Cardinal Karl Lehmann of Mainz was a veteran of many Synods and had a certain reputation in world episcopal circles: he often fell asleep, loudly, during Synod speech making. As Cardinal George said, “I don’t mind him sleeping; we all do. But he snores.” Lehmann seemed genuinely concerned about the collapse of the German birth rate but was unwilling to concede that Humanae Vitae may have been right about the effects of the “contraceptive mentality”—despite admitting that Europe’s demographic winter was, at bottom, a result of solipsism and selfishness. The cardinal, a leader of the Church’s progressive party, did offer one suggestive image of the deleterious effects of secularization in his country: some people, he said, were discovering that “they cannot live with the silence.”
There was a fair amount of pre-conclave politicking at Synod 2001. But I also detected a disturbing attitude of “Let’s not worry about the Pope’s health; things will sort themselves out.” One would have thought that this was an opportunity for the cardinal-electors to be discussing what kind of pope they thought might best follow John Paul II. Curial dysfunction was regularly criticized, yet it often came across like complaining about the oppressive Roman heat during Ferragosto: a staple of the local scene for which no one seemed to have a remedy.
Tourism was taking a beating in Rome in the aftermath of 9/11, so Joaquín Navarro-Valls and I had the Taverna Angelica pretty much to ourselves at lunch on October 26. The savvy papal spokesman was already concerned that popular European support for the US action in Afghanistan was going to unravel sooner rather than later, which would give the politicians of the left in Germany, France, and Belgium the excuse they needed to back away from the anti–al-Qaeda coalition. Joaquín suggested that President Bush call in thoughtful European print and television reporters for video-recorded conversations that could go “over the heads” of the Euro-commentariat and speak directly to the people, as John Paul II had done before the Cairo world population conference in 1994. It seemed a sensible idea, which I passed along to friends at the White House, to no discernible effect. Navarro was also candid about the incapacities of Cardinal Sodano and the Vatican Secretariat of State in grasping that the Euro-left was trying to portray John Paul as the chaplain of their anti-US campaign.
As for the Pope’s health, Joaquín said that it had taken a bit of a downturn but that John Paul’s mind was as clear as ever and that he remained “the center of all initiative.” A recent attempt to crack open the door to China with a papal letter marking the four hundredth anniversary of Matteo Ricci’s arrival in the Middle Kingdom and asking forgiveness for whatever offenses Christians may have committed in China in the past was the eighty-one-year-old Pope’s idea: “Nobody in the bureaucracy would ever have thought of such a thing.”
On the evening of November 3, my penultimate night in Rome, I had dinner with John Paul, Bishops Dziwisz and Ryłko, and Msgr. Mokrzycki. It was the eve of the Pope’s name day and, following Polish tradition, the apartment was filled with flowers, with more coming up on the family elevator with me.
Despite the long haul of the Synod, John Paul was in good form, yet obviously concerned that 9/11 and its aftermath would shatter the hope he expressed at the UN in 1995: that the tears of the twentieth century would give rise to a “new springtime of the human spirit.” At the beginning of dinner the Pope asked me to summarize what I thought the last month and a half meant. I said I thought it was a turning point in world history, an example of the mystery of evil at work through the corruption of an already defective monotheism, a possible moment of moral sobering-up in the US, and a very complex mess from a strategic and international-political point of view. All of this, I continued, was a moral challenge as well as a political challenge, and while the first duty of a responsible government was the security of its citizens, President Bush’s September 20 speech indicated that American military action against al-Qaeda and its Taliban facilitators would be conducted according to just war principles and not as a matter of vendetta or revenge. It was essential for everyone to understand that what was at stake here was not simply the security of the United States but the very possibility of any world “order.” I also pointed out that Osama bin Laden was a very rich man and that it didn’t help clarify what we were all facing when it was said that terrorism was the product of poverty—the line being taken at the UN by Archbishop Renato Martino, the Holy See’s permanent representative there.
Each of these points was the subject of discussion among John Paul, Dziwisz, Ryłko, and me; three times during the back-and-forth, the Pope punctuated the conversation with a heartfelt, if somber, “God bless America.” The United States had been wounded; John Paul, whose affection for America ran deep, knew that, and in quoting Irving Berlin he was trying to convey his understanding and his sympathy.
We then talked about upcoming World Youth Day 2002 in Toronto, and while there had been some chatter during the Synod about postponing it because of 9/11, it was clear that John Paul wouldn’t hear of it. I completely agreed and said that WYD 2002 was more important than ever as a countersign to al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the world that publicly vibrant and assertive religion wasn’t necessarily violent religion.
The question of a German edition of Witness to Hope had been resolved, and my dinner companions were happy about that. John Paul said he was reading the book in Polish for a second time; I asked him why, and he said I helped him think about things he otherwise wouldn’t have the opportunity to reflect upon. When I mentioned that I’d been in Warsaw in October, there was some joking about the relative merits of the Polish capital and Kraków, with none of the devout Cracovians present suggesting the superiority of the former. As for the city he loved so well, and those he loved who lived there, I could see that, as John Paul dealt with some of his correspondence over dessert, several of the responses to name-day greetings were signed “Wujek.”
The Pope seemed reluctant to say goodbye; we did so three times, the first including a blessing for Joan, the children, and “all my American friends.” (At one point in the conversation, Bishop Ryłko had asked whether one of those friends, Richard Neuhaus, was a parochius, a parish priest, in New York. I said he was, at Immaculate Conception Church—to which Ryłko replied, with a laugh in which the Pope and Dziwisz joined, “Parochius sui generis.”) Bishop Dziwisz regifted me a cake that had obviously just arrived for the name day, saying “This is for your wife.” Not knowing quite how I was going to get a cake back to the United States, I didn’t think Joan would mind if I took the liberty of regifting the regift to the faculty dining room at the North American College.
THE LONG LENT
ROME, PORTUGAL, TORONTO, AND GERMANY, 2002
IT WAS RICHARD NEUHAUS WHO FIRST CALLED IT THE “LONG LENT”: the crisis caused by revelations of clerical sexual abuse in the United States, which broke out in January 2002 and continued throughout the year (and beyond). It certainly felt that way. Day after day, stories of grave clerical sins and episcopal misgovernance hammered the Church in America, demoralizing a Catholic community beginning to experience the fruits of the John Paul II Effect, especially in seminaries and among younger priests. Day after day, US Catholics wondered why the Pope and the Vatican didn’t do something dramatic to stanch the bleeding. My experience of this disaster involved three expeditions to Rome, two to try to help senior Vatican officials and John Paul II understand what was going on, and one to begin sifting through the debris.
In mid-February 2002, with the crisis in flood tide, I went to Rome to co-chair an academic conference and spent many hours outside that event trying to understand the Roman perception of the crisis, while filling in what blanks I could from my own experience and analysis of it. Before I arrived, I’d asked a friend in the Curia whether anyone in real authority in the Holy See “got it.” His reply: “No.” My conversations with various Roman officials taught me that my friend’s response was too simple; some did get it, or were beginning to get it, although there was a long way to go before the creaky b
ureaucratic machinery of the Holy See “got it” comprehensively.
Some old friends, including Cardinal J. Francis Stafford (who had dealt with these problems forthrightly when he was Archbishop of Denver), understood that this was fundamentally a spiritual crisis: a manifestation of grave sin that could not be addressed solely in bureaucratic, legal, or therapeutic terms. That one of the chief villains, Father John Geoghan, had been treated at a Catholic facility for troubled priests without any of the therapists making recommendations about the reformation of Geoghan’s spiritual life spoke volumes about the disaster the therapeutic culture had wrought in American Catholicism.
But if there was at least some capacity to recognize that a spiritual crisis underlay the abuse crisis, there was little willingness to acknowledge, much less address, one aspect of that spiritual crisis: the fact that homosexual predation had played a large role in these crimes of abuse, which would become ever more clear as the investigation of the abuse continued. That the general breakdown of clerical discipline since Vatican II involved the homosexual exploitation of the young was not something with which senior officials in Rome were willing to wrestle in the first months of the crisis.
During this February Roman work period I began to sense that there was a serious information gap between Rome and the United States. US Catholics imagined the Vatican was experiencing the crisis as they were, in real time, and that simply wasn’t the case. The Vatican and the Pope were months behind the information curve, thanks to incapacities in Rome and in the nunciature in Washington.
This information gap and the institutional sluggishness that caused it came into dramatic focus two and a half weeks after I left Rome. On March 21, Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos of the Congregation for the Clergy held a press conference to present John Paul II’s annual Holy Thursday letter to the priests of the world. Castrillón’s presser was an unmitigated disaster. Not only did the cardinal fail to mention that John Paul II had been a vocal advocate of the reform of the priesthood and seminary formation for two decades and more, Cardinal Castrillón also failed to point out that the relatively few cases of clerical sexual abuse in the 1990s suggested that John Paul’s reforms were having an effect. John Paul’s description of sexual abuse as a manifestation of the “mystery of evil” in the world had caused a furor; Castrillón did not say that this described the crisis with complete accuracy and in a way that reflected the terrible experiences of the victims of abuse. He also failed to emphasize the Pope’s grief over the victims and over the abusers’ betrayals of the priesthood, whose nobility as a vocation he had upheld and lived. Rather, Castrillón blamed the furor on the obsessions of the world media and went on to suggest that, what with a crisis in the Middle East, the Pope had other things to worry about. An opportunity for clarification was thus turned into a fiasco.
The catastrophe of the Castrillón press conference persuaded me that I should return to Rome immediately after Easter to try again, this time armed with materials I was determined to get to John Paul II—articles by men and women he trusted, analyzing the crisis in the theological terms in which he understood it but also arguing that serious measures were required if the crisis were to become an opportunity to advance the New Evangelization through a deeper reform of the priesthood, the seminaries, and the American episcopate. Otherwise, the evangelical grand strategy the Pope had proposed for the Church of the twenty-first century and the third millennium was going to be gravely impeded.
I began by going over the whole tawdry mess with Bishop James Harvey during an overnight stay at Castel Gandolfo, in the capacious apartment he used in the Villa Barberini as Prefect of the Papal Household. Over the next week, I met with officials of various curial offices, including the Secretariat of State, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and the Congregation for Bishops. Knowing that repetition was essential to cutting through bureaucratic lethargy and the fog of incomprehension, I repeated the same basic message time and again: the crisis was not a media invention and there were serious problems that must be addressed; the Pope had to be directly engaged with the US bishops’ conference leadership, urging them to take effective action. That, I hoped, would reinforce what the conference leadership was telling John Paul. In the midst of all this, Cardinal Bernard Law, who had become the symbol of the entire crisis, arrived in Rome, prepared to step down. Yet because the Pope and the senior officials of the Curia were three months behind the information curve, they couldn’t hear Law’s offer as anything other than a desperate gesture, which it was not; it was a well-considered and courageous offer, and Law should have insisted that he knew the situation better than John Paul and the Curia.
While that drama played out, I sent John Paul and Bishop Dziwisz the dossier of materials I brought with me, convinced from my conversations that such analyses of the gravity of the crisis, its sources, and the likely remedies were not being forwarded from the Washington nunciature with the sense of urgency that would get them taken seriously.
Bishop Dziwisz invited me for dinner on April 17, which I had to decline because of conflicting commitments to the University of Dallas and my daughter Monica (then doing her Rome semester at the Due Santi campus), and to colleagues who were arriving for yet another academic conference I was to co-chair. We hoped to find another opportunity for a meal, but amid the chaos—the US cardinals were called to an emergency meeting with curial officials and the Pope to discuss the crisis—that never happened. Which was likely for the best, because at Dziwisz’s suggestion I sent John Paul a lengthy letter that gave a more detailed summary of the crisis than would have been possible over a meal: an analysis and a set of recommendations I hoped would help frame the discussions with the American churchmen he was about to meet.
The letter was built around what I called six essential points:
1. The crisis was real and it was the Church’s crisis.
2. The crisis of clerical sexual abuse was fundamentally a spiritual crisis, a manifestation of inadequate conversion to Christ.
3. The three expressions of clerical sexual abuse included pedophilia strictly speaking (a disordered sexual attraction to children), the age-old problem of priests in irregular and sinful relationships with women, and, most prevalently, the abuse of teenage boys and young men.
4. The crisis of clerical sexual abuse had been fed by a culture of dissent in the Church, in which men who lived lives of intellectual deception—pretending they accepted Church teachings with which they disagreed and that they had no intention of promoting—learned to live lives of deception in their sexual conduct as well.
5. The key to transforming this crisis into a moment of renewal and reform for the Church was leadership, which could only come from evangelical, pastoral, courageous bishops who responded to these problems like apostles, not managers, and who taught the faith boldly and by the example of their lives.
6. The Holy See had to address the question of when a bishop’s credibility had become so weakened that he can no longer govern his diocese effectively; far more scandal was being created by inept episcopal leadership than by the Church’s frank admission that a man, even if not personally guilty of willful irresponsibility, had lost his capacity to teach and govern.
I closed on a personal note:
Holy Father, you have honored me over the years with your friendship and by giving me the opportunity to write your biography.… Yet… nothing I have ever written [to] you has been more important than this letter. The great achievements of your papacy are, in the United States, in jeopardy; yet those achievements have also laid the foundation for the reform we now need. Help us, Holy Father, to make that reform happen.
At the same time that I was writing John Paul, I was consulting with the English section of the Secretariat of State on a draft of the remarks the Pope would make at the impending meeting of American cardinals and the Curia. There was a tug-of-war over the language; the superiors were raising the usual bureaucratic cautions and were concerned about being to
o specific; the men I was working with were pushing back. I thought the statement needed a “money quote”—and after no little difficulty the final draft included the sentence I thought would be in the first paragraph of every story and at the top of every newscast: John Paul stating bluntly that the people of the Church must “know that there is no place in the priesthood for those who would harm the young.”
By the time I got back to Washington on the evening of April 22, I was sick of the whole business. But there was no respite, as the media frenzy over the cardinals’ meeting in Rome continued unabated for days. On Friday afternoon, April 26, I tried to escape for a few hours at my son Stephen’s baseball game, and while sitting in a lawn chair watching Our Lady of Good Counsel take on Paul VI, a thought occurred: stop grumbling and write a book. So between innings I called Loretta Barrett, told her that I was going to write a book on the crisis, and suggested that she find a publisher—quickly.
It turned out to be the best therapy possible. I wrote The Courage To Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church in three and a half weeks. Loretta brought the manuscript, and me, to Elizabeth Maguire at Basic Books; Liz became a good friend as well as editor and publisher, and the book was published in record time, in late August.
While I was writing Courage I received a letter from Bishop Dziwisz in response to what I had written John Paul when we couldn’t meet in April. As he put it about the timing problem, “Everything worked out fine. In fact it was probably better that the Holy Father was able to see your important words in writing.… He has asked me to personally convey his gratitude and appreciates the time and effort you took to analyze, explain, and give valuable insights on the present day crisis. It may well have been the Holy Spirit guiding us all at that very moment. Your daughter’s play and our schedules adjusted accordingly were for the good.”
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