David Ancell / Tuesday March 11, 2003
It seems that this article by Rod Dreher has been hot news on St. Blog’s. It has been all over the HMS blog (see this and this and this). There’s more than I could possibly find and link to.
I think the issue is far more complex than Dreher makes it sound. My reading of the article gives me the impression that Dreher thinks the Holy Father should just tour the United States with a bullhorn and yell “You’re fired!” at many bishops. I think that this would give them the easy way out. They need to stand out there and face what they’ve done.
The Holy Father has every right to expect the bishops to fix the mess they’ve caused. I think it’s safe to assume that child sexual abuse by clergy is unlikely to be successfully concealed in the Catholic Church for at least a decade, so there is no immediate danger. The dissident teaching that the bishops have allowed to spread have taken years to get where they are and will take many more years to go away. Simply removing the bishops won’t fix the problem. Suddenly changing everything will create confusion. My employer right now is changing our staffing, the phone system, the computers, the computer system, the system that makes shipping labels, and probably some other things I can’t remember. It is chaos where I am working, and this is just one corporation.
However, Mr. Dreher has the point. How far can we go with bishops who insist on not doing the job that they were ordained for? There comes a point where a bishop is incapacitated as a leader. I think we have a few bishops in office who are past that point, and I wonder why they are still in office. Granted, I don’t know how many were privately reprimanded, but public sin, if not corrected, calls for public action before the whole Church. Jesus himself said so.
I love the Church and will never leave her. However, I can’t understand why so many things have been allowed to go wrong. When will something be done? The Holy Father has great concern about this possible war and rightly so. I just hope (I presume no judgement.) that the current situation in the Church is as high of a priority for him.
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