The Editor of the religious magazine, Reality, has hit out at Church leaders who appear to be more interested in changing the language of the liturgy than trying to figure out why so many children have been harmed by clerics. Writing in the January editorial of Reality, Fr Gerry Moloney, CSsR, claims, “Something seems wrong when the Vatican conducts an apostolic visitation of religious sisters in the United States to make sure they are fully obedient to the Holy See ... but conducts no visitation of dioceses worldwide to ensure children are safeguarded.”
Referring to the findings of the Murphy Report, Fr Moloney writes, “For let’s face it, something seems wrong when such abuse could go unchecked for so long in so many dioceses.” He adds, “Something seems wrong when some Church people appear more interested in silk robes and the Latin Mass and East-facing altars than in examining why our Church has not been a safe environment for its most vulnerable members.”
Noting that the abuse scandals have not only “destroyed many innocent lives” but had “also undermined the good work of so many Church people at home and throughout the world”, he continues, “Something seems wrong when trying to restore a Tridentine model of Church is more important to a small but vociferous minority than building a Church where all the baptised feel at home and loved and included and heard and protected.”
The Redemptorist Editor highlights a fact which he claims the “restorationists ignore,” namely that “most sex abusers and most bishops and Church authorities grew up and were formed in the pre-Vatican II Church.”
This model of Church he slates as one “that had obvious systems failures” and “a theology that kept women and lay men firmly in their place.”
Posing the question of what “kind of Church we want to have” Fr Moloney writes, “What we need is not a rigid, defensive, secretive Church but an open, transparent, inclusive one; where power and decision-making are not the preserve of elderly celibate males but all the baptised.”
Fr Moloney concludes that the appalling litany of abuse and cover up “must also lead us as a Church to examine our attitude to sexuality, the idealisation of virginity, and the insistence on celibacy as a requirement for priesthood.”
Admitting that child sexual abuse is a problem in every Church and not just the Catholic Church, Fr Moloney nevertheless asks if priestly life and family life went together would it not “make for a more healthy system?”
He poses the following scenario and asks, “Can anyone deny that if priests could marry, if spouses and children lived in presbyteries, if priestly life and family life went together, if this were part of the structure of the Church, that it would make for a more healthy system?” He adds, “At the very least, it would make the hierarchical Church appear more human, more approachable, less unnatural and less suspect.”
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