Crisis of trust in the Vatican

05 July 2012

If all publicity is good publicity, the Catholic Church has certainly prospered over recent years.

Clerical abuse and its handling, the new translation of the Roman Missal, the Bishop Bill Morris affair, the reining in of Caritas, the censure in the United States of the group representing religious sisters and of the work of two women theologians, the silencing of prominent Irish priests and the cleaning out of the Irish College in Rome, the public disquiet expressed by clergy in Austria and Ireland, the sacking of the head of the Vatican Bank, the steady leaking of confidential Roman documents, and the conflict between the Obama Administration and the USA Bishops over health care are just some of the recurrent stories.

Most of these stories have raised questions about how central authority is exercised. For many critics the answers are self-evident. Just as the actions of Orcs and other forces of Mordor reflect what Mordor is, so arrogance and misbehaviour are what you expect from the Catholic Church. They are as much a fact of life there as others would find them in News Limited, the Greens, the Unions or any other organisations they may want to identify as part of the Evil Empire.

If you want to address the way people in any organisation behave, however, you must first understand why they act as they do.

In the case of the Catholic Church the account it gives of its foundations is of critical importance. In this account faith is passed on by Christ through the Apostles to the early Christians. The Apostles live on in later generations through the bishops. The place of Peter who was charged with strengthening his brethren in their faith, is subsequently held held by his successors, the Bishops of Rome.

The weight of this account and of two thousand years of history explains why the Bishops and Popes feel such an enormous sense of personal responsibility for handing down faithfully the faith they have received. They will always respond cautiously to alternative understandings of faith or morality and demand that their continuity with the faith of the early church be demonstrated.

But the handing on of faith is not like the reading of the will that distributes family possessions: that is entirely top down. Faith is at heart a relationship to God. In all Catholics of any generation, including Bishops, it needs to come alive and its implications to be

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Crisis of trust in the Vatican

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