There has been much talk about whether Pope Francis can "clean the Augean stables" of the Catholic hierarchy, i.e., sweep out the pedophile-enabling members of the hierarchy and institute new rules that any priest who harms children shall be turned over the the authorities, or at least kept away from children. I am not getting my hopes up.
Or, perhaps more accurately, I have some hopes that he will remove some of the most notorious offenders (based more on where they are most publicized and have generated most outcry, rather than the ones who have actually shielded the most pedophiles), and that he will institute a reasonable policy for such things going forward. If we are very lucky, he may even do a decent job of firing people who don't follow the policy going forward. But a purge of members of the hierarchy who covered up pedophile priests is out of the question, and the reason is simple.
The cover-ups were official, systematic policy, ordered from the very top. This policy dates back at least to John XXIII, who commanded all bishops to keep a policy of "strictest secrecy" toward such allegations and to insist on an oath of silence from all complainants. The instructions themselves were to be kept in the secret archives of the Vatican, and any bishop breaking silence was to be excommunicated. These instructions remained in force until 2001 and were strictly followed. Excommunication is a terrible thing to a bishop. Among the members of hierarchy following these instructions appear to have been an Argentine Jesuit by the name of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now known as Pope Francis I. In short to fire members of the Catholic hierarchy complicit in covering up pedophile priests would be to fire the entire Catholic hierarchy. I do not know of any institution that could survive a purge on such a scale.
The Catholic Church is by no means unique in this regard. Indeed, one of the most depressing conclusions I have reached over recent years is that reforming an entrenched power structure is just about impossible. The reasons why this should be so are obvious -- attempts at reform at striking the powerful where they are strongest. The powerful are well prepared to resist. If there is one thing the last few years have proven, it is that the United States is no exception to this rule.
I suppose I should have known. This history of serious reformers coming to power in democratic countries, attempting to reform power structures, and running intense resistance is an old one. One need look no farther from our own shores to see the resistance to Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson becoming President (to say nothing of the reaction to Lincoln!) Countless other examples can be offered of the fear reformers have inspired in democratic countries -- Popular Front governments in Europe in the 1930's, Salvador Allende in Chile, Lula da Silva in Brazil,* any European today who questions the austerity orthodoxy -- examples can be easily multiplied. Many a democracy has failed when leaders attempted too great an interference with power structures. Which leads to another point. Power structures are hard to attack, not just because a narrow elite is well-placed to defend them, but because enough people have enough stake in the status quo to make resistance to change broad-based.
Attempts to attack power structures in non-democratic countries were the gloves are off are even more difficult -- and dangerous. Just ask anyone who has gotten on the wrong side of Vladimir Putin. Entrenched power structures are extremely difficult to modify short of all-out revolution that sweeps everything away. And all-out revolutions are immensely destructive, plunge society into chaos and madness, and usually bring to power whoever is strong enough to impose order on the overall chaos -- not usually anyone very nice.
The only exception I can think of right off hand is blessed little Iceland, and Iceland is an unusual case. What happened in Iceland was that the country's financial elite committed economic suicide. Iceland's massive banking structure collapsed. Suddenly Iceland's bankers had no power or means of protecting their power, and no one else had a stake in the survival of a power structure that had ceased to exist. The bankers were still powerful enough that the government proposed to bail them out. Given that the banks' debts were about ten times the size of Iceland's total economy, such an attempt was doomed to fail, but that didn't keep many other countries from attempting it. In Iceland, the people saw that their bankers had committed economic suicide and insisted on a referendum on whether to transform them into zombies. The proposal failed overwhelmingly. And Sweden and Norway were reasonably successful in forcing banks to write off their losses and restructure in the 1990's. Clearly Scandinavians are special.
So what does that leave the rest of us? The best remedies I can offer are time and persistence. Francis I, after all, is from Argentina. Argentina, like most of Latin America, was once quite a nasty military dictatorship. When the military stepped down, it retained considerable power through various institutions and left safeguards in place to protect itself. Slowly and over time, it was squeezed out of power, its abuses exposes, and even prosecutions undertaken. In any advanced capitalist economy, large and powerful industries are displaced over time with other powerful industries. And the Catholic Church? Well, remove the worst offenders, institute new policies going forward and rigorously enforce them, and wait for the current crop of bishops to die off. Then put in new bishops who will treat child abuse with the seriousness it deserves.
And remember the legend of the Augean stables. They ultimately turned out to be so filthy that any conventional attempt to clean them was hopeless. Instead, Heracles diverted two rivers into the stables to wash the whole mess away. See revolution, above.
___________________________________________
*Granted, Lula da Silva ended up mostly tinkering around the edges of Brazil's power structure and was highly successful. But the panic when he first came to power was real, and many people urged him to take some sort of harsh, punitive measures against the poor, just to assure foreign investors that he was their friend.
No comments:
Post a Comment