Thursday, May 12, 2005
LEVADA
This article on Levada from the Mercury News doesn't exactly give reason for hope, saying as it does that
``I think it does not bode well,'' David Clohessy, national director of the clergy victims' group SNAP, said of Levada's possible appointment to the Congregation, which reviews all defrocking cases, many of which are sex-abuse related. ``It's a victory for the pro-secrecy forces within the church.''
and
Rose Marie Berger, Catholic columnist and associate editor of Sojourners, a popular Christian magazine, said Levada's history at the California Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and as archbishop of Portland shows a man who prefers to deal with things ``deeply behind the scenes.''
He was one of a few bishops, she said, who in the early 1990s lobbied to keep internal debate about the role of women in the church from being published. ``He was not interested in open discussion,'' she said.
Keeping the discussion of women's ordination "behind the scenes" has merit because it is contrary to the faith and is a change being proposed, not something that has already happened. However, it was this very tendency toward secrecy that got us into the sexual abuse mess that we are still suffering from. Sexual abuse, by the time it got to the bishop, in most cases one would hope was a fact of history and not something being contemplated for the future. Therefore, it would not be handled in the same way as a proposed doctrinal challenge with no merit.
The article spins these two instances of cover-up as though they rest on equal ground, when in fact they do not even come close to being the same. Secrecy is not always bad, but secrecy that covers up a scandal is not justified.
