If, a year ago, anyone had been told that in 2002 there would erupt the greatest scandal in the history of American Catholicism, that several bishops would be forced to resign under a cloud, and that frenzied public scrutiny would be focused on clerical misbehavior, a reasonable person would have assumed that the whole experience would have a purgative effect, that at long last the Church's leadership would be forced to look unflinchingly at deep-rooted abuses. Instead, when the dust settles, it seems likely that the forces of dissent will somehow have emerged more deeply entrenched than ever.
The bishops, according to conventional wisdom, have taken a strong stand on clerical pedophilia, in their "zero tolerance" policy, which is a direct repudiation of their previous common practice whereby pedophile priests were merely shuffled from one assignment to another. Looked at closely, however, the new policy can also be viewed as merely a kind of damage control. The policy in effect says to transgressing priests, "If you get involved with minors, you will have to deal with the police and the Church will cease to protect you," the unspoken corollary then being, “Have the good sense to confine your sexual activities to people who are of age.”
There is no evidence that most of the bishops now intend to enforce the discipline of celibacy in a systematic way, and some have stated publicly that they do not regard homosexuality as even relevant to pedophilia, even though most clerical pedophiles prey on boys. Nor, astoundingly, do most bishops seem to think that the rejection of Catholic teaching about sexuality in any way contributes to the problem. A proposal to inquire into homosexuality and theological dissent as causative factors was rejected by a large majority of the bishops at their June meeting.
The degree to which all this defies common sense is astounding. Anyone with even a minimal knowledge of Catholic morality knows that pedophilia is a grave sin, made even worse when committed by priests supposedly vowed to chastity. Pope John Paul II has, in numerous writings, systematically articulated the most profound and sublime view of sexuality ever set forth by a Christian thinker, a view which would, once again, condemn pedophilia in the strongest terms. Yet for more than thirty years there has been an incessant drum beat of rejection of Catholic sexual morality as "rigid," "outmoded," "negative," and "unloving," along with continuous sniping at the Holy Father as himself merely a survival of an earlier era. Yet the bishops collectively somehow fail to see that priests who have violated the innocence of children may have felt justified in doing so partly on the grounds that Catholic moral teaching was undergoing a revolutionary change and that it was the right, even the duty, of individual Catholics to question the teachings of their Church.
The program of the bishops' semi-annual meeting in June left substantial clues to the fact that dissent will still enjoy a protected status in the Church. Besides hearing from victims of pedophilia, the bishops were required by their leaders to listen to speeches by Margaret O'Brien Steinfels, editor of Commonweal, and Scott Appleby, a historian from the University of Notre Dame, both long associated with dissenting movements. Appleby bluntly told the bishops to ignore the Holy See in dealing with their problems.
The bishops received similar advice from a number of liberals. Without specifying its contents, Appleby revealed that Father Edward Malloy, president of Notre Dame, had sent the bishops a plan. David O'Brien, a historian from the College of the Holy Cross, also long associated with dissent, identified the defenders of Catholic sexual morality as themselves the greatest obstacles to reform, while Jesuit Father Stephen Sundborg, president of the University of Seattle, proposed that the bishops address the problem by publicly praising the Catholic universities (most of which are centers of dissent) and publicly apologizing to homosexuals who feel hurt by Catholic doctrine. The Boston Globe, the principal journalistic organ unearthing the pedophilia scandals, published an article predicting that true reform will come from the dissenting theologians on the faculty of Boston College.
None of these writers even attempted to explain how being still more tolerant of theological dissent would solve the pedophilia problem. They implied that somehow traditional Catholic moral teaching led to pedophilia, although it was hardly credible to make such a claim forthrightly. Appleby, without explanation, talked about a gulf between bishops and laity dating back thirty-four years, an obvious reference to the papal encyclical Humane Vitae, which reaffirmed the prohibition on birth control, as though that prohibition somehow prepared the way for pedophilia or as though permitting birth control would have prevented it.
If there was any logic in these positions, it was in the claim that, since the bishops have been derelict in dealing with clerical abuses, it is now necessary to hand over their authority to nuns and lay people. The "culture of secrecy" was identified as the root cause of the abuses.
Such arguments were never developed systematically, because their absurdity would then have been obvious. Belatedly, for example, there have been reports of the sexual abuse of children by nuns, and the majority of all abusers are of course laymen. Accused pedophile priests have sometimes received intense public support from some of their parishioners, who have been known to treat the victims as trouble-makers. As the Enron and other scandals demonstrate, the culture of secrecy flourishes in corporate circles populated by married lay people, and the accountability of politicians to the citizens by no means guarantees that public office is free of serious abuses of power and the concealment of such abuses.
The liberals who now prescribe for the Church's illnesses do not even bother to deny the fact that their nostrum is not specific to the problems at hand but is merely the same cure-all they have been peddling for 35 years - ordination of women, a married priesthood, encouragement of "openness" employed as a euphemism for dissent. Although most liberals are probably sincere, their prescription objectively amounts to a cynical exploitation of the Church's deep troubles to promote an irrelevant and self-serving agenda.
The bishops at their Dallas meeting allowed themselves to be persuaded that neither homosexuality nor theological dissent has any bearing on their problems, although the fact that O'Brien and Appleby were the principal speakers invited to advise the bishops shows that such a conclusion had already been reached by the conference leadership. (In his talk Appleby thanked Msgr. Francis Maniscalco, the bishops' director of public relations, for inviting him to speak, then praised Msgr. Maniscalco for his "heroic" efforts during the crisis, a revealing example of the symbiotic relationship which exists between dissenters and ecclesiastical bureaucrats.)
In Dallas the bishops did not resolve to begin treating pedophilia as a grave spiritual and moral problem, something which would have been a significant step on the road to the Church's authentic recovery. Instead it will be treated as a legal problem, placed in the hands of the police, and, as in the past, as a therapeutic problem. There is every indication that the bishops will continue to rely on the St. Luke's Institute and other agencies which have been part of the problem rather than of the solution, and in some dioceses there have already been indications that the "solution" will be yet more therapy for priests and seminarians, a process which has singularly failed to prevent the problem and in some cases has exacerbated it. (Among other things, the therapeutic approach does not allow itself to tell people that homosexual activity is morally wrong. Indeed it precisely seeks to enable the patient to "come to terms with his sexual identity.")
Their credibility and authority severely damaged, some bishops will probably recognize that a cheap and swift way of regaining it is by making a dramatic show of "openness." A bishop who appoints a diocesan committee which includes known dissenters, outspoken feminists, even admitted homosexuals, will be praised for his courageous and statesmanlike reforms.
There is a stark reality here which virtually no one has acknowledged: If orthodox Catholics had their way, and homosexuals were excluded from the priesthood, there would be practically no clerical child abuse, even if that policy were viewed as overly rigid. The liberal position, unadmitted, implicitly concedes that a certain amount of pedophilia is tolerable, so long as the Church also remains tolerant of homosexuals.
Early in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, when for a time it seemed as though there would be little change in the direction of the country despite Reagan's election, someone formulated the principle "Policy equals people," meaning that policies do not change if they are to be implemented by people who do not agree with them. Dissenters, and those sympathetic to dissent, are so deeply entrenched on all levels of American Catholicism that they are now in the process of exploiting to their own advantage the most devastating manifestations of the bankruptcy of their position.
James Hitchcock, a founder of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, writes a syndicated column for American diocesan newspapers