U.S. Catholics and Vatican Face a Cultural Chasm in Coping With Sex Scandal

A month ago, long after clerical sex scandals had mushroomed in the United States, the Colombian cardinal overseeing the worldwide Roman Catholic priesthood fielded a barrage of questions from reporters here over how the Vatican would respond.

Defensive and irritated, Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos portrayed the scandals as the product of an American “culture of pansexuality and sexual licentiousness” and noted sourly that most of the questions were in English. “This by itself is an X-ray of the problem,” he said.

Today, when 12 American cardinals lay the sex abuse crisis before Pope John Paul II and his top aides, what the Vatican had long viewed as an “American problem” will become its own.

The Americans’ immediate goal is to persuade the Vatican to authorize the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to impose unprecedented binding procedures on all 195 U.S. diocesan bishops for addressing clerical sex abuse.

But more fundamentally, the extraordinary two-day meeting here is an opportunity to bridge a cultural gap between the Curia--the central Vatican bureaucracy that is dominated by Italians and, to a lesser extent, by other Europeans and Latin Americans--and Catholics in the United States, whose church is one of the world’s largest and richest.

The divide reflects conflicting values: New World openness versus Old World secrecy, American home rule versus Vatican centralization, Anglo-Saxon CEO-style management versus a Mediterranean forgive-and-forget attitude toward sinners.

The chasm helps one understand a range of conflicts between the Vatican and American Catholics during John Paul’s long reign, including disputes over academic freedom at Catholic universities and inclusive language in the liturgy. And it helps explain why the pope and his aides failed at first to grasp the scale of the current crisis, the American church’s worst in modern times.

Senior U.S. clerics, summoned here on a week’s notice, said Monday that they were encouraged by the Vatican’s belated attention and the chance to explain the American perspective.

For today’s opening session in the frescoed Sala Bologna, in the Apostolic Palace, the Vatican is sending eight top curial officials--up from the original list of three--to meet with the Americans. The pope will address the group today and attend as many of the sessions as his schedule allows, the Vatican said.

“The more members of the Holy Father’s Curia who are engaged in the discussion, the better it is for the church,” said Bishop Wilton D. Gregory of Belleville, Ill., president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who will join the American delegation. He said the talks will allow Vatican officials “to ask the questions that perhaps they do not fully understand in terms of the crisis we are facing.”

The two sides have a history of misunderstanding.

Since the 19th century, when Pope Leo XIII cracked down on what he called “Americanism,” the Curia has viewed American culture as deeply rooted in Calvinist individualism, lacking a strong concept of community or the church.

More recently, in 1989, John Paul became concerned that the American church was spinning beyond his control. He summoned all American archbishops, including cardinals, to Rome. The discussion ranged widely--from the high rate of remarriage for divorced American Catholics to the American hierarchy’s tolerance for dissent within the church.

John May, then archbishop of St. Louis, crystallized the clashing perspectives in his opening remarks.

“Authoritarianism is suspect in any area of learning or culture,” he said. “To assert that there is a church teaching with authority binding for eternity is truly a sign of contradiction to many Americans who consider the divine right of bishops as outmoded as the divine right of kings.”

The response by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany, the Vatican’s guardian of doctrinal orthodoxy, was equally blunt: Bishops must remember that they are “guardians of an authoritarian tradition.”

Since then, papal appointments have brought the American church hierarchy more into line, but disagreements have persisted.

In 1990, for example, a papal document on higher education required theologians at Catholic universities to get certification from their bishops that they were teaching authentic Catholic doctrine. U.S. bishops resisted, arguing in defense of academic freedom. To many of them, the Vatican effort smacked of loyalty oaths and blacklisting.

The American reaction, in the Vatican’s view, was a rebellious assertion of individual freedom against the collective good of the church.

A few years later, the Vatican began objecting to the use of inclusive language--the word “people,” for example, instead of “man”--in English translations of Latin liturgical texts. It demanded new powers over the translators--a panel set up by English-speaking bishops conferences around the world. Bishops in America balked.

Both disputes--over universities and translations--were settled on the Vatican’s terms, after lengthy discussions with American bishops.

The sex scandals have highlighted a new set of cultural differences, along with what George S. Weigel, an American theologian and papal biographer, called “an urgency gap” between the Vatican and American Catholics.

One difference is over the Vatican perception that pedophilia is mostly an American problem.

Many American Catholics resent that view. They believe the U.S. is taking the lead in grappling with a problem that is hidden in many other societies but will eventually confront the church worldwide.

Pedophilia scandals have already hit the Catholic Church in Canada, Australia, Ireland, Britain, France, Germany, Mexico and Poland. But the phenomenon has gained far more attention in America, where the culture makes victims less inhibited about stepping forward and the right to sue in court offers the prospect of financial damages.

The Vatican is immersed in Italian culture, which, like many others, regards sex abuse and other aberrant human behavior as inappropriate fodder for public discussion.

When Mexico’s bishops met this month, they claimed that their country had no abuse cases--then admitted it did. Still, Mexican Archbishop Sergio Obeso told a news conference that evidence of crimes will not be turned over to the civil authorities, because “dirty laundry is washed at home.”

“The reaction in the United States is, ‘Just wait and see,’ ” said Father Thomas J. Reese, who edits the Jesuit magazine America. “For cultural reasons, it’s a lot more difficult in the Mediterranean countries and in Latin America for a young man to come forward and say publicly that he was abused as a child. But concern about sex abuse is going to spread from the United States and hit many other countries in a few years. There’s a denial factor now, but it won’t last.”

Another tension is between Vatican secrecy and American openness.

When the scandals in America erupted, the Vatican first insisted that it had already addressed the problem with a new requirement that all accusations of clerical sexual abuse be reported to Rome.

But these requirements, adopted last May, were issued in secret. They were sent in June to bishops and heads of religious orders but not publicly announced until January, when they were finally published in Latin in the journal of record of the Holy See.

Vatican officials struggling to grasp the impact of the scandals have also displayed a lack of understanding of American civil law, which has made financial liability a big issue.

Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone of Italy, a Vatican official, called it a “strange fact” that in the United States the church is forced under civil law to pay millions of dollars in damages for the misdeeds of “single individuals.”

“This ordinarily doesn’t happen” in other societies, he said in an interview with the Italian magazine 30 Giorni, “and it shouldn’t happen.”

Another factor that blinded the Vatican to the American scandals was a suspicion among curial officials that sex abuse allegations were being orchestrated and reported by opponents of the church’s strong stand against abortion and birth control and its insistence on clerical celibacy.

It took weeks of insistent messages from American cardinals and bishops to convince the Vatican that the scandals have severely eroded the faith of ordinary Catholics and threaten to taint John Paul’s reign.

“The magnitude of this scandal has finally hit home here,” said Weigel, the theologian, who has spent the last three weeks in Rome. “The urgency gap has finally begun to narrow.”

The two days of debate here will try to reconcile conflicting perceptions over what to do about the scandal.

In remarks over the weekend to visiting clergymen, John Paul emphasized that Jesus demands a “higher loyalty” from priests, including humility, poverty and chastity.

Some American Catholics worry that the pope is framing the sex abuse issue more as a matter of discipline by individual priests than as an institutional failure. Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles, said he would plead in today’s meeting for a papal apology to the victims of clerical sex abuse.

“This is an institutional church issue,” Mahony said in an interview. “The pope has to say something that is very pastoral and caring to the victims and to children and youth.”

On Sunday, one U.S. cardinal told The Times that he and other prelates planned to urge the Vatican in meetings Monday to ask Cardinal Bernard Law to resign as the archbishop of Boston. Law has come under fire for his handling of cases of pedophile priests. The cardinal offered no progress report on Monday’s meetings.

As for what to do about pedophile priests, Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a spokeswoman for the American bishops, said the bishops tend to favor a chief executive’s approach: “You do something wrong, you’re fired.”

“But it’s not that easy to dismiss someone from the priesthood,” she added, noting the Vatican view that once someone is ordained a priest, he is a priest forever.

Also, the American push for mandatory reporting policies--which would require bishops to inform police of any credible allegations of sexual abuse against a priest--has been met so far with a cautious response from the Vatican.

Society must “respect the ‘professional secrecy’ of priests,” Bertone said in the 30 Giorni interview. “If a priest cannot confide in his bishop because he is afraid of being denounced . . . it would mean that there is no more freedom of conscience.”

On one hand, the Americans see the Vatican’s point. “It’s one thing if you’re dealing with a constitutional government that believes in due process and innocent until proven guilty,” Walsh said. “If you’re in a dictatorial state, in China, I’m not sure whether you’d want the bishops doing that.”

But Mahony said worldwide standards are essential in an age of globalized missionary work. American dioceses often rely on foreign priests, he said, yet often are not told by those priests’ superiors when one has a record of sexual abuse.

If accused of sexual misbehavior in America, Mahony complained, such priests have an easy out.

“They get a dime and call a cab,” he said. “They’re gone.”

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