Washington D.C., Jan 4, 2019 / 12:00 pm (CNA).- This week the U.S. bishops gathered at Mundelein Seminary in the Archdiocese of Chicago for a weeklong retreat, held at the urging of Pope Francis. Under the guidance of the preacher to the papal household, Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, they will spend a week “pausing in prayer” to “reflect on the signs of the times.”
Although recent scandals loom large over the meeting, the pope has asked the bishops to focus on their own conversion, before further discussion about new systems or structures to address the sexual abuse crisis.
In a letter sent to the American bishops ahead of their retreat, Pope Francis underscored that the recent crisis has “severely undercut and diminished” the Church’s credibility. Only response grounded in unity and communion, the pope wrote, has the power to restore the Church’s authority and authenticity.
The pope warned the bishops to avoid temptations to seek either the “relative calm resulting from compromise, or from a democratic vote where some emerge as ‘winners’ and others not.”
These temptations remain strong. One of the great frustrations for many of them during the Baltimore assembly was what they saw as a missed opportunity to produce “a solution,” in whatever form.
Whatever model bishops supported in November: the proposed lay-led national commission or the so-called metropolitan model, at least some seemed to be looking for a silver bullet, a powerful “fix” that would restore confidence now and prevent scandals from repeating.
Many American Catholics, too, seemed to expect a cure-all structural reform, and are now hoping that at the global summit on abuse in February, Rome will produce the reforms the U.S. Church could not.
But expectations that there can be one practical solution to solve the crisis are likely to prove false hopes. It has become obvious to most observers that no new policy, structure, or process can answer or prevent what is essentially a crisis of sin.
In his letter, Francis called administrative reforms “necessary yet insufficient” as they “ultimately risk reducing everything to an organizational problem.” The pope called the bishops to recognize their “sinfulness and limitations” and to preach to each other the need for conversion.
The pope’s diagnosis seems to be rooted in the evidence of recent months.
The current crisis is really better understood as a web of intersecting crises. The sexual abuse of minors is rightly seen as the most scandalous among them, but it has festered – as the pope has observed – among other illnesses in the body of the Church.
Clericalism, sexual permissiveness, moral indifference, and administrative negligence are themselves serious problems that require answers of their own.
But, if recent history is any guide, those answers are unlikely to come from any canonical or structural reform, however dramatic or well-intended.
As Cardinal Blase Cupich noted in November, there have been structures and commitments of various kinds in place in since 2002. The Statement of Episcopal Commitment was designed to ensure Church law was always followed when allegations were made, no matter who was being accused. And in 2016, Pope Francis issued the motu proprio Come una madre amorivole, which established – or was meant to – an entirely new canonical procedure for investigating and triying allegations against a bishop.
But even with those those policies and promises, Church officials have not seemed to consider themselves bound to any uniform procedure for handling allegations against bishops. Meanwhile, Francis has withdrawn the reforms of Come una madre before they were ever tested.
Many are now realizing that the problems facing the Church have never been the result of a lack of procedures. Instead, attention is beginning to shift to an enduring lack of will in the Church to employ its policies consistently and with rigor.
Absent a moral commitment to see them applied unsparingly, no reform measures – however systematic – can prevent the worst from happening.
As a case in point: last month it emerged that the Archdiocese of New York, which has some of the clearest, best-established abuse policies of any U.S. diocese, left a priest in ministry even after its own independent commission offered compensation to several of his alleged victims.
As recently as last month, the office of clergy personnel issued a letter of good standing stating “without qualification” that no accusation had ever been made against him; this despite an ongoing investigation by the archdiocese’s own review board.
The failures in New York were not caused by a lack of policies and procedures. Instead, they appear to have been truly human failures.
This may be the reason the pope appears skeptical that another policy or structure could yield different results, at any level of the Church, without personal conversion by the people charged with implementing them.
In August of last year, at the height of the Church’s summer of scandal, the USCCB’s own lay-led National Review Board agreed, issuing a statement that ruled out further structural reforms as a solution.
“The evil of the crimes that have been perpetrated reaching into the highest levels of the hierarchy will not be stemmed simply by the creation of new committees, policies, or procedures,” the review board wrote.
“What needs to happen is a genuine change in the Church’s culture, specifically among the bishops themselves. This evil has resulted from a loss of moral leadership and an abuse of power that led to a culture of silence that enabled these incidents to occur.”
Moral leadership, as the pope has told the U.S. bishops in no uncertain terms, cannot be effected by a vote. It requires a personal conversion in the face of failure and sin. Real change will require a totally new mindset among bishops, and the Curia.
The 19th century British Prime Minister George Canning ridiculed what he called “the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the carriage.”
“Men are everything,” Canning said, “measures comparatively nothing.”
Pope Francis echoed this sentiment in his letter to the bishops, warning them that the Church’s lost credibility “cannot be regained by issuing stern decrees or by simply creating new committees or improving flow charts.”
Instead, the pope wrote, the Church will only regain her credibility by “acknowledging its sinfulness and limitation” while at the same time “preaching the need for conversion.”
After the scandals of 2002, many bishops and officials treated the new measures and standards as a hardship to be endured, rather than a new reality of ecclesiastical life to be internalized. The “cultural change” called for by the national review board and the pope may prove to be the only means of breaking what has begun to resemble a cycle of scandal.
By warning the American bishops against measures aimed at recovering their reputations rather than amending their ways, the pope may have set the bar by which his own February summit will be measured. In his letter, Francis has called for a “shared project that is at once broad, unassuming, sober, and transparent.” Such a project, it seems, would bear little resemblance to past attempts to respond to the sexual abuse crisis.
As the bishops pray in Mundelein and the pope’s advisers prepare for February’s meeting in Rome, many Catholics begin 2019 wondering if a hierarchy beset by scandal can truly convert, or merely reform – again.
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So. A cardinal of the Holy Roman Church can’t even properly interpret the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Cardinal Muller was right. These guys are third-rate theologians.
Or not theologians at all.
This is why faithful Catholics are leaving; some to Orthodoxy; others to evangelical churches. This cardinal along with other cardinals and bishops, and Pope Francis, are destroying the Church for this generation and the upcoming generation.
And doesn’t “intrinsically disordered” offend the “human dignity” of each person…just like the death penalty (which for a practical purposes can be justified almost never?) …and the refusal to allow “death with dignity” for the terminally ill?
IMO, this shift started with JPII’s provisos for capital punishment…despite Veritas Splendor…a kind of workaround, a supra-Good in “the person” which makes little reference to particular goods such as “justice” really…but presents a card in moral theology that trumps natural law and Scripture…and ends all discussion?
What world does Cardinal Tobin live in that he thinks Catholics mistreat gay people? In the presence of our Lord, we are encouraged in the CCC to worship with proper disposition and decorum. Do you think that unmarried heterosexual couples, who also have a disordered attraction, and same-sex couples should display their relationships in the house of our Lord? It is unfortunate that a apostolic descendant cannot stand by the Church of the God he took an oath to completely obey.
“Tobin said of the book that “in too many parts of our church LGBT people have been made to feel unwelcome, excluded, and even shamed.”
Anybody who is committing a mortal sin *should* be ashamed.
“Father Martin’s brave, prophetic, and inspiring new book marks an essential step in inviting church leaders to minister with more compassion, and in reminding LGBT Catholics that they are as much a part of our church as any other Catholic.””
“LGBT” is an evil term, identifying a person with the sins he is tempted to commit and acting as if he has no will and no self-control. Catholics who are committing those sins are indeed as much a part of the Church as any other Catholic, and like any other Catholic who is committing mortal sin is called to repent and to stop sinning, not to celebrate his sin.
Unfortunately the reasons for calling anything immoral or intrinsincally evil are not addressed in any article I have ever seen. The reason is, it takes ones soul away from love and union with its creator which is what it even exists for and HIS truly holy and wholesome purposes. One stops off at the wrong station and becomes involved deeply and may never move on with eternal consequences. Who knows what lies ahead if you love God and HIS WORD which the catechism beautifully teaches. Personally I would not trust the one who says differently. (It has been tried so boringly often.) Careful what you give your power into. I stand with St. Michael who says “Who is like God?” I would seek union with HIM. Biology doesn’t lie either.
No matter how you slice it, it always comes down to the homosexual act. Tobin and Martin choose to look away. But as long as the homosexual community is unwilling or unable to separate the state of temptation and the conscious choice to act on that temptation, the Church has nothing more to say.
The best thing I can say relative to Archbishop Tobin is that he is at least not in the Indianapolis Diocese any longer.
It’s disturbing, to say the least, how the “LBGT” acronym is now being bandied about in the highest places as if it’s spumoni in relation to a *vanilla* Church teaching.
Has any Catholic moral theologian given a cogent argument as to what it means to “welcome” someone who practices B[isexuality], for example, other than to direct them to the confessional?
Too many prominent prelates have allowed themselves to be led into an intellectual sinkhole, unable to perceive today’s popular falsehood that opposes the clarity found in both the natural sciences and the Bible: that various and sundry sexual behaviors occur because people have/develop “identities” different from what’s evidenced by the obvious functional design of their God-given anatomies.
Perhaps the term “disordered” is not “unfortunate” but inadequate. Unnatural, irrational, hedonistic, self-destructive, are more fitting.
No one ever said that fighting for the truth would be easy.
St. Athanasius, pray for us.
Every time a member of the clergy makes a statement like this, they are effectively stating that they no longer believe in Christ, His teachings, the Bible or the Church. When it is coming from a Cardinal during Holy Week, we can be pretty assured of their lack of faith……. In this case, another of Pope Francis’s new Cardinals, it only enforces the thought that Francis too has walked away from the Lord. He can kiss all the feet he wants to, but as long as he is stacking the deck with his cadre of homosexual clergy, he cannot be believed as one who follows Christ. May the Lord have mercy upon their souls.
So I think the fundamental problem is that our Holy Father and company in their sentimentality have already ‘blessed’ contraception which opens the door to all the other sexual sins. Sex is no longer restricted to the procreative act.
Who is really surprised that Cardinal “Nighty Night Baby” Tobin does not believe same sex relationships are intrinsically disordered?
Nighty night baby!!! Give me a break. This is no Roman Catholic Bishop. Man of no faith. The Sodomy is an Act Of pure lust..please. Remove him from the priesthood. I am worried.
This is why faithful Catholics are leaving; some to Orthodoxy; others to evangelical churches. This cardinal along with other cardinals and bishops, and Pope Francis, are destroying the Church for this generation and the upcoming generation.
Could there be anything more hurtful, harmful, and demeaning, than identifying persons according to sexual desire/inclination/orientation in order to justify the engaging in of sexual acts that are hurtful, harmful, and demeaning no matter who is engaging in said acts, including a man and woman united in marriage as husband and wife? How can identifying persons according to sexual desire/inclination/orientation justify the engaging in of sexual acts, that by their very nature deny the inherent Dignity of the human person as a beloved son or daughter? How could anyone who Loves their child, dismiss the physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual harm, that occurs, when engaging in demeaning sexual acts, that can never serve for the Good of one’s beloved or oneself? Apathy is always the result of a failure to Love; what is unfortunate is how apathetic a multitude who profess to be followers of The Christ have become because they no longer believe that Christ’s teaching in regards to sexual morality, serves out of respect for the inherent Dignity of all persons.