A reasonable response to sex abuse scandal

No one except the hard-line haters of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests and British atheists such as the ineffable Christopher Hitchens can find fault with the pope's response to the sexual abuse scandal in the United States.

SNAP wants the severed heads of many American bishops to be served up on silver platters. The pope's words, we are told, are too little and too late. Hitchens demands that the pope remove Cardinal Bernard Law from his sinecure at the church of St. Mary Major in Rome.

The hate in some of the victims groups scares me (as do their alleged links with trial lawyers). I gave the keynote address at the founding meeting of SNAP -- in those days I was one of the few priests that publicly supported the victims. They shouted hate at me even though I was on their side. "If you attack your friends," I warned them, "you won't have any friends." I was wrong. The tort lawyers seem to be their friends.

I escaped from their ire at the end of my talk. Everyone wanted to tell me in raw detail what was done to them. Somehow I had become personally responsible for the corruption in the priesthood and in the church. The victims have much to complain about and solid reasons to hate. Yet hatred and the need for revenge eats up the soul. The words of Jesus and the pope about forgiveness are dismissed. There must be more retribution before one can talk about forgiveness. Yet in fact forgiveness and reconciliation are psychologically essential as a prelude for getting on with one's life. I am not saying that there should be no more suits, no more challenges, no immoderate language, no more attempts to trump up charges against every cardinal in sight. But rage that never ends and by definition cannot end does not hurt the enemy but hurts only oneself. One must finally give up the need for revenge and move on because it concedes one more victory to the victimizer.

The pope must be more careful in the future about the men he appoints as bishops. There is no room anymore in the church, caught as it is in chaos and anger, for mean-spirited, insecure, vindictive, ill-tempered, repressively, ignorant bishops, especially those who find emotional satisfaction from lording it over the laity and the clergy. Canon law is necessary in the church, perhaps sometimes a necessary evil, but it is not a substitute for the Gospel.

If a bishop has lost his credibility, then he must go.

Tensions between various factions in the American church now are often between those who accept the changes of the Vatican Council and those who want to undo them, with the latter demanding power to purge the former. Thus the Cardinal Newman Society exists to take control of the Catholic faculties and constrain them to teach "orthodoxy," by which they mean the same doctrinal formulas that were in vain pounded into the students' heads before 1960.

That is not likely to happen if for no other reason than that is not the way you educate young people today -- or ever. It never did work even in the 1950s, when the "hit the box, hit the rail" spirituality flourished in the realm of the Golden Dome.

Moreover, a sympathetic and restrained approach to students is a far more efficient form of teaching than "hit the box, hit the rail," as the emergence of movements such as the Alliance for Catholic Education proves -- a group of young people at the Dome fervently dedicated to the Catholic education of the poor. If the Cardinal Newman Society should take over, the alliance would be dead.