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New York Times , May 4, 2002
Is the Pope Catholic?
by Bill Keller
Pope John Paul II turns 82 this month, and
he looks more mortal by the day. In his photo
op with the American cardinals last week, he
was so infirm and unintelligible that you wanted
to avert your eyes out of pity. But let's not.
The uncomfortable and largely unspoken truth
is that the current turmoil in the Roman Catholic
Church is not just a sad footnote to the life
of a beloved figure. This is a crisis of the
pope's making.
I do not mean that the pope condones child abuse,
although his zeal to combat it ranks right
down with that of, say, Cardinal Bernard Law,
the pedophile-juggling head of the Boston archdiocese.
Despite what you may have read, the pope has
not apologized for anything, nor has he acknowledged
anything amiss in the hierarchy's decades of
dissembling - or, as he dismissively put it,
the way church leaders "are perceived
to have acted." The fact that the pope's
passing reference to the rape of children as
a "crime" was treated as a bolt of
divine enlightenment reflects just how eager
we are to let him off the hook.
It should be clear by now that this scandal
is only incidentally about forcing sex on minors.
There is no evidence so far that predator priests
are more common than predator teachers or predator
doctors or predator journalists. The scandal
is the persistent failure of the church hierarchy
to comprehend, to care and to protect. The
Boy Scouts, not an organization in the vanguard
of sexual enlightenment, adopted a clear, firm
policy to protect children from molestation
19 years ago. The Catholic bishops and their
Vatican handlers, meanwhile, are still parsing
the rhetorical fine points of "zero tolerance,"
which is at best an empty slogan (does anyone
favor "10 percent tolerance"?) and
at worst a way of abdicating responsibility.
The pope lamented last week that the child
abuse scandal is eroding trust in the church.
But that is rather backward. American Catholics
have reacted so explosively to this sordid
affair precisely because they felt so little
trust to begin with. The distrust is the legacy
of Pope John Paul II.
One paradox of the Polish pope is that while
he is rightly revered for helping bring down
the godless Communists, he has replicated something
very like the old Communist Party in his church.
Karol Wojtyla has shaped a hierarchy that is
intolerant of dissent, unaccountable to its
members, secretive in the extreme and willfully
clueless about how people live. The Communists
mouthed pieties about "social justice"
and the rule of the working class while creating
a corrupt dictatorship of bureaucrats. Russians
boiled this down to a cynical adage: We pretend
to work, and they pretend to pay us. For American
Catholics, the counterpart is: They pretend
to lead, and we pretend to follow.
Like the Communist Party circa Leonid Brezhnev,
the Vatican exists first and foremost to preserve
its own power. This is disheartening for the
many good Catholics who hope this crisis will
provoke a renaissance in their church. Nobody
quite says it this way, but one reason many
Catholics see the moment as ripe for reform
is that this pope is on his last legs. Soon,
the hope goes, a vigorous new leader may emerge.
Maybe so. But like the Communists, John Paul
has carefully constructed a Kremlin that will
be inhospitable to a reformer. He has strengthened
the Vatican equivalent of the party Central
Committee, called the Curia, and populated
it with reactionaries. He has put a stamp of
papal infallibility on the issue of ordaining
women, making it more difficult for a successor
to come to terms with the issue. He has trained
bishops that the path of advancement is obsequious
obedience to himself. Alarmed by priests who
showed too much populist sympathy for their
parishioners, the pope, according to the Notre
Dame historian R. Scott Appleby, has turned
seminaries into factories of conformity, begetting
a generation of inflexible young priests who
have no idea how to talk to real-life Catholics.
Next month, after years of resistance, the
American church is supposed to begin requiring
that theologians teaching in Catholic universities
accept a "mandatum" from their bishops,
a pledge of allegiance to doctrinal orthodoxy.
The American bishops fear this will stifle
intellectual discussion, but the pope insists.
No glasnost on his watch.
Nor is the pope about to let America's uppity
laity exploit the current crisis to claim a
greater voice in their own affairs. The American
policy on handling sexual abuse is to be dictated
by Rome. And while a large majority of Catholics
want leaders who mishandled marauding priests
to resign, the culpability of bishops is not
even on the Vatican's agenda. It now seems
clear that the pope declined to let Cardinal
Law resign because he feared it might give
the laity the idea their opinion mattered.
Cardinal Law promptly marched home and quashed
efforts by restive Boston Catholics to organize
an association of parish councils. How Soviet
is that?
What reform might mean in the church is something
I leave to Catholics who care more than I do.
I am what a friend calls a "collapsed
Catholic" - well beyond lapsed - and therefore
claim no voice in whom the church ordains or
how it prays or what it chooses to call a sin.
But the struggle within the church is interesting
as part of a larger struggle within the human
race, between the forces of tolerance and absolutism.
That is a struggle that has given rise to great
migrations (including the one that created
this country) and great wars (including one
we are fighting this moment against a most
virulent strain of intolerance).
The Catholic Church has not, over the centuries,
been a stronghold of small-c catholic values,
which my dictionary defines as "broad
in sympathies, tastes, or understanding; liberal."
This is, after all, the church that gave us
the Crusades and the Inquisition.
That seemed destined to change after the Second
Vatican Council of 1962-65, which relaxed the
grip of the papal apparat and elevated the
importance of individual conscience. The Vatican
II spirit of a more open and dynamic church
invigorated American Catholic support for civil
rights and other liberal causes. But it soon
ran smack-dab into the sexual revolution.
Probably no institution run by a fraternity
of aging celibates was going to reconcile easily
with a movement that embraced the equality
of women, abortion on demand and gay rights.
It is possible, though, to imagine a leadership
that would have given it a try. In fact, Pope
Paul VI indicated some interest in adopting
a more lenient view of birth control, and he
handpicked a committee of prominent Catholics
who endorsed the idea almost by acclamation.
The pope agonized, and then astonished Catholics
by reaffirming the old ban.
"If you want to look for where credibility
on human sexuality got lost, it got lost there,"
said the Catholic University sociologist William
D'Antonio.
There is some reason to believe the man who
changed that pope's mind on birth control was
the Polish cardinal who would succeed him.
Whether or not that is true, once Cardinal
Wojtyla ascended to the papacy he adhered to
the most austere, doctrinaire view of sexual
ethics, and the most hierarchical concept of
church governance.
Implored by Catholics to consider, at least,
the lifesaving power of condoms in the age
of AIDS, John Paul II was unyielding. He actually
grouped contraception with genocide in a litany
of "intrinsically evil" acts that
condemn sinners to hell for eternity. "The
vast majority of Catholic married couples,
that is, stand on the wrong side of the abyss
with Hitler and Pol Pot," as Charles R.
Morris observed in his splendid history of
American Catholicism.
In America most Catholics ignore the pope on
this, as they do on divorce and remarriage,
abortion, sex out of wedlock, homosexuality
and many other things Rome condemns as violations
of natural law. It seems fair to say that a
church that was not so estranged from its own
members on subjects of sex and gender, a more
collegial church, would have handled the issue
of child abuse earlier and better.
There is a dwindling population of older Catholic
conservatives who say, in effect, the pope's
the man, love it or leave it. And there is
a growing population of American Catholics
who are doing just that - withdrawing tacitly
from Rome while keeping the faith in their
own parishes, if they happen to have accommodating
clergy, or in their own hearts. Whether the
church will reform, or fracture, or continue
this continental drift, I have no way of knowing,
but I wonder how long faith withstands such
a corrosive rain of hypocrisy.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
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