At the conclusion of Boston Globe Editor Martin Baron’s lecture last week in Memorial Hall, I watched a sequence unfold with a combination of amazement and disbelief.
One of the last people to ask Baron questions was a priest. As the man asked question after question, he grew more and more heated with Baron’s dismissive answers. He refused to acknowledge that The Globe had the right to investigate and report on incidences in the Catholic Church once the incidents had shown up in public records as lawsuits. He thought that the priests involved deserved more privacy than The Globe had granted them, regardless of any trends affecting normal American people.
I watched the priest get ruder and ruder as Baron shot holes in his arguments one at a time. My amazement probably was higher than that of everyone else in the room because I recognized the priest. I recognized him because when I was five, he was the priest in my home parish. My amazement increased. The longer he asked questions, the less and less he looked like the sweet, pot-bellied priest from my childhood and the more he looked like an angry, bitter old man.
The transformation of that priest mirrors the transformation of the Catholic Church. When there were no issues to deal with and everything was swept under a rug, the Church was a pillar of stability. People trusted it. Catholics sought it for its dependability.
Then it all came crumbling down when the lying and cover-ups caught up, and the Catholic Church hierarchy became an angry, bitter old man. Since that time, the Church has continued to ignore many of the problems and to be confrontational when the problems are exposed.
The Church, obviously, should have faced up to their problems long ago – long before court documents had to be unsealed or lawsuits had to be filed.
On the highest levels they still haven’t. The Vatican recently shot down a proposal that United States bishops had approved to address sexual abuses within the Church. In a letter made available on Thursday, church leaders in Rome objected to the U.S. bishops’ plan mainly because it eliminated a statute of limitations to charges and because it required that accusations be turned over to police immediately.
Many expected the resolution to fail at the Vatican, but that still does not solve the problem. Instead of fixing a problem or making changes to the resolution as it was, the Vatican scrapped a plan that had some teeth to it and started over. Where the Pope could have used the initiative taken by American bishops in June at their conference in Dallas and used it as a positive step towards solving a disastrous problem, he and other leaders continue to waffle on policy matters, rather than fixing the problem.
According to CNN.com, the Pope is hung up on several parts of the bishops’ resolution that are “difficult to reconcile with the universal law of the church.”
This is unfortunate because it gives the Catholic Church the same bad rap that it has always had – that it’s out of touch, left behind in a changing world. The Pope has approved the formation of a joint commission of Vatican officials and Catholic bishops to formulate policy to deal with American Catholic priests accused of sexual abuses. But will the new policy that they develop have the same kind of muscle to it that the one formed in June did?
It’s doubtful. The conflicts that the Pope sees with the policy already developed are in his “universal law” argument, an argument that will most likely sabotage the next policy of any kind of strength.
The original policy gave people hope because it demanded accountability and because it made it where abusers could not hide behind who they were. Pedophiles should be held accountable. Legitimate accusations should be forwarded to police forces immediately and the accusations should be investigated for merit. The original resolution drafted by American bishops addressed these concerns.
The only hope for the Church now is that the joint commission realizes this when they hash out their disagreements and formulate a policy. A Band-aid will not work – the solution needs to be something more drastic.
If “universal law” must be satisfied, so must the common good of the common people involved. There is no other way to solve the problem in a responsible manner that is quick enough to prevent pedophiles from striking other unsuspecting children.