Nothing else compared with the new pope’s obligation to deal with the lawlessness infecting the priesthood and the hierarchy, and with his 2019 declaration Vos Estis Lux Mundi (“You Are the Light of the World”), he was saluted by the church establishment for doing just that. But the decree’s fatal flaws in its response to the cover-up of priestly abuse of children and others were soon apparent: Its new structures of accountability required no public disclosure, mandated no reporting to civil authorities unless civil law requires it, and failed to require any participation of the laity in the adjudication of the crimes of priests and bishops. The most obvious (and cleric-protecting) of the Vos Estis defects is that it mandates ecclesiastical self-policing: bishops investigating fellow-bishops; reporting of priest-crimes not to civil authorities but to long-complicit church offices; the Vatican alone determining punishments. Who knows how many complicit prelates have been disciplined in any way under this policy? Three years on, with Vos Estis’ trial period having ended on June 1, the Vatican has disclosed nothing about bishops investigated, charged or punished under its procedures. Omerta rules.
Pope Francis has decried clericalism, the igniting malignancy, but he has done nothing to uproot its sources in the sexually repressive all-male priesthood, and in the authoritarian system of ecclesiastical power to which that clerical culture is essential. And Francis has done nothing to reckon with the misogyny that lies at the heart of Catholic teaching on everything from birth control to the biology of reproduction to the purpose of marriage. Inhuman notions of sexuality, originating in misreadings of the Adam and Eve story and reinforced by theologians like St. Augustine, are at the service of female subjugation. Such male supremacy is morally equivalent to white supremacy. Yet, by church officials and most Catholics, it remains unchallenged.
Francis has called the topic of women’s ordination a “closed door,” and has said a resounding “No!” to married priests. When, for example, the bishops of the pan-Amazon region voted overwhelmingly in 2019 to ask him to admit married deacons to the priesthood as a way of overcoming the region’s severe shortage of priests, Francis declined even to answer the request. The bishops of the Amazon, that is, presented him with a golden opportunity to take a step, albeit a small one, toward the dismantling of the toxic culture of clericalism — an opportunity arising from below, addressing a severe pastoral problem, and advancing a diaconate, a subsidiary form of holy orders, that his immediate predecessors had already put forward as an instrument of change. Indeed, this approach could have also opened the way to the admission of women to the ranks of the ordained. But Francis left the all-male, celibate priesthood intact, and with it the soul of clericalism — the pyramid of ecclesiastical power, the structure of abuse.
Here is the tragic irony: What the world most needed from Jorge Mario Bergoglio when he donned the fabled white cassock nine years ago was not his empathetic intervention in secular matters, however urgent, but his firm advancing of reforms within the Catholic Church. Failing in that, he reinforces within Catholicism the very trends and values he most opposes outside it. Francis rails against inequality, yet inequality defines the church’s being. He is the tribune of the poor, but in protecting the second-class status of women, he upholds a worldwide engine of poverty.
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