Photo: CNS/Paul Haring A Church whistleblower has taken aim at clericalism in a recent book, and says that it’s the “abuse of power” that enables and condones other forms of abuse in the Catholic Church.
Author of the new book, Cardinal Sin: Challenging power abuse in the Catholic Church, and abuse survivor, Brian Devlin says that a “new model” of the Church is required to prevent abuses going forward, one that emphasises the role of the laity.
Mr Devlin was one of four men who brought out the abuses of Scottish Cardinal Keith O’Brien, which saw the then-prominent churchman stripped of all but his title as cardinal.
A better model than the current “pyramid” or “triangle” structure, which sees “the Pope at the top, then all the layers of cardinals and archbishops, bishops, priests, and right down at the bottom are the billion or so laity,” would be a “venn diagram”, which would see the clergy on one side and the laity on the other, making decisions in an equal manner.
“When they cross over in the middle, that’s where the governance of the Church is. It’s a participatory model. It does the opposite of what’s happening just now. It’s transparent, it’s built on, there’s a theological phrase, sensus fidelium, it’s ‘the sense of the people’,” Mr Devlin said.
Mr Devlin also said that the current understanding of “scandal” in the Church has to be overhauled, as people initially accused him of scandalising the public and the Faithful with his accusations towards Cardinal O’Brien.
“The scandal wasn’t what we did. The scandal was what O’Brien did. I think that the Church needs to totally deconstruct this notion of scandal,” he said.
Read more here – Tackling power abuse in the Church