I suppose it was fitting, in a depressing kind of way, that the U.S. bishops' conference plenary coincided with former President Donald Trump's announcement he is seeking the presidency in 2024. In both church and state, the future will be dominated by divisiveness and a culture war ethic for the next few years, a result that contradicts the founding mission of both. The future is grim.
The church understands its most essential mission to be proclaiming Christ as "Lumen gentium," the "Light of nations" in the words of the Second Vatican Council. "Since the Church is in Christ like a sacrament or as a sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race, it desires now to unfold more fully to the faithful of the Church and to the whole world its own inner nature and universal mission,” the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church states.
Alas, the "unity of the whole human race" is not likely going to be part of the U.S. bishops' agenda during the tenure of Archbishop Timothy Broglio as president of the conference. As Cardinal Angelo Sodano's right-hand man during the 1990s, he not only witnessed the willful credulity extended to serial pedophiles like then-Fr. Marciel Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, but the utter lack of sympathy and solidarity extended to the victims of clergy sex abuse. The 1990s was the era in which Rome shot down any and all efforts by U.S. bishops to confront the crisis. Ask the bishops who were trying to deal with pedophiles in their ranks back then and they will tell you: Rome would not budge; you could not laicize these monsters.
At the press conference after his election, when asked about those years and specifically about the Maciel case, the best the new president could offer was the banal observation that "hindsight is always 20/20." To be clear, Broglio worked with Sodano until 2001. It was in 1997 that the Hartford Courant first published an expose of Maciel's depredations. You did not need hindsight to smell the corruption. Sodano, instead, facilitated the corruption. Broglio did nothing.
To be sure, Broglio worked for Sodano, not the other way round, but in the face of moral enormity, there is a moral obligation to avoid collaboration. He could have resigned. He could have become a whistleblower. Instead, he became, at best, a bystander.
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