Moral Authority

By Russell Shaw
HERALD Columnist
(From the issue of 5/16/02)

The Catholic Church is in danger of losing its moral authority—or so we’ve been told many times in recent weeks as the clergy sex abuse scandal has unfolded. Sometimes it’s been said sadly, sometimes with what resembled smug satisfaction. Either way, the remark should be taken seriously.

An Associated Press story suggests why. Writing from Albany, reporter Joel Stashenko noted "recent setbacks" for the Catholic Church in the legislatures of New York and Massachusetts, where preliminary approval was extended to legislation requiring church-related institutions to include coverage for prescription birth control in employee health insurance. The issue is being fought out elsewhere as well.

Stashenko said "both friends and foes" attributed what happened in the two states to the Church’s "preoccupation" with the scandal. Significantly, though, he also cited "evidence of waning Catholic clout" in both "even before the sex scandal broke."

Regrettably, that very likely is true. People who follow the Church’s fortunes in the public policy arena recognize that the "waning" has been underway for decades, as Catholics have assimilated into the secular culture and, in many cases, adopted secular values and attitudes on matters of public and private morality. Opinion surveys make it clear that the process is particularly pronounced among Catholics who seldom or never go to church, though by no means limited to them.

The impact of the sex abuse scandal may be short-lived or long-lasting—only time can tell. Conservative Protestants, a spent force in public life in the United States after the 1925 Scopes trial, came roaring back on the political scene in the 1970s and 1980s and were a major factor in the election of Ronald Reagan as President. Now they look like a spent force again. And who knows if that will last?

The Catholic Church similarly could recover moral authority eroded by the scandal, but the longterm trends aren’t encouraging even so. Nor will they be unless and until an essential condition for turning things around is met: Loyal Catholic lay people must do what they should have been done all along and shoulder responsibility for being "the Church" in the public arena as their special share in its mission.

It’s hardly a new idea. "What the soul is in the body, that the Christians are in the world," declared the Epistle to Diognetus, a famous piece of Christian apologetics composed around the year 200 A.D.

The point was that Christians, by living and acting as their professed faith obliged them to do, were changing the pagan environment around them for the better. Nearly 18 centuries later, the Second Vatican Council taught much the same in documents like the Constitution on the Church, the Constitution on the Church in the World, and the Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity.

But all this will remain merely on the level of a pious thought in the absence of serious planning and organization by competent Catholic laity.

In recent years, several Catholic lay groups, including the Catholic Alliance and the Catholic Campaign for America, emerged on the national scene with this end in view. Neither clicked and both have largely dropped out of sight. Considering the dire predictions now being heard about loss of moral authority by the Church, the time may have come to try again. Otherwise, the dire predictions could be right.

Although pagans look askance at Christians, the letter to Diognetus remarked, even so "it is precisely they that hold the world together." A rather large job, is it not? Time and then some to get started.

Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, D.C.

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