Picture a newly married couple, presented with the Church’s teaching on contraception. “Bishop, you seem not to grasp the hardships involved in following this teaching, the expense of a large family and the emotional cost of sexual continence. Where is the hardship in your own life or the evidence that you have called your brothers to austerity?” The Mote-Plank Factor.
Picture policemen in a big city force, urged to break the code of omertà whereby they perjure themselves and cover for one another in incidents of brutality or racism: “Hey, why should I risk my job and my neck by ratting out a fellow cop? I don’t get into the head-cracking stuff myself. Look at you bishops: what’s the worst thing that could possibly happen to you by denouncing another bishop? Nasty looks. And yet there’s not one example of your getting rid of your own felons, for God’s sake.” The Mote-Plank Factor.
I do think that many Catholics have traditionally kept a bit of Mote-Plank thinking in reserve in regard to clergy, especially bishops. Or, to put it another way, there are few bishops who’ve been known to inspire the faithful by their holiness. For some reason, that doesn’t seem to be what gets you there.
But what’s also true is that this scandal – and continuing scandal – has decimated the moral authority of the bishops as a group. I say continuing, mostly because, as we have noted time and time again, bishops from O’Brien to O’Connell, as “disgraced” as they might be, have never once been publicly mentioned by their brother bishops, except as in need of prayer. Which they certainly are. But what need just as badly, for their sake and ours, is fraternal correction. Or else not a soul is going to care when bishops try to correct anyone else.
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