30/03/02
The purge of Boston
James Keenan
http://www.thetablet.co.uk/cgi-bin/archive_db.cgi?tablet-00616#top
As American Catholics progress through Lent, they have been shaken to the roots by revelations about clerical sexual abuse. A priest looks at how they have reacted. James Keenan is Professor of Moral Theology at Weston Jesuit School of Theology.
HERE IN Boston, we have lived through an incredible Lent. The scandals are enough to place us all in sackcloth and ashes. If Lent cultivates a communal sense of shame, then this has been the most fertile Lent in my 50 years; no other disposition captures what we Catholics feel about our Church and its leadership in this revolting and disgraceful tragedy.
The stories never stop. As a noted lay leader in Boston said to me last Sunday as she arrived for the liturgy, "We're only on page five of a 500-page Russian novel". As I write, the radio has just reported three new incidents involving a bishop in another diocese, a high-ranking Boston priest and a local religious priest. How accurate these latest accusations are is certainly questionable, but for the most part they seem to be credible. Indeed, the New York Times captures the depth and breadth of this crisis in its lead editorial of 20 March: "The accounts that have come out of the Roman Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandal could hardly be more horrific - altar boys lured into bed by priests; children entrusted to the Church's care forced to perform oral sex."
Almost every day a priest is removed from his assignment: nationwide, more than 55 priests have been removed since January. The number of reported settlements against priests is astonishing: Boston alone settled for 89 priests over the past several decades. One diocese after another is being investigated by an aggressive press which recognises the enormity and universality of this crisis and that most of their Catholic readers want these stories brought to light. The Lenten move from darkness to light is clearly a necessary and painful one for all of us, but it's also an expensive one. The New York Times estimates that the Church's legal liability could run as high as $1 billion; Boston alone is paying $45 million in settlements to the victims of John Geoghan, the notorious defrocked priest accused of molesting scores of children.
Bringing these stories to light has taken a great effort from the press and from the victims. They have to struggle against the enormous legal and political shroud of secrecy that many bishops employed as a strategy for decades to thwart any awareness of the scope of these violent actions. In the light, nothing captures the ugliness of this tragedy - in which hundreds of children were raped or molested - but the testimony of the parents who entrusted their children to these priests. One mother, active in the Church along with her husband, regrets that she did not see what was happening earlier. "It tore a hole out of my heart", she said between sobs. "There were some things that, unfortunately, we missed."
No one is missing them now. Reading the many painful narratives of bishops suppressing these accusations, we are inevitably led to ask, why did members of the hierarchy mislead us all?
In trying to answer this question, the laity have clearly taken the lead. They recognise that this tragedy reflects church practices and not matters of faith. The moral theologian Lisa Sowle Cahill made this claim in her op-ed piece in the New York Times: "A Crisis of Clergy, Not of Faith". Her claim was substantiated by a poll of Boston Catholics which showed that 91 per cent of those interviewed said their faith was not diminished by these events. The laity in Boston identified the number one issue as the idea that the Church's image was more important than their children. Cahill saw here "the problem of a closed society largely insulated from the realities and values of ordinary people and in denial of many aspects of human sexuality".
As we approach Holy Week and Easter, we witness the laity's commitment to the Church by their leadership. As a letter writer to the New York Times commented the other day, the laity are no longer traumatised, but rather galvanised. They are writing and speaking about these events everywhere. Readers of The Tablet were treated to one eloquent testimony on 9 March by Professor Robert Kiely of Harvard who called on all Catholics to "repair the Church". His proposal echoes one earlier made by the noted Catholic writer James Carroll when he called for Catholics to "Take Back the Church" in the Boston Globe. Whether they write essays or letters calling for or opposing the cardinal's resignation, advocate reforms of structures that promote secrecy and isolate the Church's leadership from urgent concerns, or criticise or praise the media's own investigations, the laity's voice has never been more robust. For instance, as I write this I am reading news reports of specific and critical reactions from the president of a local college, the theology chairman of a major Boston-area university, and the director of a centre for the study of American Catholicism. All comment on the disappointingly brief remarks by the Pope in his Maundy Thursday letter to priests on penance issued on 21 March.
As they address the structural problems in church leadership today, the laity carefully differentiate their pastors' lives and service from the actions of the cardinal and his auxiliaries in reassigning known paedophiles. Kiely, for instance, acknowledges "the priests who struggle every day to keep their faith communities together". His respect for pastors is reinforced by the Boston Globe poll which reported that while 51 per cent of the 800 Catholics interviewed considered the cardinal's actions unfavourably, only 4 per cent viewed their pastors negatively. Thus, in an article in the Boston Globe, Professor Mary Jo Bane of Harvard called upon Catholics to withhold any financial contributions to the archdiocesan chancery, but insisted on maintaining - if not actually increasing - contributions to the local parish. This is a position not unlike the one taken by Cahill in her article. Not only in the press, but also in the parishes, pastors note that their parishioners frequently express compassion and concern for them.
Pastors, in turn, are responding in kind to their parishioners. During Lent, clergy have found that the Sunday readings have provided a context to examine the present crisis. As the laity heartily receive these sermons, pastors in neighbouring parishes become more confident about bringing their own perspectives to the fore. No doubt pastors around the country will have applied the Passion narrative to this tragic situation.
Similarly, pastors throughout the archdiocese have hosted "listening sessions" in their parishes, inviting the faithful to express their views on the present crisis. These have had an enormous impact, demonstrating that the deeper anger directed toward bishops comes not from progressive Catholics but from the many stalwart, elderly churchgoers who are simply fed up with the news. These pastoral actions in Boston have led to similar responses elsewhere. One New York pastor reported that fellow priests were under increasing pressure from their parishioners to respond to the crisis there.
We are witnessing a sea change here in the relationship between pastors and laity. The way I explain this change is by comparing it to an earlier shift. Until the 1950s, nurses in the United States identified themselves primarily with the physician, but then shifted their advocacy role to the patient. Similarly, pastors, especially on the east coast, have often held a fealty to their local ordinary that superseded all other loyalties. Now, however, the pastor is more clearly defined by his responsiveness to his parish.
For instance, here in Boston, three pastors formed a priests' forum. Originally conceived of as a support group, before the scandals broke, it consisted of 50 priests. It grew to 75 last month when they invited the Notre Dame theologian Fr Richard McBrien to address them. McBrien said that the group no longer sees itself as a support group but as "having a responsibility as a group of pastors to take some leadership, with or without the cardinal's support or involvement, in helping to address the issues which are tearing apart the Church in Boston and leaving lay people confused and embarrassed. If the priests hold back or defer to the cardinal, laity are going to conclude that the priests are part of the problem." Since that meeting, the group's membership has surpassed 100 and their three leaders are now widely recognised by priests and laity alike.
Like them, the cardinal himself held a listening session recently with over 3,000 members of parish councils and other leadership positions. The cardinal stated: "I stand before you recognising that the trust which many of you have had in me has been broken...because of decisions for which I was responsible, which I made...With all my heart, I am sorry for that, I apologise for that, and I will reflect on what this all means." Though he pledged himself to find the course to take us where we need to be, many called for him to resign as a sign of penitence and as a recognition of the need for new leadership.
The laity are insistent about church leadership being responsible and they are particularly impatient with any "buck-passing". When, for instance, Roman authorities tried to assert that this tragedy stems from the moral corruption of contemporary cultures, the laity demanded that the Church take the blame rather than casting it aside. Similarly, when the Vatican spokesman, Dr Navarro-Vals, tried to suggest that clergy who are gay are part of the problem, most dismissed the claim as evident scapegoating. Finally, when others suggest that this is only a local issue, the laity retort with cases from other dioceses in the United States as well as those from Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, Mexico, Poland, Spain and elsewhere. As one leader attending the cardinal's listening session remarked: "I would be very disappointed if this catastrophe in Boston ends like the catastrophes in Dallas and Chicago, where the structural elements of the Church at large are not addressed."
Lay leaders have focused their concern about the need for church reform by proposing a culture of accountability to counter-balance what they call "a culture of extreme clerical deference". In a manner of speaking, they want evident structures that assure the entire Church that our way of proceeding is ethical.
In proposing this culture of accountability, any attempt to preserve the bella figura of the hierarchy and its clergy is no longer seen as credible but damaging. The laity and their pastors perceive that the hierarchy's frequent cover-ups, using evasive silences and secrecy, affected the life of the Church in the world. They are particularly sensitive to self-serving efforts to maintain the Church's image at all costs. Appropriately, a 16-year-old high school student captured this general sentiment when he said: "By doing this, they're defeating the whole message of âLove one another' just so they won't look bad".
Similarly, the laity and their pastors are concerned about what Cahill calls "the weaknesses of a virtually all-male decision-making structure which puts a high priority on secrecy and image". They want discussions about the nature of the clergy.
Certainly, some of these discussions are about celibacy, married priests, women priests and gay priests. On the last topic, some specialists, such as Eugene Kennedy and Fr Donald Cozzens, author of The Changing Face of the Priesthood, have given ample commentary that a priest's sexual and emotional maturity and not his sexual orientation is their matter of concern. My own experience confirms this. Among the clergy, gay and straight men work more easily with one another and with the laity when they are mature and at ease with their own sexuality. Matters become strained, however, when seminarians and priests are inhibited by their own sexuality or attempt even to deny it altogether because prevailing church teachings so frequently criticise the life of gay people.
Discussion of this topic is almost overwhelmingly problematic. Priests know that they cannot publicly address the issue because those who do must inevitably acknowledge their own sexual orientation, a revelation that few bishops tolerate. Moreover, among gay and straight priests today, many fear that zero tolerance towards paedophilia could lead erroneously to zero tolerance towards gay priests. Such a move would be supported both by those who want to restore an illusory image of the priesthood and by those homosexual men afraid of their own sexuality and willing to deny it at any cost. Such a move would be a return to the self-deceptive days in which a man thought he could "leave his sexuality at the door" as he entered seminary life. Those days were days of delusion, harmful to the seminarians (both gay and straight) and harmful to the laity. As we go forward out of Lent, we will have to find a way of talking about gay priests who are good priests, mindful of the fact that our own church teachings about homosexuality have never acknowledged the gay person as a competent, caring professional.
This will not be an easy task, precisely because the clerical culture itself is such a pervasive reality. Donald Cozzens has said frequently on many national radio and television programmes that the clerical culture is one of the last remnants of medieval lifestyles and that it has inhibited the growth of the clergy. Moreover, as we have seen in this crisis and as Cozzens has noted, this clerical culture suppresses honest dialogue.
During this Lent we recognised the need to begin dismantling this culture. Priests like those in the forum have found ways of expressing in honest dialogue the problems they face, not only about sexuality, but also about community, integrity, moral courage and leadership. We have found, too, by talking honestly with our fellow clergy and with our parishioners, that honest dialogue lightens the darkness of clerical culture considerably. And, we have found, like the laity themselves, that working honestly and collaboratively, we can mature as a Church as well.
Nonetheless, our emerging Easter hope is tempered by realism. We know that there are other obstacles before us. Consider, for instance, another story from Boston. In a rather astonishing move, the archdiocesan newspaper, the Boston Pilot, published an editorial raising questions about celibacy, promising to do the next issue on women's ordination. In fact, nearly the entire issue was dedicated to the present crisis. Boston-area Catholics greeted the paper warmly and the editor, anticipating that response, brought out 100,000 copies - four times the normal weekly run. Many laity expressed a hope that Lent was coming to an end and that the light of the Resurrection after all this death would yield fresh discourse about the nature of the clergy and of leadership in the Church today. But later in the day, the cardinal commented that the editorial "unfortunately created confusion".
The cardinal's response struck me as odd. The days of worrying about upsetting the laity with newfangled ideas are over. This Lent has matured most of us rather abruptly. As our pastors are learning, the laity expect to be treated as adults. They expect responses to their questions. They expect to be brought into greater collaboration with the ordained on all levels of church governance.
As Boston's Catholics prepare on Easter Sunday to stand by the open tomb, we stand having been tested ourselves. We want more tolerance, less posturing, greater openness. We want change; but above all we want greater responsibility exercised by the leadership.
Many questions remain before us. How will we effectively prevent this from happening again? How will we minister to those who were victims? How will we overcome the enormous loss of authority to comment, as a Church, on moral matters, whether of life, sexuality, or justice? How will we convince others elsewhere that what is hidden must eventually be brought to the light? How will the laity, particularly women, be more clearly incorporated into church governance? How will we promote a culture of accountability and tolerance in the Church? How will we recognise a significant percentage of our clergy as gay when the hierarchy so resolutely suppresses any acknowledgment of a priest's sexual orientation? How will we learn to trust one another?
These questions are many, but after Palm Sunday and a week of following Jesus to his death on the Cross, we will find ourselves standing by the open tomb. We hope to find our bishops there with us.
The purge of Boston
James Keenan
http://www.thetablet.co.uk/cgi-bin/archive_db.cgi?tablet-00616#top
As American Catholics progress through Lent, they have been shaken to the roots by revelations about clerical sexual abuse. A priest looks at how they have reacted. James Keenan is Professor of Moral Theology at Weston Jesuit School of Theology.
HERE IN Boston, we have lived through an incredible Lent. The scandals are enough to place us all in sackcloth and ashes. If Lent cultivates a communal sense of shame, then this has been the most fertile Lent in my 50 years; no other disposition captures what we Catholics feel about our Church and its leadership in this revolting and disgraceful tragedy.
The stories never stop. As a noted lay leader in Boston said to me last Sunday as she arrived for the liturgy, "We're only on page five of a 500-page Russian novel". As I write, the radio has just reported three new incidents involving a bishop in another diocese, a high-ranking Boston priest and a local religious priest. How accurate these latest accusations are is certainly questionable, but for the most part they seem to be credible. Indeed, the New York Times captures the depth and breadth of this crisis in its lead editorial of 20 March: "The accounts that have come out of the Roman Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandal could hardly be more horrific - altar boys lured into bed by priests; children entrusted to the Church's care forced to perform oral sex."
Almost every day a priest is removed from his assignment: nationwide, more than 55 priests have been removed since January. The number of reported settlements against priests is astonishing: Boston alone settled for 89 priests over the past several decades. One diocese after another is being investigated by an aggressive press which recognises the enormity and universality of this crisis and that most of their Catholic readers want these stories brought to light. The Lenten move from darkness to light is clearly a necessary and painful one for all of us, but it's also an expensive one. The New York Times estimates that the Church's legal liability could run as high as $1 billion; Boston alone is paying $45 million in settlements to the victims of John Geoghan, the notorious defrocked priest accused of molesting scores of children.
Bringing these stories to light has taken a great effort from the press and from the victims. They have to struggle against the enormous legal and political shroud of secrecy that many bishops employed as a strategy for decades to thwart any awareness of the scope of these violent actions. In the light, nothing captures the ugliness of this tragedy - in which hundreds of children were raped or molested - but the testimony of the parents who entrusted their children to these priests. One mother, active in the Church along with her husband, regrets that she did not see what was happening earlier. "It tore a hole out of my heart", she said between sobs. "There were some things that, unfortunately, we missed."
No one is missing them now. Reading the many painful narratives of bishops suppressing these accusations, we are inevitably led to ask, why did members of the hierarchy mislead us all?
In trying to answer this question, the laity have clearly taken the lead. They recognise that this tragedy reflects church practices and not matters of faith. The moral theologian Lisa Sowle Cahill made this claim in her op-ed piece in the New York Times: "A Crisis of Clergy, Not of Faith". Her claim was substantiated by a poll of Boston Catholics which showed that 91 per cent of those interviewed said their faith was not diminished by these events. The laity in Boston identified the number one issue as the idea that the Church's image was more important than their children. Cahill saw here "the problem of a closed society largely insulated from the realities and values of ordinary people and in denial of many aspects of human sexuality".
As we approach Holy Week and Easter, we witness the laity's commitment to the Church by their leadership. As a letter writer to the New York Times commented the other day, the laity are no longer traumatised, but rather galvanised. They are writing and speaking about these events everywhere. Readers of The Tablet were treated to one eloquent testimony on 9 March by Professor Robert Kiely of Harvard who called on all Catholics to "repair the Church". His proposal echoes one earlier made by the noted Catholic writer James Carroll when he called for Catholics to "Take Back the Church" in the Boston Globe. Whether they write essays or letters calling for or opposing the cardinal's resignation, advocate reforms of structures that promote secrecy and isolate the Church's leadership from urgent concerns, or criticise or praise the media's own investigations, the laity's voice has never been more robust. For instance, as I write this I am reading news reports of specific and critical reactions from the president of a local college, the theology chairman of a major Boston-area university, and the director of a centre for the study of American Catholicism. All comment on the disappointingly brief remarks by the Pope in his Maundy Thursday letter to priests on penance issued on 21 March.
As they address the structural problems in church leadership today, the laity carefully differentiate their pastors' lives and service from the actions of the cardinal and his auxiliaries in reassigning known paedophiles. Kiely, for instance, acknowledges "the priests who struggle every day to keep their faith communities together". His respect for pastors is reinforced by the Boston Globe poll which reported that while 51 per cent of the 800 Catholics interviewed considered the cardinal's actions unfavourably, only 4 per cent viewed their pastors negatively. Thus, in an article in the Boston Globe, Professor Mary Jo Bane of Harvard called upon Catholics to withhold any financial contributions to the archdiocesan chancery, but insisted on maintaining - if not actually increasing - contributions to the local parish. This is a position not unlike the one taken by Cahill in her article. Not only in the press, but also in the parishes, pastors note that their parishioners frequently express compassion and concern for them.
Pastors, in turn, are responding in kind to their parishioners. During Lent, clergy have found that the Sunday readings have provided a context to examine the present crisis. As the laity heartily receive these sermons, pastors in neighbouring parishes become more confident about bringing their own perspectives to the fore. No doubt pastors around the country will have applied the Passion narrative to this tragic situation.
Similarly, pastors throughout the archdiocese have hosted "listening sessions" in their parishes, inviting the faithful to express their views on the present crisis. These have had an enormous impact, demonstrating that the deeper anger directed toward bishops comes not from progressive Catholics but from the many stalwart, elderly churchgoers who are simply fed up with the news. These pastoral actions in Boston have led to similar responses elsewhere. One New York pastor reported that fellow priests were under increasing pressure from their parishioners to respond to the crisis there.
We are witnessing a sea change here in the relationship between pastors and laity. The way I explain this change is by comparing it to an earlier shift. Until the 1950s, nurses in the United States identified themselves primarily with the physician, but then shifted their advocacy role to the patient. Similarly, pastors, especially on the east coast, have often held a fealty to their local ordinary that superseded all other loyalties. Now, however, the pastor is more clearly defined by his responsiveness to his parish.
For instance, here in Boston, three pastors formed a priests' forum. Originally conceived of as a support group, before the scandals broke, it consisted of 50 priests. It grew to 75 last month when they invited the Notre Dame theologian Fr Richard McBrien to address them. McBrien said that the group no longer sees itself as a support group but as "having a responsibility as a group of pastors to take some leadership, with or without the cardinal's support or involvement, in helping to address the issues which are tearing apart the Church in Boston and leaving lay people confused and embarrassed. If the priests hold back or defer to the cardinal, laity are going to conclude that the priests are part of the problem." Since that meeting, the group's membership has surpassed 100 and their three leaders are now widely recognised by priests and laity alike.
Like them, the cardinal himself held a listening session recently with over 3,000 members of parish councils and other leadership positions. The cardinal stated: "I stand before you recognising that the trust which many of you have had in me has been broken...because of decisions for which I was responsible, which I made...With all my heart, I am sorry for that, I apologise for that, and I will reflect on what this all means." Though he pledged himself to find the course to take us where we need to be, many called for him to resign as a sign of penitence and as a recognition of the need for new leadership.
The laity are insistent about church leadership being responsible and they are particularly impatient with any "buck-passing". When, for instance, Roman authorities tried to assert that this tragedy stems from the moral corruption of contemporary cultures, the laity demanded that the Church take the blame rather than casting it aside. Similarly, when the Vatican spokesman, Dr Navarro-Vals, tried to suggest that clergy who are gay are part of the problem, most dismissed the claim as evident scapegoating. Finally, when others suggest that this is only a local issue, the laity retort with cases from other dioceses in the United States as well as those from Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, Mexico, Poland, Spain and elsewhere. As one leader attending the cardinal's listening session remarked: "I would be very disappointed if this catastrophe in Boston ends like the catastrophes in Dallas and Chicago, where the structural elements of the Church at large are not addressed."
Lay leaders have focused their concern about the need for church reform by proposing a culture of accountability to counter-balance what they call "a culture of extreme clerical deference". In a manner of speaking, they want evident structures that assure the entire Church that our way of proceeding is ethical.
In proposing this culture of accountability, any attempt to preserve the bella figura of the hierarchy and its clergy is no longer seen as credible but damaging. The laity and their pastors perceive that the hierarchy's frequent cover-ups, using evasive silences and secrecy, affected the life of the Church in the world. They are particularly sensitive to self-serving efforts to maintain the Church's image at all costs. Appropriately, a 16-year-old high school student captured this general sentiment when he said: "By doing this, they're defeating the whole message of âLove one another' just so they won't look bad".
Similarly, the laity and their pastors are concerned about what Cahill calls "the weaknesses of a virtually all-male decision-making structure which puts a high priority on secrecy and image". They want discussions about the nature of the clergy.
Certainly, some of these discussions are about celibacy, married priests, women priests and gay priests. On the last topic, some specialists, such as Eugene Kennedy and Fr Donald Cozzens, author of The Changing Face of the Priesthood, have given ample commentary that a priest's sexual and emotional maturity and not his sexual orientation is their matter of concern. My own experience confirms this. Among the clergy, gay and straight men work more easily with one another and with the laity when they are mature and at ease with their own sexuality. Matters become strained, however, when seminarians and priests are inhibited by their own sexuality or attempt even to deny it altogether because prevailing church teachings so frequently criticise the life of gay people.
Discussion of this topic is almost overwhelmingly problematic. Priests know that they cannot publicly address the issue because those who do must inevitably acknowledge their own sexual orientation, a revelation that few bishops tolerate. Moreover, among gay and straight priests today, many fear that zero tolerance towards paedophilia could lead erroneously to zero tolerance towards gay priests. Such a move would be supported both by those who want to restore an illusory image of the priesthood and by those homosexual men afraid of their own sexuality and willing to deny it at any cost. Such a move would be a return to the self-deceptive days in which a man thought he could "leave his sexuality at the door" as he entered seminary life. Those days were days of delusion, harmful to the seminarians (both gay and straight) and harmful to the laity. As we go forward out of Lent, we will have to find a way of talking about gay priests who are good priests, mindful of the fact that our own church teachings about homosexuality have never acknowledged the gay person as a competent, caring professional.
This will not be an easy task, precisely because the clerical culture itself is such a pervasive reality. Donald Cozzens has said frequently on many national radio and television programmes that the clerical culture is one of the last remnants of medieval lifestyles and that it has inhibited the growth of the clergy. Moreover, as we have seen in this crisis and as Cozzens has noted, this clerical culture suppresses honest dialogue.
During this Lent we recognised the need to begin dismantling this culture. Priests like those in the forum have found ways of expressing in honest dialogue the problems they face, not only about sexuality, but also about community, integrity, moral courage and leadership. We have found, too, by talking honestly with our fellow clergy and with our parishioners, that honest dialogue lightens the darkness of clerical culture considerably. And, we have found, like the laity themselves, that working honestly and collaboratively, we can mature as a Church as well.
Nonetheless, our emerging Easter hope is tempered by realism. We know that there are other obstacles before us. Consider, for instance, another story from Boston. In a rather astonishing move, the archdiocesan newspaper, the Boston Pilot, published an editorial raising questions about celibacy, promising to do the next issue on women's ordination. In fact, nearly the entire issue was dedicated to the present crisis. Boston-area Catholics greeted the paper warmly and the editor, anticipating that response, brought out 100,000 copies - four times the normal weekly run. Many laity expressed a hope that Lent was coming to an end and that the light of the Resurrection after all this death would yield fresh discourse about the nature of the clergy and of leadership in the Church today. But later in the day, the cardinal commented that the editorial "unfortunately created confusion".
The cardinal's response struck me as odd. The days of worrying about upsetting the laity with newfangled ideas are over. This Lent has matured most of us rather abruptly. As our pastors are learning, the laity expect to be treated as adults. They expect responses to their questions. They expect to be brought into greater collaboration with the ordained on all levels of church governance.
As Boston's Catholics prepare on Easter Sunday to stand by the open tomb, we stand having been tested ourselves. We want more tolerance, less posturing, greater openness. We want change; but above all we want greater responsibility exercised by the leadership.
Many questions remain before us. How will we effectively prevent this from happening again? How will we minister to those who were victims? How will we overcome the enormous loss of authority to comment, as a Church, on moral matters, whether of life, sexuality, or justice? How will we convince others elsewhere that what is hidden must eventually be brought to the light? How will the laity, particularly women, be more clearly incorporated into church governance? How will we promote a culture of accountability and tolerance in the Church? How will we recognise a significant percentage of our clergy as gay when the hierarchy so resolutely suppresses any acknowledgment of a priest's sexual orientation? How will we learn to trust one another?
These questions are many, but after Palm Sunday and a week of following Jesus to his death on the Cross, we will find ourselves standing by the open tomb. We hope to find our bishops there with us.