If you are Catholic, like I am, and had been following the shameful sex scandals that have been hounding the Roman Catholic church for decades, then one of yesterday’s top stories should have caught your eye. After more than five years of negotiations with victims of clergy abuse, the Los Angeles Archdiocese has agreed to settle the case for $660 million, followed by a quick mea culpa. Apparently, the settlement does not call for the archdiocese to make a public apology. While the deal required the release of the priests’ confidential personnel files, the bigger question is what does the church intend to do with these erring priests? The church, after all, has the propensity to sweep things under the rug when it comes to wayward clergymen and yet has no qualms demanding the highest standard of morality among its flock. Talk about hypocrisy.
In the Philippines, where more than 80 percent of the 89 million population are Catholic, alleged sexual improprieties involving priests have been brought out in the open for years and years. They’ve been written about and cases had been filed. To the disgrace of the church, all it has been doing is offer promises of investigation but failing to take action. Allow me to correct that. They have acted – by “re-educating” the priests who pounce on altar boys (as if a two-week spiritual retreat is the cure to not being able to keep their pants zipped up) and eventually re-assigning them to other parishes. What I find nauseating is the church’s assumption that its followers are too forgiving. What I find disappointing, at least in the parishes I’ve been part of, is the Catholics’ seeming lack of interest in demanding moral accountability from the men who are supposed to guide us to salvation. It is as if denouncing these shameful acts will forfeit our chances of going to heaven.
By the way, the Vatican has also recently announced that Christian denominations outside the Catholic church are not full churches of Jesus Christ because they do not recognize the pope. Oh gee, I didn’t know we have the exclusive rights to declare which ones are real churches. I must have missed that when I went to all those cathecism classes.