Among the more radical proposals floated at the sessions were calls for a Third Vatican Council, and a suggestion that a coadjutor bishop be appointed in Boston to administer the archdiocese while Law would be required to focus full-time on protecting children. One speaker said the Church needed to make major changes to head off another Reformation. “What came across is that this is a very articulate, well educated, and deeply affected group of people who are going to say the truth,” said Rev. Robert J. Bowers, pastor of St. Catherine of Siena's in the Charlestown section of Boston. “You're seeing loyalty at its very best. These people are going to love the Church into something else, into a new birth.”
Law said he got the message. “I have heard you passionately and prayerfully plead for greater openness in the Church … [and] I have heard calls for greater and more meaningful involvement of the laity in the life of the Church, and specifically of women in the life of the Church,” he said. “I don't have the answers today for all the things that I have heard…. I have heard a great deal. And I need and I want… to really take in what you have offered.” But a month later, as he outlined his goals for the meeting in Rome, Law didn't mention the word
women,
and as soon as the meeting ended, he ordered a crackdown on the most mainstream lay organization to spring up from the crisis, a proposed association of parish councils that Law warned might be divisive.
Dr. James E, Muller could still recall the Gregorian chants echoing from behind the black curtains of the Carmelite monastery of his Indiana childhood, when he served as an altar boy while his uncle said Mass. In his mind's eye, he could see his uncle Paul, the pastor of a large Indianapolis parish, and his aunt Lea, a Sister of Charity who served as vice president of Mount Saint Joseph College in Ohio. He could hear his Catholic teachers, at Joan of Arc grade school and Cathedral High School in Indianapolis; at the University of Notre Dame, where he and his brothers and his father and his uncles went, and where he later sent his son; and at Georgetown University, where he did graduate work. He could cite
Pacem in Terris,
Pope John XXIII's 1963 encyclical on peace, and the writings of Thomas Merton, which together inspired Muller to cofound Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War in 1980, work for which he shared a Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. And he could remember the shame he suddenly felt about his faith in January 2002; how he wanted to smash the glass plaque he had won for celebrating Catholic values; how for the first time in memory he and his wife deliberately skipped Mass and wondered if they could ever go back. He contemplated flight from the Church. But he decided instead to stay and fight from within.
Now, from that basement in the parish school at St. John the Evangelist, the fifty-nine-year-old Muller, a renowned cardiologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and on the clinical staff of Massachusetts General Hospital, was leading a movement that seemed to be spreading like wildfire. Voice of the Faithful's meetings were packed with hundreds of mainstream Catholics, and its website was hosting raging debates on electronic bulletin boards and recording hits from all over the planet, including Vatican City. In just three months of existence, the group attracted 6,800 supporters from all over the Archdiocese of Boston and twenty-two countries around the world.
At his grandest moments, Muller dreamed of unprecedented change. “We are witnessing a conflagration of the hierarchical Catholic Church on a worldwide basis,” he said. “A dense and aged forest with dark shadows and many dying trees is in the final stages of the burn. From the ashes, within months, new life will emerge, green and fragile against the gray. Somewhat later a full, warm, and living landscape will appear — a Catholic Church enriched by the Voice of the Faithful, a pilgrim Church again on its way forward, after centuries of darkness.” His dream seemed unimaginably ambitious: he wanted to enlist half of the world's Catholics, 500 million people, in an international congress of laypeople, with chapters in every parish, that would debate policies and then represent the positions of the faithful in shaping the future of their Church. Muller sought solace from the existence of similar institutions, although much smaller, in Protestant and Jewish denominations, and he insisted there were parallels in the peace movement. “In 1980 the governments were talking about winning a nuclear war, and the people had no voice, so we tried to find the voice of the people against nuclear weapons, and I think it changed the climate for confrontation,” he said. “Now, here we have a billion Catholic laypeople that have no voice against this hierarchy, so we're trying to create a structure in which one fifth of humanity can have a voice.”
Progress was painstaking. The group spent three weeks just trying to hammer out a mission statement. They tried to find consensus on a statement calling for Law to quit, but gave up when nine people objected. At every meeting, a handful of people objected to every action. And each time someone would propose a secular action, such as urging some kind of financial boycott of Church coffers, someone else would get up to propose people pray the Rosary or stage a day of fasting. Muller was hopeful but also realistic. “My nightmare scenario is that the Church successfully papers over the clergy sexual abuse problem and leaves intact an abusive power structure,” he said. “That's why we're moving so fast, why we're meeting four times a week now. Because we know we have to seize the moment.”
Even as the laity was awakening from a long, uneasy slumber, so too were priests. At first, many were shell-shocked, ashamed, scared, and angry. Rev. Robert J. Carr, parochial vicar of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, where Law says Mass whenever he is in town, reported getting catcalls from construction workers as he walked back to his rectory after celebrating Mass for prisoners at the Nashua Street Jail. Rev. Robert Bowers, the Charlestown pastor, recalled a Halloween party at which someone came dressed as a pedophile priest. “Now, when you look out at an audience, it crosses your mind, ‘What do they think of me?’” said Monsignor Peter V. Conley, pastor of St. Jude's Church in Norfolk, a suburb southwest of Boston. “I know a priest who stood outside of his rectory and a car slowed down and a guy yelled out, ‘Hey, pedophile!’ He was in a funk for days.”
But very quickly, some priests also began to realize a new sense of power. As Cardinal Law lost influence, they gained it. Polls taken in February and April showed that even as Law's popularity plummeted, that of parish priests was sky-high — and many priests responded in kind, demonstrating far more sympathy to their parishioners than to their bishop. A number of priests sensed that Law, who had been known for summarily yanking priests out of parishes for even the slightest perceived mistake, could no longer afford to be so authoritarian. The cardinal himself began making noises about attempting to improve relations with his “brother priests.”
Priests began to organize. A few of them had already started a small support group to talk about burnout and loneliness, and that group would be the seed for a much larger organization, ultimately called the Priests’ Forum, which promised to provide a voice for priests who feel alienated by their leaders. They brought in the leading thinkers about the state of the priesthood, including Rev. Richard P. McBrien, a Notre Dame theologian, and Rev. Donald B. Cozzens, the author of
The Changing Face of the Priesthood.
They anticipated discussing tough issues: perhaps suggesting that Law rein in his extensive travel to focus on the needs of Boston, or encouraging him to stop the practice of reassigning priests whose preaching or style of worship has offended Church conservatives. Some wanted to go even further and talk about celibacy. “We need to bring that up for conversation, and discuss the theological ramifications,” said Rev. Paul E. Kilroy, pastor of St. Bernard's Church in Newton. “We are not trying to create a bandwagon for every issue, but we need to find a way to create a ministry so that burnout does not become the soup of the day.”
But as in the lay organizations, achieving consensus on anything proved difficult. Some priests wanted their group to call for Law's resignation, but others argued against it, citing priests’ obligation to be loyal to their bishop. “We want to get the forum off to a positive start with as many priests as we can,” explained one of the forum's leaders, Rev. Walter H. Cuenin of Our Lady Help of Christians in Newton. Nonetheless, chancery officials were clearly getting nervous. In mid-April Law's auxiliary bishops began summoning the eight leaders of the Priests’ Forum for chats that some described as reprimands. Some priests expected Law eventually to try to ban the group; some priests even began to speak of unionizing. “Nothing's going to be the same again,” said Rev. Robert W. Bullock, the seventy-two-year-old pastor of Our Lady of Sorrows Church, as he sat in the front room of the rectory across from his white clapboard church in suburban Sharon, Massachusetts, south of Boston. “We're going through a sea change.”
One change seemed certain as a result of the clergy sexual abuse crisis: never again would the Catholic Church in the United States knowingly allow a sexually abusive priest to have access to children. All over the country, bishops broomed out of churches those priests who had once been accused of misconduct. Numerous bishops, including Cardinal Law, began voluntarily turning over to prosecutors the names of dozens of priests accused of abuse. In many states, such a step was already mandatory; others, including Massachusetts and Colorado, were poised to make it so. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops agreed to devote its June 2002 meeting, in Dallas, to the issue of clergy sexual abuse and was ready for the first time to approve mandatory rules for all 194 dioceses in the United States, a step the bishops’ conference had resisted for nearly two decades. The new requirements would likely insist that all priests who sexually abuse minors be removed from ministry and be reported to prosecutors, that dioceses reach out to victims, and that Church workers be trained to recognize and report indications that a child might have been harmed.
But reformers wanted much more. Many argued that the hierarchy's handling of abusive priests revealed systemic problems with their Church. “It isn't just the cardinal; it's the way we operate,” Bullock said. “There are structural issues. What is it that has made us priests be so supine, and unwilling to stand up and take risks? To speak out when something awful is happening, and not to cover up? To name things for what they are? The leadership has not protected children, and we have not protected children.”
For some, the answer seemed obvious: the all-male, celibate priesthood attracted, created, or facilitated men who were uncomfortable with their own sexuality, and some fraction of those men acted out their sexual maldevelopment in inappropriate ways. Many began to ask, if women were priests, or had any role in the Church power structure, wouldn't they have acted more quickly to protect children? Such questions had been percolating beneath the surface for years, but now laypeople felt free to join the debate. Many pointed out that celibacy, although valued from the earliest days of Christianity and first mandated in the fourth century, was widely enforced only starting in the twelfth century. Defenders of celibacy have described it as a gift, a charism, a witness to sanctity. But critics have noted that celibacy was legislated to avoid the problem of Church property being passed along from a priest to his children. They have also pointed out that today married men can be ordained as Eastern Catholic priests and that there are even a handful of married men serving as Roman Catholic priests — those who were ordained as priests by the Anglican Church but then chose to enter the Catholic Church.
“The issue at the core of this is the reforming of the priesthood,” said Tom O'Neill. “If the cardinal is looking for a role in the future, he should go to His Holiness and provide leadership in the reform of the priesthood. If he's not going to provide the type of leadership needed, he will never win back the backing of the faithful nor be exonerated for his management.”
Numerous scholars have argued that celibacy was the main reason for the plunge in the number of priests in the United Slates, although there clearly were also sociological factors. In the decades after Vatican II, thousands of men left the priesthood, most often to marry women. The number of priests in the United States dropped by 23 percent, from 58,632 in 1965 to 45,191 in 2001, according to Georgetown University's Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. And the research center found other signs of trouble; the number of parishes without a priest skyrocketed, from 549 to 3,151, over those same years, and the average age of priests was rising, so that by 1999 the average diocesan priest was fifty-nine, and 24 percent of all diocesan priests were over age seventy. Catholic University of America sociologist Dean Hoge, who has studied the priesthood extensively, found that dissatisfaction with celibacy was the primary reason priests quit during their first five years, and he predicted that the number of seminarians would quadruple if celibacy were made optional.
Some Church leaders openly began to question mandatory celibacy. Although the Church insists that the ordination of women is theologically off-limits, because Jesus did not call any women as disciples, the proscription against married Roman Catholic priests is not doctrinal and could be changed if a pope were so inclined. “I have no problems with celibacy withering away,” said Archbishop Keith O'Brien, president of the Scottish Bishops’ Conference. “There is no theological problem with it ending. The loss of celibacy would give liberty to priests to exercise their God-given gift of love and sex rather than feeling they must be celibate all their lives.” When asked at a news conference about discussion of priestly celibacy, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles said, “I think all these questions are open.” And Bishop William S. Skylstad of Spokane, the vice president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said that celibacy “is not a doctrinal matter. It's a discipline. I feel it has great merit, but it's not a closed issue.”