fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Livy and the Bishops

On the abuse scandal, the Church is unable to bear its vices or their cure
shutterstock_179178539

A conservative Catholic reader passes along this disheartening (to say the least) piece from the National Catholic Reporter. Excerpts:

Dying of cancer, Bishop Emeritus Geoffrey Robinson appeared Aug. 24 before the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse to testify to the prevalence of child sexual abuse in the church.

He painted a sad picture of a brave and lonely Sisyphus with his band of bishops in tow, pushing a boulder with a reasoned response to the crisis up the Vatican Hill, only to have it pushed back by popes and cardinals who had no idea about the issue and a blindness about the incapacity of canon law to deal with it.

“However great the faults of the Australian bishops have been over the last 30 years, it still remains true that the major obstacle to a better response from the church has been the Vatican,” Robinson told the commission. Most of the Roman Curia saw the problem as a “moral one: if a priest offends, he should repent; if he repents, he should be forgiven and restored to his position. … They basically saw the sin as a sexual one, and did not show great understanding of the abuse of power involved or the harm done to the victims.”

More:

In his perceptive notes of the meeting in the Vatican in April 2000 to discuss child sexual abuse, Robinson wrote that the members of the Roman Curia showed an “an overriding concern to preserve the legal structures already in place in the Church and not to make exceptions to them unless this was absolutely necessary.”

He told the Commission how Italian Archbishop Mario Pompedda told the delegates how they might get around canon law, but he did not want a law that he had to get around. He wanted one he could follow, but “they never came up with it.” Robinson came away from that meeting knowing that the Australian bishops had no choice but to continue to go it alone, irrespective of what the fall out might be.

The extent to which he and the other Australian bishops were prepared to do that is starkly illustrated in the minutes of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference of Nov. 28, 2002, where they resolved to disobey Pope John Paul II’s 2001 Motu Proprio, Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela, which required all complaints of child sexual abuse to be referred to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith which would then instruct the bishop what to do. They would only refer those cases where there was no admission by the priest that the abuse had occurred. Robinson told the Commission that the purpose behind that was to avoid being told by Rome what to do with those priests who admitted the abuse. That decision was well justified given the figures presented to the United Nations by the Vatican that only one third of priests against whom credible allegations of child sexual abuse had been made, have been dismissed. The claim that the Vatican has a policy of zero tolerance is pure spin.

Read the whole thing. Bishop Robinson is a theological liberal who has called for the Roman Catholic Church to chuck all its traditional teachings on sexuality. It’s important to say that one does not have to agree with him here (I certainly do not) to recognize that the bishop may be telling the truth about the way the Church bureaucracy has handled — and mishandled — this crisis over the years. I’m strongly inclined to believe that he is.

One of the most profound and difficult lessons I learned from writing about the Scandal was that the theological orientation of a particular bishop or priest — liberal, conservative, etc. — was in no way a reliable guide to whether or not that cleric could be trusted to do the right thing on the matter of clerical sex abuse. My point is that if you are inclined to dismiss Bishop Robinson’s testimony solely because he’s a heterodox liberal, you’re making a mistake.

This essay hit me in a particular way, coming on a day and a week in which I’ve been thinking a great deal about the passing away of the Christian West. It hardly needs remarking that the Church in Europe has very nearly collapsed, and that the abuse scandal — something that arose within the Church, and that was perpetuated by the Church — has a lot to do with its failure in Ireland. The reasons for Europe’s loss of faith in Christianity, both in its Protestant and Catholic versions, are many and complex. Still, it is not that difficult to imagine fallen-away Europeans Catholics, as well as unbelievers, would shut the door decisively to the possibility of reversion or conversion, because of the continuing inability of the Church’s authorities to come to terms with the abuse.

One is reminded of the Roman historian Livy’s famous remark about the beginning of Rome’s decline: “We can endure neither our vices nor the remedies for them.”

The other day on this blog, my friend and faithful reader James C., a traditionalist Catholic living in England, reacted with anger to a statement by the French bishops saying that French Catholics ought to open their arms to the refugees without distinction, because to do otherwise would be “totally contrary to the spirit of religions.” James called them “spineless, useless masses of episcopal jelly” — a very Raspailian diagnosis, in fact.

I have said before here that none of us Westerners outside the Catholic Church can afford to take pleasure in her troubles, or to be indifferent to them, because as goes the Roman church — the foundation of Western civilization since the end of antiquity — so go we all. When I read things like Bishop Robinson’s testimony to the Australian government commission, side by side with statements like that of the French bishops, I have a lot of thoughts and emotions, none of them hopeful or pleasant. After all this time, I am still capable of being scandalized by the death-wish of the hierarchy. Forget serving the interests of Christ; they don’t seem capable of even serving the interests of themselves.

Advertisement

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now