The Catholic Crisis: A View from Rome

Arriving at the Vatican at Easter 2002, even a knowledgeable American sympathetic to Roman ways would have had to conclude that the senior officials of the Holy See were about three months behind the curve in assessing the U.S. crisis of clerical sexual abuse and episcopal misgovernance. Vatican officials seemed to be about in the same condition as most American Catholics in early January, when the Boston scandals were breaking into the headlines: reeling, unsure just how much of this was real and how much was media hype, uncertain about sources of information, hesitant to believe that things were as bad as they might seem. Three weeks later, things in Rome had changed, if not dramatically then at least substantially.

The turn began on Tuesday, April 9. The day before, the Pope had had lunch with several American cardinals who were in Rome for the annual meeting of the Papal Foundation, a largely U.S.-funded agency that enables John Paul II to expand his charitable activities around the world: rebuilding seminaries in the former Soviet bloc, building AIDS clinics in Africa, and so forth. Conversation at lunch had naturally turned to the unfolding scandals in the U.S., but the cardinals present - Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia, William Keeler of Baltimore, and Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C. - did not seem to convey a sense of crisis: this was, they said, a time of "purification" from which the Church would emerge stronger. The tougher message was delivered at lunch on Tuesday by the president of the recently re-named U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Bishop Wilton Gregory of Belleville, Illinois.

There were no preliminaries in this discussion. No sooner had the Pope said grace before meals than he turned to Bishop Gregory and asked, "What is the situation in the United States?" Gregory said that it was imperative that Rome understand that this was a crisis, in fact and not just in media perception. It was not going to be over anytime soon. More revelations of sexual abuse and episcopal mismanagement would be forthcoming. The Pope, who seemed determined that the U.S. bishops not face this alone, asked what he and the Holy See could do to help. Bishop Gregory, who was joined at lunch by the conference vice-president, Bishop William Skylstad of Spokane, and the conference general secretary, Monsignor William Fay, replied that the bishops would try to adopt national personnel norms at their semi-annual meeting in June, and that the best thing the Holy See could do would be to put these norms on a fast track for approval when they were sent to Rome. The Americans were assured that that would happen.

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