Donald Cozzens
Many hope that the worst of the sexual-abuse crisis is over. Frankly, I fear the worst is yet to come. Consider the battered church of Boston and the not-guilty plea entered on June 11 by accused priest Paul Shanley, who claims he was himself abused by a seminary professor and by a predecessor of his current archbishop. Shanley is likely to put up a strenuous defense, which will bring to light matters church officials would prefer remain in darkness. Should his case go to trial, Boston’s current situation may erupt with a force yet to be imagined.
As prosecutors sift through mountains of diocesan and legal documents relating to clergy abuse and investigate new allegations, the focus has shifted from the church’s jurisdiction to the jurisdiction of prosecutors and grand juries. Add to the criminal inquiries the long roster of civil cases now in the works, and there is scant reason for optimism.
What lies ahead? Catholics of all stripes are asking that question with an earnestness that has not dampened their anger. While the charter and norms established by the bishops in Dallas have prompted some to think the worst is over, church authorities continue to feel the weight of grave, unprecedented pastoral and legal challenges. How bishops and their staffs address these challenges—and to the extent they cooperate and collaborate with emerging lay leaders—will be of critical importance. Even more critical, however, will be the resolve of lay and priest leaders to step up and speak out to their bishops.
In the meantime, two contextual factors and four determining factors allow us a glimpse of the forces currently shaping and reshaping the U.S. church, and create the stage on which the present crisis plays itself out:
The priest/bishop relationship. Since the bishops’ Dallas meeting the already taxed relationship between bishops and their priests has been stressed to an unprecedented point. The zero-tolerance policy adapted in Dallas undercut the trust and confidence many priests had in their bishops. Now many priests feel it is every man for himself. Whether an allegation of abuse is credible or not seems no longer to matter. An imprudent pat on a teenager’s behind decades ago may lead to suspension and place the priest under the same cloud as a brother cleric guilty of gross sexual assault.
This strained trust is undermining the morale of an already overworked and beleaguered priest corps. Estranged from their episcopal leaders, some priests persevere only because of the support they find from parishioners and friends. When the dramatic decline in the number of candidates for the priesthood is factored in, the threat to the sacramental mission of the church weighs heavily on today’s ordained ministers.
At the same time bishops, alienated from the laity and now their priests, may soon feel that it is every bishop for himself.
Angry Catholics. It is now painfully clear that the sexual-abuse scandal has drastically reduced the trust and confidence conservative, moderate, and progressive laypeople once placed in bishops. Moreover, a surprising unity is emerging—the laity’s anger has galvanized previously disparate cohorts of Catholics into a force to be reckoned with. Only the naive believe that the actions taken in Dallas have restored the bishops’ credibility.
The laity, in as painful a drama as one can imagine, have come of age. Their outrage at the bishops has finally corrected the exaggerated deference and unquestioning trust they once accorded episcopal leaders. How the bishops respond to groups like the Boston-based Voice of the Faithful will be critical. It appears that many bishops have yet to learn how to deal nondefensively with the grass-roots initiatives of one of the best-educated, articulate, and committed body of believers among the people of God.
The following factors have yet to emerge, at least completely. Some are factual, others attitudinal. They will, nonetheless, determine what lies beyond the horizon.
The scope of the scandal. In spite of the ongoing media attention, the full extent of the scandal—the actual number of credible allegations brought to the attention of a diocese and/or to a legal jurisdiction—remains unclear. And while there are published estimates of the number of Catholic clergy who have abused children and teenagers, many dioceses have not made that information public. Until such disclosures are made, the real scope of the crisis will be questioned and discussion of the systemic dimensions of the crisis, such as the present clerical structure with its tradition of privilege, exemption, and secrecy, cannot take place.
When the scandal is framed to include adult victims of clergy abuse, especially women, it reveals a reality many church officials want desperately to conceal: mandated celibacy for diocesan clergy just isn’t working.
Catholics, furthermore, have a right to know the cost of the scandal. The sum far exceeds, I believe, the amounts juries have awarded victims in highly publicized civil trials. The laity are entitled to know how much of their contributions (in both percentages and actual dollars) is going to the victims—and to treatment centers for clergy abusers. Such information is guarded, of course, because of fear that it will influence future financial awards and settlements.
The courage of priests. How the crisis unfolds will depend to a large extent on the widespread realization among priests that the clerical system is broken. Whether priests possess the courage to stand together and organize, as they have in Boston, remains to be seen. The personal and pastoral experience of priests deserves to be taken seriously by bishops and laity alike. If the courage demonstrated by priests of Boston is emulated, priests, by "speaking their truth in love," will make a significant contribution to the strength and vitality of the church.
The courage of bishops. With the death of Chicago’s Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, the leadership vacuum in the U.S. hierarchy has become evident even to casual church watchers. Leaders there are, but to this date they haven’t had a sufficient number of brother bishops to stand with them. The more the pity. Still, the U.S. bishops understand the nature of the crisis better than Vatican officials and other advisers to the pope. Most bishops, by temperament, disposition, and training, remain unduly sensitive to what holds sway in the halls of the Vatican. The result has been a shocking deference to various curial congregations in matters—such as inclusive language in liturgical texts—that rightfully belong to the discretion of local ordinaries. In times of crisis, leaders are needed who can inspire both clergy and laity. Few bishops, I am afraid, measure up to that standard.
The next pope. In the twilight of John Paul II’s long reign, the question of his successor’s theological vision and capacity for leadership looms critical. Whomever the cardinals elect, the new pope will discover that the present scandal has carried over into his pontificate. Certainly, one of the major issues the next pope must address is the crisis in ministry, of which the sexual-abuse scandal is but one factor. Without priests, Catholics cannot have access to the Eucharist. The next pope’s biggest internal challenge will be the issue of sacramental ministry.
Fears & Hopes
The seeds of the future, like the reign of God, are to be found in our midst—in the here and now. However, reading these seeds, these signs, is never easy.
My fear is that the present scandal will become worse, even much worse, before it gets better. If the laity’s anger turns to rage, if wise and prudent decisions by bishops and other church leaders are eclipsed by the rulings of prosecutors and court officials, if priests maintain their present unholy silence, then an even deeper darkness lies ahead.
And the present darkness is dark enough. The undeniable shortage of priests is beginning to undermine even our most vital and vibrant parishes while the alienation of priests from their bishops is sapping the energies of the best of the ordained. If the darkness holds, the silent but steady exodus of educated Catholic women from the church will continue and our young will slide, along with the rest of us, into an ever more secularized and violent society. Bishops will continue to speak, to insist, to demand; but few Catholics will listen, few will obey. The once-strong faith of American Catholics will diminish until the cynicism and apathy we now witness in the churches of Western Europe will be commonplace here.
But although the picture is dark, it is not without hope.
The laity may well step up and assume their birthright as full, adult members of the church. Here, I believe, under the abiding presence of God’s Spirit, lies the hope of the future. No doubt their emerging voice and influence will threaten many bishops and priests and be perceived as a major threat to the hegemony of the institutional church. Laywomen and men, of course, like their ordained confreres, are both saints and sinners, subject to the same human weaknesses we now see so clearly in the hierarchy. They seem, nonetheless, to be anointed at this precarious juncture in the church’s history to offer the leadership and vision so wanting in many episcopal and presbyteral circles. T
hey deserve to be heard, respected, and encouraged. I believe they are God’s gift to a troubled church.
Sidney Callahan
The unknown future induces hope and fear. But one event is certain: John Paul II will eventually pass from the scene. Even his iron will and sense of mission cannot keep him going forever. The next pope to be elected will affect the course of Catholicism well into the millennium. Yet the main problems in our present church stem from the recent past.
The church has never fully assimilated the teachings of Vatican II. At the council, the clarion call for reform was sounded: Christ’s body, the church, must be true to the gospel good news and live as an ever-reforming collegial church. In a Christian communion of love and service to the world, all the baptized must participate in mission and ministry. In response to the council, liturgical reforms were soon instituted, but resistance to change quickly emerged in the structures of governance (with the exception of many religious orders). After all, no functioning system—whether family, political party, or church—easily accepts a challenge to the status quo. Why risk novelty with all its discomfort and danger? Those in authority rarely give up power.
Despite many good intentions, it was all too easy, following the council, to slide back into an authoritarian clerical culture, operating secretly and with little accountability. Most bishops maintained their unilateral powers of making decisions without consultation or participation from their priests or from the laity. Efforts to protect the institution’s power and reputation maintained the familiar defenses of denial, stonewalling, and indifference to the concerns of the laity. This arrogance flourished in many dioceses in the United States and helped contribute to the horrors of the sex-abuse crisis. But as the old saying goes, "the mills of the gods grind slowly but they grind exceedingly fine." Or as Jesus said, "Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, and nothing hidden that will not become known" (Mt 10:25)—with the help of the Boston Globe and the New York Times.
So here come the critical challenges: Will church authorities learn from these dreadful failures, and will they change? Will the laity finally rise up and demand that church governance be consistent with its theological proclamations of equality and participation? Words and deeds have become scandalously inconsistent. The pope and bishops preach social justice and champion human rights—except in their own house.
The worst fear of those seeking church reform—including many priests, theologians, and bishops—is that nothing much will change. Superficial reform will be limited to preventing further sex abuse, and whereas new rhetoric may appear, it will be a cosmetic overlay to business as usual. Perhaps there really is a giant, hidden machine that churns out the "bishopspeak" of church pronouncements. If, as is all too likely, the next pope is a confirmed conservative, he too will see the church’s problems in terms of infidelity and disobedience to church teachings. Then as now, the enemy will be recognized not as "we" but as those dissenters who are soft on birth control, homosexuality, divorce, women’s ordination, and so on. The media, modernity, Americanism, and a permissive "therapeutic" culture can be ritually scapegoated. Attention will be deflected from our real problems. Once again the great encompassing Catholic Church will slide back toward the sectarian sterility of the nineteenth-century Modernist crisis: back to more loyalty oaths, witch hunts, inquisitions, and excommunications in the name of orthodox purity. God forbid, but the American Catholic bishops could become even more subservient to Rome.
Mediocre leaders pronouncing anathemas could drive young Catholics into silence, exile, cunning—or worse, complete—indifference. People like me would survive because we already belong to communities of believers devoted to supporting the faith and intellectual life. But goodbye to the generation that should be replacing us. In my worst moments, I meditate on the challenge of living out my remaining years amid downhearted decline. All of those novels come to mind in which the last Romans abandon Britain and Gaul, or the Greenlander settlers succumb to starvation as the climate grows ever colder and the ice encroaches. As a Southern child of the Confederacy, I was familiar with the appeal of the lost cause; no wonder I am drawn to the Anglo-Irish literature of a fading ascendancy.
But enough! It is an immoral indulgence to wallow in romantic pessimism or warmed-over Stoicism. As a Christian and an American I should pull up my socks and return to the wellsprings of optimism and hope. I can keep in mind God’s surprising moves in the election of John XXIII and the calling of the council. While young, I saw the vindication of all the great persecuted theologians of the twentieth century. Perhaps I will live to see a real shakedown cruise of Peter’s bark with new applications of our theological teachings. The election of Cardinal Walter Kasper as pope would be a great start, since he is dedicated to ecumenism, pluralism, and more synods for church decision making.
Perhaps, too, the U.S. bishops will follow through on their reforms and an aroused laity will persevere in its efforts to gain a voice for the faithful. To make any difference the reforming spirit must be embodied in institutional changes at every level of church life. All the principles that allow democratic institutions to flourish can be incorporated in the church. Always and everywhere, justice and fairness require accountability, representation, separation of powers, transparency, guaranteed individual rights, and those other procedures that help check the abuse of power.
Once the faithful can participate in deliberations and decisions, then other changes will come. Eventually in response to the lived experience of local churches, the Roman church will return to a married priesthood and still uphold the ideal of vowed religious celibacy. When priesthood and ministry are seen primarily as loving service rather than the prerogatives of a separate clerical caste, then the ordination of married men, dedicated women, and faithful homosexuals should present no problem. Developing a fully Christian sexual ethic and theology of the body must be high on the agenda of future reforms. The church’s crucial witness to a culture of life would then become all the more powerful.
Can we really hope so extravagantly? Why not? Remember Thomas the Apostle, whose doubts about the excessiveness of the good news were overcome dramatically. Even more wonderfully reassuring for those of us tempted to dark forebodings is the fact that Jesus came and stood in the disciples’ midst, "although the doors were locked." So all will yet be well? Yes, finally. And in the meantime, you can bet your life on it.
John C. Cavadini
What are my hopes for the church in the aftermath of the sexual-abuse crisis? That question is easy to answer because the answer has already been given. I think Vatican II’s vision of the church as the body of Christ in which all members, each in his or her own way, are called to the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of charity, is our best hope. There is a fundamental equality in the universal call to holiness proclaimed by the council: "All share a true equality with regard to the dignity and activity common to all the faithful for the building up of the body of Christ."
With regard to the laity, the council held out a vision where those who work "in the world" are understood to be a kind of leaven for the sanctification of the world. This "secular" role, however, was not opposed to the "ecclesial" character of the laity. Rather, the language of "being in the world" parallels exactly language used about the church as a whole and of the Incarnation itself, Christ having entered this world to give witness to the truth. The laity is the church visible, the church par excellence in its function of witness, as bearer of the "Light of Nations." The laity are Christ in the world when they exercise Christ’s priesthood by sacrificing the blandishments that every power structure tenders those who would sin against human dignity, and when, by exercising that role, they exercise as well Christ’s prophetic office, permitting others to see through the hegemonic claims of those structures of oppression.
With regard to the hierarchy, specifically as ordained pastors, their role is turned inward, toward the service of the common priesthood of all believers, and for that reason is said to differ from the common priesthood "in essence." Acting in the "person of Christ the Head," priestly ministry mediates and makes present the priesthood of Christ so as to constitute the assembly as precisely themselves, the people of God and the body of Christ, and not the people of anyone else. The hierarchy’s gift of "ruling" is part of its essentially mediatorial function, and thus in their obedience to the hierarchy the laity ideally are not working against their fundamental equality in dignity, but affirming it. I would hope for renewal in the church that achieves a balance, where the obedience of the laity is less likely to be experienced as self-erasure, and the "rule" of the hierarchy becomes more and more visibly the mediation to the community of the willingness of the Good Shepherd to "lay down his life" for the sheep.
What do I fear? Failure to implement this vision. The present scandal in the church has its origin partly in such a failure, in the fostering of aberrant clerical structures founded less on service and more on distance between high church authority and those obliged to submit to it. What is clericalism? It is the classic erasure of the laity’s true equality in dignity as well as the erasure of the special dignity of the ministerial priesthood, by reducing the latter to the externals of a ruling clique oriented more toward building up its own privilege and prestige than toward serving the church as a whole. As we have seen, those structures can distance and muffle even the pleas of parents who are concerned about grave danger to their children. No one can hear—that is the essence of the scandal. Without the implementation of the vision of Vatican II, that deafness, if you will, can only grow, widening the gap between the laity and the lower clergy on the one hand, and the hierarchy on the other. In the old days this led to revolution or Reformation; now it is more likely to lead to a seeming debility of the whole church as the disillusioned simply drift away.
The best solutions, in my view, will emerge at the local level, from the sort of "dialogue" that Vatican II encourages "between the laity and their spiritual leaders." By explicitly enjoining dialogue in spiritual as well as temporal matters, the council affirmed the essentially ecclesial character of the laity, who are sometimes even "obliged" to express their opinion on any matter pertaining to the good of the church, while bishops are explicitly enjoined "not to refuse to listen." Successful local solutions can affect the whole church by example and inspiration. In dioceses where gross abuses have occurred and where the bishop has nurtured a culture of distance so great that the laity were treated with contempt, I can understand resorting temporarily to desperate measures such as the withholding of funds. But as a long-term strategy, and especially as a concerted and sustained action to force change, I fear such action becoming potentially schismatic and extortionist.
A better solution: Combat clericalism in the seminary. This does not mean downplaying the difference in essence between the ordained and the common priesthood (thus reducing both to something less than either individually). Training must make available to seminarians the true ideals of serving the people of God in the person of Christ the Head in order to inspire them beyond the sterile identity which is clericalism. This includes formation that roots out smugness toward the laity, fostering collaboration and the routine expectation that, among the layfolk, some may be more learned, more wise, more holy than priests themselves.
Another suggestion: Employ the gifts of the laity in all situations not essentially pertinent to the functions of the presbyterate or episcopacy. Why couldn’t the president of a pontifical council, say of justice and peace, be a layman or laywoman? What about the staff of these councils? They are often ordained personnel who could be released for more suitable pastoral work. Even only a few such highly visible appointments of laypeople can be immensely symbolic, something not to be underestimated in a sacramental church. Note that the issue is not simply lay involvement in the church, but upward visibility and access. Layfolk have no official, customary venues of access to the Holy Father.
Finally, closer to home, Hispanic Catholics (and others!) are flooding Pentecostal churches, where low-church conceptions of ministry make it easy for any talented preacher to exercise leadership. It is time to be creative, without violating any provision of canon law, about how to foster the preaching of laypeople who could bear dramatic witness. Is it clericalism that has restricted our imaginations so much that we have utterly failed to respond to this crisis?
Ultimately, no purely organizational strategy is enough for renewal, for the church is rejuvenated only by the holiness to which it is universally called. I have been trying to think about how major reform has come about in the past. It wasn’t through "political action" in the sense of a pressure group. That seems more often to cause schism. It is through people like Saints Francis or Catherine of Siena or Teresa of Avila, who did not mince words but who did not threaten to break away. They invested themselves in something new without trying to vest themselves with or replace central authority, but they affected it and the whole church radically. They built up the whole body by exercising their common priesthood in a witness of holiness so powerful and loving that the hierarchy was forced to "catch up" to it.
What would be an analogue in the contemporary scene? I suspect it would arise locally, probably be unexpected, and perhaps be even widely distasteful at first. Not only the hierarchy, but the laity had to "catch up" to Saint Francis as well. Most in Assisi were inclined to stone him in derision. Only later did they weep at hearing him preach. When everyone had caught up to him a little, the distance between laity and clergy perhaps seemed less. Certainly much of what goes on in the church is politics and more politics. People like Francis and Teresa were politically canny too, but for reformers to reply only or even mostly in political kind to the hierarchy may generate change but not necessarily renewal.
I would suggest that the primary place to seek and stimulate renewal is in prayer, the medium of renewal and conversion in the church. We should pray for renewal explicitly, as individuals, small Christian communities, parishes, and dioceses. This move to pray together for renewal is already a beginning of renewal. Specifically, turning to prayerful reflection on the mystery of the church will increase appreciation of this mystery, at the origin of which is not a juridical decree but an act of "total self-giving," symbolized and effected not by concepts or thoughts but by someone’s blood. It is not considered in good taste nowadays to reflect on the blood of Christ. Respectable modern empires certainly prefer the invisibility of the blood they exact from those they oppress and persecute, preferably several countries away. But it may be that, beginning with the blood of the poor and of the martyrs, in whom we especially meet Christ, prayerful reflection on the mystical constitution of the church in the self-giving of Christ will renew our love for the church as already, despite its historical flaws, something more than we could ever hope for. In this love, we can surely devise solutions for the future that will build up, rather than tear down, the Mystical Body. Departing from this love, the solutions we devise will be more worthy of fear than of hope.
Related: The Church's Sex-Abuse Crisis, by Peter Steinfels
