{"id":8212,"date":"2004-01-09T09:21:51","date_gmt":"2004-01-09T09:21:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/fr_greeley.html"},"modified":"2004-01-09T09:21:51","modified_gmt":"2004-01-09T09:21:51","slug":"fr_greeley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/fr_greeley.html","title":{"rendered":"Fr. Greeley"},"content":{"rendered":"

…has good things to say about the audit.<\/a><\/p>\n

There doubtless will be mistakes up there on the housetop. New games and new rules are hard to learn. Yet the charter and the audit suggest a major turning point in the history of the Catholic hierarchy in this country. They might not have wanted an audit by laymen, commissioned by a lay board, but their leaders were smart enough to know that it had to be, and the others went along, if in some cases only because they had no real choice.<\/p>\n

It is a measure of the justified anger of the victims of abuse that they issued a strong critique of the audit before they could have read it and thus earned themselves equal billing in the media — whether their critique was valid or not. It is a measure of the bishops’ lack of credibility that they are subject to such hostile spins on their work. Those among them who think they can now go beyond the sexual abuse crisis are kidding only themselves. Their credibility as a group is still at ground zero. If they continue their project of hassling the laity about birth control and Catholic politicians about gays, they will run the risk of being dismissed once more as hypocrites. The audit is both a step to making the church safer for kids and a step in rehabilitating their credibility as religious leaders.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…has good things to say about the audit. There doubtless will be mistakes up there on the housetop. New games and new rules are hard to learn. Yet the charter and the audit suggest a major turning point in the history of the Catholic hierarchy in this country. They might not have wanted an audit…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nFr. Greeley - Via Media<\/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\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/fr_greeley.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Fr. Greeley - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"…has good things to say about the audit. There doubtless will be mistakes up there on the housetop. New games and new rules are hard to learn. Yet the charter and the audit suggest a major turning point in the history of the Catholic hierarchy in this country. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8212\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}