Denver Newsroom, Nov 11, 2020 / 05:10 pm (CNA).- Ordinarily, a news analysis attempts to bring some context or expertise to a situation, in order to assess why something has happened, what might happen next, and whether any of it will prove to be important.
A news analysis often speculates about what newsmakers will do: At CNA, analysis considers often what the pope might do, or USCCB leaders, or bishops of prominent dioceses.
But this analysis will speculate about what ordinary Catholics – people who practice the faith and love the Lord and try to follow Jesus – will do after the publication of the Vatican’s McCarrick Report.
To do that, some context in this analysis will be personal. There is a reason I offer this personal narrative. Please bear with me.
I began working for the Catholic Church in 2005, while I was in canon law school. After finishing my canon law degree, in 2007 I began working regularly on cases involving clergy misconduct.
I have sat with priests guilty of sexual assault and coercion, of grooming young men, of acting with serial disregard for the promises of their priesthood and the spiritual health of their victims. I have also sat with priests falsely accused of those things. I have seen problems ignored, and I have seen problems treated with the attention they deserve.
I have seen priests get justice, and I have sometimes seen them face terrible injustice. I have seen victims mistreated, and victims treated with compassion and respect. I have seen cases in which every rule and protocol is followed, and cases in which most of them are ignored.
Before the initial McCarrick allegations were made public in June 2018, I had already seen some things. As friends dealt with grief and shock, I told some cynically “Now you know why I’m ticked off all the time.”
I had not known about McCarrick, but I knew about clerical abuse, and about the sins of omission and commission that allow it to happen.
The 449 pages of the McCarrick Report detail a story decades long, in which institutional and personal failures allowed a man who abused his power to act with serial and serious immorality — to, put simply, hurt people.
It includes accounts of both cowardice and courage, of institutional blindspots exploited by a manipulator, of naïveté, misplaced kindness, and ill-placed trust, of dysfunction, bureaucratic ineptitude, and malice. The report demonstrates that sin begets sin – it recounts stories of abusers who were themselves abused. It depicts the exploitation of crises for personal gain.
The report documents the damage wrought by a crippling bias towards institutional self-preservation, ironic for a Church that follows a crucified Lord.
There are few heroes: A mother who tried her best to speak out. A priest who blew the whistle to protect seminarians. A cardinal who came to realize, only over time, that he needed to make clear a serious problem.
The McCarrick Report also traces a broad trend of growing awareness of the importance of addressing abuse allegations, and addressing them properly. An increased understanding that presuming on good will is not helpful in the presence of manipulators. Efforts, often faltering, and sometimes failing, to learn from previous mistakes. But even amid that trend, there are appalling personal failures at every stage of McCarrick’s career.
The report does not document, or seem even to consider seriously, how McCarrick’s ambiguous and unmonitored financial situation enabled his decades of abuse. It mentions briefly his ability as a fundraiser, but offers no forensic analysis of his discretionary accounts. U.S. dioceses maintain records of those accounts, and to date have given no indication they plan to release them.
The report addresses bishops who lied for McCarrick, and about him, to the Holy See, but it does not ask why those bishops were willing to lie. It does not give serious attention to McCarrick’s social networks and their influence on the life of the Church – mention is made of a friend leaking high-level documents to McCarrick in the Vatican, but no attention is given to what influence networks that friend has. Many analysts have said it does not address whether there remain in ministry bishops who were gravely negligent, or even who compounded or facilitated cover-ups.
It brings many things to light, but the report is not a complete account of the McCarrick affair. A complete account may never emerge. Further, the Vatican’s report does not seem to consider present-day implications of McCarrick’s life and ministry, nor to draw lessons for the Church beyond McCarrick.
Questions remain, and those questions are very likely to go unanswered. Catholics who hope to see particular individuals brought to justice are likely to go disappointed.
And new scandals will inevitably emerge.
Since the retirement of Theodore McCarrick, there have already been some institutional reforms designed to prevent a situation like McCarrick’s from happening again. Institutional audits in U.S. dioceses, review boards, the promulgation of Vos estis lux mundi. Pope Francis or the U.S. bishops may well add more layers of policy reform.
But Pope Francis has emphasized that policy reform can not substitute for personal integrity. And the McCarrick Report demonstrates how much personal integrity actually matters. The report will likely bring statements from bishops committing to that personal integrity, and it might even inspire real conversion to that effect among some bishops and Church leaders.
Inevitably, though, there will be new failures in the Church’s life, because the Church is both human and divine: The mystical Body of Christ protected in certain ways by the Holy Spirit, and a community of sinners, each of them in need of a savior, few of them yet saints.
The Church is always and everywhere holy— its members are not usually so.
That paradox is a challenge to every believer.
But the future for the Church in the U.S. seems to depend a great deal on how ordinary Catholics respond to disappointment, discouragement, and somewhat unresolved scandal.
Religious disaffiliation is on the rise in the U.S. – a growing number of Americans identify themselves with no religion, or have no religious practice. And many ordinarly practicing Catholics are out of the habit of going to Sunday Mass, because of the pandemic. It will be unsurprising if the McCarrick scandal exacerbates religious disaffiliation, especially among young Catholics, who say in surveys that they prioritize the perceived personal integrity of leaders ahead of institutional affiliation.
Within the Church, there is a small but growing pocket of Catholics who are increasingly strident toward the authority of the pope and of U.S. bishops. In crises past, pockets like those have eventually become schisms. That seems practically unlikely in the contemporary U.S., but it is not impossible or unprecedented — there are more than 25,000 members of the “Polish National Catholic Church,” a schismatic group that began in the U.S in the early 20th century.
The point is that scandals have the capacity to discourage the practice of the faith, to foster cynicism, anger, bitterness, or indifference.
Hence the personal narrative.
My own experience has taught me that confronting the oft-disappointing humanity of the Church is an exercise in accepting that disappointment is real, and that it can be only be relieved by embracing the cross, and the Crucified Savior.
In the spiritual life, moments of disappointment present a choice: One can nurture anger or indifference, or one can turn to Christ on the cross.
One of those choices brings life, the other does not.
That’s true for the spiritual life, and for the mission of the Church itself.
A movement of Catholics who respond to crisis with an increase of prayer, fasting, charity, and evangelization is counter-intuitive. It is also a counter-witness to the “black eye for the Church” contained in the McCarrick Report. It is confounding, and compelling.
Catholics who seek holiness in times of scandal tend often to be conduits of Christian renewal.
Making such a choice, I’ve learned by my failures, is easier said than done.
There is very little saccharine or romantic about following Jesus, especially when confronted with the sinfulness of the Church’s own leaders. There is often more setback than progress.
Humility helps – remembering our own failures tends to put the sins of others in perspective. Confession and the Eucharist help all the more.
Embracing the cross does not mean accepting or tolerating the presence of sin in the Church. Rather it means both assiduously calling for reform and repenting seriously for one’s own sins and shortcomings. Maintaining communion with the Church, even while helping to rebuild it.
The mission of the Gospel probably has very little to do with tweeking existing policy. A statement of regret from the U.S. bishops’ conference is unlikely to spark a renewal of faith in Jesus Christ.
In the wake of the McCarrick Report, renewal of the Church likely has most to do with whether ordinary Catholics will turn to Christ, and embrace his suffering on the cross. That isn’t easy. But it is the path to eternal life, and, in this life, its consequences might well be surprising.
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JPII’s apologists like Archbishop Gadecki here or JPII’s hagiographer George Weigel got it wrong. JPII should never have been hastily made a saint. While he did many great consequential deeds for the church and the world, he had that blind spot in his mindset about and theology of the presbyterate (priesthood) and of human sexuality that prevented him from directly confronting the then emerging clergy homosexual predation sex abuse scandal during his reign. He hyper idealized both into mystical proportions leaving them delusional and out of touch with reality. See his Theology of the Body and Pastores Dabo Vobis, as example. That is why we now have this global scandal that greatly stained the church. An icon of this episode is the congenial but hyper homosexual predator Ted McCarrick who was promoted by JPII five times: Auxiliary Bishop of New York, Bishop of Metuchen, Archbishop of Newark, Archbishop of Washington, and Cardinal. Another one is Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaries of Christ and of Regnum Christi, who was a serial sexual predator of his own seminarians and priests and sired children with different women. JPII gave him a special preferential treatment and even exalted him as “a model of heroic priesthood.” Today, it is but right that all church institutions, facilities and schools named after JPII should be renamed.
I guess you didn’t read the article, “Lan.” John Paul was deceived by officials of the American hierarchy. When you have a church of a billion on the books, that can happen.
Absolutely right. JPII’s canonization was recklessly accelerated to such a degree that it ignored his catastrophic failures to recognize Maciel and McCarrick for the monstrous degenerates that they were as well as his horrendous episcopal appointments and promotions, including Daneels, Maradiaga, Errazuriz, Law, Schoenborn, McCarrick himself, and especially Bergoglio. It is absurd and offensive to claim that this is a “model” of sanctity and pope and chief shepherd.
And for those reasons you know he can’t be in heaven? Please provide us with your corrected list.
Lan Baode, Are you by any chance among the Traditionalists that have an evil hatred of of St. John Paul ll. I myself am a Traditionalist and I hear so much false information generated against Our Saint. There is no gratitude for the fact that St. John Paul ll worked feverishly to restore the Tridentine Mass. The Pope who through his Angelus talks and General Audiences crushed every Modernist Heresy. The Pope who called for the “Reform of the Reforms”, for the sole purpose of eradicating all Modernist heresies and errors the Modernists instilled in Christ’s Church after the Council. There are those who only search for fables that will distort the person of His Holiness. What ungrateful children of their father of lies. Magnum Subito!!!
A fashionable error is still and error, and you are in error.
Lawrence Mack Hall, I followed the Pontificate of St. John Paul The Great, from the moment he stepped out on the Loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica, till his final moments. I was not a calumniator against the Supreme Pontiff but one who pleaded with others to Hear Him in whom God is well pleased. The Holy Father was a perfect Alter Christus. His enemies are those who seek nothing but fables without truth about St. John Paul Magnus, I ask, what did I say that is an error of errors? Please answer!
Phil Lawler, editor of Catholic World News, is reported as remarking that “the question regarding whether McCarrick is protected by a homosexual network is one of two key unanswered questions in the [McCarrick] Report, the other being how he shaped Vatican policy and the U.S. hierarchy” (National Catholic Register, Dec. 6-19, pp. 7-8, NCR text).
Is the McCarrick Report yet another act of broad self-exoneration? Perspective is given by Fr. Rev. Enrique T. Rueda’s, THE HOMOSEXUAL NETWORK: Private Lives & Public Policy (1982!, some 680 richly-documented pages), which remains systematically unnoticed after nearly four decades–not even a footnote in the USCCB’s 2004 Dallas Charter.
The McCarrick Report short-story also comes in two parts: the dead make great scapegoats, and the king’s camp followers literally wear no clothes.
‘ Mary The Greek / The Crowned Lady ‘ – is after whom the parish church of
S.G .Luisa of the Divine Will revelations is said to be the named ..how apt too , since for many , the concept of the Will of God as the mercy of God can be rather like Greek ..
St.John Paul 11 is the one whom God chose to help make the Divine Mercy devotion known world over as a very needed aspect for our times ; was surprised to find through the booklet below as to how the Diary of St.Faustina is also about living in the Divine Will , similar truths mentioned in the writings and exhortations of St. John Paul 11 as well as that of his God appointed successors who have been leading us in the Divine Will –
https://issuu.com/fupehozo40505/docs/1686407343-the_crown_of_history_by_daniel_o_connor
Hope the attacks / fears about the issues can be well used to bring more focus and light to the Divine Will revelations as being a needed complement to help bring deeper trust that the paths of sanctity and its peace are not beyond the reach for the ordinary .
I see no real defense here. Just umbrage. No more convincing than Trump’s lawyers.
The Pontiff-Idolator-Bergoglio is the Protector and Liberator of homosexual predators.
As Archbishop of Buenos Aries and President of The Argentina Bishops Conference, he spent millions in Church funds orchestrating a legal defense for his friend “Rev.” Julio Grassi, the most notorious homosexual predator in modern history in Argentina, found guilty by the Argentina Supreme Court, and now serving 15 years in jail.
That’s just one big reason why the Pontiff-Idolator-Bergoglio has not visited Argentina, his very own country.
Bergoglio was twice a candidate for Pope in campaigns run by Cardinal Daneels and Cardinal McCarrick, both of whom publicly bragged about it.
In 2013, Bergoglio got his election won, and he restored Daneels to power in the Church, just 3 years after Daneels has retired in disgrace in 2010, after the Vangelhuwe family of Belgium exposed him in an audio recording trying to coverup the homosexual predation of their own uncle, Bishop Roger Vangelhuwe, “the Belgian McCarrick,” a man who raped his own little nephew.
Add to the Pontiff-Idolator-Bergoglio his liberation of the convicted and defrocked (2012) serial pedophile “Rev.” Mauro Inzoli, Who Bergoglio restored to priestly faculties in 2014.
Add to Pontiff-Idolator-Bergoglio his promotion and protection of sex abusing Bishops Zanchetta of Argentina and Barros of Chile.
And of course, Pontiff-Idolator-Francis liberated and promoted and restored to power McCarrick, who like Daneels, got him elected.
The men running Rome and it seems many Archdioceses in South America, Europe and North America are homosexual-ist frauds, running a counterfeit cult as parasite inside the Catholic Church.
They are to be opposed and exposed and held to justice and prayed for. They are not to be trusted or tolerated.
They profane the Brude of Christ Our Redeemer.
“John Paul II was a man so morally strict, of such moral rectitude, that he would never have permitted a rotten candidacy to move forward.”
But – he did. He made a terrible mistake – this is obvious, and attacking out of hand those who point it out does no good at all – better to admit it and move on.
True.