Tim had a typically cogent comment on yesterday's post wherein I called for purge of the villains, now that we know who they are.
The problem, though, is how the purge is to be done? The way the church is structured, isn't all the power arranged from the top down? If the corruption is in the pope/cardinals/bishops level, do the lay members and the priests actually have any leverage? Other than stopping the flow of money collected by the parishes to the diocese, or schisming off from the church entirely, that is?The flow of money is a big step. A diocese is a decent-sized organization with substantial labor and maintenance costs. I promise you, San Diego won't get another dime of my money until McElroy is gone. I'm not a really big donor, but I know some of them and I'm active in diocesan groups where they can be found. You better believe I'll be talking about this.
Then there is the encouragement of the local parish priests and staffs. Chances are really good that they're not part of the mafia. If you've got their backs and encourage them to stand up to the mafia, they might have some interesting behind-the-scenes conversations.
Finally, there is the diocesan staff themselves. The high-end experts such as the accountants and lawyers for the diocese are usually devout Catholics who think they're doing something good for the Church. If they get the idea that they're supporting the continued existence of the Mafia, they might quit and they're pretty hard to replace.
In short, if we find out that our bishop or cardinal is a member of the Lavender Mafia, we need to cut off their supplies and lay siege. There's not that many of them, it's just that they had an incredibly powerful network. Now that it is being exposed, that network is a liability.
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| Like this, only with fewer crossbows. |
Update: Priests can be emboldened by a supportive laity.
We are called to speak up about sin in society, even if that implies getting our head chopped off. #StJohntheBaptist #HomilyTweet
— Fr Matthew P. Schneider LC (@FrMatthewLC) August 29, 2018
2 comments:
By canon law, donations given for a specific thing-- say, building maintenance-- can only be used for that specific thing.
We've been using that for years when things like the local "bishop's appeal" were mostly things we think are either not a good thing, or actively heretical.
Giving the "I do the books" folks a reason to stay....
That's a good start. It really does sound like the pocketbook is honestly the only hold the laity has over the church proper.
Their countermove, of course, will be to decide which cardinals and bishops they can afford to lose (or actively want to get rid of, which would be preferable from their point of view). They will then sacrifice these, until they dump enough of them that the calls for justice will be satiated, and the money starts flowing again. And then they will go back to their normal procedures of keeping things under wraps and hiding offending clergy . . . until the next scandal. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I would be really surprised if the "mafia" doesn't have some version of a cell structure, where nobody knows everybody, and it is only possible to connect each guilty party to a few co-conspirators. In that case, it will be very difficult to actually follow all the strings and get everyone. That's pretty much how the secular mafia keeps from being rolled up in its entirety, after all. They lose a small cluster here and there, but the organization as a whole just keeps chugging along.
The key problem, I think, is the fundamentally secretive nature of the church. They don't like to tell anybody anything unless they absolutely have to. To some extent I can see where they think they need to be like that, because they operate in some pretty sketchy countries where the only defense against the government robbing you blind or randomly arresting your personnel is to never let them know what you have or what anyone is doing. But, on the other hand, that also means that nobody can ever fully trust the church to be truthful and forthcoming. If they want these scandals to stop, they need to actually change their culture of secrecy, and not just throw a few sacrificial clerics under the bus from time to time.
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