From the Editor's Desk

Airing out recent history

This seems to be the season, in the church, of bad news leaking out of past eras. There is the sex abuse matter, of course, and more recently the disclosures of accusations that church leaders collaborated with the Communist Party in Poland in earlier decades.

One way of dealing with it is to say the church is a human institution subjected to the full range of human frailty. And indeed it is. It is also right to weigh our judgments with some caution, voiced by Pope Benedict XVI when he traveled to Poland, about making too harsh an assessment of people who acted in other eras and out of circumstances far different from our own.

We will leave for another time consideration of the question of when accommodating for another’s circumstances and motivations shades into a kind of relativism, and we’ll just go with the presumption that mercy and compassion are paramount in all situations.

Still, the difficult matter remains of what to do when the Christian community is betrayed and offended at an essential level by one of its own — particularly one of its leaders.

We have examples, of course, of Pope John Paul II’s apologies for ancient sins, including Catholic attitudes and teaching about Jews and the punishment of Galileo. But must it always require centuries to take stock and say we were wrong?

I think it doesn’t speak well for any community, much less a Christian community, to presume that the most egregiously offended parties have to be dead before an apology can be made, one based on the facts and a reading of the historic record.

That’s why we keep mentioning, as we do again on the editorial page, the possibilities of truth commissions of some sort to deal with more recent history that needs to be aired. ( See story)

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The reality, of course, is that the church works on a whole lot of complex levels. The temptation sometimes is to talk about the “institutional” church as if there were some part of it one can separate out and shove aside as errant. The truth is that people remain incredibly faithful to what is essential, regardless of the news issuing from some quarters. Maybe that’s one of the modern mysteries. However it works, I can assure you that we are never at a loss for material for special sections on ministry. In this week’s issue, as special sections editor Teresa Malcolm puts it, the stories run from healing broken people to healing a broken world. And the work of Catholic individuals and agencies spans the globe from Liberia to Iraq, from Orwell, N.Y., to Indonesia. ( See story)

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We’re past the circus part of the new Congress and wading into the business part with the clock (literally on some networks) ticking. It is difficult to know how any Congress of whatever party could conceive of moving ahead on anything with the constant drag of a war that has taken far too many lives, American and Iraqi, and far too much money. They say $8 billion a month, a nice round figure. Joe Feuerherd, however, sees some differences in emphasis with the new gang in town, and so do those who work on the endless task of relieving poverty ( see story). It is interesting, too, to see states beginning to talk about forms of universal health care. One has to wonder if this is another indication that the country is backing off its fascination with extreme individualism and hatred of government and perhaps moving toward a more centrist idea that gestures toward the common good. Even in red Kansas, the governor suggested in a few paragraphs of her recent State of the State address that perhaps it’s time to expand health care coverage.

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Claire Schaeffer-Duffy’s intriguing interview with Afif Safieh, head of the PLO mission to the United States, serves to show once again that no easy characterization exists of those on opposing sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide. Writes Schaeffer-Duffy: “The Israeli daily Haaretz once described Safieh, who speaks three languages fluently, as the ‘most articulate Palestinian diplomat in Europe and possibly the world.’ ” Safieh is a Catholic born in Jerusalem and educated in Catholic schools, with degrees in political science at universities in Belgium and France. Note that while the interview was done at the end of 2006, several questions were posed in early January to update the piece before publication. ( See story)

-- Tom Roberts

National Catholic Reporter, January 19, 2007