The speaker was a highly sophisticated layman, possessor of a
doctorate and professor of theology at a major Catholic university. We had been
discussing the metastasizing scandals plaguing the church — scandals concerning
ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the Pennsylvania grand jury, what the pope knew
and when he knew it, and on and on. Then, unexpectedly, my companion said this:
“There is something truly demonic about all this. The Catholic
Church was virtually the last voice being raised against the sexual revolution.
And that voice has been silenced.”
I glumly agreed. “Who would listen to anything the church had to
say about sex now?”
Although it didn’t occur to me to make the point, it hardly needs
saying that sexual morality is far from being the only matter on which the
church’s voice has been effectively silenced. Don’t expect the church to get
much of a hearing for a while on immigration policy, race and racism, or other
urgent matters about which Catholic social doctrine has something important to say.
Still, the credibility of Catholic teaching calling for
self-discipline and respect for the other in what pertains to sex has
unquestionably taken the biggest hit, and it’s no mystery why. Repeated
transgressions by people with a grave obligation to live by the rule of chaste
celibacy have given the church’s opponents a giant opening to accuse it of
hypocrisy.
It’s a tragedy that this has happened at a time when — at least
in the United States — church leaders for the most part seem to have learned
the lesson of their predecessors’ errors and to be enforcing the tough policy
on clergy sex abuse that they adopted in 2002. True as that is, the bitter
consequences of sins of cover-up in the past are now coming home with a
vengeance.
There is painful irony, too, in the fact that this is happening
on the 50th anniversary of “Humanae Vitae,” Pope
Paul VI’s encyclical condemning contraception. Near its end, Pope Paul, who
will be canonized next month, warned that the rejection of its teaching would
help pave the way to a “general lowering of morality.”
What Paul VI didn’t say, perhaps because it seemed too obvious to
require saying, was that a parallel dereliction of duty by people who were
sworn to uphold and practice chaste celibacy would contribute powerfully —
indeed, was even then contributing — to the same catastrophic result.
And although I don’t expect critics of “Humanae
Vitae” to admit it, or perhaps even recognize it, the roar of dissent
that greeted the encyclical also has been a factor in the process of silencing
the church’s voice as a teacher of morality. Now the scandal of sex abuse and
cover-up has finished the job.
And that may be the most important lesson Cardinal Daniel
DiNardo, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, can impart to
the extraordinary meeting of himself and his peers that Pope Francis has
summoned to convene in Rome next February to discuss responses to the sex abuse
crisis.
The U.S. bishops have wrestled collectively with the sex abuse
problem since the 1980s, but along the way they neglected an elementary axiom
of good public relations: when something bad happens, get all the bad stuff on
the record quickly. As a result, they and the church have paid a terrible price
as embarrassing disclosures have dribbled out over the years. At this perilous
moment, Pope Paul VI’s famous dictum that the “smoke of Satan” had seeped into
the church again seems painfully pertinent.
Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington and author of American Church: The
Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall, and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America.