Catholics deserve lots of sympathy. That’s because since Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation, all manners of allegations against the Catholic Church have been resuscitated or made up.
The avalanche was inevitable after the announcement three weeks ago. After all, for 700 years it was, as Italians would say, “When a pope dies, they just elect another one.”
It seemed the centuries-old practice of popes dying in office had made a pope’s death in office mandatory. Benedict borrowed a leaf from the Book of Deuteronomy. Paraphrased: There’s time for everything under the sun, even for stepping down.
Incidentally, Gregory XII, the last pope to resign, didn’t do a Benedict, the 265th pope. Cardinals persuaded Gregory to do so as a solution to the existence of two papacy claimants, one in Italy and another in France.
It would be presumptuous to say that when cardinals elected Benedict pope in 2005, the church was crystal pure. That’s impossible in an institution of approximately two billion of the world’s 6.1 billion people.
Figuratively, the church is an empire, with an infallible ruler and an exceptionally secretive bureaucracy at the Vatican. Spread around the globe — and in sovereign states — are the Pope’s emissaries: archbishops, cardinals, bishops, priests and nuns.
These, like the faithful, are of different races, cultures, languages, and have temporal allegiance to sovereign states. Inevitably, the faithful add local nuances to the faith.
In this context, it’s fair to say as an institution the Catholic Church has managed an incredible balancing act. Debatable, maybe, but that would also be proof of its intrinsic value. At least the faithful believe so.
However, human beings have a penchant for straying from many of the ideals they profess. Institutions do, too, and their fights for survival are legendary. Catholics and the Catholic Church aren’t exceptions.
It is, therefore, no surprise that scandals involving various individuals, some by commission and others by omission have cropped up in the Church for centuries.
These include murder, corruption, nepotism, financial improprieties, back-stabbing, sexual misdeed — incest, fornication, abuse of children by some members of the clergy, et cetera, et cetera — indeed all undesirable actions in as many cultures as comprise the Catholic congregation.
The actions any institution takes to handle its wayward members and executives matter. Indeed its influence, achievement and survival depend on those actions. Religious institutions — they all profess righteousness — come into serious scrutiny in that territory.
For a decade, the Catholic Church, for example, has come under fire over senior clergy’s failure to stymie abuse of children by clergy. The Auxiliary Bishop of Malta, Monsignor Charles Scicluna, was quoted by the AFP as saying they kept quiet “out of fear of scandal”.
It’s logical to conclude that fear, over time, contributed to continued “sin inside the church,” to quote Benedict while on a trip to Portugal two years ago.
It would do the church good were the next pope to acknowledge and deal with the “sin inside the church.” In Judeo-Christianity, admitting having sinned is the first step to redemption.
Some lessons about sinful popes — Pope Alexander VI et al — with a homily “And the church still lives” — would be a good start. -Daily Nation
Some lessons about sinful popes — Pope Alexander VI et al — with a homily “And the church still lives” — would be a good start. -Daily Nation
