FALLOUT FROM THE MCCARRICK SCANDAL CONTINUES

In a previous post, I predicted that the scandal related of sexual abuse related to Cardinal McCarrick would make a turning point in the way Bishops have avoided personal accountability for the silence.

Already, it appears that the McCarrick scandal has reached a breaking point for many Catholics.

Lifelong Catholics now wonder whether the Church can withstand such hypocrisy and corruption.  

Young Catholics have chosen to abandon a Church where a Cardinal whose perverse predatory actions were silently condoned by so many Church leaders at the highest echelons of authority.

The Bishops have done themselves no favor. 

From Cardinal O’Malley’s pitiful and lame excuse that a case of sexual abuse was ignored because a letter from a Priest alleging incidents was “misdirected” in a bureaucratic shuffle, to the USCCB’s hollow response amounting to a trite admission that no one is perfect, the Bishops have lost the respect and moral authority of many of the faithful.

What went wrong?

For too long, Catholics succumbed to the deception that respect for the authority of the Bishop required unquestioning and unconditional obedience. 

Bishops were to be regarded as men of superior, even heroic, virtue.  Bishops were supposed models of faith and fidelity to Christ’s Gospel.  The Bishops were more than happy and eager to foster the misguided impression that “their feet never touched the ground”.

And so, basic standards of moral decency, responsibility and accountability were set aside and Bishops gave themselves a pass when it came to tacitly condoning the sexual predators who served under their supervision.

In the wake of the McCarrick scandal comes the backlash against the Bishops that we are witnessing in the outrage and disgust being voiced by so many.

Things have changed and the Bishops would be wise to take notice.

For decades, Bishops were successful in portraying sexual abuse by the Clergy as sins rather than crimes.  The faithful assumed that their Bishops would be diligent in caring for them.  Should a problem arise, they trusted that Bishop would do what was right and just.

Now, it has come to light that most Bishops, instead of informing government authority and alerting their local churches, in many cases simply reshuffled clergy implicated in sex crimes to different parishes or made financial settlements to victims on the condition of their silence.

Suffering such a betrayal of trust and sense of abandonment by their Bishops, Catholics turned to the courts for justice and compensation.

No longer do Catholics trust telling their stories to their Bishops, they take their stories to prosecutors and lawyers first.

With the McCarrick scandal, one can sense that Catholics will settle for nothing less than Bishops being held totally accountable for their misdeeds, either personal acts of sexual abuse or covering up such abuse.

The Holy See must likewise take notice and set into law protocols for the investigation of allegations of abuse or cover up against Bishops.

Catholics are no longer content to be treated like children by their Bishops.

The Church has reached a watershed moment in the sad tale of these sordid affairs.

How the Vatican and the Bishops respond will determine the future of the Church for decades, if not centuries, to come.