Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media George Weigel Ethics
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TRANSCRIPT Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media George Weigel Ethics & Public Policy Center John Allen, Jr. The Boston Globe November 2010 MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Welcome. For those of you who are new, you may want to know how we select our topics. You’ll see in that little brochure in your pamphlet on the Faith Angle Forum we have eight advisors to this program. They are: E.J. Dionne, Carl Cannon, Frank Foer, Michael Gerson, Ross Douthat, David Brooks, Jeffrey Goldberg, and Barbara Bradley Hagerty. We meet twice a year, and we talk about topics that would be of interest to you at the intersection of religion and public life and that is something that is in the news that you’re wanting to know more about. We try to get the best speakers on those topics. That’s how we arrived at this. This is all being recorded. Everything will be on the record except when someone asks for it to be off the record. But we do like to transcribe these and put them up on our Website. People do read them, and they’re wonderfully rich conversations. Now, our first topic. We have two of the best people on this subject in the world. They have written books about it, but also when we asked around who would be the best people to speak on this subject, the first two people I went to are these two right here. They said yes, and we’re delighted. As you know, George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow and a colleague of mine at Ethics and Public Policy Center. He’s written a definitive book on Pope John Paul II, but TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John Allen, Jr. November 2010 now he’s got a new book out, brand new, literally out a month, called The End and the Beginning: John Paul II — The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy. So, George, we’re delighted to have you here, and thank you. After George is finished, I’ll introduce John Allen, and then we’ll hear from John and then have the Q&A. GEORGE WEIGEL: Thank you, Mike, and good morning, everyone. It was lovely to see so many of you last night. Some of you I haven’t seen since Rome in April 2005, which was a long time ago. I want to thank Mike for inviting me to do this, and my friend John Allen for agreeing to share the slot. With all due respects to E.J. and others who have spent significant time in Rome, I wrote some years ago that John Allen is the best Anglophone Vatican reporter in history, and that’s a judgment I am sure I am not going to have to retract any time soon. In the mid-1990s, I think it was, perhaps early 1990s, Pope John Paul II got wind that a distinguished Polish actor by the name of Jerzy Stuhr was in Rome. So he invited Stuhr to dinner. Stuhr was properly impressed by the invitation, came to the papal apartment. The Pope said his usual rapid-fire Latin grace and immediately started in and said, “So, Pan Jerzy, tell me what brings you to Rome?” And Stuhr replies, “Your Holiness, I am playing in Forefathers’ Eve.” Forefathers’ Eve, for those of you whose Polish literature is a little rusty is the most important play in the history of the Polish theater. It’s such a powerful evocation of the Polish national spirit that its production was banned publicly in the Russian and Prussian sectors of partitioned Poland in the 19th Century. Stuhr is doing Forefathers’ Eve. The Pope said, “Ah, Forefathers’ Eve,” talks about how important a play this is in keeping alive the idea of the Polish nation, recites large chunks of the play by memory, and then says to Stuhr, “So, Pan Jerzy, tell me what role do you take?” 2 TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John Allen, Jr. November 2010 And Stuhr looks across the table at the Pope and says, “Your Holiness, I regret to report that I am Satan,” at which point and when I usually tell this story most people laugh. (Laughter) MR. WEIGEL: And the Pope scratches his head for a minute and then says, “Well, none of us gets to choose our roles, do we?” which often provokes another laugh. (Laughter) My role today, perhaps unchosen, is to raise questions about the way in which sexual abuse by the Catholic clergy was and is covered and to suggest some possible new angles of exploration for the future. This is, of course, a complicated story, and I want to complicate it a little further by doing that awful thing that authors occasionally do, and that is quote myself. Eight years ago in this little book that Mike has provided for all of you, during the Long Lent of 2002, I insisted that “it was a serious mistake for some Catholic leaders and some Catholic traditionalists to argue that the crisis of sexual abuse was created by a media frenzy. It was not. The crisis was and is,” I wrote, “the Church’s crisis.” That’s on page 52, if you want to see if I’m quoting myself accurately. Moreover, I said, I think, on page 53, the Church owed the press a debt of gratitude for “forcing to the surface issues that have for far too long been ignored or downplayed by the Church’s American leadership.” I meant that then and I would mean it now with reference to eight years ago. To be sure that praise in 2002 was not unqualified, some things were gotten wrong. Other things were misinterpreted or skewed. There was perhaps most significantly little or no attempt to locate the problem of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, which involved a very small percentage of priests in the broader cultural context of an epic of sexual abuse of the young, which takes place primarily in families and in which there were far higher incidences of abuse in certain professional groups, like public school teachers, whose crimes went virtually unexamined. 3 TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John Allen, Jr. November 2010 Still, on balance, I would strongly defend the claim I made in 2002 that this was not the media’s crisis and that the Church owed responsible reporters and editors, many of whom are in this room, a great debt of gratitude. I think, however, it would be difficult to say that in quite so unambiguous a way about Scandal Time II, as some of us came to call this past spring. But rather than go through a point by point identification of what seemed to me to be specific errors in reporting or specific errors of demonstrable editorial bias, I would rather look forward. The difference, it seems to me, between Scandal Time I in 2002 and Scandal Time II in 2010 is explained in part by a set of assumptions that skewed the most recent reporting and analysis sometimes rather badly. Left in place, these assumptions will continue to distort coverage of the Catholic Church across the full spectrum of questions in which the Church is engaged, and that would be bad for both journalism and for the Church. So in good biblical style, let me identify here telegraphically seven problematic assumptions that seem to me to be at work not all the time, but certainly more than once in this latest round of coverage and commentary earlier this year. The first of these is the assumption of the omnicompetence of the papacy or the notion that the Pope is an absolute monarch such that if anything goes wrong in the Catholic Church, the Pope is ultimately responsible. This is not true in either theory or in practice. During the third period of the Second Vatican Council, when the Council Fathers were completing work on the theological centerpiece of Vatican II’s work, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Paul VI proposed that a sentence be inserted in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church that would read, “The Pope is answerable to the Lord alone,” or, “The Pope is responsible to the Lord alone.” That papal suggestion was rather sharply rejected by the Council’s Theological Commission which said that the Pope is responsible to any number of things which constrain his ability or capacity to do whatever he might wish to do. He’s constrained by the tradition of the Church. He’s constrained by the sacramental system of the Church. 4 TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John Allen, Jr. November 2010 He’s constrained by the rules of logic. He is constrained by the canon law that governs his office, and so forth and so on. So that suggestion by Paul VI did not make it into the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. The Pope, in other words, is the servant of an authoritative tradition. He is not the tradition’s master. This notion of papal omnicompetence is also not true in practice for no matter how competent, insightful, prophetic in the real sense of the term, ability to see things that others don’t see, a given pope may be, his exercise of the office of Peter is circumscribed by any number of human realities. The first of these, of course, is the competence of his subordinates. A Pope may have a genuinely prophetic capacity to see around corners and look through walls, as John Paul II seemed to have had an intuition of the vulnerability of the Communist system in central and eastern Europe that many of his diplomats were completely oblivious to, as I try to demonstrate in The End and the Beginning.