April 2002 Call to Action News
Priest pedophilia scandal awakens Catholics to church reform
The sexual abuse scandal engulfing the Catholic Church, far from being nearly over, has only begun. Stories of priest pedophilia being kept quiet for years by the Boston archdiocese have unleashed scores of similar stories across the country. To regain credibility, many dioceses are frantically volunteering to turn over their records to prosecutors. One bishop has been brought down and others are accused. Dozens of priests have been removed. Reports of new criminal cases and civil suits are appearing almost daily. Every news medium from CNN to Time magazine is saturated with the stories. Estimated financial toll on U.S. dioceses is already over a billion dollars. And the relentless publicity is giving courage to hundreds more alleged victims of sexual abuse to go public, even those who received cash settlements years ago and agreed to secrecy.
But there is good news as well. Six weeks ago in ChurchWatch we quoted Boston Globe columnist James Carroll, the married priest and author who will keynote the CTA conference in November: “The Catholic people must take the Church back, demanding broad reform.” Today there are signs that the people are doing just that. For example:
• When Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston spent hours at the March 9 annual convocation listening to the views of 2,500 parish leaders, speaker after speaker used their two minutes at the microphone to call for more lay participation in church decisions, and for opening priesthood to married men and even to women.
More important than the numerous pleas for Law's resignation, many topics the Vatican considered closed were suddenly open. The watchword in the crowd was, “We are the Church.” Patricia Casey, 48, a parish council member from Newton, told the Globe, “This whole situation has really empowered people and priests at the parish level. We've crossed a line, and I don't think we are going to go back.”
• March 15 in The Pilot, the archdiocesan newspaper, an editorial by Msgr. Peter Conley, executive editor and a confidant of Law, declared that the questions raised by the laity — about celibacy, the all-male priesthood, homosexuality — are now so urgent and serious that they must be faced. It was this editorial — not its disavowal by Law in the next issue — that made national headlines and is creating a climate more congenial to frank and open dialogue.
People are taking action
• Public discussions begun at St. John's Parish in Wellesley, Mass., have grown quickly. Dubbed “Voice of the Faithful,” the homegrown program by mid-March was already involving 600 parishioners in weekly conversations using a consensus model. They have chosen a leadership team and set three goals for their on-going meetings: “1. to be responsive to victims and to prevent future incidents of sexual abuse; 2. to support clergy of integrity; and 3. to seek a correction of the institutional structures that resulted in a gravely flawed response to this betrayal of children.” Ten parishes are involved and the number is growing. Here is a model for other parishes and for the rest of the church —far beyond Boston. Their website is www.voiceofthefaithful.org
• An open letter to Law, drafted in February by Mary Jo Bane of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, had garnered several hundred signatures by Easter. It calls for “an independent group of experts to formulate new procedures for financial disclosure, the sharing of information, the laity’s wider participation in personnel and other policy issues, and the handling of grievances,” and asks the diocese for a commitment to follow these recommendations. Bane, well known to the Boston media for leaving the Clinton administration to protest dismantling the welfare program, is also a parish council leader who attended Law's March 9 convocation. The open letter has its own website: www.bostoncatholics.org
• At a crowded public forum March 19 at Harvard, covered by several TV channels, Bane said the current crisis for American Catholics is even bigger than the furor over the birth control encyclical in 1968. At that time, disaffected Catholics either exited the Church or ignored the teaching. This time, many Catholics like herself are choosing to stay and fight for church reforms.
• CTA New England activists in the Boston region, coordinated by Jan Leary, are at the heart of a concerned Catholics coalition that will form a human chain around the cathedral for a prayer of solidarity with sexual abuse victims at 3 PM Good Friday. Their spring conference Apr. 14 in Belmont, Mass. — a joint effort with Rabbi Michael Lerner and his Tikkun organization about social justice after 9/11 — will include a workshop on the church crisis led by Bane.
• Media articles and resources about the clergy sex abuse crisis are being posted nearly every day by CTA staff. Log on to http://www.cta-usa.org/responses.html