It is time for them to go.

William H. Slavick

The clueless Roman Catholic hierarchs and their apologists--in Rome and out--can moan endlessly about "the petty gossip of dominant opinion” and anti-Catholic bias. That did not work for Boston Cardinal Bernard Law nor will it now. The Vatican’s Teflon shield is shattered.

In truth, John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, fearing loss of patriarchal control, conspired to slam shut the windows the Second Vatican Council opened to the modern world and, before all else, shore up the battlements of the Church Triumphant and celibate male power. That campaign has been, for the Church, on all fronts, a disaster. Now revelations of the Vatican deliberately subordinating care of children to the “Church’s” reputation demands a reckoning.

Both hierarchs rejected the Council's first fruit--Latin America's liberation theology and implementation of the preferential option for the poor, initiating a precipitous decline there. Only Archbishop Oscar Romero's assassination forestalled Rome’s removal of the Salvadoran poor’s champion--for not making peace with a government that had killed thousands of his flock.

They dumped on theologians attuned to the Council's thrust--Hans Kûng, Leonardo Boff, Charles Curran, and Tisa Balasuriya.

They have carved away at the Council’s well-studied, almost unanimously approved and welcomed liturgical reforms, again distancing the celebrant from the assembly; scuttling the Council’s translation protocol for sexist, Latinate language that won’t pray, and encouraging use of the Tridentine form that subordinates the Eucharist as meal and challenge to live the Gospel.

And despite warnings as early as the 60's that priest sex abusers should not continue in ministry, the hierarchy continued to coddle abusers and threaten, silence, shame, dupe, or buy off victims to put the appearance of a pure institution before the dignity, innocence, and healing of victims—and before justice. John Paul II and bribed curial cardinals sheltered the Legionnaires of Christ founder-abuser and chief Vatican fund-raiser. Ratzinger ordered bishops to keep abuse information secret and slowed defrocking processes, assuring further abuses.

The Church is imploding, suffering the largest defection ever in the Vatican’s turn on Council reforms, its re-emphasis on doctrine rather than living the Gospel, its abandonment of John XXIII’s pursuit of peace and justice for the poor, its sexist rejection of women's equality, its denial of the Eucharist and pastoral care to half the faithful for lack of male celibate priests, its obsession with sex, and its continued failure to act responsibly in the abuse scandal.

To reassert authority, the patriarchy has engaged in a heartless war on "objectively disordered" gays and lesbians that runs roughshod over their dignity and civil rights and flouts Vatican II recognition of separation of church and state, religious liberty, and primacy of conscience.

By their fruit we have come to know them. As Munich archbishop, Ratzinger turned a wolf loose on his sheep—still loose 20-odd years later. In Rome, his office opposed Wisconsin bishops defrocking a serial abuser of hundreds of deaf children, honoring his wish to die a priest before affirming the human worth of his victims. He refused to laicize a younger California abuser for “the good of the Church.” These are unfathomable and unconscionable, betrayals of pastoral trust.

Benedict XVI’s defenders claim that, as pope, he has done everything possible about the abuse mess--everything, that is, except the essential—putting the healing of the abuse victims foremost by affirming their dignity. That requires holding abusers accountable, stopping legal stonewalling, removing hundreds of complicit bishops, and recognizing Vatican culpability. He and they still do not understand that their first pastoral obligation is to give succor to the wounded. His defenders continues to substitute for accountability ridiculous excuse-making that further diminishes victims. The words of Chaucer’s Parson echo endlessly: the "shitten shepherd and the clene sheep."

It is time for Benedict XVI to discover humility and search his conscience, to acknowledge that fear of change, patriarchal authoritarianism, and righteousness have led him—and the Church-- into a moral morass. It is time for him to recognize that his—and the Vatican’s--temporizing while thousands more were victimized; his refusal to acknowledge his and the Vatican’s wrongs, and his lack of care, of compassion, for still wounded abuse victims makes him unfit to lead the People of God--time to resign.

Before he goes, he should remove bishops and cardinals who has been party to that misdirection and abuse cover up. Then he should ask the next, necessarily smaller papal consistory to pray to John XXIII and Oscar Romero for intercessions in picking a new Bishop of Rome committed to being a faithful and humble servant and shepherd of the People of God.

Otherwise, Boston’s Fr. Bob Bullock, who circulated the petition that removed Law, should make a real Year of the Priest by summoning overextended and exhausted priests faithful to the Council and faithful women and men religious—and laity everywhere to say to the patriarchs, plainly and forcefully, that the jig is up. They must go and allow the Gospel to bloom out of the hearts of the faithful.


William H. Slavick has written extensively on peace and social justice issues in the Catholic press and Maine newspapers. He is long-time coordinator of Pax Christi Maine.