Unrepentant or opportunistic?
This is in reaction to Time Magazine’s cover story of June 7, 2010, with the banner title: “Why being Pope means never having to say you’re sorry: the sex abuse scandal and the limits of atonement.”
That’s, of course, a reprise of a late ‘60s movie, “Love Story,” whose famous line precisely was “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”
This new version, however, has nothing of the sweet elements that characterized that romantic movie. It’s rather full of attacks, missiles, torpedoes and carpet bombing aimed at the Pope and the Church.
It spent a lot of precious ink trying to prove that Benedict XVI’s papacy is “permanently damaged,” and that the Church now needs a radical reformation, again trying to repeat an unfortunate event in the Church’s tumultuous history.
Reformation here means nothing less than changing the Church’s nature and from there whatever may come as consequences. The piece proudly concludes, from a logic mostly emotion-driven, that the Church has to be democratized.
The Church, it pleads, has to be taken away from aging ecclesiastics helplessly lost in their theologies and traditions and brought back to the people. The subtext seems to be that the present Church has become obsolete.
I’m always suspicious of this kind of contrasts. There will always be distinctions of roles in any organization. But these differentiations are not meant to divide the parties involved, but rather to distribute the work to be done and to foster greater unity. This is part of our human condition.
As soon as this idea came into view while reading the article, I immediately asked myself: whom should I believe—the authors of this article or the Pope and the whole teaching of the Church from the beginning?
It’s a crazy proposition that tempted me to drop the magazine immediately. But I had to read it in toto just to get its whole thrust. It would not be fair to comment on it without reading it entirely. I might be addressing myself to phantoms of my mind.
Certainly, the story had many good points. It was well-researched. It exposed ugly details that had accumulated through the years in both Church and world cultures. Still, there were glaring loopholes, foremost among which is the matter of perspective.
In short, we have to choose between looking at the issue within the framework of faith and reason as they impact on human realities, or the viewpoint of reason alone with its full complement of human sciences like history, sociology, etc.
In this particular case, the lens used had hardly anything to do with faith, but rather more with pure reason, a reason unguided by faith but highly affected by emotions.
The scandals are ugly enough, and the Pope has apologized already a number of times for these unfortunate incidents and has promised to do all to resolve them in their different aspects and levels.
Those accusations of systematic cover-ups by bishops and even the Pope are unfair in the sense that unless legal actions are initiated and pursued, the Church authorities obviously will try their best to keep the cases away from public attention while pursuing the appropriate actions to mete justice to all parties concerned.
This behavior is universal. It can be seen in families, governments, corporations, organizations and groups. That is why we have a legal system of justice, with its laws and rules, so as to attain greater objectivity in the pursuit of justice for all.
What we should try to avoid is to be rash in judging the actuations of these human social bodies. Of course, we can look into them, probe them, and if there are valid grounds to think some unfair practices have been committed, then let’s prosecute them according to our legal system.
But this procedure has nothing to do with the nature of the Church. That nature is God-given as revealed by Christ. It is not ours to change and to shape according to our designs. It is for us to follow it and live it as best as we can.
Of course, we are notorious for our infidelities and sins. Still all these do not add up to the need to change the nature of the Church. What we need to do instead is to try our best, up to our last breath, to be faithful. For this, we have to help one another.
Are the Pope and the bishops really unrepentant, or are there groups who are taking advantage of these unfortunate events to push their own agenda?
(Fr. Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City. Email: roycimagala@gmail.com)
