George Weigel - The Courage To Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform And The Future Of The Church

I N THE FIRST MONTHS OF 2002, the Catholic Church in the United States entered the greatest crisis in its history. When Lent began on February 13, the penitential ashes imposed that day on millions of Catholics felt leaden. Something had gone desperately wrong. Something was broken. Something had to be fixed.

Like every Christian community, the Catholic Church is a Church of sinners. Its spiritual rhythms regularly repeat the ancient biblical cycle of failure, repentance, penance, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Yet even in a Church that knows a lot about sin, some acts of wickedness still retain their capacity to shock. The sexual abuse of minors by priestsmen traditionally called Fatheris one such kind of wickedness. So is the failure of bishopsshepherds, in the ancient imageto guard the flock against predators, especially predators from within the household of faith. The shock of seemingly widespread clerical sexual misconduct, reported on an almost daily basis in the first months of 2002, was immeasurably intensified by what even sympathetic Catholics had to regard as some bishops inept and irresponsible response to grave sins and crimes. In this instance, one plus one yielded something more than two: one plus one equaled an unprecedented crisis.

In the language and thought-world of the Bible, crisis has two meanings. The first is the familiar sense of the word: the venerable Websters Seventh Collegiate Dictionary defines a crisis as the turning point for better or worse in an acute disease or fever... a paroxysmal attack of pain, distress, or disordered functions... an emotionally significant event or radical change of status in a persons life. Throughout the first half of 2002, the Catholic Church in the United States certainly seemed to be in crisis, according to those definitions. The second meaning of crisis in the Biblical world is instructive, however: a crisis is also a great time of opportunity, an invitation to deeper faith, a summons to a more thorough conversion.

The premise of this small book is that we best understand the current crisis in Catholic life in this second senseas a tremendous opportunity. An opportunity for what? An opportunity to deepen the reforms of the Catholic Church begun by the Second Vatican Council in 19621965, which are precisely the reforms urged by Pope John Paul II throughout his entire pontificate.

Like virtually everything else in Catholic life, the very word reform has been bitterly contested since Vatican II. Those usually identified as Catholic reformers would, in at least some instances, be more accurately described as a wrecking crew for whom nothing short of Catholicisms transformation into a kind of high-church, politically correct American denominationCatholic Litewill suffice. At the other end of the spectrum, Catholics of a more traditional bent have shied away from the word reform and its powerful connotations of the Protestant Reformation, preferring a word like renewal to describe what they think Vatican II intended and John Paul II intends. In light of the two-edged scandal of clerical sexual abuse and episcopal malfeasance, perhaps everyone in the Catholic Churchincluding that broad group of faithful Catholics for whom the ecclesiastical tong-wars are of far less interest than the sacraments and the local parishcan now agree that what the Church needs is reform.

What, then, is genuinely Catholic