Church in Crisis: Can the Rome Meeting Bring About Change?

Rosemary Ganley
The Peterborough Examiner
February 20, 2019

Members of ECA (Ending of Clergy Abuse) and survivors of clergy sex abuse pose outside St. Peter's Square at the Vatican February 18. Organizers of Pope Francis' summit on preventing clergy sex abuse met with a dozen survivor-activists who arrived in Rome to protest the Catholic Church's response to date and demand an end to decades of cover-up by church leaders. GREGORIO BORGIA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

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The potential for this large faith community, Roman Catholicism, to be a force for good is immense. Its very numbers, its reach, its progressive theological work, its small communities that are bringing life and doing good. But that potential is mostly squandered today.

Pope Francis, an Argentine Jesuit with a strong sense of the poor, issued a powerful letter in 2016 on the environmental crisis. Such is the disunity in the church that traditionalists, who are a mighty factor, have dismissed it, and ordinary clerics have not read it or taught from it. Never mentioned in the parishes I know.

The Pope is just back from the Arabian Peninsula, where he led mass for 135,000 people and spoke about war, violence, freedom of religion and the exclusion of immigrants. He is undoubtedly a good, often brave, person. But he is a victim of history, and is blind about women and sexuality, which are rather major topics. All that impedes him from leading the radical changes that are called for.

He is no feminist, but he has a sense of discerning the times. For him, 2018 was like a bad dream. He had a disastrous visit to Chile and almost as bad a visit to Ireland. Abuse-related reports from Mexico, Australia, the U.S., India, Germany, France, Spain and Poland were issued, and a bombshell of an expose from the state of Pennsylvania on the same subject. It reported on 300 offenders. It seems some thousands of clergy from around the world have been implicated over 40 years in the sexual abuse of minors. Just as bad has been the cover-up by dozens of bishops, not reporting to the police, moving offending clerics around and closing their eyes to the obvious.
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