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The bishop's quandary | Continued
His success depends, at last, on whether or not it's any longer possible to be the face of American Catholicism and the face of reform. One thinks of George Clements, the old radical priest in Chicago, talking about how Gregory was able to work within the system without being labeled as a Tom for doing so. It's possible that this crisis in the church may push him beyond where he ever dreamed he'd go, beyond where he thinks is prudent. After all, the scandal itself has moved past decades of systematic deceit, past the empty bluster of guilty prelates, and even past the current attempts to mitigate its consequences. It may yet move so far that it brings out of Gregory whatever it was that made him challenge that teacher who talked to him about pickaninnies. "While I don't think that anyone has the right to a firsthand tour of someone else's psyche," he muses, "one of the great challenges of the priesthood is that you do live as a public person. You may not have run for public office, and you may not have signed on for any kind of public disclosure, but people look up to you. One of the great sorrows of this crisis is that people who enjoyed such moments of great public esteem have violated that. "I have my moments. I'm angry, because there are great priests who should not have to live under this cloud that their brother priests have brought down upon them." He has a platform - albeit one that has been whittled away by 20 years of church politics and surreptitious ecclesiastical scheming - but a platform nonetheless, and the crisis has come upon Wilton Gregory like the weather does, all at once and from every direction that the wind can bring it down, from a cluster of satellite trucks in Boston to the roads that wind through the bean fields to the city of Belleville, where he could sense the crisis upon his arrival the way that you can smell spent lightning in the air. There's a fountain in the center of town and, when the weather comes down, the fountain throws its water skyward in pretty volleys bent by the wind. And the agnostic rain, which knows its business, hurls the water back to earth, where some good may come of it. Charles P. Pierce is a member of the Globe Magazine staff.
This story ran in the Boston Globe Magazine on 7/21/2002.
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ou could see the problem in the televised shots of the audience during the first day of the Dallas conference. After Wilton Gregory spoke, a group of abuse survivors got up and told the American bishops their stories, and the faces of the prelates were as implacable as the gargoyles on the Vatican. There was some obvious discomfort, but more than that, somehow, there was an air in the scene of affronted authority, as though listening to this catalog of outrage was simply infra dignitatem. Whether he wants it or not, Wilton Gregory's task must be to break through to those blank faces, to point out that, on this issue at least, whatever moral credibility they think accrues to their offices is as dead as St. Peter.