The sexual abuse summit’s second full day will be February 22, feast of the Chair of St Peter, the liturgical commemoration of the Petrine office. Bishops who go to St Peter’s for early morning Mass or to visit the Blessed Sacrament will see the basilica on its most impressive day.
Three-foot tall tapers illuminate Bernini’s magnificent sculpture of the cathedra Petri, underneath the glorious Holy Spirit window and supported by 13ft-tall figures of four doctors of the Church – Ambrose, Athanasius, Chrysostom and Augustine. Set ablaze with light for its feast day, Bernini’s cathedra Petri is even more magnificent than his baldacchino masterpiece over the main altar.
The feast of the Chair of Peter is a solemn feast in the basilica, but will be observed this year as more sombre than festive. At some 150,000 lbs, the massive solidity of the cathedra Petri seems so much in contrast to the ambience in Rome, where solidity is much desired as the Holy See lurches from controversy to crisis. Some are trivial issues, some are passing, but Rome appears more the cause rather than the solution to the mounting disarray.
The sex abuse summit is the most prominent meeting on the subject since St John Paul II summoned the American cardinals to Rome in April 2002, during the white-hot heat of the Boston scandals. At that time the Roman environment was quite different.
“You have come to the house of the Successor of Peter, whose task it is to confirm his brother bishops in faith and love, and to unite them around Christ in the service of God’s People,” John Paul said then. “The door of this house is always open to you. All the more so when your communities are in distress.”
Then the Roman harbour appeared a safe port in the storm. Now not a few bishops – the Americans and Chileans prominent among them – consider the Barque of Peter itself to be charting a course for stormy waters with repeated obstacles ahead.
Much else has changed since 2002. Then, John Paul tried to keep two things in balance. First, the need to instil confidence in the Catholic faithful that “there is no place in the priesthood and religious life for those who would harm the young”. At the same time, there were cases where the sins of the past were buried in the past, and did not constitute a present danger.
“You are now working to establish more reliable criteria to ensure that such mistakes are not repeated,” John Paul said. “At the same time, even while recognising how indispensable these criteria are, we cannot forget the power of Christian conversion, that radical decision to turn away from sin and back to God, which reaches to the depths of a person’s soul and can work extraordinary change.”
The possibility of conversion and continued ministry was quickly dropped and is no longer talked about. The American bishops opted for “zero tolerance” just two months after John Paul’s address, and the Holy Father himself accepted it. The summit this week may take a step towards making that a universal policy. The scale of the horrors revealed require a policy that leaves no room for errors, given the magnitude of the errors in the past.
Bernini’s four theologian-bishops were relevant in 2002; they are not today. Then, the crisis in sexual morality was thought to be related to a crisis in moral teaching.
“[The Catholic faithful] must know that bishops and priests are totally committed to the fullness of Catholic truth on matters of sexual morality, a truth as essential to the renewal of the priesthood and the episcopate as it is to the renewal of marriage and family life,” John Paul said, more than hinting that dissenting teaching on fornication, contraception and homosexual activity created an environment which enabled sexual abuse to take root.
Those preparing this week’s summit have been at pains to insist that sexual abuse has little to do with sex, and nothing to do with teaching about sex. It’s about abuse of power.
A crisis of sins and crimes has thus become a crisis of governance. Which gives one pause about a Roman summit, for Rome is not, at the moment, an exemplar of good governance.
Fr Raymond J de Souza is a priest of the Archdiocese of Kingston, Ontario, and editor-in-chief of convivium.ca
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