euronews: Pope Francis adds 13 like-minded cardinals to Catholic hierarchy

Among the 13 are 10 cardinals who are under age 80 and therefore eligible to vote in a conclave, increasing the likelihood that a future pope might end up looking an awful lot like the current one. These are churchmen who care for migrants, promote dialogue with Muslims and minister to the faithful in poor, far-flung missionary posts.

With Saturday's consistory, Francis will have named 52% of the voting-age cardinals. Many hail from churches in the developing world, a sign of Francis' desire to mirror the universal face of the Catholic Church in its leadership ranks. [...]

The consistory comes at a fraught time in Francis' six-year papacy. Opposition is mounting among conservative Catholics who disapprove of his emphasis on the environment, migrants and other issues rather than the doctrinaire focus of his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI.

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Commonweal Magazine: Women & the Diaconate

Paul VI’s commission on women initially seemed to have a very limited mandate: it was to last for only one year and its mission was not clear. The Roman Curia did not conceal its hostility to the project. As the commission began its work, someone from the Curia leaked to the press a memo making clear that the commission would not address the issue of women’s ordination. The memo insisted that the commission would concern itself only with the question of women in the apostolate, not women in ministry.

The commission gave an interim report to the 1974 Bishops’ Synod, as tensions mounted between the women members of the commission and Paul VI. In August 1975 Archbishop Bartoletti sent Paul VI a memo requesting that the pope provide a theological and ecclesiological rationale for the rule against the ordination of women, pointing out the insufficiency of a judgment based only on discipline and tradition. This was during the period when Inter insigniores was being drafted. That declaration of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, release the following year, formally denied women access to the priesthood. In short, the whole ecclesiastical context in which the women’s commission had to do its work was hostile to any change on the issue of women and ministry. An earlier motu proprio Ministeria quaedam (1972), which instituted the ministries of the lectorate and the accolitate, also excluded women. The International Theological Commission, which had published a document on priestly ministry in 1970, was asked to prepare a report on women in the diaconate, which has never been published. [...]

But among the bishops—not to mention the whole people of God, including theologians—there is a wide variety of opinions about women deacons, a wider variety than there was in the 1970s. In the past two or three decades, and especially during the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the debate about women deacons has remained limited mostly to specialists, but the theological reflection supporting the women’s diaconate and the current ecumenical situation (some Orthodox Churches have recently reintroduced women deacons) are much more favorable to such a development in the Catholic Church than they were in the 1970s. The role of women in the church is now an important one throughout the church in a way that it was not in the 1970s. It is no longer an issue only in the Northern hemisphere; it is being discussed in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. And the discussion is likely to continue and grow in intensity no matter what the pope’s position on the issue. [...]

A first step would be to publish all the reports on the women’s diaconate, starting with those commissioned in the 1970s and including those commissioned under Francis. The discussion needs to be an open discussion if it is going to get anywhere. A second step would be to make the discussion synodal—which would require a synod ad hoc on women in the church. Why a synod? Because the discussion should be about not only the history of women’s ministry (the preserve of experts) but also the theology. A commission of experts can and should go only so far in this issue. I repeat here what I wrote in 2016 before the announcement of the commission by Francis: we should disabuse ourselves of the naïve belief that agreement about the historical evidence of women deacons and the role of the diaconate in the early church can resolve this controversy. Appeals to history are rarely conclusive in theological debates, and they can easily backfire. It is traditionalist Catholics, not progressives, who are supposed to believe that something is legitimate only to the degree that it is not new.

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Commonweal Magazine: What Benedict’s Letter on Abuse Gets Wrong

Or should clergy sex abuse be understood most basically as a grave act of sacrilege? If so, clergy sex abuse should be grouped with other acts of sacrilege, such as desecration of the Host, blasphemy against the Blessed Mother, and the commission of any serious moral wrong inside a holy place. From this perspective, the fact that the perpetrator is a priest does not merely exacerbate the wrongful act; it constitutes the core of it. The priest is befouling his holy vows. The fact that he does so by abusing a child adds to the wrong, but does not change its core moral description—it is an act of sacrilege, akin to celebrating a Black Mass.

Benedict’s letter seems to put clergy sex abuse in the category of sacrilege, not injustice. He does not use the term “sacrilege.” But it is the category that best fits his account of why the act is wrong, especially when sacrilege is understood broadly as a violation or misuse of the sacred. He presents the major victim as the Faith itself—not the children whose integrity was violated. According to Benedict, the “alarming situation” is that “the Faith no longer appears to have the rank of a good requiring protection.” What bothers him most about one of the human victims he encountered is that she can no longer hear the words of consecration without distress, because her priest-attacker used them in the course of the abuse. He says nothing about how the abuse would have affected the entire course of her life. He does not issue a forceful call to protect children, but rather implores us to “do all we can to protect the gift of the Holy Eucharist from abuse.”

Benedict’s approach has dangerous consequences. If the real victim is the Faith, then the overriding task is to protect the institution of the church, which instantiates the mystical Body of Christ in time. If the worst consequence of the crisis is the widespread loss of faith in the church’s credibility, then it is better to handle specific instances quietly—so as not to scandalize the faithful. Offending priests should be quickly laicized, so that they do not continue to befoul the Body of Christ. Once they are no longer part of the hierarchy, they are no longer the church’s problem. Victims should be encouraged to remain quiet, perhaps with a legally binding confidentiality agreement, so they don’t erode the church’s ability to pass on the faith. They should be discouraged from seeking monetary damages from the church, since it is the original and primary victim of the priest’s transgression. Finally, secular law enforcement should not be involved in most cases, since their involvement occludes the mystical and transcendent nature of the problem.

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The Atlantic: Abolish the Priesthood

The Church’s maleness and misogyny became inseparable from its structure. The conceptual underpinnings of clericalism can be laid out simply: Women were subservient to men. Laypeople were subservient to priests, who were defined as having been made “ontologically” superior by the sacrament of holy orders. Removed by celibacy from competing bonds of family and obligation, priests were slotted into a clerical hierarchy that replicated the medieval feudal order. When I became a priest, I placed my hands between the hands of the bishop ordaining me—a feudal gesture derived from the homage of a vassal to his lord. In my case, the bishop was Terence Cooke, the archbishop of New York. Following this rubric of the sacrament, I gave my loyalty to him, not to a set of principles or ideals, or even to the Church. Should we be surprised that men invited to think of themselves on such a scale of power—even as an alter Christus, “another Christ”—might get lost in a wilderness of self-centeredness? Or that they might find it hard to break from the feudal order that provides community and preferment, not to mention an elevated status the unordained will never enjoy? Or that Church law provides for the excommunication of any woman who attempts to say the Mass, but mandates no such penalty for a pedophile priest? Clericalism is self-fulfilling and self-sustaining. It thrives on secrecy, and it looks after itself. [...]

Events in subsequent months only magnified the scale of the Church’s failure. With maddening equilibrium, Pope Francis acknowledged, in response to a reporter’s question early this year, that the rape of nuns by priests and bishops remains a mostly unaddressed Catholic problem. In Africa, once AIDS became common, priests began coercing nuns into becoming sexual servants, because, as virgins, they would likely not carry the HIV virus. It was reportedly common for such priests to sponsor abortions when the nuns became pregnant. “It’s true,” Francis said calmly. “There are priests and bishops who have done that.” Nuns have come forward in India to charge priests with rape. In April, a bishop was charged with the rape and illegal confinement of a nun, whom he allegedly assaulted regularly over two years, in the southern state of Kerala. (The bishop has denied the charges.) The nun said she reported the bishop to the police only after appealing to Church authorities repeatedly—and being ignored. [...]

Pope Francis expresses “shame and sorrow” over the sexual abuse of children by priests, yet he instinctively defends perpetrators against their accusers. He has called clericalism “a perversion of the Church.” But what does he actually mean by that? He denounces the clerical culture in which abuse has found its niche but does nothing to dismantle it. In his responses, he embodies that culture. I was never surprised when his papal predecessors behaved this way—when, for instance, Cardinal Ratzinger, before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, prohibited bishops from referring cases of predator priests to civil authorities, binding them under what he called the “pontifical secret.” Even now, as a supposedly sidelined pope emeritus, Ratzinger is still defending the old order. In April he published, in a Bavarian periodical, a diatribe that was extraordinary as much for its vanity as for its ignorance. Benedict blamed sex abuse by priests on the moral laxity of the 1960s, the godlessness of contemporary culture, the existence of homosexual cliques in seminaries—and the way his own writings have been ignored. His complaint offered a barely veiled rebuttal to the pontificate of his successor, and is sure to reenergize the present pope’s right-wing critics. But alas, the pope emeritus and his allies may not have real cause for worry. That an otherwise revolutionary pope like Francis demonstrates personally the indestructibility of clericalism is the revelation. [...]

The model of potential transformation for this or any pope remains the radical post-Holocaust revision of Catholic teachings about Jews—the high point of Vatican II. The formal renunciation of the “Christ killer” slander by a solemn Church council, together with the affirmation of the integrity of Judaism, reaches far more deeply into Catholic doctrine and tradition than anything having to do with the overthrow of clericalism, whether that involves women’s ordination, married priests, or other questions of sexuality. The recasting of the Church’s relationship with the Jewish people, as I see it, was the single largest revision of Christian theology ever accomplished. The habit of Catholic (or Christian) anti-Judaism is not fully broken, but its theological justification has been expunged. Under the assertive leadership of a pope, profound change can occur, and it can occur quickly. This is what must happen now.

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UnHerd: Sex, sin and the Catholics

Secondly, Vatican II mostly ignored what Loyola professor Stephen R. Schloesser calls “biopolitics” – issues of sex, reproduction and the regulation of the human body. In some ways, this oversight was understandable. Many of the defining moments of modern biopolitics – the Stonewall Riots and the subsequent gay rights movement; Roe v. Wade; legalization of no-fault divorces and the widespread use of “the pill” in western societies – did not occur until after Vatican II concluded. But by offering little guidance on these issues, Vatican II created an opening for more conservative bishops to reassert their influence and put the brakes on what they saw an immoral Leftward shift in the Church. [...]

This conspiracy theory has only grown since the sexual abuse scandal broke. Conservative Catholic leaders and groups like the American-based Catholic League use the fact that the victims of abuse have been mostly boys as “proof” that the abuse is homosexual rather than paedophilic in nature. The abuse is, supposedly, just another form of the “self-indulgence” towards which gay priests are inclined. Pope Francis’ opponents – such as Carlo Maria Viganò, a disgruntled former Vatican ambassador to the United States – explicitly make this argument and accuse Francis of ignoring or even placating the “gay mafia” to the detriment of the Church. [...]

Instead of changing doctrines about sin, Pope Francis has attempted to emphasise those concerning humility and Amoris laetiti, “the joy of love” – as the address he gave after the Synods on the Family was called. Instead of discussing sex in terms of restrictions and prohibitions, Francis has attempted to emphasise the role of sex as “a gift from God”. And rather than searching for a “homosexual clique” at the centre of the Church’s problems, the Pope is seeking to directly hold abusive priests and their enablers to account and to change the culture that encouraged the Church to avoid scandal at the cost of not protecting its most vulnerable members. [...]

Francis’ Church would be one in which LGBTQ Catholics, divorcees, the remarried and those using birth control could participate in the public life of the Church, while they (and their priests) perhaps squint at the particulars of certain doctrines on which they disagree. It would be a Church where women feel respected and valued, even if their roles do not match their male counterparts. And it would be a Church where bishops and priests feel a solemn duty to protect the youngest and most vulnerable members of their flock from abuse – and take swift action against colleagues who violate their trust, without searching for ways to deflect blame.

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The Atlantic: Pope Benedict Says Blame the ’60s for Priests’ Abuse

Benedict didn’t stay in the background. Instead, he published a letter that is incoherent, inaccurate, and at times truly bizarre. In his letter, he wrote that the news of the February conference had compelled him to action. “I compiled some notes by which I might contribute one or two remarks to assist in this difficult hour,” he wrote.[...]

In his letter, Benedict said the crisis started in the second half of the 1980s. This is not true. He himself, as prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal office, handled abuse cases sent to the Vatican dated before then. He also managed an investigation into the Legionaries of Christ and its charismatic Mexican founder, the Reverend Marcial Maciel Dellogado, who was later found to have molested seminarians and fathered several children well before the ’80s. (He left the Legionaries out of the letter.) [...]

Why did Benedict even publish this thing? Benedict’s longtime personal secretary, Monsignor Georg Gänswein, told The New York Times that the pope had published his reflections of his own accord. The letter appeared in several archconservative outlets that have been critical of Francis and that also published a bombshell letter last summer in which an archbishop said the Vatican was full of “gay lobbies.”

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Haaretz: Sex Parties, Drugs and Gay Escorts at the Pope's Residence: Undercover in the Vatican

This is not the only affair that Martel mentions from the period of Benedict XVI. He devotes a special chapter to the pope’s visit to Cuba in 2012. The visit, which was supposed to be a historic event in one of the last bastions of communism, devastated the pope. Backed by testimonies of high-level figures in the Vatican who accompanied the pope on the journey, and offering a vivid, concrete description, the chapter captures the despair that seized the pope when he grasped the scale of the homosexual prostitution and the pedophilia within the ranks of the Church there. What was flagrantly monstrous in the Cuban case was that the Castro regime knew what was going on within the Church and turned a blind eye, in return for the full cooperation of the Havana archbishopric with the regime.[...]

Martel also devotes a long chapter to the man who, in his view, was the most abhorrent pope of all – Paul VI, one of the strictest and most conservative leaders of the Catholic Church. In the face of the sexual revolution, in the 1960s, this pope toughened the Church’s stance: against the pill, against masturbation, against homosexuality. But as in many cases in which it turned out afterward that the most ardent combatants against sexual permissiveness were also the prime suspects, Martel elaborates on the rumors and gossip that were rife in the Italian press about a romantic relationship between the pontiff and a theater and TV actor named Palo Carlini, the vigorous denials and the ultimate dismissal of suspicions by none other than Ratzinger himself, who signed the decree that led to the title “Venerable,” and later sainthood, being conferred on Paul. [...]

“In order to familiarize yourself with the world of male prostitutes around Rome’s central station, you need to be multilingual and speak Romanian, Arabic, Portuguese and Spanish. I was helped a great deal in learning about these goings-on by a young man named Mohammed, who in return for a drink or a meal gave me information about what was happening in the neighborhood. Mohammed is a Tunisian who works with two friends, Billal and Sami, as prostitutes in Rome. I had another collaborator, Gabi, a young Romanian sex worker from Bucharest. He told me that from his point of view, the busiest days for work are Fridays, when the priests leave the Vatican in civilian attire, and Sunday afternoon, when the boredom in the Vatican drives them outside. He can identify them by the crucifix around their neck when they disrobe, but also without that – by the stress they’re under. Sometimes the priest takes him in to the Vatican. If the priest is a bigwig, they tell me, he will get paid generously, sometimes 100 or 200 euros instead of the usual 50 to 60. Some of them showed me proudly the phone numbers of the priests they visit regularly. [...]

“I interviewed quite a few graduates of seminaries. In my estimation, 75 percent of those who attend the seminaries are gay. All of them told me that in our day, masturbation, which in the past was a subject not mentioned in public, has become, at the Vatican’s instructions, a central issue in the training of priests. The reason is no longer the biblical injunction against spilling your seed in vain, but the need to exercise totalitarian supervision over the young man who is cut off from his family and from his body: It’s the negation of personality in the service of the collective. The Church’s opposition to masturbation became an idée fixe, utterly insane, with the result that those who masturbate necessarily live in a kind of ‘closet’ within a closet – a kind of doubly locked homosexual identity. What a shame for the Church, which is fighting masturbation more than it is fighting pedophilia. That says it all.”

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The Guardian: Brutal and dogmatic, George Pell waged war on sex – even as he abused children

As an archbishop in Melbourne and a cardinal in Sydney Pell poured his energies into combating contraception, homosexuality, genetic engineering, divorce, equal marriage and abortion.

He was particularly brutal to gay people. When a wreath was laid outside St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne in memory of gay students in Catholic schools driven to suicide, Pell’s disdain was absolute.

“I haven’t got good statistics on the reasons for those suicides,” he declared. “If they are connected with homosexuality, it is another reason to be discouraging people going in that direction. Homosexual activity is a much greater health hazard than smoking.”[...]

Pell did nothing to curb paedophile priests in his years as auxiliary bishop, though the predations of some of the worst of them were being reported to him. He didn’t know enough, he would claim, and he didn’t have the authority to act. Despite the pleas of parents and teachers, Pell left mad Father Searson, toting a gun and terrifying children, in charge of the primary school in Doveton.

His elevation to archbishop shocked Melbourne Catholics. But he didn’t need to be loved by them. He didn’t need their votes. His authority came from Rome, where he sat on a number of councils policing church doctrine. These were the years the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith worked up fresh hard teachings to revile homosexuals.[...]

If you wanted to build a network of Catholic universities, Pell was your man. If you wanted to save hundreds of millions of dollars that victims of abuse might win in the courts, Pell was your man. If you wanted to block official inquiries into the abuse of children by clerics for as long as humanly possible, Pell was your man.

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The Atlantic: The Spotlight Effect: This Church Scandal Was Revealed by Outsiders

But it’s also an acknowledgment of how this conference would never be happening, and the dark secret of clerical sexual abuse and cover-up might never have come to light, if not for outsiders to the hierarchy: journalists, civil authorities, films, women who listened to the victims (or who were victims themselves). They helped reveal a pattern of concealment within the Church and drove a shift in the culture.[...]

To my mind, Archbishop Scicluna is the most powerful Vatican official with a full understanding of the scope of the crisis (although what changes he wants to see and whether he has the power to make them is another question). His words—albeit tailored to an audience of journalists, rather than members of the hierarchy—mark a shift for the Vatican, a way of saying not only that something horrible happened, but that it was outsiders who raised alarm bells. There’s less talk now of how the sexual revolution caused clergy to carry out abuse, or that children had somehow led priests into temptation, as there was back in 2002. Vatican officials no longer call media coverage of abuse cases “calumnious attacks” on the Church, as some did in the 2010 flare-up of the crisis under Francis’s predecessor, Benedict XIV.[...]

Huggins is also part of another group of outsiders to Church hierarchy that has become more and more vocal: women. In November, the organization representing the world’s Catholic women’s religious orders denounced the “culture of silence and secrecy” that contributed to abuse, and urged nuns to report abuse to law enforcement. This month, Francis acknowledged another Church scandal in which nuns had been sexually abused by priests for years, and said the Church was working to address the issue.

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The Atlantic: Catholic Church’s Battle Between Rhetoric and Reality

So it was striking on Thursday to hear two of the conference’s opening speakers use the term crimes in no uncertain terms—a marked change from Vatican rhetoric of the past. “An essential aspect of the exercise of stewardship in these cases is the proper interface with civil jurisdiction. We are talking about misconduct that is also a crime in all civil jurisdictions,” said Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, who spent a decade as the Vatican’s top investigator on abuse cases. He later said it was important for the Church to move “from a culture of silence” to “a culture of disclosure.”

The give and take between Church and state can also be opaque. Even today, in the most advanced democracies where the crisis has erupted—the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, France—the decision for a diocese to report an abuser to the police is still a matter of interpretation and context, not canon law. Seventeen years after the sexual-abuse crisis erupted in Boston toward the end of the papacy of John Paul II, and after it reemerged in 2010 under Benedict XVI, Church norms on the issue are still difficult to understand, not just for outsiders, but for the clerics who must uphold them. [...]

This week, Monsignor Scicluna said he was pleased that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the body that defends Catholic doctrine, increased the number of canon lawyers from 10 to 17. In the past, Francis has said that the CDF handles about 2,000 cases at a time. The backlog is enormous. The numbers are chilling. The Holy See has said that in the past decade, 3,420 credible cases of abuse worldwide were reported to the CDF, while in the United States, the Catholic Church has said that 6,900 priests have been credibly accused since 1950, according to BishopAccountability.org, an advocacy organization. [...]

It was also significant that the attendees watched painful video testimony from victims from around the world, including Africa and Asia. One woman testified that she had had a sexual relationship with a priest for 13 years, starting at age 15, and that he had forced her to get three abortions because he refused to use birth control. “I feel I have a life destroyed,” she said, according to a transcript provided by the Vatican. “He gave me everything I wanted, when I accepted to have sex; otherwise he would beat me,” she said.

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The Atlantic: Why Does the Catholic Church Keep Failing on Sexual Abuse?

Perhaps the most pressing problem for the Church is how it deals with failures at the very top—and in other countries where abuse cases are only now beginning to surface. “The lacuna in the Charter is around accountability of bishops,” O’Malley said. This is the first in a long list of problems that have bedeviled Church leaders and exacerbated mistrust among survivors and parishioners. Bishops, whose leadership role in the Church is supposedly modeled after Jesus’s apostles, often serve as the highest-ranking Catholic officials located in a given area. But even senior clergy have little ability to exercise control over one another. Currently, there is no formal mechanism in place for punishing or removing one of the thousands of Catholic bishops across the world when he is accused of wrongdoing, short of the intervention of the pope. [...]

But even in Boston, where the archdiocese released a list of credibly accused priests in 2011, the disclosures have been controversial and confusing. For one thing, abusive priests serving in the Boston area who belonged to religious orders, such as the Jesuits, were not included on the archdiocese’s 2011 list. According to O’Malley’s letter from the time, “the Boston Archdiocese does not determine the outcome in such cases; that is the responsibility of the priest’s order or diocese.” The cardinal expressed “hope that other dioceses and religious orders will review our new policy and consider making similar information available to the public.” Many of these organizations, which are all accountable to different civil laws, have still not done so. [...]

Fundamentally, there is a gap between the way the Catholic hierarchy seems to imagine the solution to the sex-abuse crisis and what the public—even Catholic laypeople—sees as possible ways forward: radical changes to the priesthood, including eliminating the requirement of celibacy, and greater roles for women and laypeople in the hierarchy. “It may be at a point now where, regardless of how ancient [the Church] is, for it to survive, it’s going to need to be willing to consider changes … to the way the organization runs,” says Helen Drinan, the president of Simmons University and the former senior vice president for human resources at Caritas Christi, a now defunct Roman Catholic hospital system that was once the second-largest health-care provider in New England. [...]

Popes lead the global Roman Catholic Church, and yet on the issue of sexual abuse, they have often been among the last to recognize the full gravity of the problem, or to act. Perhaps this is a function of insulation, and caution by Roman advisers. Perhaps this was compounded by the bias, held erroneously for so long in the Church, that sexual abuse is an American problem, and is effectively a local concern. It has taken nearly two decades since the revelations in Boston for a pope to bring top clergy together for an extensive discussion on sexual abuse. But even Francis has cautioned against “inflated expectations” for the February meeting: “The problem of abuse will continue,” the pope said at a recent press conference.

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Al Jazeera: Pope Francis admits priests, bishops sexually abused nuns

"And I think that it's continuing because it's not like once you realise it that it stops. It continues. And for some time we've been working on it," he said.

The February issue of Women Church World, a supplement distributed with the Vatican's Osservatore Romano newspaper, stated that nuns have been silent over abuse for decades for fear of retaliation.[...]

The pope has summoned the heads of some 110 national Catholic bishops' conferences and dozens of experts and leaders of religious orders to the Vatican from February 21 to 24 for an extraordinary meeting on the sexual abuse crisis.[...]

Pope Francis said Pope Benedict XVI had taken action against a France-based order after some of its religious sisters were reduced to "sexual slavery" at the hands of the priest who founded the order and other priests within it.

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The New York Review of Books: The Sins of Celibacy

The case of Cardinal McCarrick, which figures heavily in Viganò’s letter, is emblematic of the church’s failure to act on the problem of sexual abuse—and of the tendentiousness of the letter itself. In the 1980s stories began to circulate that McCarrick had invited young seminarians to his beach house and asked them to share his bed. Despite explicit allegations that were relayed to Rome, in 2000 Pope John Paul II appointed him archbishop of Washington, D.C., and made him a cardinal. Viganò speculates that the pope was too ill to know about the allegations, but does not mention that the appointment came five years before John Paul’s death. He also praises Benedict XVI for finally taking action against McCarrick by sentencing him to a life of retirement and penance, and then accuses Francis of revoking the punishment and relying on McCarrick for advice on important church appointments. If Benedict did in fact punish McCarrick, it was a very well kept secret, because he continued to appear at major church events and celebrate mass; he was even photographed with Viganò at a church celebration. [...]

The greatest responsibility for the problem of sexual abuse in the church clearly lies with Pope John Paul II, who turned a blind eye to it for more than twenty years. From the mid-1980s to 2004, the church spent $2.6 billion settling lawsuits in the US, mostly paying victims to remain silent. Cases in Ireland, Australia, England, Canada, and Mexico followed the same depressing pattern: victims were ignored or bullied, even as offending priests were quietly transferred to new parishes, where they often abused again. “John Paul knew the score: he protected the guilty priests and he protected the bishops who covered for them, he protected the institution from scandal,” I was told in a telephone interview by Father Thomas Doyle, a canon lawyer who was tasked by the papal nuncio to the US with investigating abuse by priests while working at the Vatican embassy in Washington in the mid-1980s, when the first lawsuits began to be filed. [...]

Francis’s election inspired great hopes for reform. But those who expected him to make a clean break with this history of equivocation and half-measures have been disappointed. He hesitated, for example, to meet with victims of sexual abuse during his visit to Chile in January 2018 and then insulted them by insisting that their claims that the local bishop had covered up the crimes of a notorious abuser were “calumny.” In early October, he expelled from the priesthood two retired Chilean bishops who had been accused of abuse. But when he accepted the resignation of Cardinal Donald Wuerl—who according to the Pennsylvania grand jury report repeatedly mishandled accusations of abuse when he was bishop of Pittsburgh—he praised Wuerl for his “nobility.” Francis seems to take one step forward and then one step backward. [...]

There is some self-selection by priests who agree to answer questions or fill out questionnaires or seek treatment, which is why the estimates on, say, gay priests vary so widely. But the studies are consistent in showing high percentages of sexually active priests and of gay priests. As Thomas Doyle wrote in 2004, “Knowledgeable observers, including authorities within the Church, estimate that 40–50 percent of all Catholic priests have a homosexual orientation, and that half of these are sexually active.” Sipe came to the conclusion that “50 percent of American clergy were sexually active…and between 20 and 30 percent have a homosexual orientation and yet maintained their celibacy in an equal proportion with heterosexually oriented clergy.” [...]

The obsession with enforcing unenforceable standards of sexual continence that run contrary to human nature (according to one study, 95 percent of priests report that they masturbate) has led to an extremely unhealthy atmosphere within the modern church that contributed greatly to the sexual abuse crisis. A 1971 Loyola Study, which was also commissioned by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, concluded that a large majority of American priests were psychologically immature, underdeveloped, or maldeveloped. It also found that a solid majority of priests—including those ordained in the 1940s, well before the sexual revolution—described themselves as very or somewhat sexually active.

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The New York Review of Books: The Priesthood of The Big Crazy

A wise man once told me that we humans are all at one time or another a little crazy on the subject of sex. A little crazy, yes. But Catholic priests are charged with maintaining The Big Crazy on sex all the time. These functionaries of the church are formally supposed to believe and preach sexual sillinesses, from gross denial to outright absurdity, on the broadest range of issues—masturbation, artificial insemination, contraception, sex before marriage, oral sex, vasectomy, homosexuality, gender choice, abortion, divorce, priestly celibacy, male-only priests—and uphold the church’s “doctrines,” no matter how demented.

Some priests are humane or common-sensible enough to ignore some parts of this impossibly severe set of rules, which gives them reason to be selective about sexual matters. Since scripture says nothing about most of these subjects, popes have claimed a power to define “natural law.” But the nineteenth-century English theologian John Henry Newman was right when he said, “The Pope, who comes of Revelation, has no jurisdiction over Nature.” That would be true even if the natural law being invoked had some philosophical depth, but Catholics are asked to accept childish versions of “natural law.” For instance, since the “natural” use of sex is to beget children, any use apart from that is sinful, and mortally sinful. Masturbate and you go to hell (unless, of course, you confess the sin to a priest, which gives an ordained predator the chance to be “comforting” about masturbation).

Contraception prevents the “natural” begetting? Condoms are a ticket to damnation. Homosexuality gives no “natural” progeny? Straight to hell! This is like saying that the “natural” aim of eating is for maintenance of life, so any eating that is not necessary for bodily preservation is a sin. Toast someone with champagne and you go to hell. “The church” adopted this simpleton’s view of natural law only after it had to abandon an equally childish argument from scripture. Pope Pius XI in his 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii noted that Onan was condemned to death for coitus interruptus with his brother’s widow, when “he spilled it [his seed] on the ground” (Genesis 38: 9-10). Dorothy Parker said she called her parrot Onan because it certainly spilled its seed on the ground. When Bible scholars pointed out that the Genesis passage concerned levirate marriage, later popes had to invent a lame natural law argument to replace the lame scriptural argument. [...]

Many victims of abuse by priests have made the mistake of reporting their charges to a bishop. They should have gone straight to a secular authority. To expect from the celibate clergy either candor or good sense on sexual matters is a fool’s game. The Vatican II Council proclaimed that the church is the people of God, not their rulers. The hierarchy, when it opposes the laity, makes itself the enemy of the church, not its embodiment. There are no priests in the Gospels (except Jewish priests at the Temple). Peter and Paul never called themselves or anyone else a priest. Jesus is not called a priest in the New Testament apart from a goofy claim in the late and suspect “Letter to the Hebrews,” in which Jesus is said to be a priest not in any Jewish line, but in that of a non-Jewish, so-called priest named Melchizedek, who can never die.

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The New Yorker: Will Pope Francis Cause a Schism in the Catholic Church?

Francis seems less intent on altering the Church’s most controversial doctrines than on exhibiting boredom with the whole angst-ridden discourse that surrounds them. When he was asked about footnote 351, shortly after “Amoris Laetitia” was published, he said that he couldn’t remember it. Earlier in his papacy, while fielding questions from the Vatican press corps on a plane, he was asked about the Church’s stance on homosexuality. He replied, “Who am I to judge?” It sounded more like a plea to move past the issue than like an actual invocation of humility. (After all, when it comes to society’s market-driven indifference to the poor, or even to Francis’s pet theological causes, such as devotion to the Virgin Mary, he is not shy about offering judgments.) Francis quickly became popular in the press, and among liberal non-Catholics. After the worst years of the clerical-abuse crisis in the Church, here was a leader who embodied Catholicism’s lastingly positive, if comparatively abstract, associations. (Few of us imagine ourselves as opposed to love, mercy, and human dignity.) He sounded willing, even eager, to leave the less comfortable conversations—about divorce, contraception, homosexuality—behind.

But the appeal of the institution of the Papacy, for many, lies in its promise of constancy. According to Catholic teaching, the office was created when Christ named the apostle Peter the first leader of the Church, saying, in a pun on the Greek meaning of Peter’s name, “Upon this rock will I build my church.” The more impressive the edifice you’d like to build, the more important a stable base becomes. Today, under Francis, and in the wake of Benedict’s resignation—he is now Pope Emeritus, a title that has never existed before—the Papacy has become the site for unexpected shifts and discontinuities. Hence, in part, the fierce reactions of Francis’s critics, some of whom, like Spaemann, have come to understand the clash over “Amoris” as a crisis. In becoming implicitly more amenable to divorce—and, by extension, to other ills of the wider culture—the Church, they worry, might cease, permanently, in any recognizable way, to be itself. [...]

Benedict is surely right to push back against those depictions. For all Francis’s facility with symbols and grand gestures, he has not instituted a break from Church teaching but, rather, a shift in focus from text to practice, from household rules to daily life. He is not, as some of his most strident critics have implied, indifferent to doctrine; it is more that his emphases, and his cryptic silences, have helped coax into view an ideal long cherished by liberal—and, often, lapsed—Catholics: a Church whose appeal lies in its engagement with, and not its retreat from, the wider world. It is unclear whether Francis sees himself in this light. Sometimes he seems to be a figure of convenience for political and cultural élites who have tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to marshal his universalist message against the recent global upswing of nativist-nationalist political sentiment—while, at the same time, and mostly successfully, resisting or ignoring his critiques of modern technology and economics.

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America Magazine: Five Years of Francis: The Keys to His Papacy

The sheer surprise of Francis’ election was also a factor. John Paul II had been pope for 26 years at the time of his death, and his doctrinal wingman, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was elected to succeed him in 2005 as Benedict XVI. The combined pontificates represented 35 years of a traditional reorientation in the church, and those two popes had named all of the 113 cardinals who went into the 2013 conclave. [...]

But the hallmark of Francis’ papacy, and the source of the gravitational draw of his personality, is not about some tectonic shift in the church. Rather, it is a commitment to reforming the church first in order to serve the flock truly and bear genuine and convincing witness to Christ’s teachings. [...]

Benedict XVI was wiser about the need for the church to renew itself. But he insisted that all the tools and traditions were already at hand. He had neither the energy nor the administrative skill to open the church to reform and instead sought to highlight tradition and beauty and liturgy as the irresistible draw that would outshine the church’s obvious flaws. Both John Paul and Benedict, in other words, saw themselves as pastors who went out in order to bring others back to their fold, through their own gate. [...]

Prosaic as it sounds, part of the answer lies in the numbers. By the end of 2017, Francis had named just under half of the 120 cardinals who could cast a ballot in the next papal election. A two-thirds supermajority is needed to elect a pope, so it is not as though he has “packed” the College of Cardinals. To be sure, many of the cardinals appointed by Benedict and John Paul are happy about the direction in which Francis is taking the church. But others are dismayed, to say the least, and still others are perhaps unnerved by the tumult that has been stirred by Francis’ critics and may want a compromise candidate as his successor, someone less prone to stirring the pot. On the other hand, a principal dynamic at work in the 2013 conclave—an effort by a large majority of the cardinals, whatever their orientation, to rebalance the power equation between the Vatican and local dioceses—endures and could play a central role again.

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Salon: How the Catholic Church’s hierarchy makes it difficult to punish sexual abusers

While priests in many countries are mandated both by the church and civil law to report sexual abuse to church commissions and legal authorities, there has been a culture of denial and secrecy that prevented allegations from being fully investigated. A 1962 Vatican document instructed bishops to observe the strictest secrecy in sexual abuse cases and to address sexual abuse, or “solicitation,” as an internal church matter, not as an offense that should be reported to local authorities.

Despite establishing a commission to look into the problem and address a backlog of cases, Pope Francis has still not established any protocol for handling sex abuse allegations for the Catholic Church as a whole. But the pope has set guidelines for removing bishops who have been “negligent” in addressing cases of abuse. Still, some commentators believe this is not enough. [...]

In another case from the late 1940s, Marcial Maciel, the Mexican founder of a religious order, The Legionaries of Christ, was a sexual abuser multiple times over. When allegations against Maciel were initially raised, John Paul II ignored them. Joseph Ratzinger, John Paul II’s confident and later successor, remarked: “one can’t put on trial such a close friend of the pope.” Though Maciel was eventually disciplined by Ratzinger when he took over as Pope Benedict XVI, Maciel avoided prosecution until his death in 2008.

In the United States, Cardinal Bernard Law, who protected abuser priests in the Boston archdiocese during his 1984-2004 tenure, has also escaped prosecution. In fact, Law was effectively promoted to a prestigious position as head of one of Catholicism’s most famous churches, Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.

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The Guardian: Benedict endorses Pope Francis in unprecedented Vatican ceremony

Benedict XVI has endorsed Pope Francis’s ministry in an unprecedented Vatican ceremony featuring a reigning pontiff honouring a retired one on the 65th anniversary of his ordination as a priest.

The ceremony in the Clementine Hall of the Apostolic Palace served in part to show continuity from Benedict to Francis amid continued nostalgia from some conservatives for the former’s tradition-minded papacy. [...]

While Francis presided, it was Benedict who stole the show with an off-the-cuff mini theology lesson sprinkled with Greek and Latin that showed that the mind of the German theologian is still going strong at 89.

In it, Benedict thanked Francis for letting him live out his final years in the beauty of the Vatican gardens, where he said he felt protected.

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