We may never know unless the Roman Catholic Church has a change of heart. The Vatican has never had its books audited. Without some public accounting, how will parishioners feel about giving money to pay for the sins of the fathers?
The Catholic Church is estimated to have spent $1 billion in the past decade defending priests charged with sexual misbehavior. It will take many millions more to settle just the lawsuits we know about. Bishops and cardinals could face criminal prosecution in addition to civil litigation for choosing to reassign priests charged with pedophilia rather than turning them over to the authorities.
The Catholic hierarchy hasn’t even begun to come to grips with the implications of the unfolding revelations. The church faces a crisis of confidence not unlike that which periodically seizes Capitol Hill, another institution with rigid rules and a hierarchical leadership based on seniority. Like the church, Congress makes laws but doesn’t always follow them. The analogy extends to the Appropriations committees in the House and Senate, each of which is known as the College of Cardinals, because that’s where the real power is. They hold the purse strings.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s that Congress has made some changes, and maybe the church can, too. Committee chairs who once enjoyed papal authority can now be voted out by disgruntled committee members, and power is distributed more equitably on Capitol Hill. Just as the Enron scandal forced Congress’ hand on campaign-finance reform, the Boston Globe’s exposes of pedophilia by priests triggered a long overdue re-evaluation of church practices. “The media is an agency of grace, bringing light to the church,” says a diocesan priest, who wishes to remain anonymous.
That priest says that those who embrace modern views do not rise in the church hierarchy because they can’t pass the ideological test, much like the old Communist Party. “Should [Boston’s Cardinal Bernard] Law or [New York Archbishop Edward] Egan fall, it will be the church counterpart to the fall of the Berlin Wall,” he says. These men are “American Vatican bureaucrats,” more focused on politics than ministering to a real-world flock. Few within the church mourn their fall from grace. “People are sitting on the sidelines cheering,” this priest observes. A Washington-area priest used his Palm Sunday sermon to call for Law’s resignation.
It is tempting to predict that the church is on the verge of a second Reformation, and that it will emerge stronger than ever. But reforming the church is not unlike reforming politics. Pope John Paul II has been in power since 1978, long enough to have named virtually every bishop in America. All of this pope’s appointees are ideologically conservative. What has happened mirrors a U.S. president stacking the courts. With John Paul loyalists at every level, social change will be wrenching, if not impossible. “As a group, they’re like the Taliban. If you want to succeed in this system, you never talk about the ordination of women–and abortion and birth control are like the third rail,” says this diocesan priest. Now in his mid-50s, he has watched the church elevate only those priests who represent a hidebound traditionalism. “It’s all coming home to roost,” he says. “They’re not capable of dealing in a more diverse community.”
A member of Congress home for the spring recess recalls attending the annual Catholic Charities dinner in his district. He goes every year and admires the group’s activism on behalf of the poor. They always have a speaker who has performed extraordinary good works, and the evening never fails to stir him. “When I come to this dinner, I think about converting to Catholicism,” he says. “Then I think about the pope–and how sclerotic and calcified the church is.”
Pope John Paul is sick, and has been for some time. His increasing disability has made him more remote, and there are whispers among the clergy that nobody is in charge. For the first time, the Vatican admitted the pope could not stand for services on Palm Sunday. The papal courtiers have surrounded him, and the vapid press statements emerging from the cocoon underscore how disconnected the hierarchy is from the tumult within the church.
The papacy as we know it is a 19th-century convention. The idea that in an age of e-mail and fax, and the ability to whisk around the globe in jets, everybody kowtows to a central figure seems quaint. The church is not a democracy, but neither is it a totalitarian state.
Members of Congress are not saying much. They don’t want to risk offending Catholics, and there’s no role for government in the affairs of this church. But a House Republican aide, a devout Catholic, voiced what many are feeling. “The church has let this stuff go on for way too long,” he says, recalling as a boy the lore about which priests everybody knew to avoid. He wonders whether celibacy is possible in the modern era. Not that celibacy is the cause of deviancy, but the pool of people who think they can live a life of celibacy is too small to fill the church’s needs. The priesthood attracts sexually conflicted men, and the church will have to face up to that as a potentially criminal matter, not as a way to perpetuate an outdated custom of celibacy.
