The McCarrick Case and Future of the Church

In his article, Last Rights: Canon Law in a Mirror of Justice Cracked, Father Gordon MacRae stated: 

It’s not just priests who worry about being removed from ministry and tossed on the streets. It’s all ironic because bishops, in one sense, have even fewer rights enshrined in law than priests about these things.

Archbishop Emeritus of Washington Theodore McCarrick was accused of child sexual abuse that allegedly happened a decade ago.  The cardinal is 88 years old.  From 2001 to 2006, McCarrick helped developed church policies to protect children from sexual abuse within the Church.  Nevertheless, he was not immune, and he also was charged with child sexual abuse. Responding to the alleged child sexual abuse, Cardinal McCarrick claimed that he was innocent.  You can read McCarricks response to the sexual abuse allegations here.  

An anonymous poster brought a story of Cardinal McCarrick to my attention. You can read the full story here. I will not publish the entire story in this post, but what caught my attention in the story was the following statement: 

A friend said this week that the McCarrick scandal might be the final nail in the coffin of “beige cultural Catholicism” in America. 

He meant that the scandal could lead to much broader recognition that much about the current model of Church organization and parish management doesn’t seem to be working- that many people leave the practice of Catholicism because of a broad crisis in catechesis, formation, and community and parish life. 

This idea was part of the thrust of John Paul II’s “new evangelization” paradigm, which called Catholics to “remake the Christian fabric of the ecclesial community itself.” 

It is certainly true that the growth areas in the Catholic Church in America are those that seem to have a clear missionary identity, or a particularly focused or intentional approach to Catholic life. Movements like Communion and Liberation and the NeoCatechumenal Way are loci of growth and energy. So too are missionary groups like FOCUS, and the communities devoted to traditional liturgy that have sprung up in places like Clear Creek, Oklahoma. 

Those movements are often lay-led, and developed at some distance from chancery and diocesan structures. That means that, if trust in the hierarchy is eroding, they may be seen by many Catholics as having the integrity, authenticity, or transparency that some see as lacking among hierarchs in the wake of the McCarrick scandal. 

The question now is, if decline in more typical parishes continues or hastens, whether bishops will see those groups and movements as mechanism of the “new evangelization” and welcome them, even at the cost of relinquishing some institutional and structural control.

I smiled when I read the above statement made in the Catholic News Agency.  The Catholic Church can never be destroyed because Christ promised He will be with His Church until the end of time. However, Christ has a way of purifying His Church.  Perhaps, the opponents of the Catholic Church should have paid more attention to the prophecy made by Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) of what the future Catholic Church would look like after it has been purified by God.  According to Ratzinger's prediction (the bold is mine):

Ratzinger said he was convinced the Church was going through an era similar to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. “We are at a huge turning point – he explained – in the evolution of mankind. This moment makes the move from Medieval to modern times seem insignificant.” Professor Ratzinger compared the current era to that of Pope Pius VI who was abducted by troops of the French Republic and died in prison in 1799. The Church was fighting against a force which intended to annihilate it definitively, confiscating its property and dissolving religious orders. 

Today's Church could be faced with a similar situation, undermined, according to Ratzinger, by the temptation to reduce priests to “social workers” and it and all its work reduced to a mere political presence. “From today's crisis, will emerge a Church that has lost a great deal,” he affirmed. 

“It will become small and will have to start pretty much all over again. It will no longer have use of the structures it built in its years of prosperity. The reduction in the number of faithful will lead to it losing an important part of its social privileges.” It will start off with small groups and movements and a minority that will make faith central to experience again. “It will be a more spiritual Church, and will not claim a political mandate flirting with the Right one minute and the Left the next. It will be poor and will become the Church of the destitute.”