All the Pope's Men (35 page)

SPANNING THE CULTURAL GAP BETWEEN ROME AND AMERICA

As is clear from the above chronology, the Holy See responded to the American sexual abuse crisis at times with deep doubts about the cultural forces in the United States driving the scandals, as well as reservations about some responses from the American bishops. At the same time, discussion in the American press and on the American Catholic street was often fueled by assumptions about why the Vatican was acting, or not acting, that inflamed passions. Often, neither side trusted the other.

At the outset, it should be said that both formulas used here—the Vatican and the American Catholic street—are ideal types to which no actual person or community perfectly corresponds. As discussed in chapter 2 and throughout this book, not everyone in the Vatican thinks the same way, and this has been true of the American situation as well. At critical junctures, such as what response to give to the Dallas norms or what policy to adopt on the admission of homosexuals to the priesthood, there have been serious internal disagreements within the Holy See. At the same time, as noted above, American Catholics are also divided on what caused the crisis and what to do about it. In contrasting Roman and American attitudes, it should be understood that we are talking about clusters of ideas rather than specific persons or institutions. Many Americans are sympathetic to elements of the Roman diagnosis, and many Vatican officials are open to much of what America would regard as essential to addressing the crisis.

The aim of this section is to engage in an act of translation, so that both the Holy See and the American Catholic community can understand what the other party is trying to say. One may not agree with any given sentiment that comes from the American Church, or any given decision from the Holy See, but these matters cannot be discussed constructively until the values that motivate the proposals and decisions are properly understood. The objective is thus one of clearing the air, making conversation possible.

How America Misunderstood Rome

1. Power.
Many Americans take it as axiomatic that the Vatican’s top concern is the preservation of its own power. Reading the crisis through this prism, observers in the United States often presumed that the Holy See was primarily concerned that the already-rambunctious American Catholic Church would slip further from its control. Its decisions were assumed to be driven by the desire to preserve an ancien régime in which American bishops are subservient to the Pope, and thus not to the people or communities they serve. Many American Catholics believe that the Holy See tries to keep the local church in the United States on an especially short leash, because anything that happens in the United States will be studied and imitated elsewhere.

This bias in favor of seeing power as the driving force in Vatican psychology led to serious misunderstandings. The best illustration came in mid-October, when, as reviewed above, the Holy See turned down the norms adopted by the American bishops at Dallas and proposed a mixed commission to resolve the differences. Those norms had envisioned that bishops would remove priests from ministry on the basis of their administrative authority, without a canonical trial. Many commentators in the United States, and a broad swath of the American public, assumed this was a Vatican power play intended to assert control over the American Church, especially to thwart the zero tolerance stance that had become the cornerstone of the American approach. It took time for the real issues to emerge, that the Vatican’s primary concern was a clear definition of the offense and due process for the accused. The objection was never to zero tolerance, but zero tolerance
for
what
and
after what process
. Far from being a heavy-handed Vatican intervention, the revisions were actually welcomed by many American bishops and canon lawyers—including, ironically, many of the more liberal bishops who normally complain about Rome telling America what to do. In this case, they shared many of the same reservations, especially in terms of restorative justice. The American press largely missed this story, especially in the crucial early stages, because it was stuck with the power model through which every Vatican action is understood.

Insistence that the Vatican should leave the American Church alone was at times voiced in the same breath with the demand that the Pope take personal charge of the situation and crack heads. The fact that the Pope did not “fire" bishops responsible for allowing abuse to continue was a constant source of outrage. It was in some sense a case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. In fact, the Vatican’s tendency to leave bishops’ conferences to solve their own problems outside the doctrinal realm was never more clear than in the American crisis. Early on, officials in Rome concluded that the American cultural and legal situation with respect to sexual misconduct was unique and that the proper response had to come from the local Church. Whatever one makes of this stance, and it is obviously open to critique, it does not seem the behavior of a power-obsessed cabal concerned only with potential threats to its own control.

2. Fear.
In the American press, the issues within the Catholic world most commonly linked to the abuse crisis are those involving sexuality and gender—women’s ordination, clerical celibacy, and homosexuality. Given that the positions upheld by the Holy See on those issues face terrific pressure in much of the developed world, it is sometimes assumed that the Vatican is afraid that things are slipping out of hand. Some believe this fear is compounded by the fact that celibate males who lack a mature personal understanding of the issues under consideration set Vatican policy on sexuality. (Whether that is a fair assumption is beside the point.) Connecting these dots, many Americans have assumed that the Vatican is afraid that the abuse crisis might unleash new pressures for doctrinal change on matters of sexuality, or, in the case of celibacy, change in this discipline.

This assumption is a misreading. It is true that most Vatican officials, especially those at the highest decision-making levels, tend to hold conservative views on sexual morality and are resistant to pressures for change. But they are not making policy on the sexual abuse crisis on that basis, because they take it for granted that there will be no such change, at least under the present Pope. Many Americans assume most Vatican moves are calculated with respect to these issues, as if they represent top institutional priorities. In reality, Vatican officials do not spend much time thinking about these questions, largely because they regard them as settled. It would not have occurred to then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to evaluate the proposed norms from the American bishops or calls for a plenary council from the perspective of their potential impact on the debate surrounding women’s ordination or the discipline of celibacy. It would be like suggesting that the U.S. Defense Department is crafting strategy in the Middle East in order to defend the presidential veto over acts of the legislative branch. Whatever most officials in the Pentagon might make of that bit of constitutional law, it would never have occurred to them to think it was in jeopardy, and hence it’s not part of their calculations. One needs to search for their motives elsewhere, and it’s much the same for the Vatican with respect to the American crisis.

Moreover, psychologically, Vatican officials understood themselves to be reacting with relative calm in comparison to the American bishops, who many in the Vatican felt were driven by fear of adverse financial impact, negative publicity, and “damage control" into adopting measures not in the long-term best interests of the Church. This is why, some Vatican officials believed, a number of American bishops were hesitant to defend the Church in the public discussion, or were too eager to surrender chunks of their episcopal authority either to civil prosecutors or to lay review boards. By way of contrast, many Vatican officials regarded themselves as capable of applying a more rational and thoughtful approach because of their distance and objectivity. Whether that is accurate or not is for the moment beside the point. What is relevant is that “fear" was not a driving force in the policy calculations of the Holy See, at least in the sense in which critics intended it.

3. Denial.
Many American Catholics feel that officials in the Vatican “don’t get it," that they are “in denial" about the seriousness of the American situation. This accusation hung in the air especially in the early stages from January to March 2002, when the Pope had not yet spoken. In fact, Vatican officials had their own reasons for not putting the Pope on record about the American crisis sooner. For one thing, despite repeated references to a papal silence, John Paul had already spoken several times on the issue of sexual abuse by priests, including in the United States. In June 1993, the Pope sent a four-page letter to American bishops in which he referred to “shocked moral sensibilities." Later that year, in August, before a crowd of eighteen thousand in Denver’s McNichols Arena, the Pope condemned the “suffering and scandal caused by the sins of some ministers of the altar." Then, in an address to the Roman Curia in December 1993, John Paul said, “Among those that are particularly painful are sexual (deviations) which sometimes have involved, I say it crying, members of the clergy." Most recently, in the November 2001 document
Ecclesia in Oceania
, John Paul wrote, “Sexual abuse within the Church is a profound contradiction of the teaching and witness of Jesus Christ."

That Vatican officials did not rush out new statements in the early stages of the crisis perhaps illustrates an underestimation of its seriousness, since the Pope often repeats points that he wishes to emphasize. But it has to be remembered that the Holy See was taking its cues on the issue to a significant extent from the American bishops, some of whom were advising Rome that premature papal statements might backfire, keeping the story alive artificially or even providing fodder for civil litigation. Further, the Pope no doubt felt caught between expressing his pastoral concern for the American situation, but also backing up his senior managers in the United States.

At no stage did anyone from the Holy See express anything other than revulsion at the sexual abuse of children by priests. What Americans sometimes interpreted as denial was more like ambiguity, born of the widespread sense within the Vatican that factors other than the crime of sexual abuse were contributing to the crisis. From a Roman point of view, those factors included: anti-Catholicism, opposition to the Church’s countercultural stands on abortion and sexuality, the desire to cash in with large financial payouts, and the exploitation of the crisis by activist groups of both left and right to advance their pet causes. The hesitance of some Vatican officials to engage in public acts of contrition was, to some extent, a hesitance to fuel these forces perceived as hostile to the Church. In other words, these Vatican officials may have believed that by not being more contrite or self-critical, they were helping the American Church defend itself. This belief may have been in error, but in any event it is not denial.

There was a further layer of ambiguity in the Holy See, having to do with international perspective. During much of 2002, the Catholic sex abuse crisis received saturation coverage in the American press, so that it became the top item on the agenda, in some cases the only item on the agenda, for the American bishops. They were constrained by the force of overwhelming public attention. When the Vatican did not exhibit the same level of engagement, many Americans took this as evidence of willful denial. In fact, however, public opinion and the media overseas simply did not replicate the environment in the United States. During the spring of 2002, the major religion story in the Italian press was not the American crisis, which drew relatively little attention, but the thirty-nine-day standoff between Israelis and Palestinians at Bethlehem’s Basilica of the Nativity. It was this drama that was on the front pages of the newspapers every day, and the lead item on the evening news. While Americans were frustrated that the Holy See did not have a laser-beam focus on their crisis, some in the Vatican were equally annoyed that the fate of the holy sites did not seem important to the American Catholic community. In other words, what Americans sometimes read as denial, some officials in the Holy See regarded as a matter of perspective.

In terms of whether or not the Vatican “gets it," it should also be noted that the Holy See’s mode of responding to the American crisis shifted significantly from 2002 to 2003, suggesting an institution that was learning from experience. The changes to norms governing sex abuse cases signed by John Paul II in February 2003 were based on feedback from American canon lawyers, showing a willingness to be flexible in order to make the system work. The scientific symposium on pedophilia held in the Vatican, April 2–5, 2003, was an extraordinary event, both because all the experts enlisted were non-Catholics with no theological ax to grind and because Vatican officials took what they had to say with extraordinary seriousness. Among other things, their input seems to have stalled, at least temporarily, the move to issue a document banning the admission of homosexuals to Catholic seminaries. Finally, the Vatican’s response when a group of three sex abuse victims from Boston arrived in Rome, dispatching a senior official from the Secretariat of State with a personal message from the Pope, also suggests a higher level of sensitivity than had once been the case.

4. An American Problem.
It was widely asserted that Vatican officials regarded the sexual abuse crisis as an “American problem," meaning the result of some special defect in American culture that could be left to the Americans to resolve. This impression, however, turned on a critical ambiguity. It is true that there are unique features shaping the cultural reaction to the sexual abuse problem in the United States. Aspects of Anglo-Saxon tort law, for example, provide one such factor. In the United States, it is much easier to hold the Church corporately responsible for damages caused by priests than in most other parts of the world.