It has become the scandal that won't go away, and it shouldn't. Priests from many parts of the world have been accused of sexual peversion against various youths in various conditions, and officials right up to the Vatican and the current and former Popes have been alleged to have attempted cover ups of the incidents. It is all certainly a black eye for those involved. Yet we cannot let it become a judgment of the Church herself.
To whatever degree Pope Benedict XVI and/or Pope John Paul II are culpable, they should be held accountable, as with any other Church official, whether a parish priest or bishop or Cardinal. But what sins exist are sins of the individual, not the institution. Bill O'Reilly said it best on his web site last Friday: the Church isn't about the local priest, it's about doing Christ's will and living as He taught. If Father Bob is sinning, it's not a point of theology, it's human frailty at work. If that frailty is so bad as to threaten the well being of parishioners then he needs to be dealt with both by the Church and the proper secular authorities. When higher ups further the injustice rather than address it, that needs to be dealt with as well.
Part of it is because those individual sins do put the Church herself in a bad light, but the actions must be addressed properly and in a forthright manner mainly because of the harm done to the victims. Yet that is not served by suggesting changes in theology such as allowing women priests: we need only recall the number of times women teachers have in recent memory abused young boys to see that is not the answer. It is not served by suggesting that the Catholic Church is not the One True Church: She is infallible in pronouncing moral and theological questions as right or wrong, but not infallible in the human choices of human beings. Her members can be as guilty of wrongdoing, of individual sin, as anyone else.
That the world revels in the current crisis may actually be interpreted as something of an odd compliment. The Church, standing for goodness and purity as She does, is measured by a more exacting standard of morals than most of the world. This is as it should be. It does make the crimes worse. Yet that is because what is at stake is so precious: the salvation of us all.
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Pope John Paul II refused and, so far, Pope Benedict has refused to admit that the true scandal was not the individual sinful priests, but the institutional coverup and reassignment by the bishops.
It seems that Archbishop Ratzinger engaged in these coverups and reassignments, too, like so many of his colleagues, when he presided over the Archdiocese of Munich.
But a large chunk of the problem goes back to Vatican II and its continuing fallout.
When the Catholic Church opted to phenomenologically reconfigure itself by emphasizing social justice rather than otherworldly salvation, they drove out many of the older priests and religious, and also began utilizing different criteria for seminarians.
As Michael Rose chronicles in his book _Goodbye, Good Men_, seminaries began to weed out students who prayed too much, or quoted Aquinas too much. He cites stories where seminarians openly dated women -- or men -- on the outside one evening, and then showed up for their classes the next morning.
It has often been observed that for progressives, a person's social consciousness is esteemed above their personal virtue. So long as you believe in right causes, your personal morality does not matter.
It should be no surprise that when these types of men were ordained to the priesthood, there would be trouble. But for many years the troubles were handled by those bishops who had ordained them, and by the newcomers who now worked in the chanceries, some of whom became bishops themselves.
There has been some housecleaning in some seminaries and orders since the 1980s, but much still needs to be done, and effects of those postconcilliar decisions are still with us.
And responsibility for those decisions still needs to be accepted.
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