EDITORIAL
Bishops themselves inspired dreaded ‘agenda’
In his presidential speech, Bishop
Wilton Gregory, head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops,
warned his fellow bishops that they needed to protect themselves against
unspecified attackers “even among the baptized … who have chosen to
exploit the vulnerability of the bishops in this moment to advance their own
agendas.”
We have a new dirty word in the ecclesiastical lexicon: agenda.
One can only infer that no one but the bishops, of course, should have one, and
their agenda is maintenance of the status quo no matter how battered their
credibility, no matter how severely they have betrayed the trust once placed in
them.
The problem with bishops’ meetings is that regardless of how
tightly scripted they might be, the bishops can never fully disguise that they
are, as a group, fundamentally in denial of certain realities. And the most
pressing reality that seems never to make it onto the hierarchical agenda is
the dire need for reform of a closed structure that remains entirely
unaccountable to the community it serves and largely out of range of
criticism.
Gregory has served this conference well. In 1994, he took over a
diocese, Belleville in Illinois, that was awash at the time in sexual abuse
problems. He has received high marks for cleaning up the mess left by then
Bishop James Kelleher, who was promoted to archbishop of Kansas City, Kan.
That wasn’t enough. It wasn’t long after Gregory became
the first black to head the conference that the scandal blew up again in
Boston. He deserves a better shot than spending most of his term stage-managing
the bishops’ response to the sex abuse crisis.
Why does he feel compelled now to suggest that those seeking
reform of a structure that has performed so miserably are somehow out to
“strike the shepherd and scatter the flock”? That may set a tone of
high drama and give the bishops justification for drawing the wagons into an
even tighter circle. But it is overblown and an insult to serious Catholics,
most of them in the broad middle of the conservative-to-liberal spectrum, who
are convinced of the need for reform.
Agenda? Yes, those whose trust has been betrayed have an agenda.
Jesus certainly had an agenda, spelled out in the gospels. The response to the
call for justice is an agenda. The call to mutual accountability is an
agenda.
The bishops, speaking as latecomers to victims’ concerns,
certainly have an agenda -- unfortunately that agenda still is aimed at
deflecting criticism from themselves while maintaining decision making entirely
to the themselves.
Some among the hierarchy may take comfort from a few voices who
strain to argue that the sex abuse crisis is made up by media out to get the
church or that the crisis, which was limited to a certain time period and
involved just a few priests, is over. Some contend, too, that the bishops
really didn’t know anything about the dimensions or implications of the
crisis until recently.
All are simply incorrect assertions.
We don’t know the numbers of priests involved or the amount
of treasury that was used to buy silence because the dioceses won’t
divulge those figures; while it seems the major portion of the scandal has
surfaced, we don’t know for certain because new cases keep arising and
prosecutors keep pressing for disclosure of documents that remain under seal
throughout the country. Finally, as we have reported at length, the bishops in
1985 had a lengthy rundown by three experts on the dimensions and possible
implications of the crisis. They knew. They chose after that to shuffle abusers
from one place to another, concerned primarily about the reputation of the
institution and the priests involved.
Catholics concerned about the abuse of power and a system that
remains unaccountable do have an agenda: significant, meaningful lay
participation in decision making, the end to secret proceedings and undue
clerical privilege, and full and open accounting for the use of the
church’s treasury.
National Catholic Reporter, November 22,
2002
|
