NEWS ANALYSIS : Sexual Issues Force Church to Examine Itself

As the nation’s 285 Roman Catholic bishops adjourned their semiannual meeting and returned home this weekend, they left behind a host of sex-related issues that will affect the church for years.

Sexual abuse at the hands of priests. Opposition to women’s ordination. Debate over a policy on homosexuals. Renewed concern about abortion-rights legislation.

Rarely in the history of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops have the sacred and the secular collided with such intensity on so many fronts.

Before Thursday’s conclusion of a sometimes tense and painful four-day meeting, the prelates had to deal with two issues that were not on their agenda--that of sexual abuse by priests and the rights of homosexuals--after demonstrations by placard-carrying sexual abuse victims and gays and lesbians outside the Omni Shoreham Hotel.

In the past, the church has looked upon the world and offered its counsel on such issues as war and peace, economic justice and artificial birth control.

Now the world is knocking on the church’s door and asking the church to examine itself.

While the bishops came prepared to address the ban on women priests, they said they were embarrassed by the appearance of sexual abuse victims at their door.

“(Sexual abuse of children is) lamentable. It’s very sad. We’re embarrassed about it. Quite frankly we’re trying to deal with it as forthrightly as we can,” Archbishop Daniel E. Pilarczyk of Cincinnati said.

“I was raped by a priest,” Dennis Gaboury, an organizer of the Chicago-based Victims of Clergy Abuse Linkup--one of several such groups that held protests--told reporters. Gaboury and others complained that when the bishops met to discuss the issue in June at the University of Notre Dame they ignored the victims’ pain. Instead, discussion concentrated on screening priests, cooperating with police and providing recovery programs for offenders.

“They did not hear from the real experts. The real experts are the people who experienced rape by a priest. We are here to try to ask them to please listen,” said Gaboury, who says there are at least 3,000 known U.S. victims of sexual abuse by priests.

Bishops quickly consented to a private meeting with delegations of people in a closed meeting led by Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles.

Afterward, in unscheduled remarks to the conference, Mahony said: “These were good people who have been deeply wounded by the misconduct of some of our priests. These were people whose faith has been shattered and in some cases lost.”

The conference for the first time unanimously voted to pledge renewed and stepped-up efforts to remain vigilant against sexual abuse. But victims complained that the bishops fell short of an adequate response.

The prelates also conferred with a delegation of homosexuals and heard new concerns that the election of Bill Clinton as President would unleash a raft of bills to maintain a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy.

For many bishops, the controversies mirror a growing tension between church teaching and pressure for change that will only increase and may keep the church on the defensive.

“It’s probably right and inevitable that some of what the church teaches is always going to make people uncomfortable and make people want to say things about the church,” said Pilarczyk, the outgoing president of the conference.

Throughout the meeting, the contrast in world views was evident.

Homosexuals and lesbians who protested outside also won a private meeting with the bishops, asking them to repudiate a Vatican statement that urged U.S. prelates to oppose civil rights legislation for gays.

Later, Bishop James W. Malone of Youngstown, Ohio, issued a statement acknowledging “the pain and hurt” experienced by homosexuals. But the statement did not retreat from opposition to creating “a new class of legally protected behavior.”

Of all the sexually oriented issues confronting the bishops, none was more divisive or longer debated than ordaining women to the priesthood.

In the end, the bishops rejected a proposed pastoral letter on the role of women in society and the church that affirmed Rome’s centuries-old tradition of an all-male priesthood.

However, most bishops said the letter was defeated not because of its approval of an all-male priesthood but because the arguments supporting that stand should have been stronger. Others said the letter should have been more sensitive in light of the controversy and rising dissent within the church.

To be sure, the church has been questioned before about its refusal to ordain women as priests and its view of homosexuality as sinful. There also have been grave concerns about sexual abuse by clergy.

But the past protests seemed like storm clouds on the horizon compared to the tempest that overtook this conference.

Several bishops said the church will always be embroiled in controversy.

“The church’s standing in the world has to be in part a standing with and in part a standing against,” Pilarczyk told reporters.

“If there is no tension at all between church teaching and, for want of a better term, cultural acceptance,” the archbishop said, “either the culture has gotten totally holy or the church isn’t speaking loud enough.”