On Good Friday The Church Crucifies Itself

The Associated Press is reporting the story (carried by MSNBC) that in a Good Friday sermon in front of the Pope, the Pope’s own preacher, Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, compared the attacks on the Catholic Church over the priest abuse scandal to attacks on the Jews during the Holocaust, thereby drawing outrage from around the world for a strained comparison in victimization that seems more concerned about defending and protecting the hierarchy than dealing with the widespread problem of sexual abuse and molestation by priests and attempts to conceal the problem by Bishops. It appears that Good Friday in 2010 will be seen as the church crucifying itself before the world.


Fr. Cantalamessa’s comments leave me almost speechless—almost! When an individual or a corporation has a public relations nightmare, the wisest voices always suggest that the resolution of the crisis will only come when and if: (a) there is immediate ownership of the problem; (b) get the news out quickly, don’t let it come out piecemeal so that the story drags out; (c) say you’re sorry you screwed up; (d) make amends as quickly as possible.

The Roman Catholic Church has a major crisis on its hands and it is doing everything wrong. Every principle of crisis management is being ignored. We see denials of responsibility. We see attacks on the press for reporting the problem. We have priests like Fr. Cantalamessa making really stupid and unbelievable statements, implying that the church is the victim in this crisis as were the Jews in the holocaust, a “victim of collective violence,” with “violent and concentric attacks against the church, the pope and all the faithful of the whole world.” That is chutzpah!

No wonder there is outrage. They seem not to be aware of who the real victims are in this crisis. These “attacks” as Fr. Catalamessa refers to them are reports of priest abuse and molestation that are coming forth daily in a never ending stream, along with the release of documents that show that the church hierarchy very clearly knew about the abuse and tried in very amateurish fashion to conceal what was going on in the church and to protect the priests from having to accept any responsibility or pay any price. This is not an attack on the faithful of the whole world, it is an attack on the unfaithful in the hierarchy and in the Vatican. It is too bad if Vatican officials don’t like the crop that they sowed, but it is their problem.

Is it an attack on the Pope? If so, it has been a pretty muted attack. What is reported (and denied, but not convincingly) is that this problem has been going on and been known to be a problem for decades, the church did not deal with the problem, the church moved offending priests to other dioceses where they continued to abuse, that Archbishop of Munich Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger knew (or should have known) what was going on in his diocese. As head of the office in the Vatican charged with dealing with sexual abuse, for Joseph Ratzinger to say he did not know about abuse is simply not believable, particularly because he was the author of instructions to dioceses around the world to keep such matters secret.

Attacking the messengers, and trying to play the victim in this sad story, will not play well on the world’s or history’s stage.

Celibacy Is The Problem!

The sexual abuse scandals of Europe put Germany center stage last week as several incidents came to light that involve many years of physical and sexual abuse at a boy choir school in Germany operated by the Pope’s brother, who said he had no knowledge of the abuse in the years before he was director, as well as another incident in Germany involving reassigning a molester priest to another parish (where he again molested a child) during the period in which the Pope had been the Archbishop of the diocese in Munich.

Neither the Pope nor his brother are directly involved in the scandal and both claim they had no knowledge of the molesting and abuse, which of course might be true, but which is troublesome because it implies a “see no evil, hear no evil” attitude, which has been precisely the problem the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has with respect to rampant sexual abuse problems which have gone on for decades. When I was a young adult (some 50 years ago) I was aware that there was a hidden sexual abuse problem in the Church in Western New York where I lived at the time (it was quite openly discussed), and I find it incredible that the Catholic hierarchy insists it did not have know what was going on throughout the Church when the rumors were so widespread and that once claims were made against the Church it tried so hard to conceal what was obviously a large and ever increasing problem.

These incidents follow the scandalous story widely-reported ten days ago that a high Vatican official was involved in a prostitution ring that procured young male prostitutes for Church dignitaries.

The Associated Press carried the story earlier this month that the Vatican hierarchy was trying to squelch discussion that the church’s celibacy rule had anything to do with sexual abuse, after “one of the pope’s closest advisers, Vienna archbishop Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn …. called for an honest examination of issues like celibacy and priestly education to root out the origins of sex abuse.” The article reported that leading prelates at the Vatican were strongly denying that celibacy had anything to do with molestation.

Well, I guess we can agree with the prelates that celibacy does not “cause” pedophilia or ephebephilia or homosexuality. Of course that is not the issue here. Celibacy is not a natural or healthy state and if that is a requirement for entering the priesthood it is obvious that the priesthood and orders will have a large contingent of men with unhealthy sexual needs and behaviors. Social scientists tell us that homosexuality and pedophilia are not related. Pedophilia occurs with both women and men, gay and straight, but there is a higher reported incidence of pedophilia with men than with women, possibly because men may be more inclined to act on their sexual inclinations than women.

That said, to say that there is no relationship between the celibacy rule and the frequency of aberrant sexual behavior among priests is just not credible.

Some have commented that the way for the frequency of sexual abuse by priests to be reduced is to increase the monitoring of priests and to have a zero tolerance policy by the Church hierarchy, but I doubt that will happen and I think it is naïve to suspect that anything will change given the fact that the hierarchy consists of the same sexually repressed males in which this culture of acceptance and cover up has been the model for generations.

Whatever the reason for having a celibate priesthood in the past, it appears that the Church may need to face up to the fact that celibacy may be the least of the difficulties for Catholics. As for any theological reason to maintain celibacy, that seems strained at best. Women played a significant leadership role in the early church but that role was dismissed as irrelevant by those who at a much later time in church history advocated for celibacy. The point is that there is no theological or practical reason to continue the outmoded and unnecessary practice of celibacy in the Church.

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