Memoranda

by Fr. Roger Landry - April 9, 2010

Lent continues for the Church. The coverage of the Sacred Triduum from the Vatican focused very little on the events of the Lord's suffering, death and resurrection, but mainly on what Benedict didn't say and others did with regard to the issue of the sexual abuse of minors by clergy. Several things should be kept in mind on this extended penitential journey.

First, as American Cardinal William Levada, the successor of Cardinal Ratzinger at the Vatican's Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, mentioned in a lengthy column in the Catholic newspaper of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, the cases being mentioned all highlight serious "failures on the part of the church and civil authorities to act properly at the time" that some interested lawyers and journalists are falsely ascribing to Pope Benedict rather than to diocesan decisions at the time. Cardinal Levada's statement strikes a balance that not only corresponds to the facts but to their objective interpretation. To deny the future Pope Benedict's involvement, moreover, is not to deny that the evil events occurred, not that they were terribly handled by the Church, but to ascribe responsibility to the appropriate parties.

Second, we need to admit that one of the reasons why the focus on the Vatican and Pope Benedict has been able to gain a certain traction has been, as we have mentioned in previous editorials, that the Church has not yet adequately addressed the second major part of the sexual abuse crisis. The first part of the crisis concerns priests and other Church employees who manipulated their positions to abuse the young. The Church in our country has responded firmly to this situation since 2002, by removing from public ministry and often from the clerical state altogether priestly predators, as well as by instituting background checks, training and safe environment programs that have made Catholic institutions among the safest places for kids today. The second part of the crisis concerns the accountability of those in authority who did not respond adequately to remove offending clergy from situations where they could continue to do harm. Just as the failure permanently to remove abusive priests raised legitimate questions about the judgment of the bishops in authority over them, the failure to discipline certain bishops whose handling of sexual abuse cases was exposed as palpably inadequate has led people to start questioning the judgment of those in the Vatican who have the duty of supervising the shepherds. The faithful have the sound assumption that members of the Church hierarchy will respond with holy horror, outrage and rapid discipline to priests who molest children and to bishops who culpably fail to put a stop to it. When that does not occur — and it has not happened sufficiently in the second instance — they begin to ask why, and even the most outrageous allegations begin to gain the possibility of plausibility.

Third, it would be useful to note that the present attempt to impugn Pope Benedict bears some similarities to the posthumous character assassination of Pope Pius XII. Despite the fact that Pius XII's actions during World War II ended up saving tens of thousands of Jewish lives for which he was justly praised by Jewish leaders, a fictional play in 1963 concocted the storyline that his public silence, rather than being a prudent maneuver to save the lives of Jews and Christian converts in Nazi-occupied territories, was a sign of complicity in the Holocaust. It's been shown that such a storyline was propagated — particularly by communists whose anthropology and atheism were vigorously opposed by the Church — as a means by which to attack the credibility of the Church as a whole by attacking her visible head. This historical fiction was repeated enough that it began in many places to be uncritically accepted. A similar tactic seems to be at work with Pope Benedict XVI. Despite the fact that he has been one of the most influential figures in the Vatican to remove abusive priests from ministry and the priesthood, and to alter Church law to expedite and facilitate their removal, a new story line is being suggested — by contingency lawyers with huge financial stakes in trying to portray Benedict and the Vatican in the worst possibility light with regard to sexual abuse cases — that he is the head of an international cartel of clerical abusers and their episcopal enablers. The Church didn't respond adequately to the outlandish allegations of Pius XII's putative complicity in the Holocaust because it naively thought that few would believe it; as a consequence, it allowed the story-line to become accepted common wisdom by those unfamiliar with the facts. It's imperative that the Church — and that means members of the Church throughout the world, and not just Vatican spokesmen and Catholic newspapers, but all the faithful — expose the fictitious claims about Pope Benedict, lest the same thing recur and, like with the allegations against Pope Pius XII, wound the Church's moral credibility.

Fourth, when processing scandals in the Church, it is important for all the faithful to know how properly to categorize the sins of priests and bishops. Judas Iscariot was one of the twelve chosen directly by Christ and he betrayed him; in every generation there will be those who betray rather than serve the Lord and others. The human reality of sin in the members and leaders of the Church, however, does not eliminate the divine treasure held in earthen vessels. Pope John Paul II described the proper ecclesiological understanding we're all called to have in response to scandals in a 1980 Angelus catechesis.

"It is indispensable," he said, "not to lose the divine dimension of life in the human dimension [and] to persevere in it. Christ, in fact, is at the same time the Redeemer and the Bridegroom of the Church. Christ, as Redeemer and Bridegroom, instituted [the Church] among weak people, among sinful and fallible human beings, but, at the same time, he instituted her strong, holy and infallible. She is such not by the work of human beings, but through the power of Christ's gift. To believe in the power of the Church does not mean believing in the power of the people who compose her, but believing in Christ's gift: in that power that, as St. Paul says, 'is made perfect in weakness' (2 Cor 12:9). To believe in the holiness of the Church does not mean believing in a natural human perfection, but believing in Christ's gift — in that gift which makes us the heirs of sin, [but also] the heirs of divine holiness. To believe in the infallibility of the Church does not mean — in any way! — believing in the infallibility of human persons, but believing in Christ's gift — in that gift that enables fallible men to proclaim infallibly and to confess infallibly the truth revealed for our salvation. The Church of our times — of this difficult and dangerous age in which we live, of this critical age — must have a special certainty of Christ's gift, the gift of power, the gift of holiness, the gift of infallibility. The more she is aware of human weakness, sinfulness and fallibility, the more must she guard the certainty of those gifts that come from her Redeemer and her Bridegroom."

This is one of the reasons why John Paul II's successor, rather than focusing on the abuse allegations during the celebration of the Sacred Triduum, concentrated instead on the certainty of the gifts coming from the Church's Redeemer and Bridegroom. We need those now more than ever.

Lastly, the whole Church needs to respond to these recent allegations against the Holy Father with the first thing that Catholics are always called to do: pray. We need to pray, first, for the victims of clergy sexual abuse whose painful memories are often magnified and relived whenever clerical sexual abuse is mentioned. We need to pray, second, in reparation for the horror of the abuse. We need to pray, third, for the members of the media, that they may always seek the truth. We need to pray, fourth, for those in the leadership of the Church, that they may always correspond to the graces the Lord gives them to fulfilled their divine task. Finally, we need to pray for the Pope, that the Lord may strengthen him so that he may strengthen and feed all Christ's flock.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.