Change in the Church surely is not reducible to style and approach says Michael W. Higgins
Americans love their weekend television and they especially love that annual ritual of muscle, bone and grit – football – even more.
So it was a bit of good luck that immediately following a recent Sunday game, an interview with the most popular of US prelates held centre stage for a chunk of time.
The storied CBS news magazine, 60 Minutes, profiled the open, warm and supremely well-connected Sean O’Malley, the Capuchin Cardinal Archbishop of Boston, the only American member of the Council of Cardinals advising on Vatican reform, and a friend of Pope Francis.
The interview highlighted his bracketed transparency, profound sympathies with the new Francis-style of papal governance (which is also Franciscan, a point that must please Friar Sean). What we have with Papa Francesco and Cardinal Sean (as he prefers to be addressed, in contrast with the princely ‘eminence’) is a shared approach that is deeply pastoral, a non-judgmental attitude toward the world, an openness to healthy debate and inquiry.
And so Cardinal O’Malley makes clear his abhorrence for child sex abuse by clerics, episcopal evasion, failed accountability.
He is the president of the commission for the protection of minors in the Church and the most celebrated American hierarch when it comes to effectively handling abuse-ridden dioceses – Falls River, Palm Beach (his immediate two predecessors as bishops of this scandal-plagued Florida diocese were both removed from their positions), and now Boston, the most scarred and demoralised in the nation. Dr O’Malley has made clear again and again his intolerance for abuse at every level and now enjoys papal approval and approbation for his tireless efforts to bring healing and move beyond litigation, actuarial and lawyerly strategies, and episcopal stalling.
By choosing to live with priests in a rectory, eschewing the palace, identifying the poor as a pastoral priority of the highest order, and championing the cause of illegal immigrants and divided families, he is in every way a Bergoglio man.
But the interview also revealed the Achilles’ heel of an approach that is all style and attitude – a welcome and significant shift in magisterial tone, humble and collegial, rather than remote and oracular – but change in the Church surely is not reducible to style and approach. It also involves serious re-thinking, pioneering probes and creative forays into new areas like cosmology, anthropology and cognitive science.
Cardinal O’Malley’s blunt assessment that the Vatican’s handling of the American nuns investigations was a “disaster” couldn’t have been clearer. He didn’t mince words. He also indicated that the inclusion of women in more positions at the Vatican is imminent, although he rightly declined to give a precise date.
But then he was asked in a non-confrontational manner – the whole interview was a model of politeness and cordiality – about the issue of women in the presbyterate he floundered. His answer was the official position – no surprise in that – but it was lame and unpersuasive. He opined that, if he was founding the Church, he would include women in ministry, but Christ was the founder and he did not.
But such awkwardness was rare in an interview that gave a large American audience a glimpse of a man who embodies the “new” bishop of the Bergoglio era.