Rumblings

Things had calmed down in May, somewhat (relative to April certainly), regarding the scandal of incomparable proportions that has just begun to rock the Church, but it looks like things are possibly heating up again. Catholics can rail against "the media" however much they want, but the fact is the media does have the power to control public opinion and if it wants something to happen, there's a good chance it will. I found these recent tidbits telling:

And while a well-placed Cardinal has publicly speculated that Benedict will deliver a mea culpa in early June, the words of that apology--if that is what it proves to be--will be severely limited by theology, history and the very person and office of the Pope. It is unlikely to satisfy the many members of Benedict's flock who want a very modern kind of accountability, not just mealymouthed declarations buttressed by arcane religious philosophy.

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Benedict now seems to understand the stakes. But Alberto Melloni, a church historian at the University of Modena, says other power brokers in the Vatican think the church can just ride out the storm. "They don't realize the deep bitterness among the faithful, the isolation of the clergy. We can't predict where this is going to wind up." Speaking to TIME, a senior Vatican official foresees immense consequences for the entire church. "History comes down to certain key episodes," he says. "We're facing one of those moments now."

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Presented with the scenario of a personal apology by the human embodiment of the church, a well-placed Vatican official sighed as he weighed the theological and historical implications. "It's dangerous," he said. "It's dangerous." [Dangerous to what? I suspect merely to their twisted narrative of clerical, and specifically Vatican, exceptionalism]

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The church must be a state. That became more imperative as the secular authority of the papal states in Italy was stripped away by French and Spanish monarchs, Napoleon and Garibaldi, Mussolini and Hitler. The historian Melloni points out that the papacy was able to take advantage of its weakened condition to buttress support among the faithful by resorting to vittimismo, playing the victim and blaming others for preying on the church. "This actually had the effect of raising the devotion to the Pope," he says. That was the legacy of the 32-year reign of Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, Pope Pius IX, who stage-managed the First Vatican Council into approving infallibility in 1869 with a suspect majority of bishops. In obedience to its divinely absolute monarch, the Vatican bureaucracy, the Roman Curia, became even more centralized and domineering. So even as the Pope lost his divisions, the empire of Christ based in Rome constructed a government to rival the civil institutions in countries where its clergy served the faithful. Churches and cathedrals became the embassies of God and his vicar, the Pope, in the secular world.

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After Easter, when there was no end to the stories of the sexual abuse of children at the hands of priests and how the incidents were covered up, the old guard in the Vatican ramped up vittimismo, blaming the media, atheists, homosexuals and moneygrubbing lawyers for exploiting the crisis. But that did little to buy sympathy or change the dominant opinion that Benedict's papacy was permanently damaged.

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"For a church that is famous for moving slowly, they've been moving pretty fast lately," says McDaid, the abuse victim from Massachusetts. But, he says, that's because "these people are in fear. They should be in fear. This isn't going to go away just with words."

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"Expectations are again building up for the Pope to say something that will somehow resolve everything," says a Vatican source. But the Pope seems to have no such plan in mind. "It has backed him into a corner," says the source, speaking of the speculation that a mea culpa is coming. "It is clear that people at the Vatican are not singing from the same hymnbook."

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As for challenging the Curia, a Benedict loyalist in the Vatican doubts that the aging Pope can take on the established powers of the church at this stage of his papacy. Moreover, to seek accountability for the culture of cover-up means undermining the legacy of his great friend and hero John Paul II, under whose watch much of the crisis occurred and whose papacy quite consciously chose to ignore the clamor of abuse victims until it exploded into a public scandal in 2002. The Polish Pontiff is on the fast track to sainthood. Says a Vatican insider: "When John Paul II is canonized, it will be despite his abysmal record as administrator of the church."

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[And perhaps most important and exciting of all when it comes to what we can do:]

Though their church is still run top-down, Catholics now carry the expectations of a kind of faithful citizenry rather than an obedient flock. Plans are afoot for thousands of abuse victims and their loved ones to travel to Rome in October for a "Reformation Day" to pressure the Vatican to act. McDaid, who met Benedict in Washington in 2008, is one of the prime organizers of the march on St. Peter's, and he envisions a massive democracy movement to transform Rome. "It's the people's church," he says. "We have to take it back." McDaid talks about priests and nuns who are raising travel money for "victims who can't rub two nickels together to get to Rome. This is way bigger than [Martin Luther's] Reformation."