Nick Milne writes a very reasonable response…

to the Holy Father’s letter to the Irish Church about the abuse scandal.

I empathize with him a lot–and think that he’s probably not going to get what he wants. As John Allen pointed out last week, the thing that continually baffles most people is, well, the sort of thing that baffled Rod Dreher once upon a time: namely, why doesn’t the Pope go around lopping off episcopal heads with “the stroke of a pen”.

The irony, particularly in Dreher’s case, is that in his frustration and sense of crisis about the Roman Church, he chose to be jump to the ecclesial camp which would be most irate if the Pope did was Dreher demands. They, better than I, can explain why the Pope is about a thousand years to late to go all Innocent III on us and imagine that it is his role to effectively take over the management of every diocese in the world and expel a huge number of bishops from their sees, not only for being fools when it came to the culture of secrecy in the abuse scandals, but for all sorts of other reasons as well.

T’aint gonna happen. (Not that I don’t wish it would some days. I long for the expulsion of toads like Mahony from their sees.) But the reality is that this Pope appears to be pursuing almost exactly the same course as JPII when it comes to dealing with idiot bishops. To be sure, he is far more zealous in seeing to it that pervert priests get the bum’s rush. But as far as bishops go, he is as reluctant as JPII to treat them like middle management who work for him. He appears to take the same, very eastern, view of the papacy that JPII articulated in Ut Unum Sint. If I’m right, then the best place to turn for an understanding of why these Popes act that way they do toward bishops who were idiots is… to ask Rod Dreher’s Orthodox bishop. He, along with the rest of the eastern Churches, will be happy to explain that the Pope is not the Supreme Maximum Leader who can run about treating brother bishops as mere underlings who work for him. If I’m right (and I’m pretty certain I am), the Pope feels himself very hindered by the Church’s teaching on collegiality. So, for that matter, do the Orthodox, who have their own troubles with pervy priests and the bishops who love them.

What’s that? says John Q Public, “collegiality?”.. And that, right there, is the source of the disconnect (since most people perceive the Pope as the CEO of Catholicism, Inc.)

Nick gets that Benedict is one of the good guys here, as does Allen. He’s been a zealot for hurrying the sickos out of the priesthood since he finally figured out that this was not just agitprop to nail the Church but was a real problem. In addition, though, Nick wants to see the Pope telling people to turn themselves in. I think the lingo about “satisfying the demands of justice” is basically Popespeak for that already. He is offended by the Pope exhorting the Irish Church to prayer and Eucharistic adoration and penance as the first line of attack on the problem. I can see that (since it sounds a lot like shifting the blame to the victims), but I think it’s a misreading of Benedict to see such counsel as failure to act. For Benedict, the Church’s first line of action is always prayer and liturgical worship. Everything else flows from that. That’s why he mentions the visitation second. My hope is that the visitation, flowing from the power of prayer and the liturgy, will effect exactly the clean-up that we all seek. For ultimately, it will only be grave that heals this problem, not some administrative mechanism.

Anyway, I’m grateful to Nick for his chewing over the letter, even though my take on some aspects of it is quite different from his.

Update for Andrew Sullivan readers: The meme is not “Collegiality over Accountability”, much though Andrew wishes it to be. Where crimes have been committed, the solution for accountability is rather simple and obvious: we laypeople who own all the guns, staff all the police, run all the courts and manage all the jails should arrest, try and jail bishops who are guilty of crimes. That we don’t do that very much indicates either that no crimes have been committed, or that we laypeople choose not to punish them. If no crime has been committed and the bishop is merely guilty of being a fool, then it appears to me that demanding the Church be *more* merciless than the cops is sort of getting things backwards. I prefer my Church to be merciful and my cops lock up bad guys.

Oh, and if your *really* want to see my post about the stupidity of lack of accountability (both from “see no evil” Catholics and from equally blinkered people whose concern for The Children begin and ends with their utility in attacking Benedict XVI), go here. Nobody will ever ask that latter crowd why *they* stood by and did nothing while public schools which they supported got away with murder. They were too busy congratulating themselves.