Last week a new scandal rocked the American Church. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the retired Archbishop of Washington DC, was suspended from public ministry after an abuse allegation against him was deemed “credible and substantiated”. The cardinal, now 87 and living in a nursing home, said he had no recollection of the alleged incidents involving an altar boy, which date back decades.
Church authorities also revealed that they had reached out-of-court settlements in two other cases involving adults. It then emerged that a group of Catholics had asked Rome not to appoint McCarrick to Washington in 2000, claiming that he had a history of misconduct with priests and seminarians.
The McCarrick case was immediately hailed as a turning point for the Church. Archbishop Mark Coleridge, president of the Australian bishops’ conference, said it marked a “major shift” in Catholic culture. “It’s not unrelated to the #MeToo phenomenon,” he told reporters in Rome. “There’s something going on in the culture. And one of the elements of that cultural shift is that people are prepared to speak up in a way that they would never have done before.”
Writing in the New York Times, Ross Douthat agreed. “With the exposure of systemic abuse in so many different institutions lately, it’s become possible for Catholics to regard this as a general purgation that our Church just went through first,” he noted. “But the grim truth is that the Catholic purgation was incomplete, because it was not quite #MeToo enough.”
The “#MeToo phenomenon”, which has dominated the news this year, dates back to 2006 when the African-American activist Tarana Burke used the phrase “Me Too” to encourage women to speak about their experiences of abuse. The words entered the public consciousness in 2017, when the actress Alyssa Milano urged social media users to use the hashtag #MeToo to show the extent of sexual assault after the exposure of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.
The McCarrick case is not just a “#MeToo moment”. It is also arguably a “Time’s Up” episode. The Time’s Up movement was founded in February, by Milano and other women, to highlight sexual harassment in the workplace. The allegations against Cardinal McCarrick underline the vulnerability of priests and seminarians in their “workplace”. While bosses wield considerable power over employees in the business world, their authority is as nothing compared with that of a bishop over his clergy. As Douthat puts it: “[Priests’] commitment to the Church is supernaturally absolute and life-defining, the power their superiors exercise is greater even than that of a Hollywood producer.”
While the Church has gone a considerable way to ensuring that it takes allegations of abuse against minors seriously, it has yet to create an environment in which priests and seminarians feel free to denounce abuses of episcopal authority. In theory, of course, canon law protects them. But in practice it is difficult for clergy to seek recourse against bishops as they are encouraged to revere them as spiritual fathers and their livelihoods depend on them.
This is an unpleasant subject and one most Catholics would probably rather not think about. But we should see Catholicism’s “Time’s Up moment” not as a threat to the Church’s reputation but rather as a way of seeking justice for those who have so far been denied it.
Asia Bibi has now completed nine years in jail in Pakistan. The Christian mother of five was arrested in 2009 on a highly dubious charge of blasphemy and condemned to death the following year.
Since then there have been constant moves, backed by influential imams, to have the sentence carried out. Moreover, two people who have spoken up for the rights of Asia Bibi have been assassinated: the former governor of Punjab Salman Taseer and the former minister for minorities Shahbaz Bhatti.
All this must be deeply embarrassing for the government of Pakistan, which would face popular unrest if Bibi were ever to be released. Meanwhile, she languishes in jail, the victim of an unjust system.
Yet the government has a choice in this matter, for it could face up to the Islamist bullies who want Bibi dead and tell them they are wrong. It could point out that it governs for the good of all citizens whatever their religion; and it could repeal the blasphemy laws, which are clearly open to abuse. Moreover, if it were to take these steps, it would make Pakistan a much more open society and one less liable to produce future cases of this sort. While the cowardice of the Pakistani officials is at least understandable, that of the British and international media is inexcusable. The silence surrounding the case has been astonishing. An innocent woman is threatened with execution and kept confined for nine years for the simple crime of being a Christian. Where is the outcry? Where is the outrage?
One is left with the grim suspicion that the human rights agenda is being applied selectively. But rights, of their very nature, belong to all. International pressure is the only way to change Pakistani public opinion. Thus it is vital that others, not just Christians, speak out.
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