Is the Pope Catholic?
The New York Times
May 4, 2002
By BILL KELLER
Pope John Paul II turns 82
this month, and he looks
more mortal by the day. In his
photo op with the American
cardinals last week, he was so
infirm and unintelligible that you
wanted to avert your eyes out of
pity. But let's not. The
uncomfortable and largely
unspoken truth is that the
current turmoil in the Roman
Catholic Church is not just a sad
footnote to the life of a beloved
figure. This is a crisis of the
pope's making.
I do not mean that the pope
condones child abuse, although
his zeal to combat it ranks right
down with that of, say, Cardinal
Bernard Law, the
pedophile-juggling head of the
Boston archdiocese. Despite what you may have read, the
pope has not apologized for anything, nor has he
acknowledged anything amiss in the hierarchy's decades
of dissembling - or, as he dismissively put it, the way
church leaders "are perceived to have acted." The fact that
the pope's passing reference to the rape of children as a
"crime" was treated as a bolt of divine enlightenment
reflects just how eager we are to let him off the hook.
It should be clear by now that this scandal is only
incidentally about forcing sex on minors. There is no
evidence so far that predator priests are more common
than predator teachers or predator doctors or predator
journalists. The scandal is the persistent failure of the
church hierarchy to comprehend, to care and to protect.
The Boy Scouts, not an organization in the vanguard of
sexual enlightenment, adopted a clear, firm policy to
protect children from molestation 19 years ago. The
Catholic bishops and their Vatican handlers, meanwhile,
are still parsing the rhetorical fine points of "zero
tolerance," which is at best an empty slogan (does anyone
favor "10 percent tolerance"?) and at worst a way of
abdicating responsibility.
The pope lamented last week that the child abuse scandal
is eroding trust in the church. But that is rather
backward. American Catholics have reacted so explosively
to this sordid affair precisely because they felt so little
trust to begin with. The distrust is the legacy of Pope John
Paul II.
One paradox of the Polish pope is that while he is rightly
revered for helping bring down the godless Communists,
he has replicated something very like the old Communist
Party in his church. Karol Wojtyla has shaped a hierarchy
that is intolerant of dissent, unaccountable to its
members, secretive in the extreme and willfully clueless
about how people live. The Communists mouthed pieties
about "social justice" and the rule of the working class
while creating a corrupt dictatorship of bureaucrats.
Russians boiled this down to a cynical adage: We pretend
to work, and they pretend to pay us. For American
Catholics, the counterpart is: They pretend to lead, and
we pretend to follow.
Like the Communist Party circa Leonid Brezhnev, the
Vatican exists first and foremost to preserve its own power.
This is disheartening for the many good Catholics who
hope this crisis will provoke a renaissance in their church.
Nobody quite says it this way, but one reason many
Catholics see the moment as ripe for reform is that this
pope is on his last legs. Soon, the hope goes, a vigorous
new leader may emerge.
Maybe so. But like the Communists, John Paul has
carefully constructed a Kremlin that will be inhospitable
to a reformer. He has strengthened the Vatican equivalent
of the party Central Committee, called the Curia, and
populated it with reactionaries. He has put a stamp of
papal infallibility on the issue of ordaining women,
making it more difficult for a successor to come to terms
with the issue. He has trained bishops that the path of
advancement is obsequious obedience to himself. Alarmed
by priests who showed too much populist sympathy for
their parishioners, the pope, according to the Notre Dame
historian R. Scott Appleby, has turned seminaries into
factories of conformity, begetting a generation of inflexible
young priests who have no idea how to talk to real-life
Catholics.
Next month, after years of resistance, the American
church is supposed to begin requiring that theologians
teaching in Catholic universities accept a "mandatum"
from their bishops, a pledge of allegiance to doctrinal
orthodoxy. The American bishops fear this will stifle
intellectual discussion, but the pope insists. No glasnost
on his watch.
Nor is the pope about to let America's uppity laity exploit
the current crisis to claim a greater voice in their own
affairs. The American policy on handling sexual abuse is
to be dictated by Rome. And while a large majority of
Catholics want leaders who mishandled marauding priests
to resign, the culpability of bishops is not even on the
Vatican's agenda. It now seems clear that the pope
declined to let Cardinal Law resign because he feared it
might give the laity the idea their opinion mattered.
Cardinal Law promptly marched home and quashed
efforts by restive Boston Catholics to organize an
association of parish councils. How Soviet is that?
What reform might mean in the church is something I
leave to Catholics who care more than I do. I am what a
friend calls a "collapsed Catholic" - well beyond lapsed -
and therefore claim no voice in whom the church ordains
or how it prays or what it chooses to call a sin.
But the struggle within the church is interesting as part
of a larger struggle within the human race, between the
forces of tolerance and absolutism. That is a struggle that
has given rise to great migrations (including the one that
created this country) and great wars (including one we are
fighting this moment against a most virulent strain of
intolerance).
The Catholic Church has not, over the centuries, been a
stronghold of small-c catholic values, which my dictionary
defines as "broad in sympathies, tastes, or understanding;
liberal." This is, after all, the church that gave us the
Crusades and the Inquisition.
That seemed destined to change after the Second Vatican
Council of 1962-65, which relaxed the grip of the papal
apparat and elevated the importance of individual
conscience. The Vatican II spirit of a more open and
dynamic church invigorated American Catholic support for
civil rights and other liberal causes. But it soon ran
smack-dab into the sexual revolution.
Probably no institution run by a fraternity of aging
celibates was going to reconcile easily with a movement
that embraced the equality of women, abortion on
demand and gay rights. It is possible, though, to imagine
a leadership that would have given it a try. In fact, Pope
Paul VI indicated some interest in adopting a more lenient
view of birth control, and he handpicked a committee of
prominent Catholics who endorsed the idea almost by
acclamation. The pope agonized, and then astonished
Catholics by reaffirming the old ban.
"If you want to look for where credibility on human
sexuality got lost, it got lost there," said the Catholic
University sociologist William D'Antonio.
There is some reason to believe that the man who
changed that pope's mind on birth control was the Polish
cardinal who would succeed him. Whether or not that is
true, once Cardinal Wojtyla ascended to the papacy he
adhered to the most austere, doctrinaire view of sexual
ethics, and the most hierarchical concept of church
governance.
Implored by Catholics to consider, at least, the lifesaving
power of condoms in the age of AIDS, John Paul II was
unyielding. He actually grouped contraception with
genocide in a litany of "intrinsically evil" acts that
condemn sinners to hell for eternity. "The vast majority of
Catholic married couples, that is, stand on the wrong side
of the abyss with Hitler and Pol Pot," as Charles R. Morris
observed in his splendid history of American Catholicism.
In America most Catholics ignore the pope on this, as they
do on divorce and remarriage, abortion, sex out of
wedlock, homosexuality and many other things Rome
condemns as violations of natural law. It seems fair to say
that a church that was not so estranged from its own
members on subjects of sex and gender, a more collegial
church, would have handled the issue of child abuse
earlier and better.
There is a dwindling population of older Catholic
conservatives who say, in effect, the pope's the man, love it
or leave it. And there is a growing population of American
Catholics who are doing just that - withdrawing tacitly
from Rome while keeping the faith in their own parishes,
if they happen to have accommodating clergy, or in their
own hearts. Whether the church will reform, or fracture,
or continue this continental drift, I have no way of
knowing, but I wonder how long faith withstands such a
corrosive rain of hypocrisy.
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