The Catholic Church: A crisis of confidence

An Austrian priest purposely avoids using Pope Benedict XVI’s name in his sermons, to protest his handling of the pedophile crisis. A Philadelphia woman says she has stopped going to confession because she now wonders if her priest is “more of a sinner” than she is. These are snapshots of a church in turmoil, said Vanessa Gera in the Associated Press. As millions of Roman Catholics observe Easter week, many “are finding their relationship to the church painfully tested” as they confront suggestions that Benedict himself was complicit in the “coverup” for pedophile priests. The latest blow was a report in The New York Times that when the pope was Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger of the Munich archdiocese, he was directly sent a memo informing him that a pedophile priest had been assigned to another parish. It also was revealed last week that in 1990, when Ratzinger was serving as a cardinal in Rome, he declined to defrock a Wisconsin priest who had molested 200 deaf boys over several decades, after the priest asked to live out his life in dignity. The Vatican insists the pontiff was not involved in the decision-making in these cases, said Tom McNichol in TheAtlantic.com. Still, Catholics are asking: “What did he know and when did he know it?”

We’re beyond that question already, said Christopher Hitchens in Slate.com. No rational person can believe that Ratzinger, who was in charge of the church’s “global response to clerical pederasty,” was kept in the dark about hundreds of “parish-level atrocities.” Now that this scandal has reached the pope, it’s become all too evident that the church “regularly abandoned the children and did its best to protect their tormentors.” What Catholics need now, said Lisa Miller in Newsweek, is a pope who can respond to the pedophile crisis—and its coverup—in an authentically human, not institutional, way. But the 83-year-old Benedict has spent most of his life in the cloistered corridors of the church’s hierarchy, enforcing doctrine and dogma. “For such a man, the desire to protect fellow clerics can be so deep as to be instinctive.”

These attacks on the pope are utterly unfair, said Bill Donohue in CNN.com. When these abuse cases occurred, decades ago, “the zeitgeist of the day” was therapy and rehabilitation, not calling in the cops. The attacks on the pope are part of a campaign by liberals to undermine the church’s authority and its teachings on priestly celibacy—“a profoundly countercultural idea.” Benedict has, in fact, done more than any other pope to address the abuse scandal, said Rod Dreher in Beliefnet.com, and it’s wrong to portray him as a “see-no-evil pontiff.” He’s met personally with abuse victims and “uttered some extraordinary words of regret.” Clearly, though, “people are looking for something more.”

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What we’re looking for is real change, said Andrew Sullivan in TheAtlantic.com. The church’s medieval view of sex as dirty and sinful, and its insistence on priestly celibacy, has created a “truly sick subculture” of “tormented men with arrested sexual and emotional development.” Yet the pope remains as vehement as ever that women cannot be priests or play a more assertive role in church life, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. So we are left with a “sordid culture of men protecting men”—and a church whose moral authority grows fainter every day.