A Crisis of Faith Bedevils Roman Catholic Church : Religion: Pedophile priests are the least of its woes, as its membership drops, its critical teachings are ignored and its political child is corrupt.

Sexual misconduct among American priests; the corruption and decadence of the Christian Democratic Party in Italy; the rise of evangelical Christianity in Latin America; the collapse of Catholic Christianity among the educated elites of Europe; the intellectual victory of liberal economics in the developing world--connect the dots and you get the picture of a church in crisis.

The aspect of all this that gets the most press in America--the sad stories of pedophile priests--is the least of the church’s real worries. After all, the church does not teach that its clergy are saints--just the opposite. Sin is with us every day, says the Catholic Church, and it deliberately teaches that the efficacy of its sacraments and the accuracy of its teachings are independent of the moral failings of its bishops and priests. From a certain point of view, the sex scandals don’t so much disprove the Christian faith as confirm our need for it.

But the pedophilia scandal comes when the Catholic Church throughout the West is facing a crisis of faith. Traditionally, the church has seen the relationship of its priests and its laity in hierarchical terms; the task of the former is to preach and to teach; that of the latter is to pray, pay and obey. Through most of the centuries of Catholic history, that model seemed compelling. Poorly educated peasants were expected to defer to their natural superiors in both politics and religion. Male-female relationships were similarly cast in hierarchical terms, and the all-masculine priesthood was part of an overall structure of male privilege that fitted into a hierarchical order that ran from rich men down to poor women.

“If men got pregnant,” goes the pro-choice slogan, “abortion would be a sacrament.” This is unfair, but the church must somehow separate the baby of its authentic doctrine from the bath water of its cultural assumptions. This would be difficult under the best of circumstances; the pedophilia scandals make things much worse. An all-male celibate priesthood who abuses their position of power and trust to abuse vulnerable young people--and especially young boys--seems to do more than to remind us that nobody is perfect. It also gives many people the feeling that the church lacks psychological insight into its own problems--that the church is too hung up about issues of sexuality and power to speak with authority on these topics.

The problem is not simply that a handful of priests exhibit an all-too-human failing; the authorities in a number of religious orders and dioceses appear to have turned a blind eye to abuses that they should have been able to prevent. To borrow a biblical image, the church can seem to be swallowing the camel of priestly pedophilia while straining at the gnat of artificial birth control.

The result is to deepen the alienation of many American Catholics from the teaching, though not the community, of their church. It gives moral support to Catholics who want to treat their tradition as a kind of dogmatic smorgasbord; you can eat as much as you like of the good stuff while turning up your nose at the dishes you detest. This is basically a Protestant attitude toward church dogma--each individual must decide in the light of the Bible and their conscience what doctrine is acceptable. There is a quiet Reformation among the pews today; millions of Catholics are silently turning away from church teaching on issues that the hierarchy regards as critical.

This pattern is a familiar one in Western Europe. Throughout the Western world, many people continue to go to church, but quietly choose to ignore its teachings when they please. The church hollows out; its impressive buildings still stand but they become empty facades.

In its traditional strongholds in the Latin world--Latin Europe and Latin America--the church faces new and perhaps even more serious challenges. Throughout Latin America and among American Latinos, aggressive proselytizing among fundamentalist and Pentecostal Protestant sects is making significant demographic inroads. Countries like Brazil are no longer monolithically Catholic; on present trends, some Latin American countries will have more Protestant churchgoers than Catholic ones at some point in the next century.

The decline of Catholicism seems set to continue in Latin America. With the fall of communism, the continent’s elites see increasingly less reason to support a church that often exhibits an irritating propensity to side with the poor. On the other hand, many poor Latinos continue to identify Catholicism with the stagnant quasi-feudal system that dominated the continent’s past. The spread of individualistic, laissez-faire ideas in traditionally communitarian societies also predisposes many people to accept a Protestant perspective.

Meanwhile, the record in Latin Europe is equally distressing. In Spain, the influence of the church has been in decline since the end of the Franco dictatorship. In Italy, the recent collapse of the Christian Democratic Party in an avalanche of scandal is perhaps an irreparable blow to the church’s standing. The Italian Christian Democratic Party was the child of the church; Pope after Pope, bishop after bishop urged Italians to support it. Now what many Italians have been raised to regard as the party of the church turns out to be a seething mass of corruption.

It is much worse than a handful of pedophile priests. Christian Democratic politicians had close links with the Mafia. The party systematically looted Italy’s treasury and private companies. Old scandals, like the involvement of the Vatican in the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano, take on a new and more sinister coloring in the popular mind. Italians ask, with some justification: Where was the church in all this? Was the hierarchy blind to corruption or was it tainted? In either case, the church’s ability to play a constructive political role in Italian politics has suffered.

Now the Christian Democrats have fallen apart as a political force, with their share of the vote reduced to about 10% in the latest Italian elections. The successors of the Italian Communist Party are now favored to win the next national elections. The church has not only lost a powerful political ally; it is tarnished by the moral failures of the party it helped form and systematically promoted for 50 years.

A crisis of moral leadership in North America; a popular crisis of faith in Latin America; a loss of its privileged position in Latin Europe--the Catholic Church has serious problems on several fronts. Coming against the background of a collapse in religious vocations in many countries and a continuing financial crisis, these problems are likely to have a serious impact on the strength of the institution.

An additional, complicating factor: the natural rhythm of the papacy. Long papacies begin with an energetic, often charismatic leader, but time and the cares of office take their toll. As Popes age, decision-making power in the church tends to shift to the Vatican bureaucracy. John Paul II is a man of strong character and will, but the church’s problems are growing more serious as time goes on.

The Catholic Church has faced crises before and overcome them; it will certainly survive its present troubles. But the Throne of St. Peter has never been a comfortable seat and Pope John Paul II’s successor is likely to have a more difficult papacy than most.