If you follow Vatican news articles, much of the time they are painfully boring. Occasionally there will be a minor change in some rules that are of interest only to a canon lawyer or a theological clarification that is of interest only to a few theologians. However, in recent weeks there were two items that made international headlines and are worth taking a closer look. The first is the resignation of Theodore McCarrick from being a cardinal and the second is the pope’s clarification of the church’s teaching on capital punishment.
If there is anything that I am sick and tired of hearing about, it is the sex abuse scandal in the church. As a canon lawyer I’ve worked cases and it was the topic of my dissertation during my canon law studies. Then there has been the non-stop coverage of the Apuron situation on Guam. In Pennsylvania the Attorney General is publishing a Grand Jury report shortly on sex abuse by Catholic clergy and that has been in the news regularly. This boils down to two basic facts. First, this is a church of sinners. Second, most of the bishops did a poor job of dealing with complaints about sex abuse when they first received them.
When I was a kid you looked up to the clergy, almost as if they were supermen. They could do no wrong. Occasionally you would hear of some priest being transferred for no clear reason or a teacher being fired. It wasn’t impossible to guess that they did something to get themselves into trouble, but you didn’t ask too many questions. There was gossip floating in the community, but it was only gossip. By the time I was in high school and college, a fair number of clergy and religious were leaving the rectory and monastery to lead normal married life. By that time I could understand their desires and the reasons they left, I knew the clergy to be normal human beings, not supermen, but there was nothing wrong with being a normal human being.
There were still a few saints among the clergy and I was blessed to know several. Those normal human beings who stayed in the rectory or monastery could be appreciated for their commitment and willingness to serve, even as they struggled to honor those commitments. I believe that my attitude was relatively common among most of the faithful. Few people placed the clergy on pedestals any longer but there was a respect for what they were trying to do with their lives.
I worked in criminal justice prior to being ordained as a deacon and was not ignorant of the sleazy side of life. I was aware that occasionally some clergy would give in to their sinful nature and violate not only their commitment as clergy but even break criminal laws.
The common thinking at the time was that these clergy were emotionally immature. They went into seminary as high school students and never had the opportunity to be involved in adolescent and later adult heterosexual relationships. So, they were fixated at a high school level of emotional development. Once ordained and out in the world, they functioned emotionally as adolescents. This model worked reasonably well to explain many situations of clergy misbehavior. The abuse crisis in the mid-80’s made it clear that it wasn’t just the emotionally immature involved but that there were classic serial predators among the clergy who were using their role as clergy to groom and then abuse the people that they were sworn to pastor. Most cases didn’t fit this model, but it did occur.