Abandoned Altars

There’s an elephant quietly sitting in the nave that everyone on all sides of the clergy sex abuse crisis have been diligently ignoring, even the victims themselves. No clergy or even would-be reformers have really remarked on it yet, although it should be more obvious with each and every sad story. More importantly, it is a troubling issue that touches on the very heart and soul of Catholicism.

The monstrous truth is simply this: what the clergy sex abuse crisis clearly demonstrates is that the sacramental system has failed.

This is not just a case of hierarchical reneging of responsibility. There’s more to this than some bad apples. This is nothing that a few reforms can fix, some screening of seminarians or more pastoral responses by bishops. It is nothing less than a fundamental challenge to the entire Catholic Church, and it shows that the spiritual principles the whole structure is supposedly based on simply do not work.

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This week, PBS’s FRONTLINE series showed an incredible documentary about the clergy sex abuse crisis, Hand of God. What made this show stand out from others about the topic, is first of all, it’s intimacy.

Joe Cultrera, the filmmaker, is the younger brother of the victim, Paul, and he wisely captures in the film not just the family dynamics, but how they fit into the larger family of the parish, and how, in the end, what happened to his brother was not just abuse of him but of that entire social world. And it shows, with devastating clarity, how that abuse was perpetuated even more by the bishops than by the pervert priest, Fr. Birmingham. For these men not only permitted, enabled, and in effect, blessed his thirty-year crime spree, at the end, as if in cold revenge, they close down the parish to pay for their sins.

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Yesterday was not “just” a Friday the 13th, but the anniversary of “the” Friday the 13th.

699 years ago yesterday at dawn all over France, the king’s men busted the “Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon”, known more simply as the “Knights Templar“, for heresy.

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Any doubts about what kind of Supreme Pontiff Josef Ratzinger would become should be settled with the dust from his recent challenge.

Seems there’s a new pope in town. One with quite as geopolitical an agenda as the late John Paul II, but with a different emphasis. The evil empire that haunted and probably even tried to assassinate the “Slavic Pope” (as Malachi Martin liked to call him) did not outlive him. But his successor, this German Pope, has found that more ancient foes have risen once again in the meantime.

And Benedict XVI is apparently not afraid of a showdown. Indirectly, that is, and with the kind of cunning of which John Paul (or Innocent III) for that matter, would be proud.

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