Abuse: The boil must be lanced

The relentless focus on revelations of sexual abuse by Church personnel and their cover-up is a constant source of pain for Catholics, especially when the coverage is characterised by frenzy, caricature, and even distortion. It is not difficult to see how some Catholics resent this attention on the Church — maybe even the coverage in this newspaper — to the point that they feel persecuted.

The revelations bear the dimensions of a major crisis, going back to the United States, moving on to Ireland and now to Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. South Africa has had its share of scandal. People are now asking the question many have dared not ask: how far and how high does it go?

While there may still be many who don’t want to ask questions, the situation calls for Catholics to understand the realities that underpin the scandal, and not bury their heads in the sand. Neither the aggressive coverage by many media nor the sometimes desperate justifications from some Catholics are helpful in formulating a reasoned position. Catholics must defend what is defensible, and rebuke what must be rebuked.

Likewise, lay people who pass judgment on serious lapses by their spiritual leaders must not be rebuked for doing so, as is sometimes the practice of appealing to blind, uncritical loyalty, as though loyalty has greater value than voicing the truth.

No doubt much of the secular criticism directed at the Church and its hierarchy is driven by an anti-Catholic agenda. But this must not deceive the faithful into regarding the magnitude of the scandal as an invention or exaggeration by a hostile media.

The scandal is immense, and its authors are those who perpetrated abominable acts on minors, and those who knew and tolerated these crimes. There is no way of mitigating the disgrace, and faithful Catholics on every level are just as scandalised as non-Catholics.

The Church must be grateful to those commissions and media that brought attention to the shameful extent of the scandal. Painful though it was, it forced the Church to change its ways profoundly. Some media have done the Church a service, which increasing numbers of bishops are acknowledging.

Even now, not all criticism is gratuitous, and general media-bashing would be a wholly unsuitable Catholic reaction. And yet there are media which engage in objectionable mischief. For example, basic journalistic standards were relegated to base sensationalism in a late-March London Times article that linked a sex abuse scandal involving the secular Vienna Boys’ Choir to the Church’s abuse scandal in Germany, going as far as quoting the German interior minister. Such reports feed the Church’s fears of a persecution, and even a false defence that the true extent of the scandal is merely media hype.

However, just as the critics have accused the Church of not putting the abuse victims at the forefront of its concern, so one may wonder where exactly concern for abuse survivors ranks in sensationalistic and prejudicial media coverage, and in the denunciations by those who would like the whole Church brought down.

Where is the concern for abused people in calling for the resignation of Pope Benedict, who has committed himself to rooting out abuse in the Church and who is meeting with the survivors of abuse to hear their stories?

It is not impertinent, of course, to question the pope’s actions, inactions and knowledge relating to abuse cases when he was the archbishop of Munich and Freising and then the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It is not appropriate, however, to demand Pope Benedict’s resignation — and certainly not when such calls are related to an anti-Catholic agenda.

The Church has not found a way to communicate with consistent clarity, though it has come a long way from the days of foolishness, just eight years ago, when curial officials described clerical abuse of minors as an “Anglo-Saxon disease” and others attributed it to homosexuality; a time when Cardinal Dario Castrillón Hoyos admitted in reference to the reporting of abuses to the civil authorities that the Church prefers “keeping things within the family”. Those days are gone, thankfully, and yet the Church still struggles to make itself understood.

Pope Benedict’s pastoral letter to the Church in Ireland contained so much that was good. A lot of that was disregarded by the secular press which either did not understand what the pope was saying (and, unfortunately, the letter contained much theological code) or distorted the pope’s intentions. This may exasperate us, but it is not enough to leave it at that.

The hierarchy, if it is sincere in addressing the scandal comprehensively, must communicate forthrightly and unequivocally in terms that are easy to understand. Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin and Bishop Stephan Ackermann of Trier, Germany, have provided a blueprint for that (alas, rumours have it that not everybody in the hierarchy appreciates Archbishop Martin’s candour).

It is likely that more scandals will break in the future. Further commission reports are expected to emerge from Ireland, and before too long scandals in the bastions of ancestral Catholicism — France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Croatia and so on — may break. The Church must prepare itself for that. Pre-emptive disclosure may be one way of doing so. In the words of German Archbishop Ludwig Schick of Bamberg: “This boil must be lanced. Everything must come out.”

The abuse scandal, and in particular the incidence of molestations being covered up and tolerated, is a betrayal of priests and bishops, whose reputation is now clouded by the deplorable actions of others. It is also a betrayal of the faithful. Many of them are leaving the Church; some may have lost faith altogether.

In some ways, the Church seemed to have lost sight of its mission — to lead believers to salvation. It must be made clear that the salvific mission of the Catholic Church cannot be compromised by those who preach it, even though the calibre of those who preach it can compromise the encounter with the Church’s salvific mission.

The Body of Christ is torn apart by this scandal, which even some Catholics are using as a weapon in a war of ideology. For example, the abuse of minors is not an appropriate argument against clerical celibacy. Indeed, it is also questionable sociology — for one thing, there is no statistical link between clerical celibacy and the abuse of minors.

Likewise, it is grossly deceptive to blame Vatican II (or a particular “reading” of it) and social liberalisation when many of the revealed cases preceded the 1960s. The simple truth is that abusers and the bishops who failed to protect children covered the whole spectrum of philosophies. Such disputes within the Church are unedifying and contemptuous of those who were abused. Our attention should be on them, not on scoring ideological points.

The changing times did not encourage child molestation, but they did facilitate the reporting of such abuse. And no matter how hard it has been on the Church’s reputation, it is a welcome fact that the abuses and their cover-up were eventually revealed, forcing the Church to reform itself in this respect.

For all the criticism the Church is rightly receiving and for all the pain this scandal is causing, we can take comfort from one reality: there probably is no safer place for young people today than the Catholic Church.