Reforming the church: will we all become saints? - Of Several Minds

Commonweal, Sept 13, 2002 by Paul Baumann

In too many instances the reaction of Catholics to the church's sexual-abuse scandal has been as demoralizing as the scandal itself. Conservative Catholics, for example, are making a concerted and frankly demagogic effort to blame the crisis on the so-called "culture of dissent" within the church. There would be no crisis, they brightly propose, if the abusers had merely followed the church's teachings about sexual morality. Well, yeah. Neither would we be in this fix if Adam and Eve had followed instructions in the Garden of Eden. But in both cases, it seems a little late in the day to be sanctimonious about the fact of human fallibility and disobedience.

Even more astonishing is how conservatives divine a connection between dissent and the sexual molestation of children and the cover-up of such crimes. The molesters and their protectors in the episcopacy come from across the ideological landscape, from liberal to conservative churchmen, from priests trained before Vatican II to those ordained afterward. Cause and effect is complicated, and it is reductionist to pin the scandal on dissent or homosexuality or the failure of "fidelity"--or the failure to implement Vatican II, for that matter. Yes, confusion about sexual morality had something to do with it. But so did quite venerable practices, such as clerical privilege and arrogance. Yet the abuse scandal is being wielded as a club to attack what papal biographer George Weigel delights in calling "The Catholic Lite Brigade" (see The Courage to Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church, Basic Books, $22, 235 pp.). Weigel is looking for a "harder, more brilliant form of Catholicism"--absent certain dissenters, of course. "The game is over," he boasts about the future of "faithful dissent."

I think the evident anger of conservatives has at least two sources. First, the scandal has discredited the church's "countercultural" message about sexual morality. As a consequence, much good work exposing the evils of abortion and questioning the assumptions of the sexual revolution will be vitiated. Second, conservatives, who have been crowing about the recruitment of "orthodox" seminarians drawn by John Paul II's image and "heroic ideal of the priesthood," as Weigel likes to put it, see this achievement endangered by the exposure of the aberrations of an earlier, more liberal era.

Conservatives, of course, complain bitterly about liberals using the crisis to trot out pet theories about celibacy or hierarchy. They have a point. I find especially interesting, however, the ways in which the critiques of both liberals and conservatives converge. Whatever the differences articulate Catholics have over Humanae vitae or the legitimacy of dissent, most condemn clericalism, call for reform and for the laity to take their rightful, "equal" place in the church, embrace the "universal call to holiness," and speak of the need for saints. Once conservatives were expected to defend the institution. Not anymore. Weigel, for example, is eager to condemn clericalism and ecclesiastical bureaucracy, and he issues resounding calls for spiritual renewal. "The reform will be accomplished most of all by saints," he writes. "The call to holiness must be lived more intensely by every member of the church. Every Catholic committed to truly Catholic reform can say, with Pope Pius XI and Dorothy Day, 'Let us thank God that he makes us live among the present problems. It is no longer permitted to anyone to be mediocre.'"

There is something uncharitable, even un-Catholic in such rhetoric, whether it comes from the left or the right. The prospect of a church that doesn't permit mediocrity is not just idle, it's frightening. I have a democratic suspicion of demands for sanctity as a solution to corruption and other inveterate human failings. Such exhortations are rhetorical, utopian, and implicitly elitist. Frequently, they are also a smoke screen to forestall real institutional or political change.

Calls for the laity to awaken and belatedly put on the mantle of "holiness" need to be approached with caution. Most of the talk about the "universal call to holiness" strikes me like speculation about how much better democracy would be if "disaffected voters" participated. There is no evidence to support such a claim. Nor is there much evidence to support the idea that the vast majority of churchgoing Catholics are eager to become Benedictine oblates. Allegiance to the church and the assimilation of the gospel are much more varied and ambiguous than that.

Nor can there be an institutional church without some degree of clericalism. We are all doubtless equal by virtue of baptism, but priests, like doctors, perform distinct and indispensable functions. Inevitably, they will be "set apart" from the laity in some way. That doesn't mean that priests, any more than doctors, should be regarded as unquestioned authorities. On the contrary, they need added scrutiny precisely because of their power. Happily, the church has never relied on the sanctity of its priests. Quite the contrary: the tradition assures us that the sacraments are efficacious regardless of a priest's moral failings.