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Indulgence

Tuesday, 
April 13, 2010

An excerpt from Indulgence, by Hendrick Hertzberg, The New Yorker (Apr 19, 2010 issue).

The Catholic Church is an authoritarian institution, modeled on the political structures of the Roman Empire and medieval Europe. It is better at transmitting instructions downward than at facilitating accountability upward. It is monolithic. It claims the unique legitimacy of a line of succession going back to the apostolic circle of Jesus Christ. Its leaders are protected by a nimbus of mystery, pomp, holiness, and, in the case of the Pope, infallibility-to be sure, only in certain doctrinal matters, not administrative ones, but the aura is not so selective. The hierarchy of such an institution naturally resists admitting to moral turpitude and sees squalid scandal as a mortal threat. Equally important, the government of the Church is entirely male.

It is not "anti-Catholic" to hypothesize that these things may have something to do with the Church's extraordinary difficulty in coming to terms with clerical sexual abuse. The iniquities now roiling the Catholic Church are more shocking than the ones that so outraged Martin Luther. But the broader society in which the Church is embedded has grown incomparably freer. To the extent that the Church manages to purge itself of its shame - its sins, its crime - it will owe a debt of gratitude to the lawyers, the journalists, and, above all, the victims and families who have had the courage to persevere, against formidable resistance, in holding it to account. Without their efforts, the suffering of tens of thousands of children would still be a secret. Our largely democratic, secularist, liberal, pluralist modern world, against which the Church has so often set its face, turns out to be its best teacher - and the savior, you might say, of its most vulnerable, most trusting communicants.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 13th, 2010 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Quotes.
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One comment on “Indulgence”

  1. Very very unfortunate thing that is happening...
    but to credit the rescue of these poor children to "our largely democratic/liberal world" is a bit of a stretch. Although Hertzberg and his magazine make no apologies for their political bias, he has likened Obama to Gandhi (in his failure, no less). To hear about the problem of Papal Infallibility from an Obamaniac - well, that's pretty funny! Just saying...(I have Church issues, too!)

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