I know some of my fellow Catholics will disagree, especially those next to me in the pews who are more orthodox or strict in their adherence to Vatican authority. So I beg their forbearance and understanding that I write this not from disdain of the church but from love of it. My point? It seems to me that something far more profound is happening to the Church than its leaders now recognize. This is big. The horror any decent person should feel at the brutal exploitation of children in the Church’s charge has turned into something even deeper in the collective Catholic soul. We wonder whether there really is something rotten at the heart of this institution. We wonder whether its continued indefensible subjugation of women, its cruelty and condescension toward gay people, its reflexive hostility to inspection or openness, even in defending and shrouding the abuse of children, doesn’t bespeak something that isn’t the antithesis of the Gospels. Like everyone else in the Church, I’m a sinner and I’m not speaking out of any sense of moral superiority. On the contrary. But the evil that we have discovered in our church these past few months is not simply incidental. It is structural. It comes from a hierarchical structure that, far from reflecting the truth of the Gospels, has become its own rationale. I am sick of belonging to a church where even its own priests do not believe some of the tenets they are supposed to uphold, where most of the laity cannot understand the reasons behind some of the doctrines we are supposed to adhere to, where reasoned dissent is dismissed or ignored, where the dignity of the human person is denied in the very rules by which the institution is governed.
PERESTROIKA: I think the hierarchy believes it can ride this out. I think they believe that with a few more apologies and a few more appointments and re-shuffles, the faithful will return as we were before and behave as we have before. We won’t. The Catholic Church in America will not endure as we know it unless the current hierarchy is rooted out and unless the issue of a celibate all-male priesthood is addressed head-on without euphemism or denial. Others may differ, but it seems to me that the exclusion of women from the priesthood is the root of the problem. None of this hideous abuse of children would have occurred in the same way if women were fully a part of the institution. Not only would they have blown the whistle on some of this evil, their very presence would have helped prevent it from happening. There is simply no profound theological reason for the exclusion of women from ecclesiastical power, nothing but the inheritance of a patriarchal anachronism that is suffocating the Church from its apex to its roots. No church can exclude half of humanity from its sacred offices without denying the fundamental dignity and equality of the human person. The pedophile scandal and the homosexual dimension of the priesthood are not the fundamental problem. They are symptoms of a deeper problem – male privilege and secrecy and hierarchy that distorts the psyches of the people running the Church and betrays the faithful who need and love it so much.
STAYING AND FIGHTING: I’m sometimes asked as a gay man how I can stay in a Church that even now, in some respects, believes me to be ‘intrinsically disordered.’ I stay because I have no choice, because faith is not a choice, it is a gift, because without the sacraments of grace, my life would be barren and my soul parched. I stay because I believe God wants me to stay and struggle to defeat the forces of fear and secrecy and exclusion on which the current church – but not the Gospels – is constructed. I’m not alone. And many have other reasons for pain and discomfort. But what I realize this now means is an end to passivity in the face of such corruption. We have been far too compliant in the past than we should have been. In some ways, I fear the Church in America in 2002 is not completely unlike the Soviet Union in 1984. Its structure has lost moral and popular support. Unlike the Soviet Union, the Church’s essential truths remain unsullied and eternal. But like the Soviet Union, confidence in its basic institutional integrity has vanished. That means that a collapse is coming, if it is not already here. That means that we, the people of the Church, have to demand change – structural change – before it implodes. And part of that change must mean a frank discussion about what has gone so terribly wrong and about the end of an all-male and all-celibate priesthood. That is the least we can accomplish. And it may yet not be enough.
BOOK CLUB: The discussion begins today. It will have a slightly different structure than last month. If you go to the book-club page, you’ll find a set of topic questions for the next couple of days. Another set will follow on Friday and next Tuesday. We’ll publish as many responses to these questions as we can, grouped around these topics so as to organize the discussion a little better. Frank Bruni has agreed to pitch in when he feels like, which I hope will be often. So join the debate – about this president, his character, the press and the conduct of the war.
The Dish 