Newly elected Pope Francis recently made his first public statement on the issue. The pope ordered the Vatican to, quote, “act decisively as far as cases of sexual abuse are concerned, promoting, above all, measures to protect minors, help for those who have suffered such violence in the past (and) the necessary procedures against those who are guilty.”
But outside groups, including the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, have questioned the popes actions. While serving as cardinal in Argentina, Pope Francis was criticized for failing to meet with abuse victims.
Just in the past week, a number of new revelations about sexual abuse in the church emerged. On Sunday, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia permanently removed three priests from the ministry, including one whose accuser killed himself after his allegation was dismissed by church officials. Meanwhile in Austria, authorities have charged a defrocked priest with sexually abusing 15 children as head of a Catholic boarding school.
Bishop Thomas Gumbleton talking:
ordinarily, SNAP, or the Survivors Network, is not welcome in Catholic churches, on Catholic premises, which I think is wrong, obviously. There are people who have been victimized in very cruel ways within the church, and instead of pushing them away, I think bishops and church leaders should draw them in and welcome them and truly listen to them. From the very beginning of this crisis, I think the Catholic bishops made a huge mistake in turning it into a legal situation, going to their lawyers right away, because that immediately becomes adversarial. Thats the way our justice system works. So, the victims now become the enemy. And instead of dealing with them in a pastoral, loving, welcoming way and trying to help heal whats happened to them, they get pushed away. And that gets carried out in something like being not allowed to speak on Catholic premises.
The people who come to church every Sunday, is, first of all, theyve lost a sense of confidence in church leadership, and so the moral credibility of the Catholic bishops has diminished a great deal. And so, that means that when they speak on other issues, the impact of their statements is far less than it might have been if they were accepted more as clear, authentic moral leaders. And its also contributed to the fact that so many people have walked away from active participation in the Catholic community. Thirty million is a number that one research group has put forward that have left active participation. They dont consider themselves as not being Catholic any longer, but theyre not there every Sunday anymore. Theyre not quite so willing to listen to the bishop or the pope when either speaks. And thats a big loss for the church.
As far as economics are concerned, the closing of Catholic schools, I dont think, is impacted by this. There are so many other reasons why thats happening. But the Catholic Church has not been wanting for funds for a long time. And Im not concerned about the fact that because of the way this whole crisis has been handled, the church is having to pay out huge sums of money. Thats not good, but a good part of it is covered by insurance, too. So, when the bishops speak about not having any funds to cover their social programs and so on, that isnt a reality. So many of those programs actually are funded by government sources, too. So, that doesnt ring true to me that were going to not be able to do what were supposed to do. The church doesnt need to be a rich, very wealthy, corporate type of institution.
The group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, has questioned Pope Franciss commitment to addressing clerical sex abuse of minors. In a statement, the group said, “Actions speak louder than words. And one of the first actions Pope Francis took was to visit perhaps the most high-profile corrupt prelate on the planet, Cardinal Bernard Law, who remains a powerful church official despite having been drummed out of Boston for hiding and enabling crimes by hundreds of child molesting clerics.”
I would agree with them that that was not a very good thing to do if hes deeply concerned about the sex abuse crisis. But I feel that we still have to give him a bit more time to see how he will handle it. Once hes read the reports that have been put together by the committee of cardinals that were to investigate what has been going on in the curia, and once he becomes more fully aware of the universal situation rather than what he dealt with in Argentina alone, I hope and definitely pray that he will be much more forthright in trying to deal with the root causes of this crisis, which that has not been done up to this point in any diocese that Im aware of or in the universal church.
when a friend of minein fact, the person who started SNAPcame to me and asked me to intervene with the local bishop, because the priest who had abused her, and who had also abused other people that she was aware of, was still functioning. And I said, “Thats impossible.”
I was an auxiliary bishop in Detroit. But I was a friend of Barbara Blaine, the founder of SNAP, from decadesfor decades. And when she came to me and told me this, I said, “Well, Ill go see the bishop, and Ill talk to him, and Im sure hes not going to continue to keep this covered up.” Well, I went to see him, and he assured me, “Ill do something about it. Ill take care of it.” So I took him at his word, but nothing ever happened. And so, that made me realize that some of the, well, best bishops around were not dealing with this issue the way it needed to be dealt with. I mean, it just was terribly wrong to allow a priest to continue to function in a situation where he could abuse other children. And it turned out he was still abusing other people. and the bishop was allowing this to go on. And I just found that totally reprehensible and incomprehensible. It just didnt seem to me to be how we needed to act. And so, I became very adamant in the determination to try to do what I could within the bishops conference to change this and to support people like the survivors who belong to SNAP and all other survivors besides.
Now Im still a bishop, notbut I have no administrative authority. And I was technically, at this time, still the recognized auxiliary bishop of Detroit. But when I spoke before the Ohio Legislature to support a bill that would allow for whats come to be called a window of opportunity in regard to the statute of limitations, the bishops of Ohio were very, very angry and went to the papal nuncio to report me, in a sense, because I had publicly spoken out against the policy that was their policy, and Im an outsider coming from Michigan and speaking in Ohio, although I dont think boundary lines like one diocese or another would prevent anyone from speaking about issues that affect the whole church. I mean, I dont think that you should be barred from speaking in one diocese or another. But they were very angry about it.
And so, within a week, I had received word from Romethe nuncio went to Romeand that I must immediately resign as an auxiliary bishop and/or they would resign me, force me out. And so, I accepted that, because I was already a year past the normal age, 75, and I had no hesitation in resigning that. But I did not want to give up my parish, where I had been pastor for 23 years, andbut that was added in. And I still do not understand why someone in Rome, the head of a curial office, should be able to tell the archbishop of Detroit who may or may not serve as pastor in the archdiocese. But the archbishop accepted this directive from Rome and forced me to resign from the parish also.
The canon law says a bishop at the age of 75 will request to resign. But it doesnt say “must.” It says that would be the the normal thing. So, I had not done it, and it was over a year, so at that point I felt theres no sense in trying to struggle to stay on, because it didntwouldnt change my ministry much as a bishop, anyway, because I was not serving in an administrative function within the diocese. And so, I was doing pastoral ministry, and still do, and celebrating sacraments with people, including confirmation, which is normally a sacrament celebrated by the bishop. And I still do that, but I do not have any administrative responsibilities.
actually, they didnt hold the hearing that day, but I had prepared a statement, and the statement went out to the media. And, of course, it got circulated. And in it, what really caught attention, it was the first time I had spoken about my own experience of being abused. And the reason I brought that out, not that I was looking for some kind of sympathy or anything, but only because I wanted to let the legislators know that victims simply cannot immediately come forward. Well, there may be a few, but generally speaking, youre so overwhelmed by it, and theres always the possibility of feeling maybe it was my fault and, you know, that he was a good priest; why would he do something evil? Welland also just embarrassment, confusion. You cant speak about it.
when I became active regarding the nuclear weapons issue, that was in the period of the early 1980s, late ’70s, early 80s, when the nuclear freeze movement was happening in this country. And there was outrage around the world against nuclear weapons. So, it wasn’t something unique that I, as a bishop, would be part of that, because it was common. And even within our bishops conference, there were many other bishops at that time. And as a result of that, the fact that so many were opposed, thats when we wrote a pastoral letter called “The Challenge of Peace: Gods Promise and Our Response.” And it was a pastoral letter that was promulgated in 1983 in May and actually caught attention from the media around the world. And so, I was, at that point, part of a mainstream effort on that issue, especially.
Now, on the Vietnam War issue, which I had become an opponent of a bit earlier, in the late ’60s and early 70s, there were a large number of Catholic bishops that were opposed there, too. And so it wasn’t so extraordinary that I was speaking out. In fact, in 1971, we passed a resolution in the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops which stated, “Whatever good we hope to achieve by this war in Vietnam, that good has been surpassed by the evil that were doing,” which thatthats one of the criteria for a just war. So we were in fact saying, “This war is not just.” And that was 1971, kind of late in the day, but still, we did make that statement.
And Ive continued to feel very strongly about the need to speak out against war and violence. And here again, I feel Im, in a sense, in the mainstream, at least as far as on this issue. Pope John Paul II has issuedor did issue statements that I use, time and time again, that are as strong and as clear against nuclear war, but even conventional warfare. He said at Hiroshima, when he visited there, that has to become a part of the past, the tragic past of human history. In other words, we can never let this happen again. And hes spoken clearly on that. At the end of the first Persian Gulf War, he wrote a document thats one of the most authoritative teaching documents in the church, in which he says, “I, myself, on the occasion of the recent war in the Persian Gulf, repeated the cry, ‘Never again war!'” He goes on in that document to say why we have to say no to war today. And so, I feel, on those issues, Im very much in line with the official teaching of the church.
war tax resistance. I feel a good portion of those taxes goes to our war budget, which is our so-called defense budget, but its really a war budget. Its the largest of any nation in the world. And years ago, Pope Paul VI said the arms raceand thats what we are doing with our defense budgetis, in itself, an act of aggression against the poor. Using that money for weapons and strategies to use them is taking money away from the poor and causing them to starve. We should be using our natural resources and our wealth to promote development and to promote justice in the world. When you have a world where theres such a gap between the rich and the poor, and such huge numbers suffering because of that, the church has a real responsibility to use whatever income it can bring toI mean, our nation has a responsibility to use its income to help development happen, because thats the basis for peace.
There were many bishops that also were very involved in the liberation theology movement and continue to struggle to have that be accepted within the church. Andexcuse meultimately, liberation theology was not condemned in an outright fashion. There was one document that was published, but then bishops in Latin America went to Rome and debated the subject with officials in the Roman Curia and with the pope, and a second document then was published that agreed that liberation theology could certainly be followed within the church.
But the main concern of Pope John Paul II, and Cardinal Ratzinger at the time, was that it not become a Marxist ideology. And liberation theologians are not Marxists, but sometimes they use Marxist analysis to try to understand the socioeconomic situation of their people, just the way Thomas Aquinas used Aristotelianism to understand or to articulate some Catholic teachings on the basis of that philosophy. He didnt say, “Im an Aristotelian,” but he used those ideas to articulate Catholic teaching. So liberal theologians use sometimes Marxist analysis to help them describe what is happening to the people who are suffering because of the economic situation in which they find themselves.
Lori Berenson had been active in El Salvador in the struggles there, and I had met her in El Salvador when I was also becoming more involved with the situation of the civil war that was going on there. And it wasI went down there to be on the side of the theologians and the pastors and the bishops, like Archbishop Romero himself, who were on the side of the poor. And she was there for that reason, also. And thats where I first met her.
So when she then later was working in Peru and she connected with one of the guerrilla movementsand insists that she never was a member of it, but she did work with them and interact with them. And Im not sure whether she actually did commit a crime or not, but she was being treated in a very harsh way and did not seem to have had a fair trial. And so I went with her parents to try towell, just like Pope Francis went to visit the people in jail a couple of weeks ago, well, you go to visit people in jail, and you try to understand their situation and help them in whatever pastoral way you can. So thats what I was doing with Lori Berenson, and hoping that there could be another trial and that she would be vindicated. But shes still under parole situation now.
on abortion, I certainly stand with the idea that its evil and immoral, a crime to kill an infant, even in the womb. And the killing of any human person, I am convinced, is evil and wrong. I believe in what Eileen Egan, a peace activist who helped Dorothy Day at the Catholic Worker, developed the idea of a spectrum, a seamless garment. If youre going to be against violence, you have to be against all violence. And so, if abortion is an attempt to bring about a violent solution to a very complicated problem, I dont think a violent solution is the right solution.
I cant judge the conscience of another person. And here, too, you have complications about exactly when does a fetus become a human person. And the Catholic teaching is that we really dont know, but you have to take the safer course. Now, someone might feel that in certain circumstances, because you dont know, the safer course might not be the right course. as a man, I dont really have, you know, the kind of insight into all of this that women would have, and so I cant speak definitively.
in 1968, in a pastoral letter, the Catholic bishops of the U.S. published a statement that was called “Human Life in Our Day.” And in it, we appealed again to conscience and that people might see that contraception isthe guilt of it is diminished to the point where there is no guilt, because of the circumstances. And again, we were appealing to the need to allow people to make their own conscientious decisions in this regard.
we have in Detroit, what the state law calls an emergency financial manager. But that person has almost dictatorial powers, because he can determine how money is going to be, well, raised, but also spent, and in fact change contracts forthis is one of the reasons labor unions wanted not to have this happen, but to have more negotiation, because he can actually just change contracts and lower wages, and that does seem to me to be wrong and anti-democratic. And the mayor does not really have authority any longer, City Council, people who were elected by the citizens. Now it all revolves around this one person.
35 percent of Detroit households get food stamps
People do not have to be poor. We could build an economically just system whereby we could bring about a better distribution of the wealth within our country, within any city. But we really have to work at that, and we have to be open to some new ideas and ways ofwell, if I use the word, people will be upset, but redistribution of wealth, that has to happen. We have to move the wealth from the rich to the poor and not allow a situation where the rich get richer all the time and the poor get poorer. Thats wrong.
source democracynow.org
Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, former auxiliary bishop of the Detroit Archdiocese.