On the Abuse Scandal in the Roman Catholic Church

On the Abuse Scandal in the Roman Catholic Church

In recent times the Roman Catholic Church has once again been rocked by news of widespread abuse of children and other vulnerable people by Roman Catholic clergymen, mostly priests but also including the former Archbishop of Washington, D.C. We hear that this archbishop routinely imposed on Catholic seminarians, men preparing for the priesthood, to join him in bed for grossly inappropriate activities. The abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church isn’t new. We’ve heard about it for decades. We’ve heard of priests who sexually abuse children. We’ve heard of bishops who cover up for them and rather than remove them from the priesthood simply transfer them to a different parish, where they have continued their abusive behavior. We’ve heard of such behavior in dioceses across the United States and in other nations as well, including Chile and others in South America. A former Vatican official who intensely dislikes the policies of Pope Francis has accused the Pope of knowing about and covering up instances of abuse. The source of that accusation is suspect, but we cannot simply dismiss it without more information. I know of one Catholic laywoman whose faith in the Church has been shaken if not quite totally destroyed. I have heard of Catholic priests whose faith in the Church has been shaken too, to the point where they have even considered leaving the Church and its priesthood. The abuse scandal presents the greatest challenge to the institutional claims of the Roman Catholic Church perhaps since the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century.

In the September, 2018, edition of the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry Newsletter the school’s Dean, Dr. Mark Markuly, has published a lengthy and thoughtful essay under the title “Can the Catholic Church Overcome Its Sex Abuse Scandals?” In that essay Dean Markuly says that “Inadequate theologies have perpetuated this chronic sex abuse situation. The church needs new theologies of gender, sexuality, ordination, authority, ecclesiology (the nature of what a church is and does), and a half dozen other issues.” He at least suggests that he agrees with voices within the Catholic Church calling for nothing less than a new Reformation and saying the Church faces a crisis as severe as the one that produced the Protestant Reformation some five hundred years ago. I am a Protestant clergyperson not a Catholic one, but I received my formal theological and ministerial training at the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry, so I have perhaps a bit more of a grounding in Roman Catholicism than do most Protestant clergypersons. More importantly, when institutions are in crisis it is always helpful for them to hear from outside voices, voices that can perhaps analyze the issues the crisis presents more clearly than can the persons directly involved in the crisis.¹ So for what it’s worth I will here add my outside voice to the literature addressing the Catholic Church’s abuse crisis.

Dean Markuly is absolutely correct when he says that “inadequate theologies have perpetuated this chronic abuse situation.” Beyond that, inadequate theologies created the conditions in which the “abuse situation” arose in the first place. The Dean points to theologies of gender, sexuality, ordination, authority, and ecclesiology as contributing to the problem. He is absolutely right about that, but I think we need to make a distinction between theologies of gender and sexuality on the one hand and theologies of ordination, authority, and ecclesiology on the other. I’ll address these two areas of theology separately, starting with the Catholic theologies of gender and sexuality.

We think of the issue at hand as being one of sexual abuse, and for the most part it is. It is easy to jump to the conclusion that the Catholic practice of priestly celibacy is the root of the problem. I don’t want to dismiss the issues around priestly celibacy as a cause of the problem entirely, but I don’t believe that they lie at the root of the problem. Yes, the Roman Catholic Church requires its priests to be celibate. They do not marry. They may not engage in sexual activity of any kind. I and many others believe that the vow of celibacy that all Catholic priests must take forces them to deny or at least to suppress a significant part of their humanity. God created us all as sexual beings. There is no reason for us to deny that reality. That we are sexual beings raises a host of moral issues with which we all must deal, but denying ourselves all outlet for our sexuality is, it seems to me and many others, not healthy.

The sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic church is not an issue of homosexuality among Catholic priests. Yes, we have known for a long time that many Catholic priests are homosexual. I’ve heard it said that that’s in part because a Roman Catholic priest doesn’t have to keep answering questions from his family about why he isn’t married. Be that as it may, the abuse scandal in the Catholic Church has nothing to do with homosexuality. Most men who sexually abuse boys are heterosexual. Homosexual men are no more likely to be child abusers than are heterosexual ones. Driving homosexual priests out of the Church would do nothing to solve the abuse crisis.

I do not believe that the epidemic of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests is primarily a sexual matter. It is primarily a matter of power. The sexual abuse scandal is grounded in and arises from a fundamental problem with Roman Catholic ecclesiology and church polity. We can start to see this problem by realizing that the polity, that is, the institutional structure, of the Roman Catholic Church is imperial. The church is modeled on the political structure of the Roman Empire. That Empire had an emperor at its head who had nearly unlimited power. The Roman Catholic Church has a Pope at its head who has nearly unlimited power. The Roman Empire had a collective body immediately below the emperor called the Senate, which had some legislative authority. The Roman Catholic Church has a collective body immediately below the Pope called the College of Cardinals, which has some authority in the Church. The Roman Empire was administered by local officials called “ediles.” They were appointed by and answered to the Emperor, not by or to the people of the areas they administered. The Roman Catholic Church is administered by local officials called bishops. They are appointed by and answer to the Pope, not by or to the people of the Church in the areas they administer. The Roman Catholic Church has one level of authority below the Pope, namely, the parish priests. They have spiritual authority over the people, but they are appointed by the local bishop and are primarily responsible to him, not to the people of their parish. Thus we see that the structure of the Roman Catholic Church is essentially imperial, modeled on the structure of the Roman Empire. Imperial structures create imperial policies. That it does is one of the Roman Catholic Church’s foundational problems.

Then there are the claims that the church makes about the Christian faith and about itself. The Church calls itself the depositum fidei, the depository or treasury of the faith. The Church says “extra Ecclesia nulla salus,” outside the church there is no salvation. The Church thus sets itself up as the one indispensable institution in the life of faith. The fullness of the Christian faith, it says, is found only in itself. Outside of itself there is no salvation. Depart from the church and you are not saved. Those assertions are official Catholic doctrine. We Protestants of course disagree with them, but the issue before us isn’t whether we agree with them but what their effect is on the Church’s internal dynamics. The Church comes to be all about power. The Church says to the people: We have what you desperately need. We can give it to you, or we can withhold it from you. We have the power to save your soul or to condemn it to everlasting torment. You dare not openly defy us. You may not even loudly disagree with us, for we have power over your eternal soul. We control your access to God. God may save you, but God does that only through us.

I know of course that not all Roman Catholics think in terms this stark. I had a wonderful experience at the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry with many wonderful Catholic instructors and fellow students. They never tried to make us Protestants into Catholics. My sister-in-law recently converted to Roman Catholicism, and I’m confident that she wouldn’t assert the things I’ve said here about the Roman Catholic Church as unquestionable truths. I do not object in theory to people being Roman Catholic. I do object to that Church’s official dogmas about itself.

Under those dogmas preservation of the Church in all of its unquestioned sanctity becomes the highest value. The Church becomes a value in its own right rather than for what it offers to the people who live their spiritual lives within it. To this way of thinking the people can do without almost anything in life, but they cannot do without the Church. It becomes essential to preserve the Church and, just as importantly, to preserve the people’s faith not in God and Jesus Christ but in the Church.

Beyond that, the sanctified position of the clergy within the Church creates an environment of privilege. In Catholic theology the priest stands in loco Christi, in the place of Christ. Catholic theology of ordination makes an ordained person existentially different from unordained people. The Church teaches that in the sacrament of ordination a man’s being is transformed into something new, something different, something better. This existential change is said to be permanent. A priest may resign from or be removed from the priesthood, but his ordination remains. His transformed, exalted status remains. In my Protestant tradition we understand ordination differently, but I can imagine that for some men, not most but a few, the Catholic theology of ordination gives them the idea that they can do no wrong. What they do is right because an ordained man has done it. Surely the exalted understanding of the priesthood plays a role in preparing the ground for abuse.

It seems clear that these and other aspects of Roman Catholic theology create the opportunity and the temptation for priests to engage in abusive behavior toward vulnerable people, especially children. They see themselves as holding exalted positions in the church, never mind that the collar and stoles they wear are supposed to be symbols of service not superiority. The people of the church are taught not to challenge them, or at least not to challenge them about anything fundamental in the Catholic faith. No one expects a priest to ask anyone to engage in inappropriate sexual behavior and certainly not to force that behavior on anyone. Surely there must be some explanation grounded in the structure of the Church that induces so many priests to abuse others. The exalted position of the priest seems to be part of that explanation.

The Roman Catholic theology of the church itself, its ecclesiology, explains how the hierarchy has reacted to protect not the victims of abuse but its perpetrators. The Church is more important than any person in it, whether a priest or a victim of priestly abuse. The Church holds the faith. The Church holds the keys to the Kingdom, and it must be protected at any cost. That at least seems to be how far too many bishops and archbishops have thought about the matter. Exposing the abuse and disciplining those who committed it either through internal discipline or by turning them over to civil authorities, or both, would open the Church to criticism. It might shake the belief of the members in the sanctity of the Church. Never mind that all the cover up that has gone on has done that far more than dealing with the issue head on would have. So prelates chose cover up over corrective action. When they did they were acting in a way that Roman Catholic ecclesiology fully justified and even dictated.

So what is to be done? At a more superficial level the Church needs to remove priests (or others) who have abused anyone from the priesthood. No institution can withstand the backlash against abuse by its representatives when it takes no action against them. Certainly the Roman Catholic Church cannot, at least not in its current configuration and size. Then the Church authorities must turn the abusers over to civil authorities for whatever prosecution the law allows. Sadly that prosecution will be blocked in many cases by the statute of limitations, but the Church must do what it can to see that its lawbreakers are brought to justice.

That is the least the Church must do. Those actions will clean out a lot of evildoers. It will not however do anything to address the underlying causes of the problem. To address the underlying causes of the problem the Church must reexamine its underlying theologies that created or contributed to the problem, as Dean Markuly suggests. The Church could start by examining whether or not its imperial structure corresponds to Gospel values. Many of us Protestants ask: What does all the pomp and circumstance around the Roman Catholic hierarchy (especially in the Vatican around the Pope) have to do with the values of an itinerant Jewish preacher from Galilee whom we call Lord and Savior? Not much if anything at all many of Protestants answer. Yes, the Vatican houses some of the greatest creations of the human spirit in its collections of paintings, sculptures, manuscripts, and other sacred items. Still, Jesus preached against worldly show. In the Gospel of Luke he says the poor are blessed and the rich are cursed. Luke 6:20 and 24. In many ways the Roman Catholic Church is the Roman Empire alive and operating in the world today. It’s time for it to reexamine the ecclesiology that created and that maintains an institution that on its face so contradicts the values Jesus taught, lived, and died for.

The Church also needs to reexamine and transform the way that it handles the priesthood and its theology of ordination, including its limitation of the priesthood to men. For one thing, women priests would be statistically less likely to abuse children than male priests seem to be. Beyond that, St. Paul said that in Christ there is no longer male or female because all are one in Christ. Galatians 3:28. Jesus of Nazareth was a male human being, but the risen Christ surely transcends small human distinctions like male and female. The Roman Catholic Church has immense difficulty changing its doctrine. That’s because changing doctrine suggests that earlier doctrine was wrong, and Church doctrine cannot be admitted to be wrong. The Church’s doctrine says only men may be priests. Yet that Roman Catholic doctrine says that doesn’t change the undeniable truth that women have as much potential for being first rate pastors, preachers, and sacramental clerics as men do. At Seattle University I sat with wonderful Roman Catholic women who were in tears because they so strongly feel the call to all aspects of the priesthood, and they knew their Church would never let them answer that call. it is past time for that reality to change. Opening the priesthood to women would be one action the Church could take that might address some of elements that have led to the abuse crisis.

I said above that priestly celibacy is not a major factor in this crisis, but it does play at least a small role. That priests must be celibate is not a matter of Roman Catholic doctrine. It is only a matter of canon law, so it is easier to change than is the doctrine of the male only priesthood. Yes, married men sometimes become child abusers too, but the Catholic practice of priestly celibacy deprives priests of the intimate personal relationships that are so important to most of us in keeping us on track and making our lives meaningful. Sexual abuse is, as far as we know, statistically much less common among married Protestant clergy than it is among unmarried Roman Catholic clergy. Changing the law on priestly celibacy would be another thing the Church could do that would probably help to reduce the incidence of abuse by priests.

Most significant I believe is a reexamination of the Roman Catholic Church’s claim that it is the one and only depositum fidei, the depository of the faith. It must reexamine and reform its belief that salvation is fully available to people only in the Church. That assertion is first of all bad theology. Clearly a great many people find an authentic connection with God outside the Roman Catholic Church. I am one such person, but there are millions upon millions of other people who are as well. Roman Catholicism at its best is a powerful, inspiring, and uplifting version of religious faith, but it is not the only one that “works” for people. It’s time the Catholic Church got away from claiming that it is. Elevating the Church to supreme importance the way the Roman Catholic Church does is a major factor in the priest abuse scandal. It’s past time for the Church to change it.

The Catholic priest abuse scandal has no easy solution. It is grounded too deeply into the very being of the Roman Catholic Church for there to be an easy solution. Still, one thing is clear. The Church must change the way it has handled the scandal. It must change it radically, and it must change it now. Half measures will not do. In the sixteenth century the Catholic Church instituted various reforms in response to the Protestant Reformation at the Council of Trent. It is time for the Church to institute reforms again, to hold another Council of Trent, this time not in response to a challenge from us Protestants but in response to a crisis that is of its own making. It must act radically, and it must act fast. The people of the Church are hurting. They wonder how it could happen. They want to Church to respond forcefully and effectively. It’s obvious from the outside that the Church needs to act. Is it obvious from the inside? I think it is becoming obvious if it isn’t obvious already. May God be with the Roman Catholic Church and guide it as it seeks appropriate ways to respond.

1Actually, we Protestant clergypersons may be more involved in the Catholic Church’s current crisis than we know. I remember a Protestant clergy ethics and boundary trainer telling a room full of UCC and Presbyterian clergy a few years ago that everyone thinks we’re all child abusers. I think, or at least hope, that that claim is an exaggeration. Still, Protestant clergy have committed abuse too, although as far as we know that horrific issue is not as widespread in the Protestant churches as it is in the Roman Catholic Church.