Betrayal (30 page)
But after Cardinal J. Francis Stafford, president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Laity, told the
New York Times
that he expected celibacy to be discussed at the gathering of U.S. cardinals in Rome, the Pope quickly shot down that possibility. “The value of celibacy as a complete gift of self to the Lord and his Church must be carefully safeguarded,” the Pope told a group of visiting Nigerian bishops.
Pope John Paul II himself had been an outspoken proponent of the important role of laypeople in changing the Church. “The renewal of the Church in America will not be possible without the active presence of the laity;’ he said in the 1999 apostolic exhortation
Ecclesia in America.
“Therefore, they are largely responsible for the future of the Church” Nonetheless, the obstacles to change in the Catholic Church are immense.
As fast as progressives and centrists demand sweeping change, traditionalists rise up to demand a return to orthodoxy. Where progressives call for reform — the ordination of women and married men, an increased role for laypeople in decisions such as the selection of bishops — conservatives call for restoration: a renewed emphasis on celibacy, the barring of gay men as seminarians, and more traditional teaching standards in the formation of priests. “People on the far left and the far right greet bad news for the Church as good news for them, because the left can smile and say, ‘We told you so — you didn't make enough reforms,’ and the right can say, ‘We had too many reforms, and lets go back to pre-Vatican II,’” said William Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. ‘’People on the left have been itching for reform regarding the totality of the Church's teachings on sexual ethics, and they're going to seize this moment. And on the right, a lot of people have been arguing for a long time that the Church has gone soft and doesn't have the courage of its convictions.”
Some Catholics sought to discredit voices of dissent. They complained when progressive priests, such as Rev. Richard McBrien, were quoted on television or in the newspapers; they objected to poll results that included the views of people who go to Mass less than once a week, though the Church itself counts such people as Catholics. Some orthodox Catholics queried leaders of Voice of the Faithful about their stance on issues such as birth control, saying that only if the leaders agreed with all Church teachings could they really be Catholics; others posted notes on electronic message boards suggesting that unhappy Catholics should just become Protestants. Catholic commentators such as William J. Bennett, William P. Buckley Jr., and Patrick J. Buchanan articulated the conservatives’ concerns in newspaper columns. “What the Church needs, to restore its moral authority, is to stand up to the moral confusion of modernity, not embrace it,” Buchanan wrote. ‘That way lies total ruin.” The famously conservative editorial board of the
Wall Street Journal
warned that “we aren't about to join those whose real agenda is to leave the Church crushed and humiliated.” And Ronald P. McArthur, the president emeritus of Thomas Aquinas College, a conservative Catholic institution in California, argued that “there has been an attempt by so-called theologians and liturgists and leaders within the Church to literally midwife another religion, and that has had repercussions in the seminaries and in the wider life of the Church. What is happening now, if not predictable, is at least compatible with the flight from orthodoxy.”
Then, of course, there was the danger of apathy. Even as the clergy sex abuse scandal triggered a flurry of angry e-mail and a surge of participation in Voice of the Faithful, street protests and petition drives around Boston drew a few hundred participants at most, a tiny number in an archdiocese of more than 2 million Catholics. Numerous scholars and activists suggested that perhaps the only way for laypeople to wield power was by withholding contributions, but a consensus on some kind of financial boycott seemed elusive because many were concerned about hurting the poor who benefit from Church ministries. “Americans have a short memory — they get all angry about something or other, but then as soon as the wave has crested, they move on,” said Lisa Sowle Cahill, a Boston College theologian. “Can the lower structures in the Church really keep up the momentum, even with a new archbishop or cardinal? That's the real question.”
Despite all kinds of societal and Church change over the past several decades, the Catholic Church remains the most hierarchical of the world's major religious traditions, and John Paul II, over his twenty-four-year tenure, has appointed hundreds of bishops and cardinals who share his traditionalist — sometimes called restorationist — views. Not surprisingly, the Vatican expressed no interest in sweeping reform in response to the clergy sexual abuse crisis. “Rome can't be open to changing the faith,” Cardinal Stafford told the
New York Times.
“That's the gift of God, and Rome has no power to make any changes there. The power of the pope or bishops is very restricted. One has to be humble enough to admit that.”
The Vatican was also keenly aware that the American energy for change was not universal. The 60 million-plus Catholics in the United Slates made up a vibrant, and affluent, segment of the Church but were only 6 percent of Catholics worldwide, and many officials of the Curia believed that the desire for change was more reflective of Americanism than Catholicism. Although incidents of clergy sexual abuse were reported worldwide, the scandal was clearly most intense in the United States; in the developing world, where the Church sees its future, many Catholics were more concerned with issues of day-to-day survival. At the Vatican's first news conference on clergy sexual abuse, a curial cardinal, Dario Castrillón Hoyos of Colombia, made note of the fact that most of the questions were posed in English, calling that fact “an X ray of the problem.”
Even in the United States, some bishops, while declaring an interest in openness, reverted to type. In Dallas, where the diocese had been hailed as a model of how to protect children, Bishop Charles V. Grahmann barred priests from speaking to the news media without his permission. In Boston, Cardinal Law declared that “we now realize both within the Church and in society at large that secrecy often inhibits healing and places others at risk,” but his spokeswoman, Donna M. Morrissey, largely stopped returning reporters’ phone calls and was content to let most news stories appear without comment from the archdiocese. Law also repeatedly asserted his
concern for victims
, but then allowed his lawyers to file a legal document asserting that negligence by a six-year-old boy and his parents contributed to the boy's abuse by Rev. Paul R. Shanley.
And in a step that infuriated many in Boston, the night that the cardinals’ meeting ended in Rome, Law phoned his vicar general, Bishop Walter J. Edyvean, and ordered him to fax a letter to all priests barring them from assisting a proposed association of parish pastoral councils, declaring to the pastors, “You are not to join, foster or promote this endeavor.”
“While all the Christian faithful possess ‘a true equality regarding dignity and action … according to each one's own condition and function,’” Edyvean wrote, quoting from canon law, “this equality is lived out within the hierarchical structure of the Church. Within this structure bishops, priests and deacons fulfill a special role in the functions of teaching, sanctifying and governing.”
By the time the clergy sexual abuse crisis forced Pope John Paul II to summon all the American cardinals to his side in April, the once vigorous pontiff was a frail man, nearing his eighty-second birthday. He had survived an assassination attempt in 3981, and chronic joint problems after a hip replacement in 1994, but was now physically hobbled, with slurred speech, apparently as a result of Parkinson's disease.
This Pope, the sixth-longest-serving in history, was beloved as a spiritual leader and a symbol of holiness, and renowned for his staunch anticommunism and his unprecedented efforts at interfaith and ecumenical relations. But his record on internal Church issues was much more controversial, because he was perceived as closed to debate over many aspects of Church life. In 1986 his administration engineered the resignation of Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen of Seattle, who was perceived as too liberal, and the ouster of Rev. Charles Curran from the faculty of Catholic University of America, for teachings deemed out of step with Catholic theology. In 1999 the Vatican ordered a nun, Sister Jeannine Gramick, and a priest, Rev. Robert Nugent, to stop their ministry to gays and lesbians because they refused to condemn homosexual activity. And in 2001, amid what appeared to be a crackdown on progressive theologians, and as the Church was putting into place a requirement that American Catholic theologians seek approval from their local bishops to teach at Catholic colleges and universities, the Vatican barred a Massachusetts theologian, Rev. Roger Haight of the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, from teaching while the Vatican investigated whether a book he wrote on salvation might have contradicted the magisterium. ‘’For the world he's been a marvelous pope, but for the Church his legacy is going to be more problematic, because there's a good deal of division now within the Catholic community,” said Thomas H. Groome, a Boston College theologian. The communiqué issued by the cardinals who gathered with the Pope in Rome to discuss the issue of clergy sexual abuse reinforced the sense that the hierarchy had little interest in a no-holds-barred debate. “The Pastors of the Church need clearly to promote the correct moral teaching of the Church and publicly to reprimand individuals who spread dissent,” the communiqué said.
As long as John Paul II was in charge, the Church's fundamental organization would not change, and the restriction of the priesthood to celibate men would not be lifted. The Pope, like other members of the Vatican leadership, saw clergy sexual abuse as part of a broad societal problem, not as a reflection of structural problems within the Church. “The abuse of the young is a grave symptom of a crisis affecting not only the Church but society as a whole,” he told the U.S. cardinals. “It is a deep-seated crisis of sexual morality, even of human relationships, and its prime victims are the family and the young. In addressing the problem of abuse with clarity and determination, the Church will help society to understand and deal with the crisis in its midst.”
But many theologians had already begun to think about the Church post-John Paul II. Although few people talked openly about the pontiff's passing, it was widely understood that the Pope was ailing — twice during Holy Week 2002 he was unable to finish Mass — and speculation had begun about who would be next to sit in the throne of Saint Peter. The conventional wisdom held that the next pope would be someone equally conservative, because over the course of his lengthy papacy John Paul II had appointed the vast majority of the College of Cardinals, But the conventional wisdom is often wrong. “Media commentators routinely use phrases such as ‘stacking the deck’ to express the idea that John Paul II has influenced the outcome of the next papal election by creating cardinals in his own image and likeness,” wrote John L. Allen Jr., Vatican correspondent for the
National Catholic Reporter.
“History, however, suggests a different view. Conclaves full of cardinals appointed by the deceased pope do not elect photocopies of the man who named them. More often, the opposite holds true: they elect popes who pursue different policies.”
Few people expected the cardinals to choose a man who would support a Third Vatican –Council, at which issues of reform would be fully ventilated. But some looked to a new Holy Father with a more sympathetic ear to laypeople with proposals for change. And the
Vaticanistas,
the corps of journalists and others who make a living observing the Holy See, saw some likelihood that the next papacy would be a short one — that the cardinals would choose one of their older colleagues as the next pope to increase the odds that he wouldn't live too long. That's because long papacies tend to concentrate power in Rome, and after the unusually long reign of John Paul II, many bishops were hoping to see some power devolve from the Curia to their own dioceses around the world.
In Wellesley the Voice of the Faithful crowds kept growing through the spring of 2002. Gatherings turned into revival-style meetings, with a charismatic emcee, Mary Scanlon Calcaterra, prone to shouting things like “praise the Lord” after a newcomer would get up to give personal testimony about why he or she joined the group.
“I am sixty-one years of age, benefited from seventeen years of Catholic education, have always been involved in ministry of some sort in the Church, did a year of missionary work in Alaska, worked in a chancery, taught CCD for years, have been on a pastoral council and a eucharistic minister and did a thirteen-part series for Boston Catholic television,” said one participant, Mary Ann Keyes. “What I am mostly is someone who loves my Church, and my hope is that out of this enormous pain will emerge a new way for our Church to carry on.” Another participant, Donna Salacuse, declared, “Voice of the Faithful has brought hope to me that the laity will assume the role given it by Vatican II and stand together with the clergy as Church. The laity represents a vast resource of talent and energy. We seek our rightful place in the Church so that together we may deal with the challenges facing us. We must never again be the mute people in the pews.”
Some of the laypeople were quite clear on what they had to offer, urged on by Dr. Muller, who was fond of reminding gatherings that it took laypeople, led by Galileo, to convince the hierarchy that the planetary system is sun-centered. “We're trying to save the hierarchy from itself, from its own insularity, its own tendency to secrecy, its own medievalism, by bringing in the laity, with our ideas,” said Luise Cahill Dittrich, one of the group's leaders. “They need us. They don't know how to police themselves; they don't know anything about human sexuality, about the democratic process, or about the equality of women. And they're so busy defending themselves, they lack compassion and love, which is what Jesus was all about.”