Benedict and the Scandal
by Mark P. Shea - April 23, 2008
Reprinted with permission.
Now that Benedict has come and gone we are in the thick of media analysis of the meaning of it all. Many folk (Rod Dreher is a notable example) were (as I expected) disappointed because the pope didn't "do something" about bishops who have, to say the least, not particularly distinguished themselves in the Scandal. Dreher wanted a "read them the riot act" moment. Others scattered around the secular and mainstream media talked about Benedict "firing" them and so forth.
The pope, as you might expect, addressed the bishops and (as you also might expect given his high degree of commitment to dialog with any person of good will or even not-so-good will) his talk wound up being a mixture of his thoughts and attempts to engage the often dim-witted drivel of the USCCB functionaries upon whom he depends for information about what's going on in the USCCB. But though he made clear that sometimes sexual abuse cases had been very badly handled by our bishops, there was no Riot Act Reading. Compounding this, for Dreher, was the reaction of our dim-witted functionaries, which was predictably less-than-stellar (not to say vaguely nauseating). Dreher mentioned Bishop Tod Brown, who offered the usual disingenuous smarm that he learned from his master, the even more egregious and untrustworthy Cardinal Mahony. Both Brown and Mahony are textbook examples of just about everything that is wrong with the USCCB's response to the crisis of sexual abuse in the Church. All this bugs Dreher and he expresses his disappointment with Benedict (though, to be fair, he was also very delighted to see Benedict meet with abuse victims and gave him his due).
The thing is, I'm not sure what Dreher and many others think should have happened between Benedict and the bishops. But then I haven't thought Dreher has had a realistic grasp of the options the pope has in this matter since the beginning. Dreher began his quarrel with the papacy on this matter when, as he famously said, the pope "let us down" by not dismissing a bunch of bishops "with the stroke of a pen." Life for Dreher since then has constituted the never-ending encounter with the fact that this entire perception of what the pope could or would do was wholly unrealistic.
As I've argued repeatedly, anybody who has read and internalized Ut Unum Sint could not be surprised when the pope with the most Eastern conception of the papacy in a thousand years did not regard it as his role to micromanage the American Church. Likewise, John Paul II's successor, Benedict, for all his fury at the Scandal (and it is real fury, not feigned for the cameras) is also constrained by the fact that, at the end of the day, he is bound to his commitment to regard himself as first among equals, not as The Guy Ordained by God to Tell All the Other Bishops to Obey Him or Hit The Road. His mission is to strengthen the brethren, not lay about him with mace and cudgel. Both his office and his personality are wholly arrayed against this highly American desire to "fix" everything with a cathartic gust of rage.
Moreover, the crowning paradox of Dreher's position is that, having left the Catholic Church for Eastern Orthodoxy in large part because of the Scandal, he is now in communion with bishops who would take it very ill if the pope were to do what Dreher so much wants him to do. It's one of the most puzzling aspects of Dreher's position and I hope that one of these days he will articulate how he can simultaneously hold an Orthodox ecclesiology and still want Benedict (or any pope) to act like Innocent III. I honestly don't get it.
Meanwhile, from where I sit it seems we are left with this:
Failing to summarily fire bishops whom even we laypeople (who own all the guns, run all the police forces, staff all the courts, and manage all the jails) have not opted to charge with any crimes, what is it we laypeople are asking the pope to do?
As far as I can tell, we are demanding that the one person in the world whose job, more than any other, is to proclaim the mercy of God do our job for us by administering some sort of vague but severe punishment for something we will not, ourselves, punish (and which we in many cases celebrate: namely a laissez-faire attitude toward our sex lives, including the sex lives of our kids).
Now I'm all for jailing bishops who have committed crimes. But, see, that's our job as laypeople and we have basically decided we can't or won't do that. I'm not a lawyer and I have no idea of the legal guilt of this or that bishop. But I do know something about the Gospel and it seems to me that if we laypeople don't think we have a case against the bishops beyond their being dumb, shady, slick, and/or disingenuous in the handling of serial perverts, then I don't see how it is the pope's task to be more merciless than we are.
The American Church has made great strides in making parishes places of almost paranoid safety for kids since 2002. This is but one of the prices we pay for the wretchedness of the episcopal response to the Scandal. Some of the Zero Tolerance idiocy is a heavy cross to bear for all the normal people who have to go through endless training and scrutiny because bishops did not have the sense God gave a goose when some serial pervert was reassigned to a fresh field of victims multiple times by these numbskulls. Now the bishops overcompensate by treating everybody as a serial pervert. That's exasperating, but it does give the lie to the notion that "nothing has been done." Plenty has been done and I, as a layman, have not a worry in the world about the safety of my children in the Church.
But that's not what people now mean by the phrase "nothing has been done." What they mean is that they do not have the sense that sufficient vengeance has been wreaked on bishops. Well, if there is legal vengeance to be wreaked, that's up to us laypeople, innit? But we have not done so, apparently because we don't have a case. So we hope that Benedict will do something or other to wreak that vengeance for us and we take it out on him for not doing our job. I think that's kinda crazy. I don't want a Church that is all about vengeance. I much prefer a Church that is about mercy.
Mark P. Shea is a senior editor at www.CatholicExchange.com and a columnist for InsideCatholic. Visit his blog at www.markshea.blogspot.com.
