The Catholic Church sex abuse scandal has raised many issues about the nature of the Catholic Church and its role in modern society.The crux of the problem -- the Catholic Church's decision to shield abusive priests from secular authorities -- is rooted in centuries of history in which the Roman Catholic Church was literally above the law.
For a long time the Church was special, but in North America, at least, it is becoming a very normal institution, particularly under the pressures generated by this recent scandal.
The Roman Catholic Church had its origins in the Roman Empire, and after the Roman Emperors took Christianity as their faith the religion and the political power structure became deeply intertwined.
Church structure mirrored the administrative structure of the empire, and when the empire split, Rome and Byzantium ruled by "separate but equal" co-emperors, so did the Church. But in both empires the faith and the Church survived long after the political structures had faded and crumbled.
As new centralized states reemerged after the fall of Rome and Byzantium, the Church that had persisted through the interregnum held a privileged position. Priests were not subject to secular law and Church property was not taxed.
The Church could even influence political and military affairs: e.g. the Crusades, and the Papal States of Italy. Though there were conflicts with political institutions (and within the Church itself) over resources, there was no serious erosion of the Church's privileged position until the 14th and 15th centuries, when some of the most prosperous and powerful arms of the church were nationalized under rulers like Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain.
But even then the Church remained a special institution, whose control afforded a particularly powerful form of legitimacy to the new nation-states of early modern Europe.
But religious legitimacy, temporarily bolstered by the Reformation and the religious warfare which ensued for 150 years, eventually proved to be less useful in the face of more efficient and secular states and the Church slowly regained its image as an international institution, above national interests and beyond normal politics.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, anti-religious ideas, and particularly hostility to the powerful and wealthy Catholic Church, became more widespread and influential, and the Roman Catholic Church found its property confiscated -- as in the French Revolution -- and its influence questioned -- as in the kulturkampf [cultural struggle] against the Church led by Prussia's Bismarck.
Under the influence of the French and American revolutions, the ideal of the secular state takes hold. More importantly, though, the revolutionary concept of universal law becomes one of the root ideas of Western civilization, thanks in no small part to the spread of the Napoleonic Code.
The secular state is bolstered by increasingly diverse populations: the acceptance of religious difference within the state made it impossible to justify treating one church differently than another, except in extreme circumstances. Churches still retained privileges, including tax-free status and a certain presumption of greater innocence.
The current crisis has revealed the extent to which the Roman Catholic Church has become normalized over the last century. The Church retains its tax-free status, but not its freedom from government scrutiny and control: tax-free status comes with limitations on political activism, for example. The Church has incorporated its dioceses as a charitable religious institution under civil law, but has no legal existence as a single institution. Civil lawsuits forced the Church to make public accountings of its property and resources, but the Church has used its diocesan divisions, enshrined in law, to insulate the damage. The cost of the lawsuits raised the possibility that at least one diocese would seek bankruptcy protection, and that individual parish churches might be closed and the property liquidated.
The Church as a whole, of course, could afford to pay the settlements, but it has taken advantage of the legal structure under which it operates to insulate itself. It is interesting to note that the current debate within the Episcopal Church over their homosexual archbishop is also framed within the context of the legal and financial complexity of organizing a schism.
One of the only remaining privileges of the Church, the shield of the confessional from the prying eyes of public prosecutors, is clearly under fire. It is worth noting that the concept of priest-penitent privilege (and its secular equivalent, doctor-patient privilege) exists entirely because of public acceptance of the Catholic Church's insistence on the sanctity of its rites and the right of its faithful to confess without incurring civil or criminal penalty.
The fact that non-Catholics have that same right with their clergy is a side effect because of the impossibility of writing a modern law that applies only to one faith. But that privilege is also under strain, limited by the doctrine of imminent harm, as well as by an increasingly narrow interpretation of the conditions under which it might apply.
It took the pressure of the sex abuse scandal to create the presumption that priests would be turned over to civil authorities in the event of credible accusations. The faith of Catholics and non-Catholics alike that the Church would act morally and responsibly has been shaken, particularly by the way the Church used the protection of confessional secrecy to shield its priests from civil authorities. Instead, the Church has responded much like a corporation would, with lawyers and trickles of documents and press statements and accounting tricks to hide resources.
The Roman Catholic Church is struggling with its few remaining distinctive features: the all-male, celibate priesthood; the challenge of integrating a world-wide community of Christians into a single Catholic Church with a single orthodox position; the undemocratic nature of the Church, which conflicts sharply with the need to involve Catholic laity in both ritual and institutional leadership.
It is too facile to say that the Church is at a crossroads: it has been through a dizzying array of crossroad points in the modern age. But it is difficult to maintain a sacred and special institution in a secular and equalizing society: it has clearly already affected the nature of the Church, and will continue to do so.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Clerical Whispers’ for any or all of the articles placed here.
The placing of an article hereupon does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
Sotto Voce