Church officials repeatedly point to the fact that relatively few cases have emerged involving priests ordained during the 1990s as evidence that their new screening and training procedures are succeeding. But critics are skeptical, arguing that abusive priests will simply be more careful in the future not to attract attention. “I don't see this leadership having the ability from a moral or a human standpoint to be able to address this crisis,” Demarest said. And there have been some recent cases: in January 2002, police in Haverhill, Massachusetts, arrested thirty-three-year-old Rev. Kelvin E. Iguabita, who had been ordained in 1999, and charged him with twice raping a fifteen-year-old girl in his parish rectory. Nonetheless, Plazewski is one of the optimists, those who believe the Church is now paying a price for past mistakes, but that things have improved. “The good news is that these [abuse] cases that we're dealing with now come from a time when the seminary system was not where it is now,” he said. “A lot of effort has been made and that effort will bear fruit.”
The Struggle for Change
T
he twelve U.S. cardinals who gathered in the Vatican's ornate Sala Bologna in the spring of 2002 were an unusual mix by most measures—a group of celibate men, with an average age of seventy-two, two of whom were themselves under fire for their failure to oust priests accused of sexually abusing minors. But they were the princes of the Church, men whose loyalty to the institution and its faith had earned them the red hats that symbolized their stature and influence; men who were now charged with correcting the course of a religion racked by scandal so great that even Cardinal Bernard Law, the man at the eye of the storm, had told worshipers it was “undermining the mission of the Catholic Church.”
On the same late April day that the cardinals arrived in Vatican City for a presummit dinner, another gathering was taking place four thousand miles away, in the prosperous Boston suburb of Wellesley. There too a group of Catholics whose lives had been shaken by the sexual abuse crisis were gathering to talk about what they could do to help fix the problem. But instead of meeting in the tapestried halls of the Vatican's Palazzo Apostolico, these Catholics were assembling in the basement of a church school where each Monday night for three months they had been moving aside cafeteria tables to make room for a fast-growing group of heartbroken laypeople. These churchgoing suburbanites, many of them graduates of Catholic schools and colleges, had stuck with Catholicism all their lives despite disagreements over a variety of teachings, putting their money into the collection baskets and giving their time to the parish committees and enrolling their children in the parish schools. But now they were sitting in folding chairs on the linoleum floor at St. John the Evangelist School, beside a concrete-block wall decorated with paper letters spelling out their motto. On one side of a large cross, the letters spelled out the words KEEP THE FAITH. On the other side, the letters said CHANGE THE CHURCH.
Not since the heady days of the early 1960s, after Pope John XXIII summoned the world's bishops to Rome for the Second Vatican Council, has the future of Catholicism been more uncertain.
The crisis that began with the story of a pedophile priest opened a Pandora's box of grievances nursed by Catholics for decades; Homosexuality. The role of women. The nature of authority. Debates that had long taken place only at the margins of Church life suddenly seized center stage. Should married men, or women, be ordained as priests? Should laypeople play a greater role in governing the Church, including the selection of bishops and the assignment of priests? American Catholics struggled to understand what it was about their Church that had enabled more than fifteen hundred priests to molest minors and had caused numerous bishops to shuffle problem priests from parish to parish rather than fire them or turn them over to prosecutors.
Some Catholics began to predict a wave of change akin to that set off by the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, when the Church's inability to rein in clerical corruption created an opening for Martin Luther to launch a broad theological critique that wound up splitting Western Christianity into Catholicism and Protestantism. Others speculated about some kind of geographic schism, in which U.S. Catholics would break from Rome. Neither scenario was given much credence by theologians, but even Pope John Paul II acknowledged that Catholicism might be forever changed by the events of 2002. “We must be confident that this time of trial will bring a purification of the entire Catholic community,” he told the visiting U.S. cardinals in his sumptuous private library, “a purification that is urgently needed if the Church is to preach more effectively the Gospel of Jesus Christ in all its liberating force.”
The first major call to arms was sounded by Mary Jo Bane, a professor of public policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a member of the parish council at her local church, St. William's, in the Dorchester section of Boston. Bane was no stranger to speaking out — she had drawn national attention by quitting her job as a high-ranking official in the Clinton administration to protest the president's support of a welfare reform measure that she saw as unfair to poor people. But previously she had relied on her Catholic social teaching to impel her lengthy career as a human services advocate and administrator; now she was relying on lessons learned in the secular arena to empower her to challenge her own Church. “I will give no money to the archdiocese until steps are taken to remedy structural and cultural flaws that created the current crisis,” Bane declared in an op-ed piece. “I urge my fellow Catholics to do the same. Perhaps then the cardinal will pay attention to those of us who love the Church, who grieve for what has happened to it, but who hope for what it can become.”
For many Catholics, the apparent coddling of priests who had molested minors stood in sharp contrast with the way they themselves had been treated as kids, threatened with eternal damnation for minor sins. “I remember back in the 1950s if you ate meat on Friday, did not wear a hat or veil to church, or ate breakfast before Communion, you could burn in hell for these sins,” said one Catholic layman, Victor Conlogue. “How come there is no mention of Geoghan going to hell?”
Even worse, many saw evidence of astonishing hypocrisy. A Church that kept paychecks flowing to priests who raped children but cut off benefits to priests who married adult women. A Church that in many cases failed to oust priests who touched the genitals of little boys, violating their bodies and their souls, but that in 2000 fired and evicted the seventy-two-year-old baptizing nun, Jeannette Normandin, for touching water to the forehead of a baby. “I cannot imagine what is going through the mind of a cardinal who lets priests who change wine and bread into the Eucharist use those same hands to molest children,” said a sixty-seven-year-old laywoman, Mary Leveck of San Antonio. “It is sinful of the cardinals and bishops who tried to cover this up.”
For many, the clergy sexual abuse scandal was the final straw in their relationship with the Church hierarchy, a relationship that had been fraying for several generations as U.S. Catholics struggled to balance their American values of democracy and egalitarianism with their Catholic understanding of authority and clericalism. Thousands had simply left the Church — in some cases for other denominations; and in many cases for a life in spiritual exile, still culturally Catholic, but unwilling or unable to participate in the life of a Church whose politics they abhorred. Those who formed organizations to push for change were defined by Church leaders as marginal, fringe, even non-Catholic. In Boston, for example, Law barred Massachusetts Wo men-Church, a group advocating the ordination of women, from meeting on Church property — despite the fact that polls consistently showed that a sizable majority of U.S. Catholics support the ordination of women and the end of mandatory celibacy for priests.
Many scholars have argued that the Church's moral authority began seriously to erode in 1968, when Pope Paul VI, in the encyclical
Humanae Vitae,
reasserted the Church's opposition to the use of artificial birth control. That teaching has been widely ignored, and some argue that it opened the door for Catholics to reject other Church teachings, particularly on sexual matters, without abandoning their faith. The erosion of Catholic authority was aided by sociological factors as well; many Americans, regardless of faith, were according less deference to societal institutions and were increasingly determined to define their own sexual mores. In poll after poll, most Catholics acknowledged that they simply don't agree with Church teachings on birth control, divorce, premarital sex, and homosexuality, and many said they don't agree on abortion, either. Those disagreements led to a kind of religious cognitive dissonance, in which Catholics rejected and ignored the Church's teachings on matters of sexual ethics while embracing the Church's basic articulation of Catholic Christian faith and its rich liturgical practices.
American Catholics, of course, are also part of a larger American society that thrives on dissent, in which critics of corporations demand change through shareholder and public pressure and critics of government force change through the ballot box. In this context, the metaphor of bishops as shepherds and laypeople as sheep increasingly rang hollow. And the timing couldn't have been better for a lay-led transformation. Catholics, once a largely immigrant group in the United States, were now more highly educated and affluent than ever; as a result, they were increasingly confident in their ability to demand the same responsible roles in their Church as they held in other civic institutions. Vatican II, a gathering of the world's bishops from 1962 to 1965, had launched an era of reform in the Church most famously symbolized by the decisions to allow worship in vernacular languages, rather than in Latin, and to allow priests to face worshipers during prayer, rather than an altar along the rear wall of the sanctuary. Over the ensuing several decades, as the number of priests and nuns plummeted, laypeople took on increasingly important roles in the Church, often overseeing and administering parish churches, running Catholic schools, and social service programs, and joining faculties of theology. One sign of the increasing importance of laypeople in the Church came in 2001, when Georgetown University, the oldest Catholic university in the United States, chose as its forty-eighth president John J. DeGioia, the first layman to head the venerable school founded in 1789 by a Catholic archbishop, John Carroll.
Not only has Catholic educational achievement been rising, but a growing minority of lay Catholics are also increasingly knowledgeable about the fundamentals of their own faith. In Boston, St. John's Seminary uses classrooms once intended for priests to train laypeople in theology and ministry. Many saw hope in Vatican II's promise that the
sensus fidelium,
the sense of the faithful, must be heard. “The holy people of God shares also in Christ's prophetic office,” declares
Lumen Gentium,
the dogmatic constitution of the Church. “… The entire body of the faithful, anointed as they are by the Holy One, cannot err in matters of belief.” That seemed clear to Catholics in the pews, if not to the cardinals who gathered at the Vatican.
Any doubt that the cries for reform had penetrated deep within the laity was erased March 9, 2002, the day of Law's annual convocation, a gathering of several thousand lay leaders from around the archdiocese, at the World Trade Center along Boston Harbor.
Many Catholics had been skeptical of the gathering, which was held under tight security, because the participants had been handpicked by parish priests. “Is Cardinal Law's March 9 convocation going to be a listening session, as touted, or a pep rally for Cardinal Law?” wondered one laywoman, Helene O'Brien of Acton, a suburb of Boston. But in a display of how the sexual abuse of minors by priests had galvanized local Catholics, many of the Church's top lay leaders told Law, to his face, that they wanted sweeping reforms of the Church's structure. The archdiocese refused to let reporters attend the six “listening” sessions, but those who were there said that Law appeared stunned by the anger directed at him — in remarks afterward, he acknowledged for the first time that many Catholics felt he had betrayed them. Some laypeople wore lavender ribbons to show their sorrow over the pain experienced by victims of abuse by priests. Others wore white buttons reading, “In Solidarity with Our Priest,” in an effort to demonstrate the widespread concern parishioners were expressing about the psychological impact of the sexual abuse scandal on priests who were not abusers. A group of women from Wellesley wore red, which they said represented their penitence over their Church's conduct. “You've got a pretty outraged flock here,” Paul A. Baier of Wellesley said that day. “And this is the core of the Church. These are three thousand hard-core believers willing to give up a Saturday, and if they're fifty to eighty percent pissed-off, you've got a problem.”
Suddenly parish council members and religious education teachers were giving voice to concerns previously associated only with activist groups such as Call to Action, FutureChurch, and the Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church. “We need to change the whole power structure of the Church,” said Bonnie Ciambotti, a eucharistic minister and religious education teacher from Newton, an upscale suburb west of Boston. “We need more women. The power, and the male dominance, and the secrecy are how this whole thing started.”
“In a strange way, this whole situation has really empowered Catholic people and priests at the parish level,” said Patricia Casey, a member of the parish council at her church, St. Ignatius Loyola, in Newton. “I think we've kind of crossed a line, and I don't think we're going to go back. People will be asking, when we get together next year, ‘What has changed in the Church because of this?’ That's the question of the day.” Another participant, Jane Audrey-Neuhauser, said, “What is significant about this call for renewal and reform is that it does not come from a splinter group outside of Catholic worship but from the leaders, workers, and priests within the parishes of the archdiocese.”