c. 2004 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) It may help, but you need not be an artist or a psychologist to grasp the fundamentals of human communication. Beneath denials and evasions, people still try to tell us the truth about themselves.
America’s Catholic bishops told the truth about themselves as they elected new officers this week at their semiannual meeting in Washington.
First, they showed how like ordinary Americans they are, because they used fancy electronic keypads, instead of old paper ballots, to elect a new president with just a little over half the vote. William Skylstad, 70, of Spokane, Wash., had been vice president since 2001 and, according to the Washington Post’s analysis, “ordinarily would have been a shoo-in for the presidency.”
He ended up with 52 percent of the vote. How American can you get?
This “We Are Just Like America” tally was repeated as Francis Cardinal George of Chicago narrowly defeated Bishop Donald Wuerl of Pittsburgh for vice president.
Any observer of the bishops already knows how very much they resemble the rest of the country and how, in international ecclesiastical settings, they can usually be depended on to be more American than anything else: accustomed to democratic ways and the habits of fair play, common sense and straight speaking.
They spoke as straight as a Gary Cooper western hero in their choice of Skylstad, who has already announced plans to declare his diocese in bankruptcy because of sexual abuse claims.
One must sympathize with these good men as they admit the hard truth about themselves. They are uncomfortable, as the close votes show, and they are running out of ideas as well as money. They are confessing, like Robert Frost’s poetic persona in “The Road Not Taken” that 20 years ago they made a choice at a path that divided in the woods “and that has made all the difference.”
The road they _ or, rather, their predecessors _ selected then was to deny the then-burgeoning sex abuse crisis and to put aside their pastoral intuitions and follow the advice of insurance companies and lawyers to “defend their assets” rather than their children or their people.
A generation later, they stand, almost like the beggars at the gate in the Gospel, at their inevitable destination, where their failure to act, as Father Thomas Doyle warned them at the time, would eventually cost them a billion dollars a year.
That mark was long ago passed and our bishops are sadly, publicly and perhaps unknowingly accepting their diminished identities, ironically experiencing a variation of the humiliation suffered by sex abuse victims. They poignantly present themselves under a white flag as bankrupt leaders, telling us, in this election, that they are presently divided and uncertain about what to do in the future.
MO/PH END RNS
(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)
