1of2 Structure & Culture. 2of2 Pope Francis, Never Again Dec 2018

[BarbTherese]

My comment: It is going to take time for The Church to address adequately the crisis of abuse in The Church, including the cover ups by hierarchy.  As an ordinary in the pew Catholic, I need to give The Church time.   Indeed structures and culture in The Church needs to change.  A culture change means that no matter our place in The Church, our mindset, our understanding of what it is ALL about,  needs to change and that takes a commitment to do so and then faithful application to that commitment until it is internalised and becomes intrinsic to the Catholic cultural consciousness.

 

https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/8/31/17801204/catholic-church-abuse-scandal-pennsylvania-priest

I’m a Catholic priest. I’m ashamed at this abuse crisis.

Structural changes alone won’t fix the church. Our culture must change as well.

Author - Fr Patrick Gilger, 31 August 2018

Fr. Patrick Gilger is a Jesuit priest. An award-winning author, he is the consulting editor for culture at America Media and a fellow at Public Seminar. He is completing a PhD in the sociology of religion at the New School for Social Research.

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Excerpt only........."I should not be so shocked.

As a Jesuit, a Roman Catholic priest — as somebody who lives and breathes the church — I should have understood already how broken the institution of the church can be. After all, the scandal of child sex abuse and its cover-up by the church hierarchy broke in Boston in 2002. Then it happened again in Minnesota in 2012. That list could go on. I read about those scandals years ago with both anger and sadness. But in reading the recent Pennsylvania reports detailing yet another cover-up of clergy sexual abuse, I found shock giving way to shame.

 For too long, clergy have claimed, and the church has granted, authority simply for being ordained. We must sever the connection — the clericalism — that mistakes a ministry of service for a grant of privilege.

Structural reforms are necessary but not sufficient to begin making this change. At a minimum, as Cardinal DiNardo, the current president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, recently said, the church must welcome lay oversight at the parish, diocese, and national levels. We must implement transparent protocols for the supervision not only of priests but of bishops and cardinals. Lay leaders, especially women, must be included in the formation of Catholic clergy. But for any of this to be more than empty procedures, the church will have to unlearn one culture and relearn another. This will mean changing our identities. And it will cost.

For the whole church, this means unlearning the instinct to try to repay people for the gift of their lives by giving them titles, powers, offices — even by automatically calling them holy. It means constantly remembering that it is service that grounds authority and teaches us how to use power.

In such a church, there would be less need to have a priest write an article in which the voices of the laity — in their anger, their attention to the poor, their tears, and their courage to confront what causes fear — are raised up, because ministers would be listened to because of their authentic service rather than their titles.

Ministry in such a church — one much bigger, much holier, much truer than any of us can ever be alone — can still be a gift, not just for priests but for all.

 

 

 

 

Pope: Church will ‘never again’ cover up clergy sex abuse

Reported: 21st December 2018

https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/pope-catholic-church-priest-sex-abuse-scandal-coverup/

 

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“Let it be clear that before these abominations the church will spare no effort to do all that is necessary to bring to justice whosoever has committed such crimes,” he said.

Francis urged victims to come forward, thanked the media for giving them a voice and issued a stark warning to abusers: “Convert and hand yourself over to human justice, and prepare for divine justice.”

Francis’ remarks capped a dreadful year for the Catholic Church, one that began with his own botched handling of a sprawling sex abuse scandal in Chile and ended with the U.S. hierarchy in a free-fall of credibility as state prosecutors have begun uncovering decades of cover-up.

Francis has summoned church leaders from around the globe for a February abuse prevention summit, in an indication that he has come to realize that the problem is far greater and far more global than he had understood at the start of his pontificate five years ago.

“This is no easy task, since the guilty are capable of skillfully covering their tracks,” and choosing victims who will keep silent.

It was perhaps a veiled reference to ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the disgraced retired archbishop of Washington who is now facing a canonical trial on allegations he groped a teenage altar boy in the 1970s.

 

 

Edited January 11, 2019 by BarbaraTherese