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ROME (CNS) -- The laity in the United States can help the Catholic Church overcome its current crisis by learning the truth about what has happened and by ensuring fidelity to and a stronger formation in the faith, a Harvard Law professor told a Rome audience.
Mary Ann Glendon, a Boston resident, said new lay groups organised in the wake of the clergy sex abuse crisis too often act as if lay administrative control of the Catholic Church would end the crisis and scandal. "I personally do not think the cause of the crisis is a failure of leadership or authority," Glendon said in a November 4 speech at the Legionaries of Christ's Regina Apostolorum University. Church leaders have admitted making mistakes, particularly with regard to their use of medical and psychiatric reports on offenders, and "the media could have been handled differently," she said, but the key to the crisis lies with individuals. "You must start with the human person," she said, responding to questions after her talk. "There has been a lapse of fidelity, little by little, that's how sin starts." Glendon said that when the media began reporting on the cases the attempts of Catholics in the United States to provide accurate information were too weak. "A narrative was being constructed about what happened," she said. The sense was that the abuse was massive, ongoing, ignored by church leaders and that it was a problem particular to the Catholic Church's celibate clergy. "This is a false storyline imbedded in the minds of many Catholics," Glendon said.
It was only after months of front-page headlines that the media began "to dribble out the information that most of the cases, nay, nearly all of the cases, took place long ago in the '60s, '70s and '80s," she said. "Was it really news that a tiny minority of Catholic priests succumbed to the general sexual bacchanalia of those years?" |
In addition, she said, the media created the atmosphere of near hysteria by initially describing the cases as involving paedophilia, the abuse of pre-pubescent children, when in fact most of the cases involved priests and teen-age boys.
The media attention to the story, particularly the massive coverage of the Boston Globe, is fuelled by a deep-seated and long-standing anti-Catholicism, she said. "I often hear it said that the Globe will receive a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on this matter," Glendon said.. "All I can say is that, if fairness and accuracy have anything to do with it, awarding the Pulitzer Prize to the Boston Globe would be like giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Osama bin Laden." Glendon said the response of Catholic laypeople must be to learn their faith, take it seriously, get involved and "embrace the callings that are theirs in baptism." Without formation, she said, "we are going to have trouble defending our beliefs -- even to ourselves. We are going to feel helpless when we come up against the secularism, historicism and relativism that are so pervasive in our culture." It is understandable that many well-intentioned laypeople have been drawn into new movements, such as the Boston-based Voice of the Faithful, she said. "Many Catholics are, of course, deeply concerned about recent revelations of clerical sexual abuse; they want to do something about it and they grasp the slogans that are in the air." But believing that "the church and her ministers are to be regarded with mistrust and that she stands in need of supervision by secular reformers" are not Catholic positions and will not strengthen the Catholic community, she said. Authentic reform and renewal of the church, she said, must focus on faith on living the Christian virtues, not on trying to seize power. Mary Ann Glendon's complete speech will appear on Thursday on The Record's website www.the record. com.au -- By Cindy Wooden |
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