{"id":174,"date":"2011-02-22T05:38:57","date_gmt":"2011-02-22T05:38:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/dolans-complaint.html"},"modified":"2011-02-22T05:38:57","modified_gmt":"2011-02-22T05:38:57","slug":"dolans-complaint","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/dolans-complaint.html","title":{"rendered":"Archbishop Dolan’s complaint"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this month, the big dog in the Catholic hierarchy, Tim Dolan of New York, told<\/a> NCR’s John Allen that church leaders needed to project a “sense of contrition” if they are to recover their pre-scandal credibility.<\/p>\n

\n

“What we have to do, and the bishops have to lead it, is one big fat mea
\nculpa,” Dolan said. “We can’t get tired of that, and we have to mean it.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So it’s interesting that it was not Dolan but Sean O’Malley of Boston, the other American hierarch on the Vatican’s team looking into the Irish church, who made<\/a> the big fat mea culpa two days ago. In a Dublin cathedral, O’Malley and Diarmuid Martin of Dublin washed and dried the feet of eight victims of clerical sex abuse. As Martin put it, “”For covering up crimes of abuse, and by so doing actually causing the
\nsexual abuse of more children… we ask God’s forgiveness.” <\/p>\n

As for Dolan, most of what he had to say to Allen had to do with his grousing that the American bishops went too far in adopting a zero tolerance policy for priests accused of abuse. It was no longer the case, he claimed, that the vast majority of accusations are accurate, implying that he would like to do away with the policy of automatically suspending a priest when a credible but unsubstantiated allegation is made. The problem? “[Y]ou can’t remove a guy without people jumping to conclusions.”<\/p>\n

So what? If an investigation proves the accusation false, you put that out there, and lift the suspension, and get on with business. That’s what you would do with a teacher or a prison guard or anyone else in a position of authority. Dolan’s complaint shows how deeply entrenched the clericalist mindset is in the Catholic church. And why big fat mea culpas won’t do the trick unless there’s credible evidence that those responsible for the cover-ups have been and will be punished.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier this month, the big dog in the Catholic hierarchy, Tim Dolan of New York, told NCR’s John Allen that church leaders needed to project a “sense of contrition” if they are to recover their pre-scandal credibility. “What we have to do, and the bishops have to lead it, is one big fat mea culpa,”…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nArchbishop Dolan's complaint - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/dolans-complaint.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Archbishop Dolan's complaint - 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}