All the Pope's Men (38 page)

Both sides would perhaps reassure the other if there were more evidence of compassion in their own positions. American Catholics would assuage much Roman anxiety if they toned down attacks on bishops and on clerical culture, and spoke more of recovery as a project of the entire community, clergy and laity together. This is one reason that movements such as Voice of the Faithful make Roman sensibilities nervous, since it can look like an interest group inside the Church, pitting the laity against the hierarchy. This is not to say Voice of the Faithful is unhelpful, but that the vocabulary and strategies used can sometimes raise apprehensions. Vatican officials, meanwhile, would strike a much more positive chord if they were to visibly meet with victims and offer in a personal way the compassion of the gospel to which they so often refer in statements. The bold appointment of Archbishop Sean O’Malley to Boston, whose record on outreach to victims is exemplary, shows that someone in the Holy See gets the point. It would be far more effective, however, if the Pope himself were to offer consolation in his own name and through his own presence.

Truth

American Catholics accuse the Vatican of dishonesty on sexuality. It preaches sexual chastity, but does not seem willing to address in a forthright way notorious violations of chastity among its own clergy. The Holy See, on the other hand, often suspects that Americans come from a culture of political compromise in which the very notion of objective truth is alien. Americans, they worry, have a pragmatist view of doctrine and discipline that reflects the imprint of American philosophers such as William James, John Dewey, and Charles Sanders Peirce—if it’s not working, get rid of it. When Americans press the Vatican to be more flexible, to be more willing to compromise on matters such as celibacy and the role of laity, officials in Rome often conclude that the hidden message is the age-old response of Pilate before Christ: “Truth? What is that?" Thus Vatican officials believe that across a whole range of issues, from celibacy to the authority of the hierarchy, the already-tenuous American commitment to Catholic tradition may crack under the strain of the crisis.

Americans would reassure Roman anxieties by making their acceptance of the doctrinal tradition in the
Catechism
more explicit. This does not have to mean a slavish or uncritical assent to every jot and tittle, but rather an unabashed acceptance of the broad parameters for debate marked out by orthodoxy. Voice of the Faithful’s motto is “Keep the Faith, Change the Church." Such slogans would seem more credible if their proponents talked as much about the faith to keep as the Church to change. The Holy See, meanwhile, would help the healing process in the United States by more clearly recognizing that there is no clerical monopoly on truth and that the experience of the lay faithful has much to contribute in terms of practical wisdom on issues such as finance, administration, and personnel. One positive step would be a public signal from the Pope that he intends the already-existing instruments of consultation, such as parish councils and finance councils, to be taken seriously. If the Pope were to receive a delegation of American laity to discuss the crisis, perhaps alongside the executive officers of the U.S. bishops’ conference to demonstrate that this is not an either/or proposition, that too would be powerful symbolism.

Role of the Bishop

Both the American street and the Holy See agree that at the heart of the American crisis is the bishop. For Americans, the negligence of certain bishops in not stopping abuser priests when they should have known better is the single most galling aspect of the crisis. A core concern for the Holy See, meanwhile, has been a kind of gradual chipping away at episcopal authority that could end up with the bishop as a sort of facilitator rather than the teacher, sanctifier, and governor of his flock. Thus Vatican officials worried about the National Review Board, to the extent that it could exercise an ill-defined supervisory role over the bishops. They worried when Bishop Thomas O’Brien in Phoenix bargained away portions of his canonical authority in order to avoid criminal prosecution by Maricopa County. They have been concerned by mandatory reporter policies that obligate bishops to report accusations against priests to the civil authorities. All seem fraught with the potential to reduce the discretion and authority of the bishop, undercutting his role in canon law as the final authority in the local church.

Both the American and the Roman response, it should be noted, build on longstanding concerns that predate the sexual abuse crisis. Many Americans have long complained about imperious and arrogant bishops who did not perceive themselves to be answerable to their own communities. In fact, the response of the American Catholic community to the crisis of 2002 cannot be understood without appreciating that it provided a focus for a great tide of anger that had its origins elsewhere, in resentments that had been gathering for decades. The Holy See, on the other hand, has long been alarmed by various forces it sees undercutting the authority of the local bishop, rooted in the theological conviction that a bishop by virtue of ordination is personally responsible for his diocese and should live up to that obligation. The 1998 document
Apostolos Suos
, which many commentators took as an attack on the authority of bishops’ conferences, was from the Holy See’s point of view intended to emancipate individual bishops from domination by ecclesiastical bureaucracies.

What both sides share, beneath their various ways of expressing the point, is a profound conviction that bishops matter. The quality of life in a local church depends on little else like it rests on the quality of episcopal leadership. This realization clears a space for fruitful discussion between the Vatican and American Catholics about how bishops might best be selected, how they might be trained and formed, and how they might best be supported in their ministry by the collaboration of the Catholic laity. Psychologically, American bishops and their colleagues in Rome are probably more ready to have this conversation in a serious way, after the shock of the crisis, than at any time since the Second Vatican Council. Such a discussion, if it could succeed in avoiding adversarial dynamics, might find surprising areas of common ground.

Reform

Both the Holy See and the American Catholic street regard reform as essential to healing the crisis of sexual abuse, and both sometimes charge the other with stifling that reform. Voice of the Faithful has proposed reforms such as financial transparency and greater lay participation. While the group would assign primary responsibility for the failure to implement these reforms to the American bishops, many also point to a culture of closure and defensiveness from Rome as another key to the problem. The Holy See certainly could insist that American bishops adopt the Voice of the Faithful program. By failing to do so, critics argue, the Vatican at least passively endorses business as usual.

But governance and consultation hardly exhaust the areas of reform floated by various forces in the American Church. Some Catholics from the left would like to see clerical celibacy made optional, power decentralized from Rome to the local churches, bishops elected rather than appointed by the Holy Father, and perhaps even the ordination of women as priests. Catholics from the right would prefer a campaign of weeding dissenting theologians out of Catholic colleges and seminaries, eliminating homosexual candidates from programs of priestly formation, jettisoning ecclesiastical bureaucracies that have caved into the magisterium of the so-called experts, and boldly proclaiming Catholic doctrine in season and out. Both sides often blame Rome for its failure to approve, and insist upon, these proposed reforms.

Meanwhile, the Holy See believes in a program of reform too, but in the classically Catholic sense of the term—a movement that is primarily spiritual rather than ideological, doctrinal, or managerial. This is the sense in which one refers to the Cistercian reform of the Benedictines, for example, or the Capuchin reform of the Franciscans. Such reform begins with a desire to live the gospel and the tradition more fully. As the French Dominican Yves Congar wrote in
True and False
Reform in the Church
, “The great law of a Catholic reformism will be to begin with a return to the principles of Catholicism." Any reform that does not feature immersion in the sacraments and in prayer will be suspect. Authentic reform always stresses the need to
sentire cum ecclesia
— “to think with the Church." It is a project to be carried out in cooperation with the pastors of the Church, never in struggle against them.

Cardinal Avery Dulles, in an August/September 2003 essay in the journal
First Things
, has offered eight principles for assessing reform proposals:

Genuine reform is always a return to Sacred Scripture and tradition.

Any reform conducted in the Catholic spirit will respect the Church’s styles of worship and pastoral life. It will be content to operate within the Church’s spiritual and devotional heritage, with due regard for her Marian piety, her devotion to the saints, her high regard for the monastic life and the vows of religion, her penitential practices, and her eucharistic worship.

A genuinely Catholic reform will adhere to the fullness of Catholic doctrine, including not only the dogmatic definitions of Popes and councils, but doctrines constantly and universally held as matters pertaining to the faith.

True reform will respect the divinely given structures of the Church.

A reform that is Catholic in spirit will seek to maintain communion with the whole body of the Church, and will avoid anything savoring of schism or factionalism. . . . To be Catholic is precisely to see oneself as part of a larger whole, to be inserted in the Church universal.

Reformers will have to exercise the virtue of patience, often accepting delays.

A valid reform must not yield to the tendencies of our fallen nature, but must rather resist them.

We must be on guard against purported reforms that are aligned with the prevailing tendencies in secular society. . . . We must energetically oppose reformers who contend that the Church must abandon her claims to absolute truth, must allow dissent from her own doctrines, and must be governed according to the principles of liberal democracy.

I suspect both sides in this conversation would feel more at ease if they could somehow assuage the worries of the other. Americans often suspect that when Rome talks about reform, they spiritualize the concept in order to avoid any substantive changes in structures. In truth, the Holy See, at least in the person of John Paul II and the best and brightest around him, were not closed to the possibility of structural changes in the Church. The point of the Pope’s 1995 encyclical
Ut Unum Sint
was to invite the Church’s ecumenical partners into a “patient dialogue" about precisely such reforms of the papacy that might be needed to further the cause of Christian unity. If that conversation is still proceeding slowly, it is at least proceeding. Perhaps what is called for in this historical moment is a similar papal invitation directed to Catholics themselves, calling them to a similar “patient dialogue" on renewal of the Church and laying out some parameters for that discussion. What Roman Catholicism may need, in other words, is an
Ut Unum Sint
addressed to Catholics, a charter document from the Pope focused on dialogue inside the Catholic Church, on how to foster communion without papering over differences or ducking problems. The document could build upon Paul VI’s 1965 encyclical
Ecclesiam Suam
, in which the Pope called for a dialogue within the Church that would be “open and responsive to all truth, every virtue, every spiritual value." Such a gesture from the Holy Father, followed by efforts to foster the dialogue it describes, would help to reassure the vast majority of reasonable Roman Catholics in the United States of the goodwill of Rome.

In the Vatican, meanwhile, the suspicion is often that Americans know only the language of political power, and their reform agenda is more akin to a putsch than a purification. American Catholics would reduce anxiety levels in Rome if they would learn to speak in a more spiritual argot. For example, since forgiveness and healing are essential elements of resolution to the sex abuse crisis, perhaps the various groups and movements in the United States could promote a nationwide return to the Sacrament of Reconciliation. If the Vatican were to see churches across the United States filled with Catholics desiring to make confessions, imploring God’s grace on themselves and this wounded church, it would speak volumes about the underlying ecclesiology of the reform movement. Further, it would help to avoid phrasing public activism in antagonistic terms, as if it’s “the laity versus the clergy," or “the left versus the right." Obviously, no one is pretending that pious exercises by themselves can solve the sexual abuse crisis; it will take more than prayer to address the underlying political, legal, and cultural problems. It may also seem perverse to suggest that American Catholics seek reconciliation, when those who are principally in need of confession are the priests who abused children and the bishops who failed to stop them. Yet the whole Church in the United States has been hurt, not just by the crisis, but by the anger and division it has generated. To heal, an examination of conscience by all parties is essential. Prayers for forgiveness and grace are never wasted. The more the reform movement can be visibly rooted in committed, faithful Catholicism, the better.

In the end, the Vatican and the American street will continue to clash on many issues, and that tension can be healthy. One of the factors that has given Catholicism a kind of sane, moderate balance over the centuries is that no one faction in the Church, including Rome, ever dominates for very long. History always steps in and restores equilibrium, one sign that the Holy Spirit is faithful to Christ’s promise never to desert the Church. Still, exchanges between Rome and America would be more constructive if both sides were to drop the pretense that they know the real motives of the other, and consider instead their actual aims and fears. Each has much to learn, and this mutual exchange could foster the communion that is at the heart of what it means to be a
Catholic
Church.