As I read reactions to the findings that priests have systematically abused children, this time in Pennsylvania, I wonder what it will take to bring about real change and truly end the debauchery. We all have tolerated it for many years. Any of us with any casual connection to the clerical culture were aware that not everything was proper and above board.
The ‘check engine’ light really went on a few years back when the first scandals began emerging publicly about how priests were abusing young people sexually. Everyone, not just the bishops, were afraid to look under the hood, afraid of what we might find, afraid of what we suspected was there.
Of course, there are all those bishops and priests who covered up the debauchery. They were the ones who really knew what was going on. And it has taken civil courts and civil officials to bring to light what the bishops should have exposed on their own years ago. But there also were all those of us who knew or thought we knew that things were not right. And yet most of us stayed loyal to the lie.
The perversity of the institution goes from top to bottom. Yes, the leadership needs a radical change. But what kind of change must followers make in order to atone for the wrongs and make things right. If that change ever happens, it will no longer be the Catholic Church but something radically different. The guilty may be few, but all are complicit. The kind of internal change needed will bring us together in another quite different place.
Those who call for changes in leadership, for reform of the clericalism, for women involvement are only partially accurate. They only go so far, not far enough, and they continue to remain loyal to the institution. I think it will take much more than simply burying a defunct clericalism to find an adequate building spot.