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Headage The Church's Problem The fundamental cause of the current crisis in the Catholic Church is that the authorities of the Church--priests, nuns, bishops, and the Pope--have no real understanding of what human sexuality is or how it affects people's lives. The reason for this is simple: they don't have sex. Many of them have never had sex. Sex for them is a theoretical abstraction that they attempt to force into a procreative model that is centuries old. When people who don't have a clue about a subject act as authorities on that subject, they make foolish mistakes. Based on their belief in the redemptive power of confession and faith in Christ, the Catholic authorities have routinely treated each abuser simply as a sinner, guilty of a sin like any other, and subject to the standard 'treatment' for sin. That is: the priest confessed, and was then absolved, counseled, and moved to another parish. The Church considers all confessions sealed, and would thus see nothing wrong with concealing the priest's misdeeds. Because members of the Church hierarchy have no personal understanding of the force of human sexuality, they are nonplussed when an offending priest 'backslides' and commits another act of abuse. Their response to the repeated offense is the only response they know: confession, absolution, and counsel. The Church's leaders do not entirely comprehend the damage done to sexually abused children because Church doctrine devalues sex itself as a worldly, regrettable necessity. All sexual sin, therefore, appears similar to them. The tremendous abuse of power that constitutes sexual predation upon children seems comparable to extramarital or homosexual sex that occurs between consenting adults. Such lack of discernment is evident in the words of the Pope. In his speech to the American cardinals, he said "The abuse which has caused this crisis is by every standard wrong and rightly considered a crime by society." Note that it is not the abusers--that is, the priests--who are the problem, but the "abuse," that is, the sin itself. He admits to a "generalized lack of knowledge about the nature of the problem" which led bishops to "make decisions which subsequent events showed to be wrong." At the same time--he is the Pope, after all--he insists that the "power of Christian conversion" is what will truly solve the problem. In other words, it is up to the abusers to follow through on their "radical decision to turn away from sin and back to God." In the meantime, children are paying for what the he considers to be the priests' failure to accept God's grace. The Pope also said that "many are offended at the way in which the Church's leaders are perceived to have acted in this matter." In the face of the flagrant moral failure of the Church's leadership to protect its parishioners' children, he suggests that it is only the laity's poor perception that prevents them from understanding the bishops' good reasons for protecting their pedophiliac charges. There is, he says, a "deep-seated crisis of sexual morality" affecting not only the Church, but society as a whole. For society at large, the problem is that the Church authorities have failed to fully recognize the sexual molestation of children as a deeply corrupt abuse of power and are unaware that the concealment of that abuse represents a breakdown of their moral discernment. For the Pope, the problem is that society has infected the Church with sin. The "fullness of Catholic truth on matters of sexual morality" to which the Pope insists his bishops and priests are committed is a truth that is incapable of addressing the problem. It is a truth believed and promulgated by those who have little or no personal experience with human sexuality, who devalue human sexuality as a matter of doctrine, and who fail to recognize that a human sexual relationship is not the same as a simple "human relationship." Although I disagree strongly with him about many things, I have a great deal of respect for this Pope, because he has a fine mind and is a worthy intellectual expositor of the faith. However, it is highly unlikely that he will be able to repair the continuing damage caused in America and elsewhere by the Church's ignorance of the power and complexity of human sexuality. Like his charges, he simply doesn't get it.
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