The crisis in the Catholic Church

For over twenty years, the Catholic Church has been rocked by an endless succession of scandals involving child molestation by priests, and actions by the Church hierarchy to cover up these crimes and shield the perpetrators from justice.  But just this month -- triggered by the grand jury report on sexual abuse in Pennsylvania, and a letter by a high Vatican official -- the scandal has erupted into a kind of civil war within Catholicism.  Conservative Catholic news sites like Church Militant and LifeSite News have been talking about little else for days.

One of the most highly-placed accused sexual predators is Theodore McCarrick, an archbishop and former cardinal, alleged to have preyed not upon children but upon seminarians and younger priests under his authority.  About a week ago, archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a former nuncio (Vatican ambassador) to the US, published an 11-page open letter claiming that Pope Francis, while fully aware of McCarrick's crimes, had lifted penalties imposed on him by the previous Pope Benedict XVI and entrusted him with increased authority within the Church, effectively condoning his crimes and protecting him from any consequences for them.

Now, given that the Catholic Church all over the world has been covering up abuse by predator priests and moving them around to protect them for decades and probably generations, it's long been obvious that doing so was Church policy all along and that the Popes must have known about it and condoned it, if not outright ordered it.  Viganò's letter, however, is a "smoking gun" -- an authoritative figure within the Church directly and credibly accusing the sitting Pope of a specific act of collusion with an abuser.  And so far Francis's response to these claims has been decidedly evasive.

The letter also accuses many other top men in the Church of being either abusers or co-conspirators, notably cardinal Donald Wuerl, who allegedly even defied Pope Benedict's sanctions in order to protect McCarrick.  In the latest twist in the story, Church Militant is now reporting that Pope Francis has ordered Wuerl to be secretly smuggled out of the US to protect him from a possible federal RICO investigation of the Catholic Church in the US.

These accusations have led to widespread calls for implicated Church officials, and even Pope Francis himself, to resign.  Here's Michael Voris, the head of the Church Militant news site:

It's startling to hear a conservative Catholic speaking in such terms.

Now, I'm well aware that there's an agenda here, on two levels.  First, conservative Catholics have long been alarmed at Francis's statements apparently backing off a bit from hard-line Catholic taboos on homosexuality, participation of divorced-and-remarried persons in Church rituals, and other issues.  But as Voris says, Church Militant and similar sites have always held back from personal criticism of the Pope -- it was a line they did not feel they could cross.  Obviously that inhibition is now gone.

Second, because many of the cases in Pennsylvania involved sexual abuse of adult or adolescent males rather than children, conservative Catholics have proclaimed that the real problem here is not pedophilia but homosexuality -- specifically a vast network of evil homosexual predators who have infiltrated the Church in order to prey upon victims (and, in some versions of the story, to bring the Church into disrepute at the instigation of Satan himself).  To them, it's an opportunity to reassert and legitimize the taboo on homosexuality itself and to demonize gays in general.

In fact, it's not surprising that many Catholic clergy are homosexual.  In decades past (when many of these men, now of advanced years, joined the clergy), becoming a priest was one of the few ways for a man who remained unmarried and never showed interest in women to avoid suspicion of homosexuality, suspicion which in those days was quite dangerous.  And since gay people display the same range of decent people to complete slimebuckets as the rest of the population does, inevitably some fraction of gay men are sexual predators, just as some fraction of straight men are.  Why so many Catholic clergy are among those predators is an interesting question, but we hardly need to postulate a Satanic conspiracy to explain what we've seen.

It is notable that liberal blogs and sites have so far taken little interest in the crisis roiling the world's largest and most powerful religious organization.  Conservative Catholics claim it's because of the homosexual nature of the scandal -- liberals, they say, will condemn pedophilia but are ideologically committed to defending homosexuality.  This is nonsense.  Liberals have no trouble condemning sexual predation upon adults, as the attention given to #MeToo shows.  I suspect liberals' discomfort with the crisis reflects sympathy for Pope Francis, whom they regard as a liberal reformer.  In fact, as illustrated by links I've posted on this blog from time to time, he's just as much of a hypocritical con man as his predecessors; most likely he's merely realized that clinging to medieval attitudes about things like homosexuality and divorce in the twenty-first century threatens to erode what remains of the Church's crumbling authority, and is timidly trying to adapt the Church to the times for the sake of its survival.

The crisis will pose a dilemma to the masses of Catholic laity, the majority of whom (at least in the US) are fairly liberal and not highly observant, and probably regard hard-liners like Voris as unappealing fanatics.  On the other hand, they don't condone sexual predators either, and can no longer avoid realizing that the rot of cover-ups goes to the very top.

Needless to say, at the prospect of an all-out war between bigots and sexual predators, I can only hope that they inflict the greatest possible damage on each other, and upon the arrogant, corrupt, and power-hungry institution which has dominated so much of the world for so many weary centuries.  Think of it, too, as a little belated justice for the countless victims whose abusers that institution has protected and enabled for so long.