SHEPHERDS AND SCANDALS: So Rod Dreher’s op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, criticizing Pope John Paul II for being overly lax in his governance and allowing American bishops to shield predator priests, has provoked a pretty enormous hurricane in the Catholic blogosphere. I’m coming to this discussion very late (Internet time moves fast–too fast, really), so I will use this post to collect the statements I find most persuasive (or, alternatively, the ones we most need to grapple with and respond to), and make a few observations I haven’t seen elsewhere. You can find a lot of the discussion here, here, and here, especially in the comments sections.

First I have got to say that the level of vitriol directed at fellow Christians in this dispute has been startling. Although I think that I basically disagree with Tom Hoopes’s position (as laid out here), he’s been attacked personally; people have assumed that he has no children (bizarre, inappropriate, and false); people have assumed that he’s a bland yes-man who would set fire to an infant if the pope told him to. Hoopes was my boss for a year, and so I know how ridiculous this image of him is. But the vitriol directed at him is as nothing in comparison to that directed at Dreher himself. So let me start out by saying that I absolutely agree with Amy Welborn’s assessment of what Dreher was and was not saying in his WSJ piece. Of the people who have replied to Dreher, I found Hoopes to be the most challenging, and although there were some misunderstandings of what he was saying, it seems they’ve been cleared up. And like I said, I know and like Hoopes personally, so there’s my deal.

I don’t want to psychologize too much, but I wonder if the rhetoric is so ferocious not only because of the emotions of anguish, shame, and protective urges (toward the ailing pope, the Church, falsely accused priests, and, of course, the victims of abusive priests), but also because none of us wants to be saying this stuff. I doubt anyone wants to be cast in the role of apologist for cardinals who have shuffled abusive priests from parish to parish. I doubt anyone wants to be viewed, by other orthodox Catholics, as performing “spin control” for a callous bishop or an out-to-lunch Vatican. And I am 100% certain that Rod Dreher neither expected nor desired to find the sewer of filth he has spent the past several months excavating. Dreher’s love (yes, love) for John Paul II shone, in my view, from his WSJ piece. He was careful to say that he was deeply grateful for the pope’s teaching, for his personal witness, indeed, for everything except his administration of the Church. That gratitude did not seem to me to be in any way forced or “for show.” I mean, for Pete’s sake, the guy says that John Paul II will most likely be remembered, eventually, as John Paul the Great! There was not a sentence in Dreher’s article that I could not sign my name to.

But honestly, I don’t care too much why people are assuming the worst about one another, I just want it to stop. So.

What does Dreher want? What do I want? I don’t want heads to roll throughout the American hierarchy–I can see that that would leave our dioceses in chaos. I don’t think it’s necessary, either. But to leave every single one of the cardinals who have sheltered predators in place seems to me like a colossal mistake. Many have participated in the creation of this horror in some way, but some are (much) more egregious than others. The worst should go.

Even if you disagree with that, I think it’s impossible to take issue with a point Dreher made in a comment at Mark Shea’s site: “[W]hy doesn’t the Pope order his bishops to quit frustrating the attempts of secular authorities to investigate what has happened? Why doesn’t he instruct his bishops to knock off the ugly legal strategies being employed against victims with legitimate grievances? You would scarcely believe the abuse many of these people have had to take at the hands of diocesan lawyers paid for with our tithes.” Similarly, the Pope could meet with abuse victims. That would, it seems, make the “Carmelite approach” (discussed below) all the more obvious, just, and striking. So it seems like even if you think that every single cardinal in the USA should keep his office, there are still actions the Vatican could take (and take publicly, to promote accountability!) that it has not taken.