The Roman Catholic Church needs to reform the way it recruits and trains its priests if it wants to address an ongoing sexual abuse crisis, the Rev. James Bacik said on Sunday.
“We have to get seminarians outside of the seminary,” he said. “Send them to Notre Dame or Berkeley or [the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago], where I taught. … Get them into a situation where good solid theology is taught and where they’re interacting with lay people and with men and women.”
The proposal was one of four “radical solutions” that the retired diocesan priest and widely regarded theologian shared during a special lecture, “A Response to the Vatican Summit on Clergy Sex Abuse: Searching for More Radical Solutions,” at the Franciscan Center. His proposals addressed some of the practices within the church that contributed to abuse and, in turn, its cover-up by superiors within the church hierarchy, he said.
The lecture was co-sponsored by the Sylvania Franciscan Village, Perrysburg St. Rose Peace and Justice Committee and the Association of U.S. Catholic Priests Toledo Chapter Social Justice Subcommittee.
In front of an audience of approximately 250, Father Bacik offered perspectives on the global summit that Pope Francis convened at the Vatican in February to address a sexual abuse crisis within the Roman Catholic Church. He also proposed four ways to address what he characterized as the root cause of the crisis: In addition to addressing the formation of clergy, he called for a rethinking of the way the church appoints its bishops, the way it elevates its clergy in a culture of clericalism, and the way it views homosexuality in relation to the crisis.
Father Bacik holds a doctorate in theology from the University of Oxford in England, ministered and taught at the University of Toledo for more than 30 years, and has published a dozen books and numerous articles. He lectures frequently at Sylvania Franciscan Village.
He began the lecture offering perspectives on the summit, drawing contrasts between its reception nationally and globally: While American Catholics generally felt that nothing new or substantive came out of it, Father Bacik said, they have been grappling with clergy sexual abuse since 2002; they’ve also seen new instances of abuse drop since the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops instituted the Dallas Charter in 2002.
Father Bacik pointed out that the church is still coming to terms with the issue in other countries.
“The American church has done more than any other church in the whole world to deal with this problem,” he said, acknowledging it’s tough for abuse survivors in the U.S. to hear. “The reality is U.S. bishops have done a decent job of working on this — not perfect — but it has done a lot of good.”
He continued his analysis with four broad “solutions” of his own.
Regarding the formation of priests, in addition to educating seminarians outside of insular institutions, he proposed a reconsideration of celibacy. Regarding the appointment of bishops, he suggested lay and local communities should have greater input on who leads their diocese. On clericalism, he called for a new understanding of the priesthood that does not put clergy on pedestals.
And on homosexuality, he criticized what he described as “right-wing” Catholics who blame homosexual priests for the abuse crisis. As he noted during his lecture, the 2004 John Jay Report, a landmark document analyzing the scope of the clergy sexual abuse in the United States, found that homosexual priests do not abuse at higher rates than heterosexual priests.
“It’s not the problem,” he said. “We can’t allow that to cloud our thinking.”
The lecture drew several emotional responses from the audience, who shared their own thoughts and pointed questions in a question-and-answer session. These included Claudia Vercellotti, a local leader for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, who brought the issue back to the local level and called for meaningful dialogue in the Diocese of Toledo, and an elderly woman who shared her family’s pain after a priest abused her son.
“Can the hierarchy be trusted to police themselves?” the woman asked rhetorically.
First Published April 1, 2019, 12:02 a.m.
