SELF-REFERENTIAL OR SLOW LEARNING CURVE?

As it concerns clericalism and the horizontal referentialism of the modern Mass and Church arhitectecture, we need to move away from the priest being front and center in a confrontational manner to the altar being front and center to include the tabernacle:

Not this:

But this:

Pope Francis in a long, boring concluding talk at the conference for the protection of minors said some important things, but what will be more important are canon laws dealing with bishops who enable abuse through neglect, the poor selection of preistly candidates they ordain (especially if there are indications from formaters that a candidate is unsuitable, and we certainly had that in our diocese with Wayland Brown) and then the poor supervision of priests when red flags are raised about their behavior.

What I heard in Pope Francis is what I thought about 10 years ago. I wonder who wrote this speech which did such a disservice to the pope. The homily by the Australian archbiship was much better in fact:

1. The abuse crisis transcends the Catholic priesthood. This is certainly true, but the pope has the power to clean house as the Supreme Pontiff and deal with the crisis of bishops today--he can't deal with the secular side of this except leading by example and teaching Catholic sexual morality as it concerns chastity and not creating loopholes as he did in Amoris Laetitia. People are quite capable of creating loopholes for themselves; they don't need the pope to encouarage them especially priests who are breaking their promises and/or vows of celibate chastity.

2. I thought the problem was that of abusive priests, but in reality it is a problem of supervision and management of bishops. They are the one who shuffled abusing priests from parish to parish and diocese to diocese. They are the ones who made confidential agreements with victims and they are the ones who acted in a less than transparent way.

3. I have always thought this is a problem of clericalism, that abusing priests had to have their priesthood saved for their sake but also so the bishop could have a body to place in a parish or other setting. Victims seem to left on their own, especially would-be victims, kind of like "buyer beware" when a huckster sells an inferior product, like a used car, to an unsuspecting buyer.

A part of the clericalism is not making distinction between abuse of small children driven by a serious and incurable mental illness and the sexual acting out in the most immoral and unethical way with teenagers by taking advantage of them.

In the Catholic priesthood, pedophilia is a minuscule problem, although one pedophile, especially an unsupervised one or one who uses his priesthood as cover, can have hundreds of victims and there have been notorious cases in the priesthood all of which bishops could have prevented.

But preists who cannot live celibate lives, like young nubile teenagers, be they male or female is not necessarily a serious mental illness but rather a moral illness. It should also be seen as a firing offense.

4. All that I have written indicates that the Church, meaning bishops should be handling this in-house. No, in democratic countries with religious freedom, law enforcement should be called when civil laws are broken. I don't think I heard this at the recent meeting. Did you?

My own policy today is that if I become aware of anyone who is being accused of molestation of a minor, I will call the police first and if it is a church person, a priest or deacon, this will make no difference, but I will call the diocese second.

Law enforcement has a mechanism to sort out accusations.