Stephen P. White

If the lay vocation is lived fully and well – with all the lay faithful taking seriously the gift and responsibility of their Baptism – what then might the Church look like?

Advent is a season of hope because we believe that the One who makes things whole is on His way.

Collegiality and synodality cannot be of service to the Church if they are simply window dressing for the ecclesial groupthink which too often insists: “Do what we mean, not what we say.”

The bishops’ mission is to teach, sanctify, and govern precisely so those they serve can fulfill the mission to the rest of us, who are called by baptism to proclaim the Gospel.

Since last summer, much of the discussion about the abuse crisis has focused on justice for victims, accountability for bishops, and the role laypeople can and must play in renewing the Church. There are obvious reasons for these emphases. Yet in a somewhat ironic twist, there has been less attention paid to the ways in which priests have experienced the crisis.

Can we really expect the Church to undergo purification and at the same time expect that we, who are part of the Church, should be spared the pain and anguish of that purification?

The price the Church pays for trying to save face is, in the end, always greater than the up-front cost of transparency.

Sexual abuse is a plague no matter where it occurs or to whom. But one of the underexplored facets of the clerical sexual abuse crisis in the United States is the way in which marginalized and minority communities have proven particularly susceptible both to abusers themselves and to the malfeasance of bishops and religious superiors who mishandled reports of abuse.

As the unfolding mess in New York shows, dealing with the legal implications of the abuse crisis alone consumes an inordinate amount of the Church’s time and energy, to say nothing of money. Such demands are likely to grow more acute in the short term.

Genuine renewal in the Church requires both paths to reform: structural and administrative changes, as well as ongoing conversion and growth in holiness.

The drama of the past year in the Church in the United States can sometimes distract from the global dimensions of the crisis of clerical sexual abuse and episcopal malfeasance. In Poland, the Church faces its own scandal of clerical sexual abuse.

Given the degree to which episcopal malfeasance is the hallmark of the abuse crisis in its current iteration, and given how much expectation there has been for bishops to “do something” about the crisis, it’s worth looking more closely at the steps that they took at their general assembly in Baltimore last month.