The Pope said on Tuesday that the Roman Catholic Church had faced a persistent problem of sexual abuse of nuns by priests and even bishops, the first time he has publicly acknowledged the issue. - VATICAN MEDIA/NYT
"This is the most serious crisis in the Catholic Church since the Reformation in 1517," said historian Massimo Faggioli recently about Pope Francis's call for a big meeting of the world's RC bishops in Rome, Feb. 21-24. "The crisis is global, but it has a North American strain, inseparable from issues of sexuality, homosexuality and gender."
I would say it is really a double crisis: one of sex and one of governance.
After a long delay, with increasingly damaging reports from all over the world about sexual abuse of minors, of seminarians by bishops, and just last week the rape of nuns in India by a bishop, the leader of the Church, Pope Francis, has summoned the leader of each country's conference of bishops (our Canadian man is Rev. Lionel Gendron) to Rome for a three-day meeting, ostensibly to discuss the "protection of children."
The Pope has cautioned that "expectations should be kept low." Mine are low.
Consider who won't be there, speaking, voting or participating in any way: women, lay people and sex abuse survivors. Those optics are very bad, but the reality is worse. The meeting is meant to address the huge scandal of sex abuse of children by clergy, but it will showcase, too, other burning issues.
The faithful are leaving in droves. My perceptive friend Mary E. Hunt of Washington ruefully says there are three groups: nuns, nones and never agains. My circle is full of "never agains."
For me, that stubbornly held and backward view of women's second-class status, combined with an immature and punitive policy on all matters sexual, is at the very bottom of this crisis. And the monarchical, male-only, exclusive style of governing with its deep-seated fear of sexuality, and of ordinary people, is long outdated, ineffective and harmful.
Reform groups from Europe and the U.S. are calling for three reforms: the ordination of women, a new theology of homosexuality and the withdrawal of the condition of celibacy from the priesthood. All good, all helpful, but the continuation of absolute governance from above, the clericalism by which members give inordinate deference to the priest, which Pope Francis himself has decried, means that they won't go deep enough.
A Vatican Council Three, open to the insights of 40 years of prophetic feminist thinking about the divine, and structured as a democratic assembly, might stem this slide, stop the suffering and restructure a toppling institution.
Women's voices are already vibrant. Law professor Mary Leary at Catholic University of America calls for "an independent, outside, top-to-bottom review, not reporting to the hierarchy but to the public."