And as Douthat so rightly points out is very ironic. He also points out a interesting related American political dynamic as well.
...................the events of recent decades indicate that the pope can’t trust them — not least because if and when local bishops foul up, the Vatican will inevitably be held responsible (by the media, and perhaps eventually even by the courts) for their crimes and blunders. Thus the great irony of the sex abuse scandal: It’s damaged Rome’s moral credibility immeasurably, but at the same time it’s leading to a Catholic future in which the Vatican actually expands its control over church administration.
Catholicism’s hierarchical culture notwithstanding, the church has never been nearly as centralized, nor the pope as powerful, as outsiders and critics often like to imagine. The pontiff appoints bishops and makes doctrinal pronouncements, but popes wrestle with their bureaucracies just like any politician, and the day-to-day administration of the church is almost completely localized. (The Vatican’s much-cited “crackdowns” on dissenters like Charles Curran and Leonardo Boff are well-publicized but also extraordinarily rare — not to mention frequently ineffectual.) This administrative localism, I suspect, is one of the many reasons why so many Rome-based cardinals spent so long downplaying the significance of the American sex scandals — because most of the disastrous decisions were being made in local dioceses, and the Vatican was largely kept out of the loop.
But now that era is over. As time goes by (and especially if the media drumbeat continues), the C.D.F. will probably acquire an ever-larger staff, to avoid accusations that laicization proceedings are taking too long, that abusive priests are still hanging around Catholic communities, that bishops in India (or wherever) aren’t handling abuse allegations appropriately, etc. Bishops, in turn, will become accustomed to punting more and more hard personnel decisions up the ladder, prompting further centralization in Rome, and so on.
All of this is understandable, given the gravity of the scandal, and it’s obviously preferable to the see-no-evil, pre-Pope Benedict status quo. But it means that far from becoming the more decentralized body that many of the current hierarchy’s critics claim to hope for, the post-scandal Catholic Church may end up more Rome-centric than ever.....
Douthat then goes and makes an interesting observations as to this and politics that is worth looking at in full.
The implications of this pattern — in which a crisis of authority leads to inexorably to greater centralization — extend well beyond Catholicism. Like many people on the right (and some on the left), I’m a great believer in the virtues of devolution, federalism and local control.................
But here’s the question: is real decentralization sustainable, given the centripetal forces of mass culture, mass media and mass politics? Once you’ve established that administration can be centralized, won’t any cascade of local blunders eventually get pinned, whether by the press or the public or the legal system, on some more central authority … which in turn will try to consolidate or re-consolidate its power, on the theory that if you’re going to get the blame, you might as well have the authority as well? And doesn’t this mean that any bold attempt at decentralization will only last until the next crisis — the next Hurricane Katrina, the next financial collapse, the next sex abuse scandal?
I don’t know the answers to these questions. But so far, the experience of the Catholic Church doesn’t seem encouraging. The Vatican is likely to emerge from this crisis more unpopular with rank-and-file Catholics, and yet more administratively powerful than ever. Which, not coincidentally, is exactly what’s been happening to America’s ever-more-potent, ever-less-popular federal government for many, many years as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment