Responding to clericalism and sex abuse

Tom Wright
US Catholic
Sept. 18, 2012

Principle:

“In the church all are one in Christ; there is no Greek or Roman, no Jew or Gentile, no male or female”—and no hierarchy of privilege or status or honor conferred by ministerial office or rank alone. All baptized believers immersed in the sacramental life and apostolic works of the Catholic community are to be respected as equal inheritors of the ancient traditions and full participants in the work of redemption, a work accomplished by and through Christ alone. The church, catholic and apostolic, is a graced community of sinners and pilgrims, and those who receive holy orders must never set themselves apart from or above the faithful; to the contrary, the clergy must be subject, like the laity, to the correction and exhortations of all the faithful.

The sexual abuse of children and young adults by a tiny minority of Catholic priests is itself a terrible stain on the institutional church—but the repeated failure of the bishops and other priests to report and remove the perpetrators has magnified and deepened, beyond immediate repair, the erosion of trust and the crisis of faith within the Catholic community.

This moral blindness and outrageous complacency in the face of evil is all the more damning and damaging in that it arises from within a body of Catholic leaders, some of whose most prominent members have been harsh in their judgments of the moral failings of the laity.

Quick to perceive challenges to their authority in the exercise of theological exploration and spiritual creativity, especially among women, they have placed their own “class” of Catholics—the ordained—above recrimination while seldom hesitating to “prune” the church of “dissenters” to their increasingly authoritarian rule. Jealous of their prerogatives as “elites,” they have identified their own often narrow interests with the will of Christ and the good of the church.

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At the heart of the sexual abuse crisis is the sin of clericalism—a constellation of ideas and practices rooted in the conviction that ordination to the priesthood confers a special and privileged status that places the priest above the nonordained baptized by virtue of the sacrament itself, unmoored from its proper setting within the moral life and spiritual pilgrimage of the individual priest. ...........

Mistrust is also at the root of the new and virulent clericalism. Some bishops are convinced that laypeople have become soft, gone over to the dark side, abandoned the faith. There is more than a grain of truth to this diagnosis, perhaps, but the pastoral response has too often been colored by fear and threat rather than by confidence and hope.

Circling the wagons against a hostile world and a laity that cannot be counted on, these enclave priests protect their own, no matter the cost. The non-ordained are once again relegated to coach class.

But this cannot be suffered. Roman Catholicism is a church, not a sect. No head can exist without its body. The faithful are not branches to be pruned but the root that gives life to the great oak.

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Happily, the Catholic Church is big enough for sinners of all stripes, ordained and non-ordained. Blessed Pope John XXIII reminded us of this perennial truth when he wisely called for a suspension of excommunications and a renewal of collegiality and affirmation across “ranks” that had become too rigid and stultifying.

Let us pray fervently for a renewal of the church in this spirit of catholic collegiality, and for the recovery of the genuinely apostolic priesthood that must surely help inspire and accompany such a renewal.

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