Passage Four
To claim supernatural powers and then be caught in dirty acts—sexually abusing children or, even worse, protecting the abusers—is not only a moral problem. It is a near fatal professional error. I wonder if the hierarchy knows how gravely the Roman Catholic Church, especially the American church, has been wounded. There’s huge internal bleeding, a hemorrhage of credibility —yet, in the face of all that, a changing official attitude mixing pain and evasion. At least priest Jimmy Swaggart had the good grace to cry on television and beat his breast and otherwise oblige the audience with the acting of regret. Last week the Pilot, the newspaper of the archdiocese of Boston, did ask several questions that it admitted are "out there in the minds of Catholics"—an interesting phrase, by the way, that suggests some of the problems: A hierarchy that sees "the Catholic mind" as something "out there" and the defended priests as being "in here." Among the questions: 1) Should being alone continue to be "a normative condition for the diocesan priests" 2) If being alone were of their own choice, would there be fewer errors of this nature in the priests My answers would be: 1) No. 2) Yes.
There’s no cure-all, as the Pilot said. Catholics have to think though strong arguments for and against being alone—and for and against the appointment of women as priests. But the current failure will be compounded if the debate becomes a merely technical discussion of difficulties and ignores the overall danger to the church. A Catholic Church that is losing so much ground around the world and has such difficulty in employing new priests cannot afford the critical, firm pride of centuries past. Allowing priests to marry, and appointing women, would do an important thing: begin to change the culture of the priests—a culture that needs very considerable changing. It would help clean the sometimes dirty atmosphere of the religion.
Sexual crimes against the most innocent lambs in the flock are a tragedy for the authority and moral structure of the church. Faith climbs on a vertical axis to God. The vertical is supported by a horizontal axis—trust, which is the everyday, stabilizing living church. If trust dissolves into doubt and dislike, if God’s representatives on earth turn out to be, many of them, child abusers and protectors of child abusers, then who will ever see such men at their priestly work without suspicion and hating What is the passage mainly about