Pimpin' Bishops

Don’t get me wrong.  I am pleased and proud that members of the gay Catholic group Dignity staked out the roadside along the Popemobile’s route through Washington DC.  For years, Dignity has been the strongest gay Catholic voice in the nation.  But crowing about the Pope’s having waved to the silent Dignity contingent made me squirm.  Are we really satisfied with that – a Papal wave?  The news story makes the members sound like a pair of Okies vacationing in Hollywood who managed to get a glimpse of a Big Star and imagined the Big Star threw a smile their way:

The pope appeared to look directly at about a dozen members of the group as they stood behind a 10-foot long banner with the message, “Dignity Washington — Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Catholics, Our Families and Friends — A community of Faith in Action.”
“I thought it was a good chance for us to be seen and he obviously saw us and waved at us, so I think we got our message across,” said Raymond Panas, president of Dignity Washington. …
“Whether he actually saw or read our sign, we’ll never know,” said Dignity member Bob Miailovich. “It was nice to see him, and it was all very prim and proper. He waved in our direction and that was very nice.”

I confess that this tendency to let ourselves get excited by the crumbs thrown our way is one I share.  I suppose it comes from making our way through the desert of spiritual experience that dealing with the Roman Catholic hierarchy has been. 

For example, when I first heard that the Pope made a clear distinction between homosexuality and pedophilia in comments made en route to the U.S., and promised to root those subject to the latter out of the priesthood, I was initially pleasantly surprised:

[T]he pontiff said: “I would not speak at this moment about homosexuality, but pedophilia, which is another thing. And we would absolutely exclude pedophiles from the sacred ministry.”

“Who is guilty of pedophilia cannot be a priest,” he added.

For a professor trained in subtle theological nuance, Ratzinger has never made as clear that he recognizes a difference between the two concepts.  His comments delighted me: all those right wing conservative Catholics will be disappointed because B16 so undermined their argument that priestly homosexuality was the cause of the abuse scandal. 

But on further review, what does B16’s distinction mean?  What value does it have?  For example, if pedophile priests are the issue, why bar homosexual candidates from the seminary?  This initiative was one of the first major acts of the B16 Papacy back in 2005.

More important, what really shook the faithful was NOT the acts of pedophile priests, however horrific those acts were.  The faithful could have attributed these terrible acts merely to a (large) handful of sick individuals without losing faith in the Church. 

What scandalized the faithful was the conduct of the bishops – bishops who not only protected priests from exposure, but set them up in new parishes to prey (pun intended) on a whole new crop of young people.  In other words, bishops who were panderers and pimps for their pedophile priests.  In this sense, pedophiles were not the whole problem, and certainly not gay priests.  The problem was pimping bishops.  A truly revolutionary statement by B16 would have been this: “Who is guilty of being a bishop cannot be a priest.”