The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  * * *

  Anyway, the response from the bishops and the cardinal was not clear to me. They did not refer to any of my points in their remarks afterward. When the meeting ended I tried to find Cardinal McCarrick to speak with him, but he was gone.

  I don’t imagine any of the laymen left the meeting with a feeling that great progress had been made in any area. I left with a feeling that some progress may have been made in some area, but I couldn’t say what area or why.

  I did not come away angry, as some have, or depressed. I came away satisfied that I’d said what I thought needed saying, and somewhat sad and perplexed. Why would this be happening? What does God want us to do? And how can flawed and ridiculous people like us help?

  Someone at the meeting quoted the historian Paul Johnson saying some years back to a new Catholic, “Come on in, it’s awful!” We all laughed, but you know I think it was the one thing everyone in the room agreed on.

  Anyway, I’ve been asked what I said, and this was it. There has been no reporting of remarks from the meeting in July with the liberals of the church, and I hope there will be. It would be good if some of those who were there would report what they said, and how it was received by the bishops and cardinal. That might be helpful, as this old church finds its way.

  How to Save the Catholic Church

  The Wall Street Journal: April 16, 2010

  The great second wave of church scandals appears this week to be settling down. In the Vatican they’re likely thinking “the worst is over” and “we’ve weathered the storm.” Is that good? Not to this Catholic. The more relaxed the institution, the less likely it will reform.

  Let’s look at the first wave. Eight years ago, on April 19, 2002, I wrote in these pages of the American church scandal, calling it calamitous, a threat to the standing and reputation of the entire church. Sexual abuse by priests “was the heart of the scandal, but at the same time only the start of the scandal”: The rest was what might be called the racketeering dimension. Lawsuits had been brought charging that the church as an institution acted to cover up criminal behavior by misleading, lying and withholding facts. The most celebrated cases in 2002 were in Boston, where a judge had forced the release of 11,000 pages of church documents showing the abusive actions of priests and detailing then-Archbishop Bernard F. Law’s attempts to hide the crimes. The Boston scandal generated hundreds of lawsuits, cost hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements and judgments, and included famous and blood-chilling cases—the repeat sexual abuser Father John Geoghan, who molested scores of boys and girls and was repeatedly transferred, was assigned to a parish in Waltham where he became too familiar with children in a public pool; Cardinal Law claimed he was probably “proselytizing.”

  In the piece I criticized Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, then archbishop of Washington, who had suggested to the Washington Post that the scandal was media-driven, that journalists are having “a heyday.” Then came the it-wasn’t-so-bad defense: The bishop of Joliet, Ill., Joseph Imesch, said that while priests who sexually abuse children should lose their jobs, priests who sexually abuse adolescents and teenagers have a “quirk” and can be treated and continue as priests.

  Really, he called it a quirk.

  Does any of this, the finger-pointing and blame-gaming, sound familiar? Isn’t it what we’ve been hearing the past few weeks?

  At the end of the piece I called on the pope, John Paul II, to begin to show the seriousness of the church’s efforts to admit, heal and repair by taking the miter from Cardinal Law’s head and the ring from his finger and retiring him: “Send a message to those in the church who need to hear it, that covering up, going along, and paying off victims is over. That careerism is over, and Christianity is back.”

  The piece didn’t go over well in the American church, or the Vatican. One interesting response came from Cardinal Law himself, whom I ran into a year later in Rome. “We don’t need friends of the church turning on the church at such a difficult time,” he said. “We need loyalty when the church is going through a tough time.”

  I’d suggested in the piece that the rarefied lives cardinals led had contributed to an inability to understand the struggles of others and the pain of those abused, and soon Cardinal Law and I were talking about his mansion outside Boston. He asked me how it would look if he’d refused to live there. I told him it would look good, but more to the point, the church was going to lose the cardinal’s mansion to trial lawyers, and it should sell it first and put the money in schools.

  Soon enough the mansion was gone, sold to pay the plaintiffs. Cardinal Law’s successor, Archbishop Sean O’Malley, lives in an apartment in Boston’s South End.

  John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter once called Cardinal Law “the poster boy” of the American scandal. He has also become the poster boy for the church’s problems in handling the scandal. And that has to do with its old-boy network, with the continued dominance of those who grew up in the old way.

  In December 2002, Cardinal Law left Boston just hours before state troopers arrived with subpoenas seeking his grand jury testimony in what the state’s attorney general, Thomas Reilly, called a massive cover-up of child abuse. The cardinal made his way to Rome, where he resigned, and where he stayed with Archbishop James Harvey, a close friend and, as head of the pontifical household, the most powerful American in the Vatican. Within a year Archbishop Harvey, too, was implicated in the scandal: The Dallas Morning News reported the Vatican had promoted a priest through its diplomatic corps even though it had received persistent, high-level warnings that he had sexually abused a young girl. The warnings had gone to Archbishop Harvey.

  Cardinal Law received one of the best sinecures in Rome, as head of the Basilica of Saint Maria Maggiore and a member of the Vatican office tasked with appointing new bishops and correcting misconduct.

  These stories are common in the church. Cardinal Angelo Sodano, a former Vatican secretary of state and now dean of the College of Cardinals, was a primary protector of the now-disgraced Father Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ, described by a heroic uncoverer of the scandals, Jason Berry, in the National Catholic Reporter, as “a morphine addict who sexually abused at least twenty… seminarians.”

  I know this from having seen it: Many—not all, but many—of the men who staff the highest levels of the Vatican have been part of the very scandal they are now charged with repairing. They are defensive and they are angry, and they will not turn the church around on their own.

  In a way, the Vatican lives outside time and space. The verities it speaks of and stands for are timeless and transcendent. For those who work there, bishops and cardinals, it can become its own reality. And when those inside fight for what they think is the life of the institution, they feel fully justified in fighting any way they please. They can do this because, as they rationalize it, they are not fighting only for themselves—it’s not selfish, their fight—but to protect the greatest institution in the history of the world.

  But in the past few decades, they not only fought persons—“If you were loyal you’d be silent”—they fought information.

  What they don’t fully understand right now—what they can’t fully wrap their heads around—is that the information won.

  The information came in through the cracks, it came in waves, in newspaper front pages, in books, in news beamed to every satellite dish in Europe and America. The information could not be controlled or stopped. The information was that something very sick was going on in the heart of the church.

  Once, leaders of the Vatican felt that silence would protect the church. But now anyone who cares about it must come to understand that only speaking, revealing, admitting and changing will save the church.

  The old Vatican needs new blood.

  They need to let younger generations of priests and nuns rise to positions of authority within a new church. Most especially and most immediately, they need to elevate women. As a nun said to me this week, if a wo
man had been sitting beside a bishop transferring a priest with a history of abuse, she would have said: “Hey, wait a minute!”

  If the media and the victims don’t keep the pressure on, the old ways will continue. As for Cardinal Law, he should not be where he is, nor mitred nor ringed.

  “Go and Repair My House”

  The Wall Street Journal: March 15, 2013

  I’ll tell you how it looks: like one big unexpected gift for the church and the world.

  Everything about Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s election was a surprise—his age, the name he took, his mien as he was presented to the world. He was plainly dressed, a simple white cassock, no regalia, no finery. He stood there on the balcony like a straight soft pillar and looked out at the crowd. There were no grand gestures, not even, at first, a smile. He looked tentative, even overwhelmed. I thought, as I watched, “My God—he’s shy.”

  Then the telling moment about the prayer. Before he gave a blessing he asked for a blessing: He asked the crowd to pray for him. He bent his head down and the raucous, cheering square suddenly became silent, as everyone prayed. I thought, “My God—he’s humble.”

  I wasn’t sure what to make of it and said so to a friend, a member of another faith who wants the best for the church because to him that’s like wanting the best for the world. He was already loving what he was seeing. He asked what was giving me pause. I said I don’t know, the curia is full of tough fellows, the pope has to be strong.

  “That is more than strength,” he said of the man on the screen. “This is not cynical humanity. This is showing there is another way to be.”

  Yes. This is a kind of public leadership we are no longer used to—unassuming, self-effacing. Leaders of the world now are garish and brazen. You can think of half a dozen of their names in less than a minute. They’re good at showbiz, they find the light and flash the smile.

  But this man wasn’t trying to act like anything else.

  “He looks like he didn’t want to be pope,” my friend said. That’s exactly what he looked like. He looked like Alec Guinness in the role of a quiet, humble man who late in life becomes pope. I mentioned that to another friend who said, “That would be the story of a hero.”

  And so, as they’re saying in Europe, Francis the Humble. May he be a living antidote.

  * * *

  He is orthodox, traditional, his understanding of the faith in line with the teaching of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. He believes in, stands for, speaks for the culture of life.

  He loves the poor and not in an abstract way. He gave the cardinal’s palace in Buenos Aires to a missionary order with no money. He lives in an apartment, cooks his own food, rides the bus. He rejects pomposity. He does not feel superior. He is a fellow soul. He had booked a flight back to Argentina when the conclave ended.

  But these two traits—his embrace of the church’s doctrines and his characterological tenderness toward the poor—are very powerful together, and can create a powerful fusion. He could bridge the gap or close some of the distance between social justice Catholics and traditional, doctrinal Catholics. That would be a relief.

  And he has suffered. Somehow you knew this as you looked at him Wednesday night. Much on this subject will come out.

  The meaning of the name he chose should not be underestimated. Cardinal Bergoglio is a Jesuit, and the Jesuits were founded by St. Ignatius Loyola, who said he wanted to be like St. Francis of Assisi.

  One of the most famous moments in St. Francis’s life is the day he was passing by the church of St. Damiano. It was old and near collapse. From St. Bonaventure’s “Life of Francis of Assisi”: “Inspired by the Spirit, he went inside to pray. Kneeling before an image of the Crucified, he was filled with great fervor and consolation.… While his tear-filled eyes were gazing at the Lord’s cross, he heard with his bodily ears a voice coming from the cross, telling him three times: ‘Francis, go and repair my house which, as you see, is falling into ruin.’” Francis was amazed “at the sound of this astonishing voice, since he was alone in the church.” He set himself to obeying the command.

  Go and repair my house, which is falling into ruin. Could the new pope’s intentions be any clearer? The Catholic Church in 2013 is falling into ruin. It has been damaged by scandal and the scandals arose from arrogance, conceit, clubbiness and an assumption that the special can act in particular ways, that they may make mistakes but it’s understandable, and if it causes problems the church will take care of it.

  Pope Francis already seems, in small ways rich in symbolism, to be moving the Vatican away from arrogance. His actions in just his first 24 hours are suggestive.

  He picks up his own luggage, pays his own hotel bill, shuns security, refuses a limousine, gets on a minibus with the cardinals. That doesn’t sound like a prince, or a pope. He goes to visit a church in a modest car in rush-hour traffic. He pointedly refuses to sit on a throne after his election, it is reported, and meets his fellow cardinals standing, on equal footing. The night he was elected, according to New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Vatican officials and staffers came forward to meet the new pope. He politely put them off: Not now, the people are waiting. Then he went to the balcony.

  The church’s grandeur is beautiful, but Francis seems to be saying he himself won’t be grand. This will mean something in that old Vatican. It will mean something to the curia.

  * * *

  After the conclave, I’m grateful for two other things. First, after all the strains and scandals, they still came running. A pope was being picked. The smoke came out and the crowd was there in St. Peter’s Square. They stood in the darkness, cold and damp, and they waited and cheered and the square filled up. As the cameras panned the crowd there was joy on their faces, and the joy felt like renewal.

  People come for many reasons. To show love and loyalty, to be part of something, to see history. But maybe we don’t fully know why they run, or why we turn when the first reports come of white smoke, and put on the TV or the computer. Maybe it comes down to this: “We want God.” Which is what millions of people shouted when John Paul II first went home to Poland. This is something in the human heart, and no strains or scandals will prevail against it.

  I viewed it all initially with hope, doubt and detachment. And then the white smoke, and the bells, and the people came running, and once again as many times before my eyes filled with tears, and my throat tightened. That in the end is how so many Catholics, whatever their level of engagement with the church, feel. “I was more loyal than I meant to be.”

  Much will unfold now, much will be seen. An ardent, loving 76-year-old cardinal in the middle of an acute church crisis is not going to sit around and do nothing. He’s going to move. “Go and repair my house, which you see is falling into ruin.”

  Cardinal, Please Spare This Church

  The Wall Street Journal: December 26, 2014

  The Archdiocese of New York is threatening to close down my little church, a jewel in Catholicism’s crown on 89th Street just off Madison, in Carnegie Hill, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. This has caused great pain in our neighborhood this Christmas. St. Thomas More Church is where my son made his first holy communion, where he was confirmed. It is where at the presentation of the cross, on Good Friday, everyone in the parish who wants to—and that is everyone in the parish, poor people, crazy people, people just holding on, housekeepers, shopkeepers, billionaires—stands on line together, as equals, as brothers and sisters, to kiss the foot of the cross. It always makes me cry.

  None of this is important except multiply it by 5,000, 10,000, a million people who’ve walked through our doors the past 75 years to marry, to bury, to worship.

  There is context, of course, and context must always be respected. New York isn’t the only place that is or will be closing churches, so the story may have some national application.

  The Catholic Church, the greatest refuge of the poor in the history of the world, is always in need of money. The New York Archdi
ocese itself supports schools, hospitals, charities, churches, orders. It is in constant need. There is the refurbishment of mighty St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which has been extremely expensive. There has been the cost, the past 20 years, of all the settlements and legal fees associated with the sex scandals. Compounding this is the constant bureaucratic challenge to manage resources efficiently, professionally.

  The church must save where it can. Churches have been closed. Most had particular stresses in common. Some had lost parishioners due to demographic change and a peeling off of the faithful. Some cannot support themselves financially and become a drain on the archdiocese. Some churches have fallen behind in repair and have become structurally dangerous. Some lost their place in the heart and life of their communities.

  But the great mystery at the heart of the threatened closing of St. Thomas is more that none of these criteria apply to it. Not one.

  St. Thomas More Church is not empty, it is vital, vibrant and alive. The other day at a special mass, the standing-room-only crowd spilled out onto the steps. People move into—and stay in—Carnegie Hill just for the church. Almost half the people at Sunday mass take long car and subway rides to worship there. (All this is from a list of facts about the church put together by its desperate parishioners.)

  St. Thomas More not only supports itself financially, it gives money back to the archdiocese. It’s not structurally unsound, it has just completed a major and costly refurbishment. It hasn’t lost its school, it has a full, lively, respected preschool in the basement that families are desperate to get into. It is the sacramental home of all the Catholic schools in the area that don’t have their own church or chapel. It is “a powerhouse of lay involvement in the spirit of Vatican II,” says the parishioners’ fact sheet, with a large parish council and four separate Catholic instruction programs for children. More can be said but at its heart it is a place for families, many of them old-style Catholics with four and five kids. Coffee hour after the 10 a.m. children’s mass is jammed.