Catholic Church

The question everywhere is the same these days: What, in the long run, will be the effect of the pedophilia scandal on the Catholic Church? Speculation ranges from predictions of total collapse to speculation about total reconfiguration. Given the long lessons of history, neither hypothesis is likely, perhaps, but we may have already been given a mirror into the future of change. Let me tell you what I've seen already.

It was 1996. I was in Dublin at the time writing a book. To do concentrated work I had gone away to live alone in a small townhouse on the canal. For a while, there were no distractions at all. But then the first pedophilia scandal erupted in Ireland. I found myself as immersed in the story as the rest of the country but, as an outside observer, more concerned about the overall effects of the situation than by the cast of characters. I began to understand that the Irish, too, were dealing with this situation differently than they had in the past.

The Irish had already dealt with the case of a bishop who had fathered a son years before, supported him financially all his life, but never acknowledged him. They had read themselves weary about the young pastor who dropped dead leaving a mistress housekeeper and their children who were now suing the diocese for his estate. They had watched the church battle the government over the legalization of contraception. The Irish, it seemed, were well battle-tested on sexual scandals.

Having a 3-and-a-half-year-old son has made the horrific revelations about the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests even more abhorrent. His innocence and vulnerability have been my daily context as I listen to one awful story after another. It makes a person very angry.

Concern for the victims of the widespread sexual abuse has to be our first and overriding concern. Where the Catholic Church and its leaders have begun to fully repent of these terrible sins and make those who have been irreparably damaged its principle priority, it becomes the beginning of healing. But where concerns for the perpetrators, or the priesthood, or the institution, or the financial consequences have dominated the response, the original sin has been seriously compounded. Clearly, the path that must be followed now is to put the welfare of the victims over the protection of the system. Indeed, that is the only way to save and heal the system in the long run.

But what must be done? Some wrongly blame celibacy. But as Richard Rohr explains in his incisive article in this issue, celibacy is not the problem (though some reforms in how it might be implemented may be in order). While I support both the ordination of women priests (my wife is an Episcopal cleric) and the welcoming of married priests, neither of these crucial church reforms would solve the problem either. Both pedophilia (the sexual abuse of children) and the abuse of power in sexual relations with post-pubescent young people are problems in many places, including other churches where women and married priests are accepted. Nor is the problem the prevalence of homosexual men in the Catholic priesthood. Pedophilia is as much a heterosexual illness as a homosexual one. The underlying issue in this terrible church sex scandal is not—as the Left and the Right have variously asserted—celibacy, the lack of women priests or married priests, or the number of homosexuals in the priesthood.

Hearing confessions is a rather dangerous and lethal profession. It creates a kind of patience with sin that is often scandalous to outsiders. But confession is a very good thing about my Catholic tradition that might not be recognized in the midst of our shame about the pedophilia scandal.

Good confessional practice does not encourage you to read a situation in a forensic or argumentative context, and in fact quite the contrary. The whole purpose is healing and reconciliation. Ours is not "innocent until proven guilty" but actually "guilty and declared innocent." We start with the conviction and move therapeutically from there.

This wonderful pastoral practice is now to our severe disadvantage inside of the entirely different set of assumptions of the secular social order. This is a good reality check for us, but we Catholics (and all Christians) deserve to understand our own partly ignorant and partly vulnerable position in the world today. We have a very different agenda than the world. Some priests have surely been wolves among lambs, but we are also lambs in a very wolfish system of law and punishment. That is the world as it must be, exactly what Jesus promised us.

The confessor and the Christian judges evil in terms of its possibility for transformation and openness to grace; the dualistic secular mind knows only crime and punishment, quid pro quo—an "eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." We are grateful for a certain sense of social order that it gives us.