Pretty good news from Pope Francis:

Pope Francis has issued new rules obligating priests and nuns to report incidents of abuse or cover-ups to church authorities, saying, “The crimes of sexual abuse offend Our Lord, cause physical, psychological and spiritual damage to the victims and harm the community of the faithful.”

The sweeping new regulations are Francis’ latest effort to combat sexual abuse involving the church, a long-running and painful issue that has cast a shadow on his papacy.

The papal decree also sets up new procedures to hold more-senior church authorities such as bishops accountable for committing abuse or for covering up the crimes of others. And it requires that within a year, churches must establish “one or more public, stable and easily accessible systems for submission of reports.”

Pope Issues New Edict Requiring Vatican Officials To Report Sex Abuse Allegations
RELIGION
Pope Issues New Edict Requiring Vatican Officials To Report Sex Abuse Allegations
Priests and nuns will be required to report the sexual abuse of minors and adults, as well as crimes related to child pornography, and are obligated to report if they know that a superior has covered up those crimes.

“In order that these phenomena, in all their forms, never happen again, a continuous and profound conversion of hearts is needed, attested by concrete and effective actions that involve everyone in the Church,” the pope said in the decree, which takes effect June 1.

The new regulations do not require church faithful to report abuses or cover-ups to law enforcement, as some victims of predatory priests have called for.

“Except for the nod to comply with civil law, the edict keeps the process entirely internal,” Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, said in a statement. She called it a “step forward” but expressed concern that the process will be “managed by church officials who already have proved to be secretive and protective of accused priests.”

She’s right about that, but I’m still glad to see this move. It put me in mind, though, of something weighing on my heart from these last days in Slovakia and Czechia.

In the Q&A period of my talks at the Bratislava Hanus Days festival, more than a few local Catholics asked me how I could possibly have left the Catholic Church over the abuse scandal. I told my story, but I am fairly confident that most people just didn’t understand. That honestly doesn’t bother me. I was once in the same position as they were. I wouldn’t have understood how it could happen to someone either … until it did. When I am asked about this in public, I always try hard to convey the most difficult lessons I learned from the deep and shocking pain of losing my ability to believe as a Catholic:

1. that you should never, ever take your faith for granted, assuming that because you are intellectually convinced, you’re set; and
2. that you should never, ever be prideful about your faith; and
3. that you should make yourself resilient in the faith by devoting yourself to prayer and in some way incarnating the faith by the work of your hands; and finally
4. that you should never make the mistake of thinking that you’re engaging in the work of God by immersing yourself in Church politics

These are truths that Christians of all churches and confessions should take to heart. I don’t even bother arguing about this stuff anymore. If you are open to hearing the hard-won wisdom of a shipwreck like me, good. If not, well, I hope you are never put to the test. I really and truly do.

In one of the group conversations with young Slovak Catholics, I was told that the sex abuse scandal is just now starting to hit the church in Slovakia, which is one of the most faithful Catholic countries in Europe. (The same is true, I learned, in Czechia.) The Slovak Catholics I was talking with wanted to know more about the scandal in the US — how it started, how it played out, and so forth.

“I would say that 99 percent of Slovak Catholics would not believe that such a thing is possible here,” said one of the men. He said it in a tone of genuine concern. It became clear as we talked that he is worried about how his fellow Catholics would cope with sex abuse revelations, if these crimes really did occur in any widespread capacity in the Slovak church.

Similarly, in a couple of conversations with Catholics in Prague, I heard confident dismissals of the scandals from believing Catholics, who asserted that these reports are ginned up to hurt the credibility of the Church globally. Yet I was able to discern that my interlocutors, though intelligent and worldly, didn’t seem to be aware of the depth and breadth of what had happened in the US Catholic Church.

Few if any of these good Catholic people are prepared for what may be about to hit them. Now, I don’t know any more than they do what might have been done by corrupt churchmen, and covered up. And I don’t know anything about the sociology of the Catholic Church in those countries (other than that the Slovaks are far more religious than the Czechs). What I do know is that the Catholic Church was at the foundation of anti-communist resistance in Slovakia, as in Poland. In traditionally anticlerical Bohemia (the Czech part of Czechoslovakia), Catholics nevertheless depended on their faith to get them through communism. It’s very, very deep inside them. Reflecting on these conversations with Czech and Slovak believers, I understood in a new, more direct way why Pope John Paul II was so resistant to believing what was right in front of his nose.

Talking yesterday to a friend who is a Czech immigrant to the US, I mentioned my worry about this to him. I told him that my concern is first of all that if there are significant scandalous revelations to come there, that many trusting believers will find themselves shattered internally, because they had not prepared themselves for a world in which priests and bishops could do such things.

My Czech friend, himself a believing Catholic, said that it’s impossible to talk to many of his countrymen about these things. He said, “Try to speak about it with my mother or my aunt. They will stone you to death right there.”

Second, I told him, I’m worried that prominent Catholic laymen might go out on a limb to defend bishops and priests who have secrets, and then, should the secrets come to light, find themselves discredited and mocked by the secular media for having done so.

I’m thinking of the late Richard John Neuhaus’s stirring 2oo2 defense of Marcial Maciel (read down to the “Feathers of Scandal” piece), which was a grievous mistake on Neuhaus’s part. “Feathers of Scandal” was published in the the March 2002 issue of First Things, which was one of the first issues of the magazine since the Boston revelations in January of that year. As I’ve said here before, I was writing at National Review at the time, and publishing a lot of very critical things about the Church and the scandal, doing so as a Catholic. Father Neuhaus, with whom I had previously enjoyed a warm relationship, phoned me up two or three times in those weeks to read me the riot act over my writing, saying that it would only embolden the enemies of the Church. In one case, he chastised me severely for writing about a particular case despite the fact that the local bishop had assured me that there was nothing to it (there very much was!). I asked Father Neuhaus why I should take the bishop at his word. “Because he is a bishop of the Roman Catholic Church!” thundered Neuhaus.

Neuhaus was quite wrong, and years later, didn’t exactly apologize to me, but wrote with more compassion about my loss of Catholic faith than I expected him to. I was quite angry with him back then, but looking back, I recognize that it was only by some kind of grace that I was able to see more clearly than Catholics like Neuhaus, who were better Christians in most ways than I was. My passion for truth and justice cut through a lot of the anesthetizing fog that blinded other Catholics, but lest I sound self-righteous, the intemperate nature of that passion also consumed my capacity to believe in Catholic ecclesiology. This was not a problem that afflicted Catholic believers like Phil Lawler and Lee Podles, both friends of mine and unflinching journalistic observers and critics of the corrupted Church. They saw more and worse than I did, and spoke out bravely, while still keeping their faith. I have to give believers like Father Neuhaus credit, though: at least some of their blindness surely came from the same kind of love that makes a son not want to believe the worst of his mother.

I still don’t know what to make of that kind of error. I’m personally aware of a case in which a family disintegrated because its members would not allow themselves to believe the truth about someone close to them who was exploiting their trust. A member of that family tried to warn the others, but was harshly condemned by them for what they regarded as his vicious cynicism. Everything that man warned about came true, and the family never recovered from the aftermath. The Cassandra told me that if his family had taken him seriously, and acted on his warning, everything would have been different for them. But they didn’t, and now what they cherished all lies in ruins.

This is not just a Catholic problem, or a Christian problem. It is a human problem. 

As you readers who followed my blogs from Slovakia and Czechia will recall, I was profoundly moved by the witness of the underground church there under communist persecution. These people are heroes, even saints. The life of a man like Silvester Krcmery (1924-2013), who endured torture and prison for his Catholic faith, and refused to give in to hatred or despair, is enough to take one’s breath away. There was not just one of him, either! Today, Slovakia is free, and more secular than it was, but spending time with the young Catholic adults there, at least the crowd affiliated with the Hanus Days festival, was so inspirational to me. Their faith is real, and palpable. If you feel weary and despairing of the faith sometimes, go drink a beer with the young Catholics of Bratislava, and talk about God. You will come back refreshed.

This is why I’m so heavy-hearted about what may be about to roll over Czech and Slovak Catholics. They love and trust the Catholic Church, and have built their way of seeing the world around the assumption that the Church, if not perfect, is uncontestably good, in ways that not only denies the abuse narrative, but simply finds it impossible to comprehend.

I said to a well-informed (and therefore undeceived) Catholic at the end of my trip, “The sense I have here is that this place is like Boston before the bomb went off.”

“Yes, that’s true,” he said.