vague.
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In that complicated mix, C’era Una Volta un Vaticano is an important contribution, exposing a shift in the historical plates which lies beneath the occasional earthquakes in Rome. One hopes the book will eventually find an English publisher.
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Clearly, the days of deference toward the Vatican need to end immediately - or at least until the ranks of the Church hierarchy are thoroughly cleansed and the hierarchy no longer has the earmarks of a criminal enterprise geared at protecting sexual predators and pedophiles.
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