The Roman Catholic church faces a two-fold systemic crisis: the abuse of power and a lack of honesty.This dysfunction is most apparent in how the church wrestles with the impact of endemic patterns of sexual, emotional, and spiritual abuse.
Fifty years ago, Pope John XXIII convoked the church's Second Vatican Council, wanting the church to move from its post-Reformation fortress mentality to embrace an honest social analysis of the world and itself: "To read the signs of the times".
Such a discernment process was, and is, threatening to those whose fragile authority and power is rocked by a real engagement with "the joy and hope, the grief and anxiety of the people of our time".
This was clear in the 1968 crisis of authority over the church's failure to develop its teaching on artificial contraception.
The pope has a responsibility to expound church teaching on major issues, but a rounded exercise of the church's authority involves the reception of such teaching by the body of the whole church.
The crisis which followed, as a result of the failure to acknowledge the "sense of the faithful", exacerbated the denial of human sciences' insights into sexuality and reproductive health.
Typically, this led to scapegoating groups and individuals whom it seemed expedient to blame for the collapse of a highly-centralised and oracular teaching function, rather than acknowledging systemic failings in the institution itself.
Turning its back on a "listening" style of church, the Vatican appears to believe that if it says something often and loud enough, people will accept it.
Hence Archbishop Nichols' recent call for respectful dialogue, is, as he suggested, as much a call to the church, as to the media, or the wider community.
In this context, many of us heard Nichols' comments about courage in facing the scandal of sexual abuse, not to laud perpetrators, but rather a call for courage to remove those very stumbling blocks, to read honestly, faithfully, and comprehensively the signs of the times.
Trip-up stones for the church include its failure to engage transparently with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered Catholics, their parents and pastoral ministers.
Faith communities often have a systemic propensity to infantilise people, fixed firmly in vulnerability rather than empowerment for human liberation. Such misuse of power creates the hothouse for abusive sexual behaviour to run riot, like a rampant weed.
Institutionalised homophobia enables spokespersons such as Father John Owen to link paedophilia and same-gender sexual orientation revealing woeful ignorance at best, and pathological denial at worst.
Some of the convicted abusers have been products of systems which schooled them into infantilised patterns of pathological behaviour, perpetuating the abuse they themselves experienced.
Clinical studies show that many perpetrators, arrested in their psycho-sexual development in their early teens, are capable of emotional attachments later in life only with people of the age at which they became fixed emotionally and sexually.
Common features of their victims are age and emotional vulnerability, more often than same gender.
The sexual abuse scandal is not the cause but the outcome of institutional dysfunction, unable to recognise structural evil in its midst.
Blaming honourably gay men, striving also to be honourably Catholic, draws a dishonest veil over religious formation processes, and allows the psycho-sexually immature to hide in subterfuges of pathological closets, wounding themselves, and the faith community too.
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