Main Feature
Church Historian Says Sex Abuse Poses Biggest Threat to Church in 500 Years
Robert McCabe
Volume 33 Issue 1, 2 & 3 | Posted: March 28, 2019
Hampton, Va. — A month before the start of a global summit in Rome on the sex abuse crisis, a prominent church historian and theologian said that the issue poses the biggest challenge to the church in 500 years.
“This is not like the Protestant Reformation; it’s not,” Massimo Faggioli, a Villanova University professor, said in a talk at Immaculate Conception Church in Hampton, Virginia. “But in my opinion, it’s the most serious crisis in the Catholic Church since the Protestant Reformation.”
Hampton, Va. — A month before the start of a global summit in Rome on the sex abuse crisis, a prominent church historian and theologian said that the issue poses the biggest challenge to the church in 500 years.
“This is not like the Protestant Reformation; it’s not,” Massimo Faggioli, a Villanova University professor, said in a talk at Immaculate Conception Church in Hampton, Virginia. “But in my opinion, it’s the most serious crisis in the Catholic Church since the Protestant Reformation.”
While the crisis has gone global, said Faggioli, one strain of it is peculiar to the United States, where it is inseparable from such hot-button issues as sexuality, homosexuality and gender. The scandal in the United States has resulted in a “theological crisis,” he said. The crisis is also being used by some, according to Faggioli, to mount a campaign opposing Pope Francis.
Last year was a game-changer in the unfolding of the sex-abuse crisis, Faggioli said, a phenomenon that has become unrelenting.
“It’s a past that doesn’t want to pass; it keeps coming back,” he said. “It’s had an impact on me as a scholar and as a Catholic.”
Almost as if recounting a bad dream, Faggioli walked his listeners through the events of 2018, beginning with Pope Francis’ disastrous visit to Chile, his complicated visit to Ireland, the release of an Australian government study on the crisis and abuse-related reports that surfaced from India, Germany, France and Spain, noting that the year showed if nothing else that the crisis is no longer viewed as just an American problem, but a global issue.
Attack on Francis
It was, nevertheless, the firestorm that erupted in the U.S. church over the alleged abuse of seminarians and priests by former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, followed by the extraordinary letter by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, accusing Pope Francis of having known about and having covered for McCarrick, that pushed the crisis to a new level, Faggioli suggested.
When more than two dozen U.S. bishops later backed Viganò, the church moved to a place it had not seen for hundreds of years, he said: “You have to go back six centuries — the 1400s — to see a national church being split publicly about the legitimacy of a pope.”
The shocking part of the Viganò controversy was not his letter, but the decision by the band of U.S. bishops to take his side, creating the “church equivalent of the Cuban missile crisis,” Faggioli said.
The crisis has exposed fault lines in the U.S. Catholic Church, he suggested.
“It has become clear, more than before, that the abuse crisis is not simply a series of abuses that were covered up,” Faggioli told the audience. “It has become part of an ecclesial fragmentation that really puts at risk one of the four things that every Catholic says when he or she says the creed,” alluding to the “one” Catholic Church and the bishops who appeared to lay down a challenge to the pope.
Robert McCabe