Shock and Denial

For a quite unforgivable lapse in adequately mentoring its flock the present-day Vatican has finally been caught in a web of deception that it might never have conceived would lead eventually to the mass denunciation of moral failure it now finds itself facing. Throughout the ages it has been known and documented that some priests in the Holy Roman Catholic Church have wandered far from the discipline imposed upon them at their ordination.

Their unsavoury proclivities and self-entitled willingness to abandon their vows of chastity and above all, their favoured place as society's most trusted religious figures, entrusted to protect the vulnerable, the needy and the faithful that comprised their flock, the while defending the reputation of the Church has been legendary. There have always existed rogue elements within any organization, no less the Catholic Church.

And while whispered legends of vile impropriety were public knowledge, the Church authority preferred to look elsewhere rather than to its responsibility to cleanse itself of what Pope Benedict once referred to as "dirt" within its house. But it would appear that he too, and particularly he as it happens, remained inordinately concerned with protecting the reputation of the Church rather than the spirit and well-being of its followers.

In so doing the Church hierarchy abandoned its pastoral, secondary function of providing a safe and sacred haven for its flock, for its primary function of bringing God's message to the very flock whose safe passage from believing childhood to faithful adulthood it has been responsible for. The brotherhood of the priestly caste proved to be too firm a bond to be ruptured by anything as remotely disruptive as priestly malfeasance.

The instinctive response of gathering itself into itself to lash out at its accusers, and claim wilfully slanderous libel by the news media has not, nor will it, nor can it, settle the affair of an honoured Church pursuing a dishonourable course of inaction when faced with the reality of a number of its clergy posing a highly disturbing threat to the very most impressionable young they were tasked with bringing to God's hearth.

There have been too many revelations, along with documentation attesting to the failure of the church hierarchy in sympathizing at the plight of the vulnerable whose trust it betrayed while empathizing with the discordant confusion within its ranks of those who betrayed their oath. Through all the disingenuous dissembling and expressions of outrage against those it claims are besmirching it, the Church has failed itself.

From actively, deliberately protecting and taking under its healing wing adult male pederasts in priests' garments who hadn't the remotest remorse for their vicious despoiling of the young, enabling them, through alternate postings in far-off parishes to continue their indecent acts, the Church has despoiled itself. For insisting on forgiveness for its errant clergy, and for abandoning children to a lifetime of bitter and twisted psyches, the Church has failed its calling, its very purpose.

"The problem has been that the institution has been concerned with protecting its reputation. but is that a Gospel value? The Gospel calls for justice, love and compassion above all. We have to have full transparency and the Pope has to show aggressive leadership in making that happen. Otherwise, the damage to the institutional church will be irreparable." Father Francis Morrisey, expert on canon law, Ottawa