No More Cover-Ups

I AM ROMAN CATHOLIC, and I want to apologize. Apparently, a portion of my church not only believes in but still practices child sacrifice.

The Pennsylvania grand jury report was clear. It opened: “We, the members of this grand jury, need you to hear this. We know some of you have heard some of it before. There have been other reports about child sex abuse within the Catholic Church. But never on this scale. For many of us, those earlier stories happened someplace else, someplace away. Now we know the truth: It happened everywhere.”

For more than 30 years, investigations around the world have revealed similar patterns in Catholic institutions. Priests, bishops, cardinals, and even popes have decided that the Roman Catholic Church is too big to fail—that perpetrators of child abuse should be “bailed out” and victims given cash and gag orders to protect the idol of a religious corporation.

Since medieval times the Catholic Church has operated as an artificial legal persona to put property in perpetual collective ownership: the first legal corporation. If diocesan priests are considered “shareholders,” then the Catholic Corporation has willingly sacrificed children in the name of shareholder protection, betraying any legitimate “pro-life” ethic it might publicly promote. In the Bible this profanity is called the “worship of Molech,” an ancient god of Israel’s enemies: Molech’s outstretched arms of bronze were held in fire until red-hot, then living children were placed in his hands.

It’s time for these idolaters to leave Catholic leadership. It’s time for lay-led accountability at every level—from the parish council and seminary to the Vatican. If every U.S. Catholic priest resigned tomorrow, most parishes would continue to celebrate Mass, support the youth group, pray with the Legion of Mary, run the food pantry, provide religious instruction, clean the church, and baptize, marry, and bury.

Perhaps Catholic churches could then mature into Vatican II communities—led by the “fully conscious and active participation” of the people of God, in dialogue with other faiths, guided by Holy Wisdom, scripture, and tradition, and rooted in a sacramental vision of this world and the world to come. 

As one priest told me, “It’s time for a third Vatican council.” I agree. The integrity of the church’s moral and charitable leadership is mortally wounded. However, Vatican III cannot be only a synod of penitential princes. As Audre Lorde put it so eloquently, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Vatican III must center those marginalized—not only those broken by the world, but also by the church. Through them, the crucified Christ speaks—a voice no “confidentiality agreement” can silence.

ADVENT IS A season to examine ends of worlds or, as Thomas Merton put it, “a theological point of no return.” We face the void out of which men with crosses have drawn the calculating cunning of their grooming, the void that sermonizes in the vicious purity codes of religious and moral leaders, spiritual advisers, megachurch pastors.

Our theological point of no return is not only confessional—it’s political. Euro-American Catholics helped elect Herod to the White House. Herod: a king of rages who sends out agents to hunt down children. Herod: with a mania so violent that Roman emperor Augustus savagely punned he’d rather be Herod’s pig than Herod’s son.

Amid announcements of inquiries, resignations, updated protocols, hotlines to report bishops, subpoenas, indictments, impeachments, “we’ve been through this before,” and “it happened in the past, not now”—we who are responsible must stand before the Unspeakable void, wounded, threatened, confused, defenseless.

We stand not in despair, but in humility and pray the Confiteor unceasingly: “I confess to almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do ...”

Only then might God trust us again with a Child.