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The bishop's quandary | Continued
After all, on this issue, the institutional church has the approximate credibility of a paper shredder, and Gregory finds himself in the position of leading a reform movement from the ranks of those very people most perceived to have created the need for reform in the first place. He's as influential within the church as any other reformer, and he's more of a reformer than anyone who's as influential. The question is no longer whether Gregory has accrued the public clout to move the church on this issue. He clearly has enough now to withstand even sniping from the Vatican. The question is how he'll use it, and whether he'll use it, and how his career as a creature of the institutional church will shape his responses to the pervasive rot within the institutions of that church itself. "To me," he says, "prudence is the queen of all the virtues, because prudence puts all the other virtues in perspective - courage, enthusiasm, joy." It's remarkable how little the daily life of the church has been changed by the global buffeting it has taken this year. The chancery in Belleville is still small and hushed. A woman named Florence Craig has been answering the phone there for somewhere between 40 and 150 years. Now, though, there are calls to field from newspapers and television networks, from Katie Couric's people in New York - the beeping, buzzing, jangled pursuit of a prudent man in an imprudent time. The formal structure of the church that Gregory says he "loves in my very fiber" is coming apart in a welter of carnal criminality that would have embarrassed the Borgias. According to a survey conducted by The Washington Post, 300 civil suits alleging sexual abuse by Catholic clergy have been filed in the United States since January. In that time, 218 priests have been removed from their positions. In Boston, the cardinal-archbishop sees a Camp OJ spring up outside his residence. A bishop is suspended in Kentucky. The new sins uncover the old. Years earlier, a Connecticut priest fathers a child with a 16-year-old girl, and his bishop looks the other way. That bishop is now the cardinal-archbishop of New York. The circuit attorney in St. Louis, across the Mississippi River from Belleville, makes a public call for victims to come forward, and her office is soon drowning in the paperwork.
"The problem is that drastic action would go counter to his basic orientation. He's a company man," says the Rev. Richard McBrien, a professor at the University of Notre Dame and an outspoken critic of the hierarchy. Indeed, Gregory's name seems to be on everyone's short list - and even there, the metastasizing scandal follows him. Until the appointment of Bishop Timothy M. Dolan to the post in June, Gregory had been mentioned as a possible successor to Milwaukee's Archbishop Rembert Weakland, whose retirement was hastened by revelations that he'd paid $450,000 in hush money to a young man with whom Weakland had admitted "inappropriate conduct." And a more intriguing rumor has Gregory coming to Boston as a replacement for Cardinal Bernard Law, if only because it's hard to think of a more complete departure from the current regime than an African-American bishop with great personal credibility in rooting out sexual misconduct. And that is the divide in Gregory, the place where the face of the corrupted institutional church morphs into the face of reform. This particular issue - the most important one the church has faced since Martin Luther, according to Gregory - always has moved him beyond where a more prudent prelate might go. He tells the story of one of the early cases that broke while he was an auxiliary bishop in Chicago, and a woman who worked with him insisted that the church must protect "its own," meaning the clergy, which it has done down through the years, to its everlasting embarrassment. "I thought very long and hard about what she'd said, and she was a dear friend," Gregory recalls. "I thought, `Well, aren't these children our own? Aren't the parents of these children our own?' " His position on handing abusive priests over to the civil authorities has been clear and unbending, and it was radically ahead of its time. On this specific issue, he's always been far ahead of his church, and now his church is being defined in the public mind by this specific issue. His career is a dilemma now - what has come before, the careful ecclesiastical bureaucrat, seems to have come into perpetual collision with who he needs to be to solve a crisis of institutional corruption. So, before Dallas, Gregory dismissed from the conversation any discussion of mandatory clerical celibacy and the ordination of women, two issues guaranteed to give Vatican conservatives the vapors. He appointed five bishops to a special ad hoc committee to devise a new policy on sexual abuse, and three of them turned out to have covered up abuse cases in their home dioceses. The policy that it produced is quickly dismissed as half a loaf - tough on priests who abuse children, but mushy on bishops who enable them. Within a month of the meeting, one national poll shows that two-thirds of American Catholics believe the policy to be too weak. Yet, after Dallas, Gregory stood with Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating after Keating was appointed by the conference to head an outside advisory panel that will monitor the implementation of the new policy, and Keating said (theoretically, at least) that we might see some of Gregory's fellow bishops hauled off to the sneezer in handcuffs. The scandal continuously moves beyond all attempts to contain it. There is a grand jury here in Boston investigating Cardinal Law, and Boston College announced that it has embarked on a two-year study of institutional reform in the church that will include many of the topics that Gregory ruled out of bounds for the meeting in Dallas. Gregory will move with the scandal, because he always has, and because he has more credibility on it now than almost any other American cleric. The ceaseless momentum of the scandal may move him beyond what might otherwise be comfortable for someone who insists, "I feel a call to be a prudent person. I've never wanted to be any kind of radical." Every question demands an answer now, and the answers themselves will be more radical than anyone would have thought they'd be 20 years ago, when Wilton Gregory became a bishop. In April, for example, after a meeting in Rome, Gregory said at a press conference that the church must guard against its priesthood becoming "dominated" by gay men, a comment that set off alarms that the onus of the burgeoning scandal would fall upon Catholics who are gay. A few weeks later, in his wood-paneled office in the chancery, he's asked what might have happened if the laity had a right to know the sex lives of their priests. What would he have said, he's asked, if the follow-up question at that press conference had been whether he or any of the other prelates on the dais were gay? "I imagine there would be a whole range of emotion," he says. "The emphasis is on healthy and celibate - living, with integrity, the promises that you make." He leans into his words, and they are clipped and precise, but his voice does not rise. Prudence is the queen of anger as well. "People have a right to have their clergy live credible, integrated lives and to know that they do," he says. "I don't have to invite people into a private journey through my psyche any more than anyone else does. There's a certain moment that we're in where a sign of emotional well-being is that you let it all hang out. I'm sorry, but there are dimensions in every person's life that belong to private, psychic confidentiality. My life's issues - my personal being - may not be worthy of the front page." A year ago, the whole line of inquiry was unthinkable. Now, it's obvious. A radical change, even a prudent man might admit. The question moves him, just a little bit, off that narrowing patch of middle ground on which men have defined themselves as priests of their church, and on which they decide whether what they have achieved is truly who they are.
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he Dallas meeting made him a star. there's no doubt
about that. His opening address at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' annual meeting in June - a meeting that was attended by far more journalists than bishops - was an apology steeped in the language of sacramental penance, and, ultimately, it was far better received than the policy on sexual abuse that the conference ultimately produced.
He appeared on Meet the Press. He took every question, and the meeting did produce some concrete change. For all intents and purposes, Wilton Gregory became simultaneously the face of institutional American Catholicism and the face of reform. And that's the bind he's in now, after Dallas, with the scandal still expanding in dozens of different directions.