Pope Benedict calls for Catholic church penance, but questions about reform persist

The appointment April 12 by Pope Benedict of an Opus Dei bishop, Jose Gomez, to lead the Los Angeles archdiocese, the largest in the US, is one example of circling the traditionalist wagons. Opus Dei is a deeply traditional group and its leaders have closed ties to Pope Benedict and his predecessor, Pope John Paul II.

Mr. Gomez takes over from Cardinal Roger Mahony, who was not replaced by the Vatican despite the costliest child abuse scandal in the US, which involved a pay-out of some $660 million dollars in 2007 to more than 500 victims of sexual abuse.

The Ryan report in Ireland described more than 380 cases of sexual abuse. Figures in Germany run into many hundreds, and in the US, there are more than 5,000 known cases.

Mr. Goubert of La Croix says Pope Benedict has been “very courageous” in disciplining church figures like Marcial Maciel, head of the ultraconservative Legion of Christ in Mexico, who fathered children and was charged with child abuse and drug problems while remaining on good terms with Pope John Paul. “For Benedict, the problem is not with the church, it is with individuals,” he says.

Weapons against the church

The former dean of the College of Cardinals, Angelo Sodano, highlighted current thinking around the papacy in comments to the Vatican newspaper L"Osservatore Romano: "By now, it’s a cultural contrast. The Pope embodies moral truths that aren’t accepted, and so the shortcomings and errors of priests are used as weapons against the church."

Gabriel Fackre, a United Church of Christ theologian and emeritus professor at the Andover-Newton Theological Academy in Massachusetts, cites the apostle Paul in Corinthians, saying that when “one member suffers, we all suffer. As churches, this hurts all of us. We have our own history of abuses in Protestantism. So from an ecumenical standpoint, let those who are without sin cast the first stone.”

At the same time, Mr. Fackre hopes the Vatican stops foot-dragging: “The mutuality that binds us together also means mutual accountability, and there needs to be a calling to account of events of this sort," he says. "It is not a time for a fortress mentality in Rome.”

Yet “Catholicism has changed, is changing, and must change,” argues theologian Tom Beaudoin at Jesuit-run Fordham University in New York. He finds Catholic groups demanding more participation, new views of Catholic spirituality, and self-governance to be rife at any American Catholic convention, showing that “on the ground,” as he puts it, the church is evolving. But in the most sacrosanct halls in Rome, there remains a “concentration of power among traditionalists.”

MR. Beaudoin wants a greater “spirit of truth” to animate the church structure. In this sense, he says, Benedict could build a bridge: “The current bishop of Rome is rightly interested in fidelity to the truth. So I would say this is a point of convergence between his vision and what is happening in the abuse crisis. We have to be a church that practices and is relentless if not reckless in its commitment to the truth about itself. It will be a very painful process that legal scholars would call disclosure – a process of letting go of illusions about who we thought we were and instead committing ourselves to the truth in a more demanding way.”

Previous

1 | 2 | 3