COMMENTARY: In Wake of Sex Scandal, Bishops Just Don’t Get It

c. 2004 Religion News Service (UNDATED) America’s bishops have the blues and are giving Catholics the blahs. They speak of America’s Catholic city of God as if it were either Sodom or Gomorrah. They seem afraid of their own people and are desperately searching for ways to assert control over them. Some, like William Murphy […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) America’s bishops have the blues and are giving Catholics the blahs. They speak of America’s Catholic city of God as if it were either Sodom or Gomorrah. They seem afraid of their own people and are desperately searching for ways to assert control over them.

Some, like William Murphy of Rockville Centre, N.Y., assault their people with the medieval kiss-my-shoe approach. Archbishop Sean O’Malley of Boston gives it a Franciscan twist with kiss my sandal.


Perhaps they have been so undone by the sex abuse scandal or by the pope, who is so critical of America that he might as well be French. They think that the handwriting on the wall is a message of doom when it is really good news.

I wrote recently of Joseph Claude Harris’ analysis of official church reports and data that reveal a flourishing rather than a foundering American church.

He notes that the church added 6,674 parish ministers between 1995 and 2002. Collections for 2002, the year the sex abuse crisis exploded, totaled $379 million, almost half again as much as the year before.

Anybody traversing Catholic America, as I do, lecturing, finds the church doing good work everywhere. You can hear Jesus speaking clearly: Go back and report … what you hear and see: the blind recover their sight, cripples walk, lepers are cured, the deaf hear, dead men are raised to life, and the poor have the good news preached to them (Matthew 11:5, New American Bible, St. Joseph Edition, 1968).

The church is serving generously every day, largely because of the dedication, perhaps without parallel in Catholic history, of ordinary men and women, as many or more of them lay persons as priests or religious, in making the people of God a living reality in the midst of the teeming and suffering world.

In Holy Family Parish in Inverness, Ill., for example, Father Pat Brennan is the one priest and pastor in residence for a people of God who carry out 140 ministries.

A $1 billion public relations/advertising campaign could not deliver what the faith itself has to Catholicism _ a profound consciousness on the part of ordinary believers that they are the church as a people and that its bishops are called to serve them in following out their vocations to be Christians.


Why, then, do America’s Catholic bishops have the blues, viewing the people who are the church as if they were terrorists trying to take it over, dreaming all the while of the day when, as the bishops see it, everything “will get back to normal” and they will be “in control” again? As Dee Selesky, one of Holy Family’s great parish coordinators, observes, “The bishops are not in crisis, they are just not in touch.”

They are not in touch with the truth that the Catholic Church in America is an enormous success, that the sacrifices made by its immigrant people a century and more ago to build a parish and school system have resulted in well-educated Catholics who are aware that they are the church and are often more theologically sophisticated than the bishops themselves.

Bishop Murphy recently issued an ultimatum to Voice of the Faithful members, as reported by Newsday, demanding that they “repair the damage” caused by attacks on him and “make a public statement of support for him as the spiritual shepherd of the church.”

This virtual demand to kiss his shoe is out of the medieval playbook used by the Bishop of Beauvais to condemn Joan of Arc. Boston’s Archbishop Sean O’Malley offers his sandal to be kissed by closing 82 parishes, many of them vital and viable Catholic communities with money in the bank. Their real estate value makes their sale attractive for cash to pay off the sex abuse scandal so sadly mismanaged by the archdiocese.

Parishioners are now conducting “sit-ins” and, as Mike Barnicle writes in the Boston Herald, these “sleepovers send Rome a wake-up call.”

Bishops would get over their blues by acknowledging that their own people are not the problem and that their job is not to control them but to encourage and applaud their extraordinary growth. And the healthiest of their people have some good suggestions about what their bishops can do with their shoes and sandals, too.


MO/PH END KENNEDY

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