Good news or bad news?

Well, it’s Lent. Is that good news or bad news? My mother always had cottage cheese for lunch and lost weight doing it. The rules have changed and I have passed the age when such virtue and/or sacrifice was necessary, anyway. But I think about it. I wind up asking about whether there’s good news or bad news for women in the church and sex abuse.

Voices of Faith are at it again. They’ve launched a new campaign, “Overcoming Silence.” International LaCroix reports that  “One of its chief goals is to have 30 percent of all leadership roles in the Church at a global level open to, and occupied by, women.” Certainly ambitious, and not as clear on the website. There, women and men are posting messages advocating for women’s leadership, and you can post one, too. Making public the anger is good news; the distance of the goal from the reality is bad news. But I will not underestimate the impact VOF can have. I credit them with making the Vatican aware that women had to be included in the summit.

But is the summit good or bad news? Jamie Manson wraps up her impressions in NCR  by first critiquing the Pope’s final address. Manson says:

The truth is there are some very sick men in the priesthood that need very serious help and there are some men in the priesthood who are so psychosexually immature or damaged that they have no place in ministry. And the closed, secretive, all-male power structure of the church protected these men and gravely exacerbated the situation.

Satan did not swoop in and use these men as his tools to destroy the church. These men destroyed it all by themselves by enforcing a warped view of sexuality, making the preservation of their patriarchal rule their first priority and trading in cover-ups, lies and institutional blackmail.

She finds Francis not prepared to take decisive action, and picks up from the “off-the-cuff” comments of the various people who did the briefings that a whole lot of those at the meeting were not fully on board, either. Her catalogue of these comments could be a comedy routine except that it’s so upsetting, especially the bad news delivered by Archbishop Charles Scicluna. He’s usually introduced as the Vatican point person on sex abuse, and I guess we could say it’s good news that he seems to understand how deplorable the situation is.

Survivors marched around Rome and no cleric stopped to encourage them, Manson also reports: certainly bad news. The good news?

The solace that survivors and their supporters can take heart in: if not for their prophetic voices, this historic summit would never have happened. Even though the outcome was disappointing and demoralizing, the survivors forced these men to stop and finally start to reckon with the startling and sickening harm they have created and the damage they have unleashed.

Finally, from the global to the local, a front-page story in The Philadelphia Inquirer Wednesday reported the bad news – tragic, not just bad – that a young woman had been raped by a priest. The good news is the process. She went to the police two years ago when she learned he had been transferred to another parish. Was that made possible for her because of #MeToo, #ChurchToo, #CatholicToo? She knew what to do about rape. The priest was immediately “placed on administrative leave” by the Archdiocese, which cooperated with a year’s investigation leading to the arrest this week. The priests’ career includes an unexplained year’s leave of absence in 2010-2011, and the Archdiocesan website lists all places he served. Counseling and support services will be offered to the two most recent parishes . Good news or bad news? Better to know than not. And after all, it’s Lent.