COMMENTARY: The Pope Should Now Apologize to Catholics

c. 2000 Religion News Service (Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin’s Press.) (UNDATED) Pope John Paul II deserves praise for his unprecedented initiative in seeking forgiveness for sins committed […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

(UNDATED) Pope John Paul II deserves praise for his unprecedented initiative in seeking forgiveness for sins committed against others by somebody _ full description not given _ in the Roman Catholic Church.


This small miracle of grace does not flow from how well it was done but from its being done at all. We are told that the pope will be more explicit in his future trips to lands whose peoples have been sinned against.

Catholics may be excused then if they anticipate that the church, or those who erred in its name, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger put it, “in the pursuit of truth,” will also apologize for the suffering it has brought to so many of its own children. Forgiveness has not begun but it certainly should end at home.

The pope might first express his regrets to faithful Catholics for leaving the source of Catholicism’s historical transgressions so vague. Did the church as an institution make mistakes or was it “stained,” in the language currently employed, by the actions of its members?

Unless the agent of fault is clarified, what happens in this pursuit of pardon, will be argued with as much intensity and for as many years as what took place in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

The pope understands and could easily make the distinction between the church as a mystery and the church as an institution. The mystery is essential to an understanding of Catholicism. The institution, however, is incidental and refers to the organizational structures it has inhabited at various times in history.

We need urgent clarification that the church as an institution, as a human construction that includes the oldest bureaucracy in the world, can, has and continues to sin. Indeed, its administrative structure can, has and continues to sin against the Catholics who constitute the church as a mystery, the church as Vatican II expressed it, as a “People of God.”

Let us examine just one area of suffering poured into the lives of many ordinary Catholics by the church’s human managers rather than its divine founder. They have perpetuated a perception of the universe, their own structures, and of human beings as outdated for theology as the concept of the flat earth is for navigation.


That false model is of a universe divided into good (heaven) above and bad (earth) below. This is the idea challenged by Copernicus and Galileo, earning them the condemnation by the institutional Church, only recently withdrawn.

This faulty map divides personality into good and bad parts and makes a poster of it: WANTED FOR BEING HUMAN AND BEING SEXUAL AT THE SAME TIME.

In a moral theology textbook still in use in the 20th century, we read that because “of their different influence on the excitement of sexual pleasure, the parts of the body were divided into honorable (face, hands, feet), less honorable (chest, back, arms, thighs), and dishonorable (sexual parts and parts very close to them).” Another moralist refers to the latter as “shameful” and “obscene.”

From this spectacularly flawed theology, the institution brought confusion at the least and ruined lives at the worst to many Catholics who felt themselves guilty for the supposed sin of being human.

This impossibility of the institution’s acknowledging past error was employed to convince Pope Paul VI to ignore the recommendations of his commission on birth control as well as the vote of the special panel of bishops he established to make final recommendations.

The institution could not change its teaching on birth control because that would mean that it had erred. Admitting that, he was told, would damage its credibility. So he issued “Humanae Vitae” and the loss of credibility occurred anyway.


Catholics have followed their consciences about this matter not out of revolt against the church but a turning away from its institutional side that, seeking to preserve itself, revealed its estrangement from their ordinary experience of married life.

That concept of a sinless institution when it is nothing more than a form that, like all housing, is fallible and changes with the times, cannot be defended as if it were part of the creed.

It is unfortunate this remarkable pope has staked so much on restoring that hierarchical institution that is the source of divided ideas about the world and human personality.

The pope’s earnest heart and indomitable will are hobbled by this inheritance and, until he can speak from the timeless mystery of Catholicism rather than from the time-dated institution of hierarchy, he will not find complete pardon from others, nor will he be able to ask it from the Catholics who have also suffered needlessly at the hands of ecclesiastical bureaucrats.

DEA END KENNEDY

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