Inside
NCR
I am writing this two days before
the U.S. bishops are scheduled to be in Dallas to confront the ugliest problem
the church has faced in the modern era. I don’t know what will come of it.
I have been contacted by press outlets large and small. Everyone is nervously
making arrangements for interviews, so intent on finding the next and newest
angle that all sides of this issue have been rubbed smooth. It is difficult to
get a purchase on this story.
So much of it is so apparent -- abuse, cover-up, wounded people,
anger and rage, disappointment, big money, eager prosecutors and civil
attorneys.
I have handed out my cell phone, land phone and fax numbers and my
e-mail address to more people than I can count. Yes, I’ll be in Dallas, I
tell them, confident that I will have yet one more “take” on this
story. After 15 years of covering and reading about this story, who
wouldn’t have something to say on command?
But what I know won’t fit easily into sound bites and the
reporting from the meeting in Dallas is what actually makes this story so
compelling and so sad.
Something, we all know, has
irrevocably shifted. Something deep has been forced out of its usual fittings,
and no one will be able to put it back in place for a long, long time. To
understand that deep displacement, however, to get at the real ache and misery
of this crisis requires the language and wisdom of the faith community, and the
bishops have placed themselves apart from that community.
The healing balm so needed can be drawn only from the deep wells
of the sacred, but the bishops have left themselves only the brittle splints of
the law and an argument over how severely to apply the law. They have cut
themselves off from the language and the community that can bring healing.
What begs for deep moans of remorse
and the demeanor of penitents is stage managed instead with spin doctors, news
releases and cautious negotiations. I find it astonishing that the bishops
could issue a draft document that contained not one line suggesting sanctions
for bishops who have protected notorious abusers, ignored and even vilified
victims and raided the community treasury to buy silence. What possible
authority can they bring to solving the problem? They go to Dallas to solve a
problem about which they have yet to ask the fundamental questions: How could
such widespread abuse happen? How could the leaders of a community of faith and
compassion turn deaf ears to the cries of the most vulnerable?
The community awaits a Jesus-like act, the gesture of a wild holy
one. It is tired, weary really, of bishops who seem trained more for the
corporate boardroom than the clamor and press of needy crowds.
The gospel for the Sunday after the
meeting begins, “At the sight of the crowds, Jesus’ heart was moved
with pity for them because they were troubled and abandoned, like sheep without
a shepherd.”
No one knows what will happen as of this writing. Perhaps one of
the bishops, unheard until now, will allow the wail of true contrition to issue
from deep within him. Maybe one will dare to jeopardize a career to speak deep
from his heart. How lavishly that man would be loved.
-- Tom Roberts
My e-mail address is troberts@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, June 21,
2002
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