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November 13, 2002, 9:25 a.m. Reading the Scandals A survey of some of the recent books on the crisis in the Catholic Church.

t hasn't been an easy year for Catholics in the United States. In the middle of one horror — the realities and threats of a jihad against Americans — Catholics turned on their TV sets, logged on to the Internet, listened to their car radios, read their newspaper of choice with their morning coffee, and learned that Catholic priests had suddenly become synonymous with pedophiles.

That is, of course, not the case. And, as some commentators and experts have pointed out, the Catholic Church does not even have an especially bad pedophilia problem, compared to other churches and institutions that interact with children. Still, any abuse of children is abhorrent, and because of that the Catholic Church does, in fact, have a terrible problem — one that people have offered radically different solutions to.

As tends to happen when any scandal hits the news, the headlines involving the Church have begotten a slew of books rehashing, chronicling, and analyzing it. Some are reprints with new introductions. Some are compilations of investigative news stories. Others show signs of hope. As might be expected, they represent widely divergent views.

The Boston Globe's Betrayal is a collection of that newspaper's local coverage of the scandal, and is immensely useful for those who want to see how things happened in Boston specifically. To some extent, however, it is far from a regional story, as many of the events that transpired in Boston have also played out in other dioceses throughout the country. Betrayal 's point of view is necessarily that of an outsider, and as such it offers a valuable perspective for which Catholics should be grateful. As George Weigel writes in his "scandal book," The Courage to Be Catholic, "the Church owes the press a debt of gratitude. Because of the press, some sexual predators have been arrested and jailed. Because of the press, the authorities were able to locate predators like Paul Shanley and former Dallas priest Rudy Kos before they could do any more damage to young minds and souls; in both instances, Church leaders had failed to protect either the Church or society. Because of the press, the Catholic Church has been forced to recognize that it is in more trouble than its leaders and lay people might have imagined." Weigel continues, "If God could work through the Assyrians in the Old Testament, God can certainly work through the New York Times and the Boston Globe today, whether the Times or the Globe realize what's happening or not." (The Globe, along with every other major news organization, tends to miss the point of the scandals: the primary role the culture of dissent has played in making them possible. Still, the job they have done has made the cleanup work inevitable, so long as the right people step up into leadership roles within the Church.)

The Globe, like many other mainstream news organizations, has never been a friend to Catholics — in fact, often just the opposite. But Church leaders would have done well to pay them more heed in the first few months of 2002. They might at least have turned on CNN International every once in a while. Presumably, the pope has better things to do, but what about his communications staff? (Yes, the Vatican has such a thing.) To counteract the spectacle of priests being led out of rectories in handcuffs, many of the Catholic faithful and the general public needed to see the Church do something to fix the problem. The pope's staff probably should have staged some kind of sincere media show. Publicly comforted victims, a town hall, or something similar would have made Catholics watching on CNN, C-SPAN, or EWTN (the Catholic network) feel that the Church was taking care of the problem. They needed the equivalent of George Bush's August Economic Forum in Waco, Texas. Someone — Cardinal Law, any of the American cardinals, or someone else at a high-level in the Catholic world — could have sat down and listened to the faithful and pledged his — and the Church's — commitment to do everything possible to ensure that no child is ever mistreated at the hands of a priest, and if a child is, that the priest never again has the opportunity to repeat his crime.

Eventually, the Church's leaders tried to do that. Three months after the scandal news started hogging the headlines, the pope called the American cardinals and a few bishops to Rome for a highly publicized and unprecedented meeting. It didn't make much of an impression on the public. Feminist nuns whined about the patriarchy to reporters while the cardinals met — for the most part privately — with the pope. And when the cardinals finally faced the press, those with the most to answer for — the ones whose dioceses were most direly afflicted by the scandal — failed to show up.

Then there was the June meeting in Dallas. Although one might expect Church leaders in the U.S. to be a bit more media savvy than their Vatican superiors, the bishops planned no real show here, either — they gave their viewers no signal that they "got it." Instead, in full view of the world, some bishops engaged in what seemed to the average viewer who was excluded from the main, closed-door session, to be, at best, Clinton-like parsing of legal language.

In an article in The Weekly Standard on the scandals, Mary Eberstadt rightly referred to homosexuality as "The Elephant in the Sacristy." Proving her point, both the Globe account and the New York Times book, A Gospel of Shame (a reprint from 1993), demonstrate a political correctness-induced naiveté that forbids the reporters even to raise the fact that the majority of the molestation cases involve homosexual priests. Indeed, the Catholic Church story is among only a few in recent memory in which the Times and Globe have demonstrated priggishness about broaching the subject of sex.

Betrayal's one huge flaw is the most valuable asset of Goodbye, Good Men. This book, written by Catholic writer Michael Rose, is based in large part on personal interviews with seminarians, priests, and ex-seminarians, telling stories from within the walls of some the nation's most prominent seminaries and rectories. Lacking Rose's detailed knowledge of seminary practices, the Globe reporters did not understand (or did not care to understand) what is at the root of the problem. Like most of the mainstream media, they do not and most likely will not. The problem stems not from the Church's traditional policies and practices but from modern-day ideas: in particular, priests, religious thinkers, and lay theologians dissenting from the teachings of the Catholic Church on key issues. The specific problem in this case was disagreement with the Church's position on issues of sexual morality, especially homosexuality.

The mainstream media certainly knew the facts. In an interview with the New York Times in the spring, Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls floated the idea that homosexuals simply should not be accepted by seminaries. That comment, of course, was not taken well, by non-Catholics and also by many Catholics. But it is an important debate to have, especially because it is likely to bring more attention to the scandalous problems Rose chronicles in his book.

Rose reports that a few seminaries have become what some refer to as "pink palaces," run by a "gay mafia." Rose shows that the sexual rebels who occupy these institutions have protected their positions by keeping out anyone who would question them. Pervading these pink palaces is an out-of-the-closet atmosphere that is openly hostile toward orthodox seminarians who seek to selflessly serve God, and to obey, teach, and live what the Catholic Church actually represents (which is not necessarily the media's interpretation of it and most certainly not how a sexual predator presents it). One seminary teacher told Rose of an exchange with the vice rector of a U.S. seminary. The teacher told the vice rector that some of the students had asked their bishop to encourage the administration at the seminary to allow them time during the week for Eucharistic adoration, prayer in front of the consecrated Body of Christ. The teacher told Rose,

The vice rector told me that he thinks these seminarians are dysfunctional. . . . He said, we're going to send them away; we're going to force them to do therapy. He considered it "anomalous and toxic behavior" for these guys to insist upon Eucharistic adoration. He thinks that the young, conservative guys are all part of an evil conspiracy, that they're in touch with some older group or confraternity, and that they're out to sabotage the New Church. He believes their problems stem from repressed sexuality — he scoffs at their belief in celibacy in the priesthood — or that they have some other fundamental emotional or psychological problem. This vice rector is all for psychological therapies. There was one kid, for example, whom he removed from the seminary and sent out to a parish while he was receiving psychological counseling. He said that he hoped the guy would then decide to drop out on his own. Not surprisingly, this was one of the guys who was interested in Eucharistic devotion. The vice rector really doesn't understand why these young guys want to be so prayerful, why they want to dress in clerics [clerical garb], and so forth. To him, they're all nuts.

The Rose book, though far from perfect — the Catholic magazine Crisis has raised some convincing questions about one of Rose's stories — was among the first to hone-in on the roots of the scandals, providing an important alternative interpretation to a relatively wide audience.

The best book to have come out on the scandals is The Courage to be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church, by George Weigel. The author not only offers a sophisticated treatment of the issues but also has some incisive suggestions for where the Church needs to go from here. The authorized biographer of Pope John Paul II, Weigel (currently a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center) is no Church outsider, but he's not one to cover things up or fail to tell it like it is. To the contrary, Weigel's clear-headed book criticizes U.S. bishops and Vatican officials where necessary, and he has some key advice for just about everyone this scandal touches. Among other things, he explains the gap between how the Vatican sees the media versus how seemingly everyone else in the West does.

In Weigel's reading of the scandals, the "reform" the Church needs is a return to what is authentically Catholic. He writes, "Crisis means trauma; crisis also means opportunity. The trauma of the Catholic Church in the United States in 2002 will become an opportunity to deepen and extend the reforms of Vatican II if the Church becomes more Catholic, not less — if the Church rediscovers the courage to be Catholic."

"The answer to the current crisis," he writes, "will not be found in Catholic Lite," in other words, the Boston's Globe's preferred form of Catholicism. "It will only be found in a classic Catholicism — a Catholicism with the courage to be countercultural, a Catholicism that has reclaimed the wisdom of the past in order to face the corruption of the present and create a renewed future, a Catholicism that risks the high adventure of fidelity."

Another useful book you'll run into at the scandal table at Barnes and Noble is the Oxford University Press re-release of Pedophiles and Priests, a 1996 book by Philip Jenkins, a widely published and cited Pennsylvania State University professor of history and religious studies. Jenkins puts the "pedophilia crisis" in some perspective, clarifying exactly how uncommon the phenomenon is, comparing Catholic rates of incidence with those of other, similar institutions. It is, of course, difficult to accept any such incidents when you think of any child suffering at the hands of a trusted priest, but the facts are useful — even important — to know — particularly for leaders of other churches who think they might be home-free. It is, moreover, a useful corrective by which to help focus the conversation, in light of the media frenzy that took place this year. Jenkins also points out that the scandals are not exclusively about pedophilia. In fact, the vast majority of cases in the headlines this year — with the exception of monsters such as Geoghan and Shanley — have been instances of homosexual relationships between priests and seminarians or teenagers. Bad as they are, these cases are not pedophilia.

Some books by critics of the Church have interesting implications. Garry Wills's Why I Am a Catholic is not, properly, speaking, a "scandal book" — he wrote it before the recent monsoon (though it was published in July of this year). But the book is instructive in providing an image of how this prominent Catholic author would remake the Church, concentrating as it does on the typical controversial issues: contraception, women priests, and married clergy. Useful, too, is his chronicle of the history of misdeeds within the Church and the papacy through the centuries. Although Wills draws dissenting conclusions that will hurt more than help in dealing with the problems at hand — read: he totally misses the point — the book demonstrates that this is a church that has been through terrible scandals and overcome them before.

Eugene Kennedy's The Unhealed Wound: The Church and Human Sexuality was first published in the spring of 2001 and was recently released in paperback. Kennedy correctly notes that the Church's problems result from its "acting as an Institution does rather than as a Church should, so that its bureaucratic attentions infect what its pastoral possibilities would otherwise heal." But where Kennedy is dead wrong serves as important instruction: Not everyone who calls for "reform" is calling for the right kind of change (another example: Voice of the Faithful). Kennedy, an ex-priest, has a litany of fundamental things he would change about the Church, nearly all of them designed to obliterate its traditional character. Whereas Weigel would go back to the Church's catechism and tradition (no one, after all, ever abused a child because he was doing what the Catholic Church — not some sick or renegade priest — teaches), Kennedy would have more "discussion" on allowing married and female priests.

Father Benedict Groeschel'sFrom Scandal to Hope is written for a specifically Catholic audience and is a brief, prayerful account from a priest-psychologist. Its focus on the media will turn off some readers as excuse making, but read in full context, it makes true and excellent points, including what the media has missed in their coverage. Colleen Carroll's The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy is not at all a scandal book, or even an exclusively Catholic book, for that matter, but if the Wills book winds up on the Catholic-scandal tables, so should this one. Anyone who is worried about the future of the Church can look here for hopeful signs. Carroll documents some of the many young Catholics, energized by the Word of God and enthusiastic about actual Catholic teachings, who are working hard in our nation's colleges and universities, making policy in the nation's capital, and raising families.

This is a critical time for a Church in need of some serious renewal. But in addition to the obvious consensus about putting the guilty people in jail, there is a lot of disagreement about which road to take. To choose the right path, it will be essential for the Catholic Church to listen to wise counselors like George Weigel, whose light on the truth shines through the muck of scary headlines and self-indulgent commentary that has flowed out of this scandal.

This piece appears in the current issue of American Outlook, published by the Hudson Institute.