It is the custom of the Pope to offer Christmas greetings to his official family, the bishops and Cardinals who direct the various departments of the Roman Curia. But his words at this occasion are typically much more than mere pleasantries. They constitute, usually, a kind of review of the previous year from the perspective of the Bishop of Rome. The Christmas statement that Benedict XVI made just this morning to his official entourage was of particular gravity, precisely because it represents one of his most thorough and insightful assessments of the clerical sex abuse scandal.
I was recently scheduled to address the priests of the Archdiocese of Boston, but bad weather rolled into O’Hare, and my flight was cancelled. However, I’d like to share with you some of the insights I had intended to offer to the Boston priests. As you know, Boston was the epicenter of the clergy sex abuse scandal that came to light in 2002 and that continues to shake the church around the country and around the world. I struggled rather mightily to prepare this talk, for I didn’t want to dwell on the difficulties, and I wanted, above all, to give these priests a sense of hope, but I knew I had to make some reference to the scandal. I decided to take my own advice (cf. an article that I wrote some weeks ago) and look at the issue through biblical eyes.
Once again we’re living in scandal times. The “Long Lent” that the American church endured in 2002 has now descended on the European church. A significant difference is that this time the Pope himself has come under scrutiny. Once again, the news media are in a frenzy—CNN has blanket coverage, the New York Times is running daily stories, and thousands of blogs are buzzing. In preparation for a television interview, I spent an entire day reading almost everything I could find in both the American and international press (I’m currently in Rome as a visiting professor) and found the process dismaying, depressing, and dispiriting. But what particularly struck me was this: though the scandal has been analyzed legally, institutionally, psychologically, and culturally, it has rarely been looked at biblically—even by church representatives themselves. And this is tragic, for the Bible, the Word of God, is the definitive lens through which the whole of reality is most rightly read, and church men and women above all should know this.