The Roman Catholic Church is now embroiled in another abuse scandal. It’s not a brand new one, but a carryover from the revelations made about the U.S. church in the 1990s, which led to the Conference of Bishops to write a “Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.” According to the Conference[1], the charter was written in 2002, and updated in 2005, 2011, and again in 2018. In essence, it calls for the church to help the victims heal from their abuse, while establishing guideline policies for the various Bishops to safeguard the faithful, and remove the offending clergy/lay ministers. While it is a nice thing for the Bishops to say they have done, it appears to do very little to address the underlying human flaws within the organization, and accomplish what is really an impossible task, preventing one human from abusing another who is in a subservient position.
The latest scandal with the RC church in the United States stems from the mid-August release of a Grand Jury investigation by the Pennsylvania Attorney General detailing decades-long abuse by over 300 priests, and subsequent coverup by the various Bishops within the various dioceses across the state[2]. Released on the heels of this report is a letter from Archbishop Carlos Maria Viganò, the Apostolic Nuncio (effectively the Pope’s ambassador) to the United States from October 2011 until April 2016, detailing how the cover-up of top Bishops with the U.S. reaches all the way to the Pope[3].
If Archbishop Viganò’s claims are true it will create both a crisis of faith for the faithful and set off a civil war within the leadership of the church itself[4]. We see now the opening salvos in this war with the release of a statement by the Pope saying he will not respond to the claim and Chicago’s Cardinal Cupich (one of the leaders identified by Viganò), which said in part. “The pope knows we have a bigger agenda. We have to speak about the environment, about the poor, we have to reach out to people who are marginalized in society. We cannot be distracted at this moment”[5]. For a layperson, this seems to epitomize the tone-deaf nature of an elite class within the church. One that is far removed from the people they claim to serve as Christ’s representatives.
The Roman Catholic Church claims to be the one true church stemming from Christ’s charge to Peter. “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” (Matthew 16:18, New Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition) But over the next two millennium, the church did not remain as it was in those first days. It has grown, reorganized, redefined the basis of faith, changed the relationship between the faithful and their God, and then the relationship between the apostles and those they were to share the news of Christ’s saving grace with. In the process, they implemented a set of classes that either make the practice of faith more palatable or as we see now create a system where the upper class finds it more important to protect than police their own who have risen to positions of power and importance.
In light of these failures, we see the faith of many common men and women being destroyed as they flee from the evils they see within the church. But don’t be confused, what we now see played out in the Roman church is systemic within all the major religions and is only now getting press because of the scandal it can invoke. If the press were really fair and balanced, as they claim, we would see them reflecting the outrage over the abuse of power within the Sunnis and Shites of Islam or the caste system of the Hindus.
Each of these faiths, Christian, Islam, Hindu, Buddhist, Judaism, and the rest, all have apologists with theological backgrounds to explain why they are right and how universal their beliefs are. These men and women have knowledge that is far and away more extensive than mine, but I see the humanity for what it is. We are by our nature imperfect, and the guidance of our books of faith was laid out to provide some order to the chaos in our societies. As we reject the basis for those guidelines we see what we have today, increasing chaos. The rising questions over the predatory nature of a percentage of the priesthood are one of the offshoots from that rejection of faith.
Now that we have laid out the issues facing the Roman Church, it seems only fair to understand where I come from and what my likely bias is. That way you can either find value in my analysis or dismiss it out of hand as pure hogwash.
I grew up in a home that although it professed a faith, did very little to either express or encourage it in the children. It was only when I reached my pre-teen years did I seek out religion in an effort to understand my place in the universe and attempt to understand the pain of parental abuse I was experiencing. I found comfort in the fellowship of the fundamental protestant church and the guidance of ministers who seemed to care and support the development of a personal relationship with God. As I went through my teen years I prayed every day, asking God to remove the curse of alcoholism from my father and end the physical abuse that occurred when he was drunk and his rage spilled out. Mostly what I got back was silence.
By the time I headed off to college I was pretty convinced God wasn’t listening and the church was just a human construct to organize people into supporting a ministerial way of life for some. While in college I spend considerable time on reflection and introspection and returned to God on a personal level, but to this day I maintain the organization of a church is fundamentally a human construct. The theology of the major religions says I am wrong and the church is the God’s way of communicating with his faithful. Ideally, the various churches are organized to help the faithful find a relationship with God, but on the human level, we should understand they are like competing businesses. To maintain their base and grow, each must explain why they are the one true church and how everyone else is wrong. Within the Christian faith, this is further broken down into a number of Catholic and Protestant divisions, each with a slightly different view of how God’s grace is to be apportioned.
So far, through my life, I’ve seen little to persuade me that my view is wrong. For many, the organized church is absolutely critical to reinforce and encourage their faith and as a visible representation of God’s commitment to humanity. For others, who reject the idea of God, the church is irrelevant and simply a crutch for those who can’t get by without the myth of a creator. For most though, the church helps them with the daily struggle and in the best cases, it is a means to understand better what God desires of them to become more perfect human beings. That said I can’t escape this one unanswerable question. Is God so petty that only those who follow the right set of rules are allowed into heaven? I just can’t conceive that to be true, but it is the construct that almost every faith or church relies on to sustain its followers.
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