Catholic bishops release report that exhonerates the catholic bishops in the series of sexual scandals. Gee. What a surprise.

The bishops of the Catholic Church have conducted a five year study of the the church’s sexual abuse crisis. Their corporate conclusion is - wait for it - the problem was the free sexual mores of the 60's and 70's and the lack of supervision of the stressed priests who had to deal with the horror of those times.

Known occurrences of sexual abuse of minors by priests rose sharply during those decades, the report found, and the problem grew worse when the church’s hierarchy responded by showing more care for the perpetrators than the victims.

So let's see. A study funded by the Catholic bishops exonerates the bishops of responsibility for the sexual abuse crisis. Surprise, surprise.

Robert M. Hoatson, a priest and a founder of Road to Recovery, which offers counseling and referrals to victims, said the idea that the sexual and social upheavals of past decades were to blame for the abuse of children was an attempt to shift responsibility from church leaders. Mr. Hoatson said he had been among those who had been abused.“It deflects responsibility from the bishops and puts it on to a sociological problem,” he said. “This is a people problem. It wasn’t because of the ’70s, and it wasn’t the ’60s, and it wasn’t because of the 1450s. This was something individuals did.”

Kristine Ward, the chairwoman of the National Survivor Advocates Coalition, said the cultural explanation did not appear to explain why abuse cases within the Catholic church have shaken places from Australia and Ireland to South America. “Does the culture of the U.S. in the 1960s explain that? It’s hard to believe,” she said.

The problem couldn't possibly be the difficulties that bishops have had for the last 50 years or more getting people to train for a career as a celibate priest, causing the bishops to be extremely protective of the warm bodies they already have on hand even when those warm bodies sexually attack boys in their care.

The article points out a number of technical points of weakness in the report, mostly going to downplay the seriousness of the problem. These bishops who paid for and released this report are the same men, after all, who first defended the perpetrators of the sexual abuses rather than the victims. It should be no surprise that the corporate leaders of the church react to charges that they failed in their job would prepare and publish a report that defends the behavior of the corporate leaders of the church.

The Catholic Church reacts to the loss of its status of social arbitrator.

Is the Catholic Church losing its privileged status in the the west? John L Allen Jr. in his blog at the National Catholic Reporter asks that question. Big stories about the Catholic Church this last week include:

• Massive police raids by the Belgian police against the Catholic Church because of the Church's obstruction of investigations into child sex abuse cases.
  
• A public reconciliation between Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn and Cardinal Angelo Sodano who Schoenborn has publicly accused of blocking action on a sex abuse case that occurred in Austria.
  
• A decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to let a sex abuse lawsuit against the Vatical proceed. Another action by the American courts against the Vatican and the Salesian order was filed in Los Angeles right after the Supreme Court decision.
  
• Personnel moves by the Vatican to appoint internal leaders with Pope Benedict's spiritual and theological outlook rather than diplomatic leaders. It's the Pope consolidating control of the Church bureaucracy.
  
• In a related bureaucratic move the Vatican created a new department, the "Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization," which is intended to try to reawaken the faith in the West. The is clearly a reaction to the decline of secular power of the Church.
  
• The fallout from the financial scandal involving the Congregation for the Evangelical of Peoples continues.
  
• The European Court of Human Rights has held a hearing to decide if the display of crucifixes in Italian public school classroom violates European protections of human rights and of freedom of conscience.
  

John Allen thinks that all of this leads directly from

"the collapse of Catholicism as a culture-shaping majority in the West. When the dust settles, policy-makers in the church, particularly in the Vatican, will be ever more committed to what social theorists call “identity politics,” a traditional defense mechanism relied upon by minorities when facing what they perceive as a hostile cultural majority.

While there are an almost infinite number of ways of defining a “minority,” one widely invoked model says it has four characteristics:

• Suffering discrimination and subordination
• Physical and/or cultural traits that set them apart, and which are disapproved by the dominant group
• A shared sense of collective identity and common burdens
• Socially shared rules about who belongs and who does not

A growing swath of Catholics in the West, particularly in the church’s leadership class, believes that all these markers now apply to the Catholic church, and the events of the past week will strongly reinforce those impressions."

[...]

Some blame a rising tide of neo-paganism in the West for the church’s woes, while others say church leaders, and especially the Vatican, have no one to blame but themselves. Whichever view one adopts, the empirical result is the same: Catholicism no longer calls the cultural tune. Benedict’s decision to launch an entire department in the Vatican dedicated to treating the West as “mission territory” amounts to a clear acknowledgment of the point.

Facing that reality, Catholicism, both at the leadership level and in important circles at the grass roots, is reacting as social theorists would likely predict, with a strategy that other embattled minority groups -- from the Amish to Orthodox Judaism, from the Gay Pride movement to the Nation of Islam -- have often employed: Emphasizing its unique markers of identity, in order to defend itself against assimilation to the majority.

I think Allen is right that this is a reaction by the leaders of the Catholic Church to their perception of the decline in power of the Church. I think, though, that any perceived religious reasons behind the reaction are mistaken. The Church is losing its power to establish and enforce a centrally controlled religious doctrine but much of that is a direct result of the fact that most people are taking personal control over what they believe their spiritual needs are. A centrally controlled religious organization is more of a hindrance to that than a help.

So this is not a religious reformation. This is a decline in the secular power of the Catholic Church caused by several things. First, with the rise of industrial society the functions previously performed by the church have become much less significant to society. The Church used to be the main source of medical care, education, and social welfare for the population. Those functions have been largely displaced by the more efficient governments and by the main sources of wealth, the businesses. They require a healthy well-educated workforce, so the motivations behind public health and education have become primarily economic rather than moral. Another function the Church used to perform was long distance communications between distant communities. Technology and global markets have completely replaced the Church in that function. The Church is no longer the international Intelligence source it used to be. Both governments and multinational corporations have replaced it in that function.

That left the Church as the main contact between the public and the upper classes. The upper classes could trust the religious leaders to advise them about the status and needs of the populace. Generally the upper classes have always tended to be generally blind to the needs of the public, though they have been quick to recognize what they needed from the public. The Church with its network of local churches providing information to the Church hierarchy was a key source of information to the upper classes. The rise of democracies around the world has largely displaced the Church in that function. That has been especially true because the Church has consistently taken the side of the elites and worked primarily to pacify the public. Then, as the Church lost this function to alternatives, it has become more conservative and unwilling to adapt to new social situations. That refusal to adapt is understandable because all the trends are towards marginalizing the Catholic Church in modern society.

The leaders in every organization like their positions and justify what they do as being "for the good of the organization." But they are actually protecting themselves and their status. When the organization declines they will use every lever the organization has access to in order to prevent that decline.

It is that effort at self-protection by the Catholic elites that we see as the Church retreats into isolation, anger at intrusive outsiders and doomed efforts to rearrange the deckchairs on their Titanic.

Too many Catholic Bishops don't get the problem of pedophilia

The Vatican's Archbishop Silvano Tomasi (Vatican's permanent observer to the U.N.) offered a statement responding to allegations that Vatican officials have done too little to deal with sex abuse within the Catholic Church.

He said that “available research” estimated that between 1.5 per cent and five per cent of clergy had been involved in abuse, the Guardian reported.

Children were more likely to suffer at the hands of relatives, family friends or babysitters than clerics, he argued.

The Archbishop also quoted research published in the Christian Science Monitor newspaper which suggested that most congregations affected by child sex allegations in the US were protestant churches while the problem was also common in the Jewish community.

Yeah, Right. The Archbishop testily says "Get off our back! The Protestants and Jews have clergy who sexually abuse children, also. We're not the only ones!"

The Archbishop is being defensive and entirely misses the point regarding what the Catholic Church is being blamed for. The Catholic Church is not the only institution that has pedophiles who join them, gain power over children and use that power to sexually abuse those children. The Catholic church is not being blamed for the existence of pedophiles. They are being blamed for accepting them into the organization, putting them in positions of power, trust and authority where they can abuse children, and then for defending those pedophiles and hiding them instead of stopping them and exposing them. How many of the other denominations have an organizational culture that makes defending the pedophiles in their midst more important than protecting children from such predators who use their positions in the church?

The Catholic Church is not being blamed for the existence of Pedophiles. It is being blamed for providing pedophiles positions of power and trust over children and for hiding the pedophiles after they have committed their crimes and protecting them from punishment for their horrible deeds. Such criminals should have been rejected in the process of selection as Priests, and when the selection procedures failed, they should be removed, punished, and exposed to the public for what they are and what they have done.

The Archbishop and his fellow Catholic leaders are not protecting the Church by concealing and protecting the pedophiles who join them. They are instead making those pedophiles representatives of the Catholic institution.

Pope: If you aren't Catholic, you aren't Christian.

Mark Klein points to Pope Benedict's restatement that the only Christian Church is the Roman Catholic Church. Times Online tells about the new 16 page statement from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The Vatican has described the Protestant and Orthodox faiths as “not proper Churches” in a document issued with the full authority of the Pope. [Snip]

The document said that the Orthodox church suffered from a “wound” because it did not recognise the primacy of the Pope. The wound was “still more profound” in Protestant denominations, it added.

It was “difficult to see how the title of ‘Church’ could possibly be attributed to them”, said the statement from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Roman Catholicism was “the one true Church of Christ”.

This position of the Pope is nothing more than a political power grab within Christianity. It is going to be a major roadblock to any further ecumenical discussions with the Protestant and Orthodox Churches. They will be dead until this statement is withdrawn. (No real loss, in my opinion.)

The document may have interesting political effects in the U.S. though. Does the old question, answered by John F. Kennedy, get resurrected against Rudy Giuliani? That question was "If you are President and decide to do something appropriate for America and the Pope tells you not to, is your position as President of America more important than your Catholic Religion? Of course, with Rudy's two divorces, three marriages, and his children not speaking to him, that may be a moot point. The discussion in Rudy's case may be whether he is religious at all. That will be an equally bad political problem for him, and with the same set of voters. He's damned either way.

The other question is whether Evangelical Protestant social conservative Churches will continue to ally themselves with the Catholics politically, particularly on things like abortion and stem-cell legislation?

Pope Benedict is clearly looking at his position world-wide, and probably has a pretty solid disdain for all things American anyway [*]. So the political ramifications of this Papal position will be played out here, and probably not given a lot of consideration in Rome.

It is going to change politics here in the U.S. to some extent. How much is the really interesting part.

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[*] As an Episcopalian (that's the American branch of the Anglican Church) I have always laughed that the real difference between the high church Episcopalians and the American Roman Catholic church is that the Episcopalians have always admitted freely and publicly that we do not obey Papal decrees, while the American Roman Catholic church members simply do not obey papal decrees, but fail to admit in public that they don't.