All Things Catholic

It may be a measure of how somnambulant Rome becomes during the ferragosto vacation period that the big Vatican story this week was actually something that didn't happen. It turns out that two Irish bishops implicated in that country's sexual abuse crisis, Dublin auxiliaries Eamonn Walsh and Raymond Field, won't be resigning after all, because Pope Benedict XVI wants them to stay on.

Next Wednesday, Kenyans head to the polls to vote on a new national constitution. It’s intended to ease the political and tribal tensions which erupted in violence in early 2008, leaving more than 1,000 Kenyans dead and some 300,000 displaced. The referendum is being closely followed all across Africa, since Kenya has long been a beacon of hope -- an African society that’s well-educated, economically advanced, and, until recently, stable.

A July 9 editorial in The New York Times called upon Pope Benedict XVI to make the American bishops’ “zero tolerance” approach to sexual abuse binding on the worldwide Catholic church. In principle that’s a perfectly reasonable idea, especially since Vatican spokespersons routinely invoke the pope’s defense of the tough American rules as proof that he gets it.

It’s customary for the Vatican to empty its pipeline of pending business before the pope heads for his annual summer retreat in Castel Gandolfo, which Benedict will do after his general audience next Wednesday. In itself, that usually makes for a flurry of news in late June, which was turbo-charged this year by dramatic events breaking in on the Vatican from the outside.

Psychology 101 tells us that traumatized people are often brittle, overreacting to stress and struggling to keep things in perspective. That’s an insight worth bearing in mind as the U.S. bishops and the leaders of Catholic health care in America work to overcome the rift that opened up during the recent national debate over health care reform.

Generally speaking, I’m as skeptical as anybody else when journalists attempt to put whole groups of people on the couch. Nonetheless, somebody needs to say out loud that two mammoth recent traumas are lurking, like elephants in the living room, in the background of the Catholic health care debate: The sexual abuse crisis, and the Vatican-sponsored investigation of American nuns.

Read the Allen's full column here: Elephants in the room of the Catholic health care debate

Over the last decade, the Vatican has been hit with at least ten lawsuits in American courts, on matters ranging from an insurance scam to the sexual abuse crisis. Off and on I’ve written about these cases, and I’ve always been curious about one odd feature of the story: How is it that the Vatican’s legal brain trust in the States ended up concentrated in the notoriously left-leaning, anti-establishment haven of Berkeley, California?

At first blush, most people probably assume that the sexual abuse crisis will result in tighter control from Rome over local bishops. The logic is impeccable: The failure of some bishops to do the right thing is a core element of the crisis, and only the pope can really hold bishops accountable.

Yet at the moment, the ecclesiological fallout from the crisis, especially in the United States, seems to cut in the opposite direction -- promoting the autonomy of individual bishops and of the bishops' conference, if not so much theologically and canonically, then psychologically and culturally.

As fate would have it, Pope Benedict XVI's five foreign trips in 2010 are almost laid out in ascending order of difficulty. Last month's weekend stop in Malta, arguably the most Catholic society on earth, amounted to the warm-up act, while next week's four-day swing in Portugal, which so far has been spared the sexual abuse scandals which have engulfed the church elsewhere in Europe, should be a fairly smooth ride as well.

Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos must feel trapped in a "Twilight Zone" episode, in which, in a flash, the whole course of his life has turned out differently. Now 80, not long ago Castrillón was a consummate Roman powerbroker, a man admired for the nerves of steel that once allowed him to stand up to drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. Novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez at one point hailed his fellow Colombian as "this rustic man, with the profile of an eagle."