George Weigel has a great article saying the response to the Scandal has been fixated on the wrong kinds of solutions. He notes that we hear lots of people calling for healing and that’s fine when we talk about healing the relationship between victims and the Church. But what about the wider problems the Church faces?
Stripped of secular-therapeutic euphemisms, here is what caused most cases of clergy sexual abuse and episcopal malfeasance: Unchaste priests weakened by poor theological instruction and defective spiritual formation met confused teenagers and young men weakened by a sex-saturated culture. Then bishops who had absorbed the managerial and bureaucratic ethos of modern American institutional life reacted to the sorry results of those encounters as managers rather than apostles.
Something is manifestly wrong in the Catholic Church when psychology constantly trumps moral theology in describing what is going on when a man seduces a teenage boy. And something is manifestly wrong when the forgiveness that is possible for all repentant sinners is confused with restoring the sinner to a public trust.
As usual, Weigel gets right to the heart of the matter and offers a great response to those who want to “fix” the Church by stripping her of all that makes her what she is.
