Of Scandal and Reform: A Roundtable Discussion

On Oct. 18, seven members of the Holy Cross community sat down for an informal discussion about the clergy sexual abuse scandal that has shaken the Church and challenged Catholics across the country over the last year. On the following pages is a transcript of that conversation, moderated by HCM editor, Jack O'Connell '81.

Participants:

Rev. Michael C. McFarland, S.J., president of the College

Rev. William A. Clark, S.J.; assistant professor, religious studies Before coming to Holy Cross, Fr. Clark spent many years in various parish ministries, including several years as a pastor in Kingston, Jamaica. His Ph.D. dissertation dealt with the authority of local church communities within the universal church. In the past few months, he has been particularly focused on the response of various local and lay groups to the scandal and crisis in the Church. He has spoken on lay leadership, rights, and responsibilities in parishes in Maine, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.

Margaret N. Freije, assistant dean, Class of 2003 Margaret Freije is an associate professor in the mathematics department and the class dean for the Class of 2003. She has been teaching at Holy Cross since 1986. She and her husband, Richard '81, are the parents of three children and are active members of their parish. Recently she has been meeting with a group of fellow parishioners to talk about the crisis in the Church and the role the laity might play in bringing about healing.

Sara Janecko '04, student Sara Janecko is a third-year, religious studies premed major. During the summer, she participated in a Lilly Grant-funded internship at the Chancery for the Diocese of Worcester in the Office for Healing and Prevention. At Holy Cross, she is involved in Pax Christi, Magis, SPUD, Eucharistic Ministry and the Purple Key Society.

Marybeth Kearns-Barrett '84, associate chaplain Marybeth Kearns-Barrett '84 has served as a chaplain at the College since 1991. She holds a master of divinity degree from Weston Jesuit School of Theology. She is married to Christopher Barrett '83 and they have four children. Marybeth and Chris, along with fellow parishioners, have met with their pastor and Bishop Reilly of the Diocese of Worcester to address their concerns regarding this crisis.

David J. O'Brien, Loyola Professor of Roman Catholic Studies David O'Brien, an historian of American Catholicism, directs the College's Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture. He spoke at the summer conference of the Voice of the Faithful in Boston. He has written and lectured on the current crisis in the Church.

Holy Cross Magazine: I want to thank everyone for coming today. We're here to discuss the clergy sexual abuse scandal. We're hoping for a free-flowing, general discussion about the issue, something that will represent the range of thought and feeling among the various College constituencies we've assembled - administrators, faculty, staff and students. I want to begin by mentioning one of the triggers that brought about this roundtable. Over the course of the last year, as we were assailed by media coverage of the scandal, more than one alumnus approached an administrator and said, "I'm tired of hearing and reading salacious coverage in the mainstream media. Couldn't the College weigh in on the scandal?" I take this to mean that there is, among Catholics, a desire for both information and thoughtful exchange regarding the crisis - something deeper and more helpful than a barrage of screaming headlines. Which brings me to my opening question: Can anyone help put the totality of this scandal in some sort of context for us? We've seen headlines from national news magazines that ask, "Can the Church Survive?" Writing in America last May, Rev. John R. Quinn, the retired archbishop of San Francisco, wrote: "In terms of its harm and far-reaching effects, the present crisis in the Church must be compared with the Reformation and the French Revolution." What is your sense of the true magnitude of the current scandal from a) a historical point of view and b) a sociological one - within the framework of the larger social order, how momentous is this crisis?

David O'Brien: That's too big for me, I think. The center of gravity in the Church is not the United States of America. It never was, and it probably never will be. I think it's a huge crisis in the American Church. I don't know of anything comparable to it in the past. Even though it has been going on for 20 years in the United States, this round has been closer to home. Here in Worcester, as in Boston, very few of us have not had someone we know affected by it. So there's a kind of personal immediacy that makes one want to be a little modest in making quick judgements. Even some of the questions we'll probably talk about today - the causes and what needs to be done to reform the Church - I still feel a little uneasy moving too quickly into those discussions. Just two weeks ago, a person I've know for many, many years revealed in a public meeting that he'd been abused in the seminary 51 years ago and that the pain has never left him. So these things are still hitting us and I feel I have to abide in that revelation of pain and listen to those victims for a while before rushing to judgement about the scope of the crisis and its historical significance.

Rev. William Clark, S.J.: When you mention those two events from Quinn's article, I don't think, as important as this is, that it's a redefining moment. Those crises - the Reformation and the French Revolution - completely redrew the map for the whole Church in terms of what the issues were going to be. I'd reiterate what David is saying: Although it's pertinent to the whole Church, the crisis per se is here in the U.S. Church, which is only a small part in some ways. But also, the issues that are coming to the fore are clarifications of issues that we've been living with for quite a while. So it's not a redefining moment. The redefinition took place in Vatican II. And I would see some of these issues that are in the process of being clarified through the various responses to the scandal as things like bounds of power between laity and clergy, clerical discipline and the whole question of ministry in the Church, the authority of Church teaching on sexuality and so forth. These are things that have been out there for some time, and the crisis has brought them all to the boiling point. But I don't think it has given us a whole new map of issues.

Marybeth Kearns-Barrett: I agree with David that it's too early to tell what the harm and magnitude will be. As I think about the potential magnitude of this scandal, for me it needs to be considered on two levels. First, there is the pain, the alienation from the Church, and the breakdown of trust experienced by both the primary victims - those who were actually abused - and the "secondary" victims - the primary victims' families and other faithful who are also hurt by the abuse and its subsequent cover-up. What will the implications be of such significant loss of trust? Secondly, there is the pattern of behavior on the part of many bishops in their handling of the complaints of sexual abuse. If these patterns of behavior - the secrecy, the silencing, the protecting of clergy at the expense of the faithful - were to be examined and addressed, I think we would find that they are not uniquely American ways of handling perceived scandal in the church. Addressing these patterns of behavior would challenge the global Church's understanding of what it means to lead and whose voices matter. I believe the Church would look radically different if these issues of power, authority and accountability were really allowed to come to the surface.

Fr. Clark: No question. It's momentous from that point of view, potentially. And it's potentially worldwide from that point of view. But I think that the questions you're pointing to are questions that have been on the table at least since 1965. A lot of them are questions that have been sleeping or have been brushfires that have been put out right away. This could be much more of a conflagration. But I think it's the same series of issues that just haven't been resolved properly. Historically, I'd be almost certain that that's the way it will come out. I don't think we've entered a new era. I think we're still in the era of figuring out the implications of Vatican II. There was a reaction to the Council and there was a backlash to the reaction, and we're in the middle of all of that right now. And these kinds of things in Church history play out over a couple of centuries or more.

HCM: You're actually jumping right to the core of one of the things that I wanted to address. In doing research for this discussion, I found a majority of writers bringing up the point that this is not necessarily a discussion about sexual abuse. It's actually about the term that Bill just used - "bounds of power" - that really, this is what's lying behind everything we've experienced in the last year. In his article, "Levels of Trust," John Cavadini, chair of the theology department at Notre Dame, writes, "Most of the outrage expressed by Catholics in this country concerns the way in which those in authority over the offending priests - mainly the bishops of the dioceses in which they served - reacted by reassigning them, in some cases repeatedly, from parish to parish." Historian R. Scott Appleby has written, "This crisis is not just about priests who have committed sexual crimes. It's about the culture of secrecy and the persistence of a two-tiered church with an elite tier that keeps its own counsel and makes financial, personnel and other decisions without consulting the laity." Would you agree that the core of this crisis has, perhaps, less to do with the offending priests and more to do with a sense of betrayal by the hierarchy of the Church? Why did the bishops behave in this manner? Ignorance? Fear? Was this "serial reassigning" of offending priests a systemic problem - a result of a lack of accountability to, and a disregard for, the rank-and-file laity?

Rev. Michael McFarland, S.J.: It's a complex question. I think there are a lot of reasons and it's hard to isolate one. In the '70s, I think you can say they didn't know any better. People viewed this as a moral problem. If somebody did this, they had just failed in their vows as priests, and in their pastoral responsibilities. And they were admonished. And in some way punished. Then, they either went back to work or they didn't. In some cases they thought, well, it's like any other moral problem. You criticize them, they confess and then it's over and you go on. I think, by 1990, people should have known better. Because there were enough high profile cases, and there was more and more psychological work that showed that in many cases these people who were serial pedophiles were incurable, or at least too much of a risk to be exposed to children. There was that element of it. But there was a culture of secrecy, no question about it. And, certainly, a kind of clericalism that said clergy are a special class that are treated differently. I think that was an unquestioned assumption that people operated under. So the fact that priests might have been given different treatment - either harsher or less harsh - could've been an unspoken and unreflective assumption. And there was this sense that we can't have scandal. That's always an important thing, and you can see it as self-protection - which in many cases it was - or in some cases, perhaps, genuine concern about protecting the Church - one that we would criticize but maybe it was done with good will in some cases. So, I think there was a whole culture that people weren't even aware of that many bishops were operating under. In other cases, you can speculate that people were just trying to hide the problem, protecting friends or protecting their own class of people. There was some of that, too. Certainly, it appears that the victims were not very high on the list of concerns. That seems to be what's emerging in a number of these testimonies. They were treated as if they were a danger to the Church when they brought forth some of these accusations. And that is really hard to justify.

Fr. Clark: It strikes me that what you mention is a result of a habit of thought that defines the Church as a clerical power structure, and that's what is meant when we talk about protecting the Church or avoiding scandal. It's not so much that there is an active despising of, or disregard for, ordinary people in the Church who, in most cases, would be the ones coming forward to make these complaints. But there's a whole way of thinking that sees everything of importance focused somewhere else, in the clerical class. It leads to the possibility of ignoring, in extremely harmful ways, what's happening outside of that class. That's just a result, it seems to me, of looking at the Church in a particular way that ultimately is extremely flawed. We don't necessarily see the flaws until something like this happens. And then we see their enormity.

Fr. McFarland: I think you can ask why is all this surfacing now, and why do we have 30 or 40 years of stuff to deal with all at once. I think probably there was this very powerful shared sense that you don't talk about sexuality. And people were inhibited from even bringing these things up in many cases, not because someone told them not to, but because everything told them not to. It was just something you didn't do. Which relates to the way the larger culture and society dealt with sexuality. It wasn't just the Church in the '50s or '60s, but everybody. So I think you had a lot of this building up.

O'Brien: After Vatican II, there were initiatives that didn't work out and those failures have something to do with why we did not do a better job dealing with these issues back in the '80s when they first hit us. But again, I want to go back to what I said earlier - that we jump into reform questions and power questions a little too fast. First of all we wouldn't be here if it weren't for the victims. We owe a lot to their lawyers and to district attorneys and judges, but especially to the victims who brought us to face these truths. The victims would probably say that the first thing we need to do is to hear their voices. And that's not been fully done. I have a feeling that there's a lot more truth to be faced before we are ready to move on to reform. This last week came the news from Rome,1 and the discussion shifted back to priests. We're back to talking about cardinals and bishops and priests. I think the full truth is not on the table, and, until it is, I'm not sure you can do the reform job right.

Sara Janecko '04: This was the primary motivation in the creation of the Worcester Diocese's Office for Healing and Prevention. The first aspect of the mission statement was to encourage healing within the Church. The first thing that the director and the coordinators did was visit all the churches, sometimes with Bishop Reilly in attendance. They would conduct a question and answer period, just to explain what the office plans to accomplish and to hear from the parishioners - to ask, What are your thoughts on this issue? How do you think the church can best be healed? And then, toward the end of this summer, at the end of my internship, we started looking at programs and prevention aids that would prevent sexual abuse in the future. That was their main goal, to deal with the victims, to listen to them and have their voices heard simply because they are part of the Church. And then, from there, it is possible to think about how we, as a Church, need to change. I thought that was a very effective way to deal with it. I agree - I don't think you can jump into the reforms until the victims voices are heard.

O'Brien: There are also other kinds of truth questions, including the gathering of data. The bishops promised a full study. The Keating Commission2 is pushing to get a budget and a staff to do the study. We need a willingness to be transparent at this level, and it's still not there. Question of reform are political questions: Who has the information and who has a place at the table?

Fr. Clark: That's the difficulty. I really appreciate what you're saying about hearing the victims' voices before we can really get down to reform. But there are fundamental questions of reform that are standing in the way of really hearing the victim's voice. And it's exactly that: Who has a place at the table, and who's going to do the listening? There's a lot of window dressing and not so much substance on that very issue.

Margaret Freije: I also think there needs to be further discussion on who the victims are. There are the actual victims of abuse. But then there are a whole lot of other victims out there. There are circles and circles of victims. From the parishes where this priest whom they loved was removed. To those who knew people who were abused. To the ordinary people who are sitting in the pews saying, "What is going on here?" To the priests who were not part of this scandal. And I think those voices are the ones that also are not being heard in so many ways. And I think you're right, David, that until those voices are heard, until there's a place to hear those voices, it's hard to know how to go forward.

Fr. McFarland: It must be hard for any parent now to think about how you relate to your parish and your priest.

Freije: It's overwhelmingly difficult. It's very hard to go into church on Sunday. My kids are 13, 11 and 5. I don't know what they're thinking about all of this. The 13- and 11-year olds are old enough to read the newspaper, to know what's going on. And I have had conversations with them, but I'm not sure that tells me what they're thinking. And I'm not sure that tells me what they're feeling when they walk into church. It's changed, for sure.

HCM: Where do we stand in terms of finding a place at the table for everyone to talk? Do you feel a sense of frustration or hope?

O'Brien: I think we'd find some hope if we knew what was going on in all the dioceses. If we had those reports, we'd probably find that there are a lot of places that have gotten through this very well, that came out of the '80s with structures and procedures in place that work well. Some dioceses have good diocesan pastoral councils and parish councils and pastoral staffs at the table when decisions are made. The Archdiocese of Chicago has done relatively well because the late Cardinal Bernardin put in place a just and relatively open process after a pretty thorough housecleaning. I think we'll find that it's not rocket science. There are ways to tell the truth, to get a process that builds trust, and we can learn from those places how to do it better. Unfortunately, the politics of the reforms that we're interested in are not very encouraging. The Episcopal Conference of the United States has been badly weakened over the last 20 years in its capacity to dialogue with Rome. Still, in Dallas, the bishops took a big step toward asserting their rule as pastoral leaders of the Church in the United States. A lot more came out of Dallas than many of us expected, but everyone knew it would be in some jeopardy when it got to the Holy See. To take one example, the Keating committee is absolutely unprecedented in its independence. I don't think there's ever been an independent body set up by the bishops with genuine oversight responsibility. The bishops took a big risk. If they try to follow through on their commitments, there will be opposition and not just from Rome. Priests' organizations are weak and priests themselves are divided. Religious orders are a shadow of what they used to be in terms of influence on the Church's decision-making process. Thousands upon thousands of lay people are now in professional ministerial roles in the U.S., but they have no organizational capacity to influence the structure. And lay people are not organized. If they're lucky, they're in a diocese where they have a good pastoral council, but in most places they don't have access to the system. That's where the Voice of the Faithful3 comes in. It's a hopeful thing that the Voice of the Faithful has appeared. It's less hopeful that it has not had more support. The wealthy, educated, well-positioned and influential people of Boston and elsewhere have not really gotten behind it and made it clear that there must be change. So the politics of reform are not promising.

Fr. Clark: That's another result, I think, of the length of time that we've gone without respecting that segment of the Church at all. When something happens in which there's an opportunity and a necessity for the voices to be heard, there's no mechanism for hearing and working out differences. It seems to me that lay people are defending their position in the church in two quite incompatible ways. One group says, "We're also the Church, and we've got to be listened to and these are our ideas that are different from the ideas of the clergy and the hierarchy." Another says, "We are really Catholic because we are defending the hierarchy, and we won't let you take away their leadership role and their rights and privileges and so forth." Right now, we have no structures that are going to allow us to resolve this tension aside from duking it out.

HCM: The calls for reform that have arisen in the aftermath of the scandal often hinge on a larger and more active role for the laity in administrative affairs. Is it possible, as some have written, that the crisis may be a genuine triggering force for a global democratization of the Church?

Fr. McFarland: I think those forces are slow, but they're happening anyway. I mean, 40 years ago it would have been inconceivable that this even would have happened, that lay voices would have been heard. So in that sense it's a very slow and frustrating but positive change. And partly it happens of necessity - the real vigor, in many cases, the energy and the numbers are coming from the laity. The Church is relying more and more on the lay people for leadership as well as for the ordinary work that goes on. Now, some people are fighting this rear-guard action every step of the way, I guess. But that's the transition that we're in. And as David pointed out in the beginning, the real action is in the third world, where the laity is a very strong force. There are educational disparities to be worked out, but, at the local level, there's strong lay leadership.

O'Brien: There's enormous energy in the Church in the United States. It's very alive. Look at the diversity of the Church, the growth of the Church in the Latino community in Los Angeles, South Texas or South Florida. There's this tremendous flood of lay people into ministerial leadership, an even bigger pool of people who would like to be in ministry if they had the opportunity. There is the example of Catholic colleges and universities where religious orders took the risk of giving the schools over to boards of trustees composed primarily of lay people. And they've thrived. And some of the Catholic hospitals and social service agencies ran the risk of real shared responsibility, and they've worked effectively. There's great faith and loyalty out there. The challenge is to get it all mobilized in such a way that it contributes to an institutional reconstruction that serves the pastoral mission of our Church.

HCM: Do you sense a discrepancy between the way the scandal has played out in local parishes as opposed to nationally? Some of the information I've read indicates that while a majority of Catholics surveyed felt a deep sense of betrayal by the highest levels of the hierarchy, somehow they felt more protective and supportive of their local priests than ever before.

Kearns-Barrett: In trying to address this crisis in our parish there was a strong desire on the part of parishioners to protect and support our pastor while at the same time challenging our bishop and his handling of the crisis.

Janecko: I've come across churches that are absolutely enraged at the whole Church as an institution, both the hierarchy and their own local priest. And then there are people whose sense of betrayal and confusion at the situation is so great and so extensive that they've left the church and joined another denomination. So I think there's a wide range of feelings about betrayal by the hierarchy that either mobilizes people to action within their own church or just causes them to give up on the church as a whole. Which is sad.

Freije: I certainly don't know this for a fact, but I'd be surprised if people who were leaving the Church to go to other denominations were doing so because they felt there would be fewer abusers in the ministry there. We all come to terms with the problem of the institution versus our faith. But I think there comes a point where you wonder if the institution is no longer supportive of your faith. And then it's hard to reconcile. Then it's hard to move forward within the confines of that institution. And I suspect that for many people this scandal shines a bright light on some of the things that have been there all along. And I think that's why the scandal is not about the individual priests and their actions, as awful as they were. But it's about what it shows regarding the institution in terms of power. And on the one hand, I understand, David, why you say that we may have gotten more out of Dallas than we hoped for. But we also got less out of Dallas than we had hoped for in so many ways. Because the process is still not transparent. I sympathize in some ways with concerns over process. Those are real concerns. But I think you only deal with process questions in the light of day. And I don't know how that's going to be accomplished. The only way to deal with process questions is to throw open the doors and make it wide open.

Fr. Clark: Well that's the first process question, isn't it? The problem is that calling for this process reform is so quickly interpreted as disloyalty and an attack on the Church. Instead, I think we need to hear the various calls for process reform in the context of the balanced relationship between the pastors and the faithful that is implied in canon law. It is true that there is an obligation to support the Church. That's stated in canon law (Canon 222), and it makes all the sense in the world. But support is a two-way street. It's required for the people from the leaders as well. And that's what is not being felt by those who are pressing for reform. In a sense it's simply a plea for the support to be mutual. People have a right to the spiritual goods of the church. That's in canon law (Canon 213) just as clearly as the obligation to support the church is. If both of those are not being held together, then the relationship is already out of sync - it's not "disloyalty" that creates the problem.

Kearns-Barrett: The thing that troubles me so much, that didn't come out of Dallas, is a failure on the part of the bishops to hold each other accountable. I know that they don't have any legal jurisdiction over one another. But it doesn't appear that there's a brotherly calling on one another to say that we can't move forward as a U.S. Catholic Conference without some of you somehow doing penance for this or being sanctioned.

HCM: In that same vein, I felt a knee-jerk reaction to all the depositions of various bishops that we saw on TV. I wonder if anyone else felt it. You would see the pictures in the newspaper or the clip on TV of a bishop walking with a phalanx of lawyers around him. And it was the same picture you had seen of Enron executives. There was a sense of corporate stonewalling. But I wonder how difficult it is for the bishops. Isn't the bishop enmeshed within the legal protocols? If the Church is sued, if a bishop is named in a lawsuit, he does have to consult with the diocesan lawyers. I guess the question is, how difficult would it be for any bishop to step outside the process? And is a comparison to this past year's corporate scandals legitimate?

Fr. Clark: I don't think it's an accident that these various scandals are all happening at once. I'm not sure I know why. It has to do with our cultural understanding of authority and the use and abuse of it. What strikes me in regard to the dilemma that you raise is that, yeah, the world has to be dealt with according to those legal protocols and systems, but what we've seen is an expectation on the part of the Church that it will be treated differently when it's a matter of the "outside world" dealing with the Church. But when the Church deals with the outside, we make use of the full array of tools and weapons that are there. And that I find very disturbing. If there's going to be a demand for special consideration in the one direction, then there should be special treatment in return. If we're going to be talking about Gospel values in defense of bishops, then bishops ought to be acting primarily from Gospel values - rather than legal protocol - in responding to the world.

HCM: I'd like to ask about the mindset of the bishops regarding the serial reassigning of abusive priests. It's near impossible for parents to understand how this could have happened. These bishops are not monsters. And yet parents cannot conceive of how one could have a document in hand identifying an abusive priest and then transfer that priest to a parish, putting additional children in harm's way. What was the process of thought? And is there something about the institutional trappings and strictures of the church that worked against moral leadership in some bizarre way?

Fr. Clark: One thing strikes me as you say that - "putting additional children in harm's way." That is, of course, absolutely not the way it would ever have come through the bishops' minds. They were dealing with personnel problems. As I think about clerical conversations I've heard about parish assignments, sometimes it seems as though the last thing you talk about is the people. You talk about the location, the collection, you talk about whether there's a school, you talk about the rectory, whether there's a debt.

Fr. McFarland: I've worked in parishes in the Boston Archdiocese. They would always have forums with the people to ask them what kind of pastor they wanted. I mean there are other considerations.

Fr. Clark: Okay, it's true, that is done. But I'm talking about conversations among priests on the level of who's going to go where? and who's going to get what? This is the kind of language that is very often used. And I'm not saying that pastors are simply callous, or that this language is used intentionally to turn people into things or to forget that they're there. But the focus of these conversations can seem to drift in that direction. I've been a part of one of those forums that you're talking about. And this was actually at a time in the early '90s when this particular parish was in need of a pastor - because the pastor had been removed for this very problem that we're talking about. And there was a forum, and the people left feeling much more frustrated than when they arrived because their real concerns were not addressed. And ultimately, the forum had virtually nothing to do with who was appointed. Now, there were lots of reasons for that. It's not as though there's a huge pool of priests, and you can go and pick the perfect pastor based on what was said at the forum. But I don't think I was alone in getting the impression that the forum, whether intentionally or not, was window dressing for a process that did not really include the people.

O'Brien: There are dioceses where parishes are bid for, and priests might even get interviewed by the parish council. When Archbishop Jean Jadot was the Apostolic Delegate in the 1970s, there was an effort to develop a process for the selection of bishops that involved consultation with the local diocese, the priests and the pastoral councils, with an emphasis on pastoral qualities in the selection of bishops. Now it appears that pastoral considerations are not the primary criteria in the selection of bishops. We all bear some responsibility for the failure of church reform. We saw what was going on with the declining number of priests, and we did nothing about it. We saw what was going on with bishops, but we lowered our voices because we didn't want to make it harder for them. Look to the question of the role of women in our Church. Even the idea of having a hearing about the role of women - as Archbishop Weakland did - put one in the left wing. Our bishops had to scrap a pastoral letter on that subject. The Catholic Common Ground Initiative,4 which attempted to construct a process so that the different groups in the Church could talk to each other, was considered too liberal. We weren't on some other planet when this stuff was going on, but we shrugged our shoulders and waited for a new pope, as if there was nothing we could do. Let's hope we don't do that again.

Freije: There are a lot of people in my parish who appreciate the fact that a number of us wrote a letter to the bishop and are willing to work with VOTF, but they don't want to be more actively involved. One of the things I wonder about is in what ways has the laity become acculturated to be the kind of laity the Church has promoted. That manifests itself a little bit in the fights between VOTF and other groups, but there are so many just sitting there, and I just don't know which way they're going to go. They may or may not be putting money in the collection basket at this point in time for a whole variety of reasons. And I guess that's the part that makes me less hopeful about where this is all going in terms of opening up this process. There are so many people who have spent their whole lives as Catholics, good Catholics, just sitting in the pews on Sundays. And I'm not sure they're ready for this. I'm not sure they want to expend the energy that would be required to make something change.

Fr. McFarland: Yes, their focus is their families and their work and maybe the volunteer efforts they do. And they want the church to support that.

Kearns-Barrett: This is especially true among younger Catholics whose ties to the institutional Church are markedly different from prior generations according to a recently published book, Young Adult Catholics: Religion in the Culture of Choice, which surveyed Catholics between the ages of 20-39. While many of these younger adults had a strong sense of Catholic identity, unlike prior generations, 64 percent of the younger Catholics surveyed believe you can be a good Catholic without going to Mass. Only 31 percent of them attend Mass weekly, the other 69 percent may attend Mass anywhere from two-to-three times per month to less than once per year. Here at Holy Cross, in a survey done by Professor Royce Singleton of the sociology department last spring, 81 percent said that their "commitment to the Church was weakened by reports indicating that a number of priests have abused children sexually." Given this kind of data, I don't even know how many younger adults will be left sitting in the pews, never mind being the passionate party David spoke about working for reform. Another issue affecting Catholics in their 20s-to-40s is how this crisis affects our children's faith and the kind of relationships they will want to have with the Church as they grow up. For my husband, Chris, and I, the most important gift we can give our children is the gift of faith - a relationship with God based on trust and love that is at the center of their lives. Yet we recognize that we can't do this alone. We need to be part of a larger community of faith. But raising children in the Catholic community is a real struggle for us now. How do you encourage children to participate in a faith community when many leaders of that community showed a blatant disregard for the welfare of children?

Fr. Clark: You're reminding me of comments that Tom Beaudoin5 made at the VOTF convention in July, about the attitude of Catholics under 35. It's almost a "show me the money" kind of attitude - Why is the Church worth our commitment? - he sees in the so-called Generation X and younger. And I think this scandal is bringing to a head something that was already developing.

O'Brien: It's interesting when you talk about the students on the campus and when you visit the parishes and talk with Patty Engdahl '85 and Frankie Nugent6 about the parishes, the response is pastoral. If I've learned one thing out of this whole episode, it is the priority of pastoral care. For too long, we took the parishes and the pastors for granted. Social justice work, higher education, Catholic art and culture - it all turns on pastoral care. If you don't have good, healthy parishes and flourishing apostolic movements, nothing else is going to work. It all goes back to good pastoral care. For me, that's kind of an eye-opening experience.

Fr. McFarland: I also worry about the effect on our students. Because I think people my age and even younger, we've all been through a lot and we're probably in for the long term. Young people may not have that same commitment. But one source of hope, one of the best things I've ever seen written on this subject was the letter that our students wrote to Bishop Reilly back in May. It was nuanced, it was very thoughtful, it was loyal, but it addressed the issue.

Janecko: I actually helped to participate in the drafting of that letter, and I believe this is a testament to the fact that not all young people are passive about this issue. While the initial shock of the gravity of the situation may cause a temporary decline in overall faith, I think that people my age care about our Church and the current situation. I know for myself, even though these awful tragedies have caused such pain among myself and my peers, I believe that change is possible. I hope for the future of our Church and a true sense of repentance and forgiveness. It is through this forgiveness that all wounds will be healed, and our Church will be able to move forward.

Fr. McFarland: I think the best defense in something like this is to help people think these things through and also take responsibility for them. They should not be believing or acting in a certain way because someone told them to. They have to come to their own informed decisions and to own them. That is what Jesuit spirituality, especially through the Spiritual Exercises, tries to do. And we try to do this in our courses - get people to question these things so they're not blindsided by something like this, to work it through intelligently, understand it and sort out the issue. On one level, the scandal is about the abuse of vulnerable children and young people. That is a terrible evil. It can ruin lives and tear apart families and communities, as it often has. The damage is often severe and long-lasting. At most, it can be mitigated through therapy for the victims; punishment, acknowledgment of the problem and appropriate treatment for the abusers; and better monitoring and control to prevent future occurrences. Sad to say, this is a widespread, though until recently, little recognized problem in our society. The statistics on the percentage of young people who are sexually abused before age 18 are appalling. Abuse by priests is a tiny percentage of this.

HCM: And yet, can we say that the sense of betrayal in clergy abuse cases is, somehow, more profoundly disturbing because of the fact that the abuser is also a symbol of a higher moral and ethical calling?

Fr. McFarland: People are deeply hurt and angered by what they see quite rightly as a betrayal of trust. To some extent, that is also an issue when a parent, teacher, babysitter or other person in a position of authority is the abuser. But with clergy there is the additional element of a sacred trust. When that is broken, it is especially shocking and painful because in some way people's religious faith and loyalty have been betrayed. Repairing that is much harder. On the one hand, people have to understand that priests and bishops are human and so therefore fail sometimes. That does not excuse them when they do, but people have to be prepared for the possibility. On the other hand, priests, bishops and other clergy have to take seriously the promises they made to serve God and the people, and understand the terrible damage that can result when they break those promises. Most importantly, clergy have to be held accountable. There can be no hiding behind the collar. The predominant identification of administrative and judicial power with the clerical state has to be revisited. It is no longer true - if it ever was - that clerics are the exclusive vessels of learning or divine wisdom. Nor are they, by their very nature, representative of the people. Good governance, however it develops, will certainly require more lay participation and responsibility. Some dioceses, including a number in the United States, are already moving in that direction, although more out of necessity - because of shortages of priests - than by design. In many cases, it seems to have worked well. It's likely to be a difficult process, requiring much study and discussion, but one of our major tasks as a Church over the next decade will be to fashion an effective system of governance that restores faith in the Church's authority.

HCM: Thank you all for participating in this forum.

1 In October, Vatican officials rejected central elements of the sexual abuse policy adopted by U.S. bishops last June in Dallas.

2 Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating was appointed to chair a national lay review board established by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops at its meeting in Dallas June 13-15.

3 The Voice of the Faithful (VOTF) is a group of Boston-based Catholics who have come together, in the words of the VOTF missions statement, "To provide a prayerful voice, attentive to the Spirit, through which the Faithful can actively participate in the governance and guidance of the Catholic Church."

4 The Catholic Common Ground Initiative was inaugurated by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin in 1996. It originated in a concern that "unnecessarily polarizing differences among church leaders and members hinder efforts to build the church community and to carry out its mission." The initiative "proposes working principles for dialogue within the church and expresses the conviction that such an effort will transform those who engage in it as well as strengthen the church for its mission in the new millennium."

5 Visiting assistant professor of theology and religious education at Boston College and the author of Virtual Faith.

6 Engdahl '85 and Nugent work for the Worcester Diocese's Office of Healing and Prevention.

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