When that old column of Santorums blew across the Internet last week, I paid little attention because..well, it was 3 years old and on a subject much discussed here over the years anyway.

But now the Massachusetts Dems have decided to hoist Santorum up on those words, so I guess we have to notice.

Santorum’s column was incredibly simplistic. We actually addressed a more sophisticated version of his argument three years ago when Michael Novak had this article in the National Review.

The simplistic answer to the simplistic version is that clerical sexual abuse has been with us for a very long time, yes, even since before Vatican II. Predators at work during the 60’s (people like Porter and Geoghan) had been trained before the Council. The bishops who have covered up and protected abusers have been from all over the map – Cardinal Law was not beloved by theological progressives, obviously. Back in ’02, a couple of commentors (this was before I had comments – I laboriously cut and pasted from emails – it got up to about a hundred emails a day before I finally put in comments. So now I only get 50 or so) had good points:

(This one is Mark Shea)

This explains the pattern we’re seeing. Some of these clever "spirit of Vatican II" bishops not only approved of boffing boys in the men’s room when their priests did it, they did it themselves. These were almost uniformly liberals. Others did not go in for boffing boys in men’s rooms, but seeing as how it had been made an acceptable pattern by the Forward Thinking priests and bishops among us, they relied on their conservative instincts to Not Rock the Boat and Keep the Machine Oiled.

Bottom Line: the present evils the Church faces are an ingenious cooperative arrangement between the worst liberal impulses and the worst conservative ones. Liberals have agitated for dissent from the Church’s teaching and for unchastity. Conservatives, faced with this, have cravenly protected the fait accompli and the status quo. This is why, if you run across a pederast bishop, he is a liberal (that subculture whose fave rave words are "transgressive", "pushing the envelope" etc.) while no conservative bishop is an actual pederast, though he may well be a cowardly enabler too spineless to challenge the Insurgent Clevers who… what’s the word I’m
looking for? Ah! Rape our children and despoil us of the Church’s teaching.

From another, now unknown reader:

(in the extended post)

Whether we use the terms "liberal" or "conservative," the Church’s overriding problem today remains Clericalism — the mentality that sees a bishop’s job as fundraising and building institutions rather than preaching the truth regardless of consequences. This is a characteristically American problem arising in part from the Catholic immigrant experience (although it’s also pervasive in Ireland and elsewhere). For clericalists, the "Church" means primarily priests and religious: Vatican II’s proclamation of the universal call of the baptized to holiness is at best an empty
formula, sometimes regurgitated but rarely reflected upon.

"Liberalism" is a sub-set of Clericalism, and for this reason Novak is right to attribute the roots of The Scandals in large part to the sexual and liturgical chaos that began in the mid-1960s. Liberal Catholics emphasize questions of ordination of women, celibacy, etc. precisely because they view the priesthood as essentially a power structure rather than a role of service. And if it’s a power structure, the inclusion of women, married men, active homosexuals and anyone else you can think of becomes a "justice
issue." For the same reasons, liturgical experiments often involve lay people taking on priestly roles — because the priesthood, is thought to be the essence of the Church itself. It is no coincidence that the leadership of the left wing of the American Catholic Church consists overwhelmingly of ex-seminarians, ex-religious, or university-tenured theologians. Too many of these folks lack life experiences that would enable them to understand the proper role of the laity in the Church.

As the Boston situation demonstrates, the clericalist error is by no means confined to liberals. Church bureaucrats who focus on the latest capital campaign, and urge the laity to simply "pray, pay, and obey," are everywhere in this country. But in my view the most promising development in the Church today is the profusion of new movements and organizations which emphasize the universal call of the laity to holiness and which explicitly reject the clericalist way of viewing the Church as merely an external institution — I’m thinking of everything from Opus Dei to the Charismatic Renewal to Communion & Liberation to Focolare to the Schoenstatt Movement to your parish Bible study or prayer group. Many of these movements get mislabelled "conservative" by the church bureaucrats, but they represent precisely the diverse outpouring of gifts of the Holy Spirit that the Second Vatican Council envisioned.

Liberalism doesn’t worry me. As the generation of Humanae Vitae dissenters begins to die out, the cause of a liberal American Church will die with them. Younger Catholics make a more coherent choice between accepting the Faith in its fullness or simply leaving the Church altogether. But the clericalist error remains deep-rooted in the United States, and not just among the clergy. Lay people who regard an intense prayer life by anyone other than a priest as bizarre zealotry are clericalists. As are the many

for whom the term "Catholic Church" brings up mental images of official diocesan boards, Catholic schools, Catholic Charities, and of course Notre Dame football.

Until we each convert ourselves and recognize that the God wants every one of us to be a saint – a canonizable saint – the clericalist error will continue to wreak havoc on the Church in the United States. Let’s pray that The Scandal is the first step in the awakening needed to bring that conversion about. If so, it is a great gift, no matter how painful.