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Time for Francis to Bind the Church's WoundsTime for Francis to Bind the Church's Wounds

Time for Francis to Bind the Church's Wounds

Pope Francis has turned heads with his fresh approach to the papacy. Now it’s time he turned his mind to the structures that fed clerical sex abuse, says Sister Nuala Kenny

Nuala Kenny
10 minute read

The sexual abuse of children and youth is a tragic, global social issue. It has inflicted untold pain and suffering, often lifelong, on survivors. It occurs most commonly in the intimacy of family and friends in the presumed safety of schools, youth groups and sports teams. This profound violation of power and trust also occurs within religious institutions, at the hands of those with a public commitment to the good and the holy — adding "spiritual abuse" to the harm done.

The Roman Catholic Church has been the subject of media and public attention for many reasons, including its size and global scope, its strict moral code — especially regarding sexuality — its structural capacity to be sued, and the inadequacy and insensitivity of its responses.

The shocking revelations of the sexual abuse of children and youth by clergy are, as Pope John Paul II said, a "profound contradiction of the teaching and witness of Jesus Christ." They are in stark contrast to Jesus' love for children and His harsh judgment of millstones and drowning for those who harm them. At the human level, this reveals the frailty and sinfulness of priests, who have the same incidence of abuse as the general population. It induces a spiritual and cognitive dissonance at the hypocrisy of revered men of God who preach and teach regarding the holy and yet act in profoundly perverted ways. It calls for a communal and ecclesial examination of conscience.

Within society, the Church's credibility and moral authority have been deeply damaged. High profile cases such as recent revelations regarding Cardinal George in Chicago expose the Church leadership's failure to comply with their own established protocols, suppressing information on offenders. Far from being seen as a protector of children, a damning 2014 report by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child expressed grave concern that "the Holy See has not acknowledged the extent of the crimes committed, has not taken the necessary measures to...protect children, and has adopted policies and practices which have led to the continuation of the abuse...." It judges that leadership has consistently "placed preservation of the reputation of the Church and the alleged offender over the protection of child victims." Indeed, the UN evaluation, while far exceeding its mandate and failing to give credit for improvements since 2001, is consistent with assessments from Canada and the United States to Ireland, Australia, Germany and the Netherlands. Church leadership response to individual victims has been characterized not by compassion and protection but by denial, secrecy, minimization of harm, protection of reputation, image and institution, and avoidance of scandal.

Church leadership has diagnosed the crisis as one of personal sin, pathology and crime. It is a clerical "bad apples" and inadequate leadership diagnosis. So, the proposed remedies developed over the last years have focused on individuals: screening for the seminary, improved education in human sexuality, protocols for the management of allegations, and policies for developing safe ministry environments. These are important and necessary but not sufficient preventive activities. A radically different diagnosis has emerged from commissions of inquiry, legal cases and research from a wide range of empirical sciences. This diagnosis acknowledges the role of individual sin, pathology and criminal activity in the abuse. It also identifies the crucial importance of cultural beliefs and systemic practices. The proper diagnosis is essential for effective treatment and healing; misdiagnosis prolongs the pain and suffering, and risks death.

The recognition of the importance of underlying systemic and cultural factors is not new. In 1989, following devastating revelations of child sexual abuse by Irish Christian brothers and diocesan clergy in St. John's, N.L., I participated in the lay-led Archdiocesan Commission of Enquiry into the Sexual Abuse of Children by Members of the Clergy. Its 1990 report summarized the available literature on the sexual abuse of children. In assessing why and how the abuse had occurred, the Commission concluded that no single cause accounts for the abuse but that a number of factors coincided to allow the abuse to occur. It identified six factors in urgent need of further exploration by Church leaders for their role: power, education, sexuality, support for priests, a management approach and avoidance of scandal.

Twenty-five years after Newfoundland and despite compelling research and experience, the hierarchy, with notable exceptions, is still unable or unwilling to acknowledge the systemic and cultural factors that have shaped and, at times, fostered the sexual abuse crisis. Why the moral blindness in failing to recognize the deeper issues of ecclesial sin and the denial of the pain and suffering inflicted on the whole Church? Agere sequitur esse is an old moral maxim. Action does indeed follow being, and Church leadership has responded to the global crisis with the same denial, minimization of harm and protection of image as in individual cases because of deeply enculturated attitudes and practices. Deep within a culture, a moral blindness can infect so that it becomes impossible to see and assess its dark side. This is when it is crucial to learn from others.

The public imagination focuses only on individual offenders, sexual predators or pedophile priests — the perverted other. Clearly, individual factors are important. But with a global social issue such as abuse, things are far more complex. David Finkelhor, an American sociologist and pioneer in child abuse studies, has provided the classic description of the dynamics of the sexual abuse of children, which provides a framework for analysis. It posits four preconditions necessary for abuse to occur:

motivation to abuse, such as psychological and psycho-sexual immaturity, emotional congruence with the victim, deviant sexual arousal and blockage of healthy relationships; overcoming internal inhibitions against harming children, as with mental illness, the use of alcohol, and the creation of excuses and justifications; overcoming the child's or youth's resistance through the special status of the offender, grooming with gifts, and threats; and overcoming external protective factors by seizing or planning for opportunities to abuse in the context of decreased familial and social vigilance.

A large body of theological, canonical, psychological and empirical research has analyzed these preconditions within the context of the Catholic Church. I focus on the distortion of clericalism for its role in motivation to abuse, overcoming the child's resistance and reducing the offender's internal inhibitions.

Clericalism is the concern to protect the particular interests of the clergy and their privilege and power. It is characterized by an authoritarian style of leadership where power and expertise are assumed by reason of position, a rigidly hierarchical worldview, and a virtual identification of the holiness of the Church with the priesthood and priests. A theology of the priesthood claiming an ontological difference, closed seminary formation, and mandatory celibacy in the Latin Rite, all contribute to a powerful aura surrounding priests, which overcomes the child's resistance and provides justification for the abuse because of special status.

The Jesuit George Wilson has identified the consequences of clericalism as resistance to critique and change, secrecy and non-accountability, loss of the call to service and contact with those whom they are called to serve. Clericalism commands a superficial deference, but it blocks honest human communication and ultimately isolates the infected cleric, leaving him incapable of appreciating the harm he has done to others. These factors weaken internal inhibitions.

External protections were eroded because parents and civil authorities accept the special status of priests and their superiors, who operate within an enclosed, self-protective clerical culture, with its own canon law, where secrecy is privileged and criticism is suppressed. There was an utter lack of transparency and accountability, so that offending priests were moved from assignment to assignment without any process of inquiry or evaluation and lay acceptance.

In the 25 years since Newfoundland, there has been an unremitting media and judicial spotlight on sexual abuse by the clergy. There have been slow but steady improvements in education, screening, policies and protocols. But there has been an ongoing failure to address the deeper factors at the core of the abuse of power that is at the heart of sexual abuse by clergy. Clericalism and a culture of secrecy and non-accountability have guaranteed the persistence of the diagnosis of personal sin. Many who work in this area are weary and beginning to despair that these systemic and cultural issues will ever be addressed.

From his greeting of "Buona sera" and his humble request for the crowd in St. Peter's to give him a blessing before he blessed them, Pope Francis has consistently confounded expectations. For a Church where signs and symbols matter greatly, the visuals are stunning: no miter with gold and jewels, no ermine-trimmed cape and no red, designer shoes. He rides a bus and pays his own hotel bill. These ordinary actions for most of us became extraordinary when done by the Pope.

Even expected activities are performed with a twist. On Holy Thursday he washes the feet not of retired priests but of young prisoners, including two women and two Muslims. He genially interacts with the boy on the high altar of St. Peter's as the master of ceremonies desperately tries to shoo the distraction away. He moves from the papal apartment to the Vatican guest house of Casa Santa Marta because he "needs people." A Jesuit, he chooses the name of Francis, a 12th century friar called to "rebuild the Church" in a highly clericalized culture, whose rule incorporated ideals of poverty, humility, mercy, hospitality and simplicity

His interaction is remarkably different as he often goes off the carefully prepared script. In the airplane returning from Rio, he astounds reporters by engaging in real conversation, asking questions and listening to the answers. For Francis, dialogue appears to be real. The last two popes were brilliant academics committed to orthodoxy and defending the faith. When Francis speaks, he sounds like a pastor concerned about youth unemployment, abandonment of the elderly and unjust economic systems. He is passionately concerned about that which "deadens us to the misery of the poor." He prefers "a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and clinging to its own security." He does not want "a Church concerned with being at the centre and which then ends by being caught up in a web of obsessions and procedures."

Astounding, even scandalous to some, is his answer in the America interview to the question, Who is Jorge Bergoglio? "I am a sinner." He emphasizes that this is not a pious figure of speech but a reality. The Pope a sinner! No wonder he made the cover of The New Yorker and Rolling Stone, and was Time magazine's Man of the Year.

This pope sees the Church not as the "perfect society" but as the real, messy and hurting Church it is.

"The thing the Church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful.... I see the Church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds."

Surely the wounds from this crisis are among the most deep and painful. Soon after his election, he met with the head of the responsible Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to affirm the need "to act decisively concerning cases of sexual abuse." He has established a special papal commission on the issue, but its mandate and membership are not yet clear. Pope Francis' approach to the abuse crisis appears to be complex, embodying Jesuitical discernment, and reflective of his belief that structural reforms "are secondary — that is, they come afterward. The first reform must be the attitude." Speaking to the bishops of Latin and South America, Francis identifies key attitudinal chane needed when he names three temptations of the Church: the Gospel as ideology, functionalism and clericalism. The temptation of ideology is to interpret the Gospel apart from the Gospel itself. Francis says we "must look at the Gospel with the eyes of a disciple" and of losing a sense of proportion, which happens when we speak more about the Church than Christ, the Pope than God's word.

In his first encyclical, Francis recognizes the need for the "continual reformation" of the Church and acknowledges "the struggle to correct those flaws introduced by her members which her own self-examination, mirroring her exemplar, Christ, points out to her and condemns." This reformation does not reduce faith to a self-centred encounter with Christ, nor is it a preoccupation with disputed questions — usually regarding sexuality, morality or restorationism — with solutions of discipline and outdated manners and beliefs. Rather it is "...a missionary impulse...channelled for the evangelization of today's world rather than for her self-preservation."

According to the Catholic News, Pope Francis also warned against a functionalism that "reduces the reality of the Church to the structure of a nongovernmental organization." The Church, then, is run like any other organization.

Clericalism is "one of the greatest evils" in the Church. Francis speaks of it often and has prayed: "Lord, free your people from a spirit of clericalism and aid them with a spirit of prophecy." He situates power and authority, even his own, in the Gospel, recognizing that "certainly Jesus Christ conferred power upon Peter, but what sort of power was it? Authentic power is service, and...the Pope too, when exercising power, must enter ever more fully into that service...."

He calls bishops to "must be pastors, close to people, fathers and brothers, and gentle, patient and merciful...men who do not think and behave like princes." He recognizes that:

"There is a problem: the temptation to clericalism. We priests tend to clericalize the laity. We do not realize it, but it is as if we infect them with our own thing. And the laity — not all but many — ask us on their knees to clericalize them, because it is more comfortable to be an altar boy than the protagonist of a lay path...."

He challenges bishops to provide "real opportunities for lay people to participate in pastoral consultation, organization and planning.... Do we support them and accompany them, overcoming the temptation to manipulate them or infantilize them?"

And he will be challenged by replies to his consultation for the Synod on the Family.

All of this gives promise of a new vision of power and relationships. Expectations are high, but these changes in style and focus have not yet resulted in many tangible results in the area of clergy sexual abuse. Responses to questions regarding clergy abuse in a March 5, 2014, interview in Corriere dellaSerra, a year into his pontificate, sound most un-like the Francis we have come to know. He seems to be reading from an old text.

Francis has said that "great changes in history were realized when reality was seen not from the centre but rather from the periphery." He comes from the periphery of the Americas not the Vatican centre; his Church is not about self-preservation but missionary discipleship, and his vision is focused on mercy, especially for those on the margins. Now he is the centre, the pressures on this man to return to the centre must be enormous.

Pope Francis must act now and link his insights regarding clericalism to the abuse of power and trust at the heart of the crisis. He must overcome the denial and secrecy; refuse to allow the Church to act for reputation and preservation, hiding behind legal technicalities, and respond with truth and accountability. The credibility of followers of Jesus demands it; the healing of the Church requires it.

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