Friday, April 02, 2010

Issues for the Church to Resolve re: Sex Scandals

I agree with this guy's assessment; he observes that there are three significant issues remaining for the Church to 'fix' regarding the sex-scandal.

  1. The overwhelming unwillingness of most bishops to exercise their authority in response to serious rejection or indifference towards issues of critical Catholic beliefs and norms - especially regarding moral issues. That is, the bishops have not been actively upholding the faith with consequent serious harm resulting to the faith and lives of many people.

  2. The public scandal of criminally negligent or otherwise seriously negligent or corrupt bishops still not having been appropriately held personally accountable. It has instead been the people in the pews and past large benefactors, who had nothing to do with the scandals, whose contributions have unjustly been taken to pay billions of dollars for settlements and obscene lawyers fees. The victims of abuse have been denied justice.

  3. The still on-going unwillingness to face or even mention the corruption caused by the tolerance of homosexuality within the clergy at all levels, including bishops and cardinals, within the religious orders and within Catholic Church institutions and colleges and schools. There has been much improvement on this item, especially thanks to Pope Benedict's strong re-affirmation of the rule that homosexuals must not be admitted into seminaries; but there is still far, far more that must be done to rid the Church of this widespread, cancerous influence within the Church body.
His prioritization is correct, too. There are moral imperatives which underlie all the problems, and over the last 30 years (or more) the Bishops have simply failed to man up on them. We could mention artificial birth control, or lax standards on annulments, or even the failure of Bishops to smack down "Catholics" who facilitate abortions by their legislative actions--albeit that has been changing recently.

There's much more in that editorial, by the way, which is significant. Read it all.
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3 comments:

  1. Anonymous4/02/2010 8:40 AM

    Yes, by all means, crack down on the 90% of the people in the pews who use condoms or other birth control devices. And lecture the absent politicians about the evils of abortion. This will surely cure the pedophile priest problem.

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  2. Dave4/02/2010 10:31 AM

    Anonymous:

    It actually works. Case in point: the Diocese of Lincoln, NE. This has been the only diocese which has always followed the Church's directives on deviant clergy. In the very few cases they've dealt with (none since the early 80's that I know of), the offender ended up in jail and was laicized shortly thereafter. The "Lavender Mafia" is nonexistent there, as they are thorough in screening the many candidates for seminary (no vocations crisis there).

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  3. Badger Catholic4/02/2010 11:49 AM

    Could you imagine Arch Listecki literally putting on sackcloth and ashes declaring he would be doing public penance for the shameful crimes of former Milwaukee priests(and archbishops?).

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