Instead of dealing with the systemic abuse scandalizing the Roman Catholic Church, some are trying to fuel the culture war machine.
I’m not Roman Catholic, but I think we should all pay attention to this scandal. Not just the crimes and cover-ups, but the bigger story.
Now, I have a rule I try to follow: don’t talk smack about other denominations. Because I don’t like when people outside of my church talk about mine. But this story triggered something familiar in me and in my church.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano has accused Pope Francis of covering up for Theodore McCarrick and the church in Pennsylvania.
As a relatively rational person, I refuse to dismiss unsubstantiated accusations out of hand. I believe in due diligence of investigation. But this accusation is different. Not just because of who Vigano is (someone who doesn’t appear trustworthy) but because it has a WTF quality to it.
As in, um…yeah, the whole flipping church covered up a whole mess of disgusting crimes. And the whole damn hierarchy has been trying to make sense of what to do about it, which takes time. I have no doubt Pope Benedict resigned because of it. There’s a kinda-news-but-not-really-news quality to the accusation.
Really, what does any this have to do with the pope exclusively?
The slime factor.
Imagine Vigano, the American church, and many more bishops and cardinals are covered in the vile slime of this scandal. [Not hard, I know.] These are the ones who did it themselves or covered it up themselves.
Then they tell people about it and some of the slime gets on those people until they wash it out with water and sunlight disinfectant.
Vigano is slime-covered. And he’s throwing slime on the pope’s alb and shouting about how he’s got slime on him.
This isn’t whistle-blowing, but scandal-mongering.
Vigano Hates the Pope
We cherish objectivity. So we want so desperately to stick to the facts and pretend it can be decided rationally without context or emotion.
But we can’t.
And at the same time, there’s a way this all seems like it could once again filter into the American Culture War. Who am I kidding. It already has. Or, should I say, it went there a long time ago.
Much like the American bishops joining in with fundamentalists to support the Greens in the Hobby Lobby case, the church leadership has jumped into the deep end of conservative politics.
And then Vigano just cannonballed right in like a drunk frat boy. He intentionally tricked the pope into siding with the far right’s culture warriors, according to Jaweed Kaleem:
“He arranged for the pope — who had until then received widely positive news coverage for saying it was not his place to judge gay people — to meet Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk who had become embroiled in national controversy over her refusal to give marriage certificates to gay couples. Vatican insiders said the pope, who shook hands and took photographs with many people during his visit, did not fully understand who Davis was when he posed with her at the ambassador’s residence.”
This isn’t the action of a credible person on the question of ethics.
That we might treat Vigano’s accusation objectively inescapably distorts the truth.
But the true slime of scandal isn’t about telling the truth. It’s about covering everyone in slime so that nobody knows who to really blame.
Or how to really clean it all up.
Which means it isn’t just about who started it, but who loves flinging slime.
The Scandal of Division
From the moment of Pope Francis’ election, many have succumbed to their bitter anxiety.
Preempting Francis’s announcement, the Italian Conference of Bishops released a statement saying one of their own was elected. Later, when they amended their statement, they then suggested there was a bias against them.
Ever since Francis’s moderating influence on the church is met immediately with scorn and vitriol. Much like the kind we’ve seen in the Episcopal Church from those eager to repress equal marriage and in the country at large with our recent “whitelash”.
It is the kind of reaction which can’t be rationalized because it comes from fear. The kind that believes a minority can’t be unbiased against a racist or disbelieves when a model minority still gets rejected because of the name on their resume.
We must, however, continue to resist the temptation to bothsides the conversation. Because the slime doesn’t begin with both or get flung with equal abandon.
They declared war.
Ross Douthat’s new book about the Pope blames Francis for the future of the church. Not surprisingly, he uses the same line of reasoning the president used when arguing that impeaching him would bring down the economy. Both of them are gaslighting the majority for the abuse of the fringe.
Vigano, Douthat, and many others are exploiting the politics of the moment. They aren’t unifying or protecting the church. They aren’t responding to the broken and disunited church with practices of harmonious reconciliation. And they aren’t merely casting aspersions or expressing a political division now that “their guy” is no longer in charge.
They are fomenting discord and blaming everyone else for it. Because the culture war doesn’t reflect an evenly divided country, left vs. right, duking it out rationally and equally on a mutually defined territory.
This so-called culture war was declared from the fringe against the liberal democratic institutions and customs of the United States.
And these actions and accusations aren’t representative of heroic whistleblowers and generous-hearted prophets.
It feels a lot more like a brood of venomous vipers hissing and threatening to kill those they love.
And even pointing that out feels slimy. Which, in lieu of getting their way, is what they want.