Rehabbing from a winter heart attack and retired from the priesthood now at 74, Frank Kelly looks at America's Roman Catholic Church convulsing in his rearview mirror and sees, as usual, more than is evident.
"If anything, the plus part of this will be a switch of power toward the laity, and the priests," he was saying yesterday. "The [church] hierarchy will come out the losers. They will have to listen to the people. The big question is, are the people going to go along?"
For all his Irish eloquence, "big" doesn't begin to measure the dimensions of that question, the one Kelly raised on the telephone from Los Angeles, where I met him a couple of years ago over topics that were breezy and altogether more pleasant. Now he wonders, in effect, whether the faithful will allow policies that grow from the church's broiling sex scandal to be dictated to them, or if they will insist on dictating those policies.
Though his heart is hopeful, his head knows that a Catholic hierarchy that's spent millennia propping up its own ornate, if dubious, infallibility won't go quietly.
Catholics now look anxiously toward Dallas, where in June American bishops will convene to interpret or illuminate or quantify or stratify the murky results of Pope John Paul II's meeting with American cardinals last month. Out of that wholly unsatisfying Vatican hand-wringing, the bishops are left with nothing less than the entire pre-Roman menu of exceedingly difficult issues: pedophilia, ephebophilia, homosexuality, repressed heterosexuality, repressed homosexuality, arrested psychosexual development, celibacy and procedures for preventing the horrifying backfire of near-medieval psychology.
Good luck.
"My fellow priests, after a round of golf a few weeks ago, were discussing the situation, saying, 'Well, the church officials or the bishop's office or whatever failed to get on top of this,' " Kelly said. "And I said, 'Are you trying to tell me that any of us here are dumber than the bishops?'
"The bishops come from the clergy. They're not any smarter than the rest of us. Basically, they're the politicians. They're basically the people who wanted to be bishops. And in that pursuit there are prized plums. [Boston Cardinal Bernard] Law came from St. Louis. On his way up he figured Boston was a prestigious place to be the archbishop of. Now we expect the bishops to be able to handle this, and that's where we attribute to them wisdom that they don't have."
Too much of the church's intellectual energy around this scandal has been wasted trying to define some kind of phantom anti-Catholic media conspiracy. Nothing the media says is going to cost the church a single parishioner whose faith is anything but cosmetic, but the panicky huffing and puffing in the church hierarchy over the media's "agenda" only makes it appear increasingly vulnerable. I'm tired, frankly, of reading hierarchical literature crammed with phrases like "a very few priests" and "a tiny percentage of priests." For each troubled priest, there can be, have been, sexual abuse victims by the dozen. The church can't claim victim status on this.
"Some would say this is press-driven, but there are too many cases," Kelly said. "Anything that's newsworthy, the press is going to get on and stay on. That's the way the press operates. I hear people say there aren't enough cases to warrant this kind of media attention, but it's not as though it were one or two cases. It's case after case after case. I don't think the press is off base.
"To me, in one sense, the shocking thing is that it is so prevalent. But I remember talking to guys in Ireland, guys who'd gone to seminary there 40, 50 years ago, and they experienced some of it in the seminary back in those days. A priest would invite seminarians up to his room for 'conference' and actually molest them.
"We're talking about a human church. The Church has gone through many situations. They've already had this in Ireland, which, as a small country, encountered far more devastating effects. But my brother, my sister, my nephews and nieces, they seem to be able to handle it. In three weeks I'll be over there again, and the whole American thing will have no impact there."
All that said, Father Kelly has difficulty with the concept of zero tolerance, whatever that means. He feels as though abusive priests can and have been rehabilitated when they're kept from climates that trigger relapse. He's got a problem, he says, with the notion that a 30-year-old charge can ultimately defrock a priest who's served the people spotlessly ever since.
That's merely in the spirit of forgiveness, which is, after all, the church's business. Some dimension of forgiveness, from every side on every issue, may be the only way out of this.
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