Sex, Scandal and Secularism:
Crisis in the Catholic Church
By Sandro Contenta
As the cardinals converge on the Vatican City to select a new pope, they face a church in steep decline in the Western world. Empty pews are indicative of a community that has lost faith with its church, a church that has been consistently conservative and has failed to address either the modern issues it faces or its many scandals. Award-winning Star journalist Sandro Contenta, who has covered the Catholic church for more than a decade looks at the state of the Church in Ireland and Quebec to reveal the lessons that the papal conclave should take to heart. Entertaining and insightful, Sex, Scandal and Secularism offers a fresh take on a critical issue.
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Crisis in the Catholic Church
By Sandro Contenta
As the cardinals converge on the Vatican City to select a new pope, they face a church in steep decline in the Western world. Empty pews are indicative of a community that has lost faith with its church, a church that has been consistently conservative and has failed to address either the modern issues it faces or its many scandals. Award-winning Star journalist Sandro Contenta, who has covered the Catholic church for more than a decade looks at the state of the Church in Ireland and Quebec to reveal the lessons that the papal conclave should take to heart. Entertaining and insightful, Sex, Scandal and Secularism offers a fresh take on a critical issue.
When you subscribe to Star Dispatches, you'll receive new eRead titles, for only $1/week. That's only $1 per week, with a minimum subscription period of 1 month, to explore news and features from a new and unique perspective. Single copies of Star Dispatches eReads can be purchased for $2.99 at starstore.ca or itunes.ca/stardispatches
Excerpt:
Sex, Scandal and Secularism:
Crisis in the Catholic Church
When I was maybe 10 years old, a new Catholic priest arrived at our east-end Montreal parish. Spiritual transcendence was not what he was about.
He sexually assaulted my friends, boys and girls. He abused them in his car, in the sacristy, in his office, in the game room; he abused them anywhere he could. I escaped being molested partly because I wasn’t an altar boy.
When my friends and I talked about it, it was always in confusion and anger. It never crossed our minds that we could do something about it. No one I knew told their parents. The abuse went on for at least a couple of years.
One day, the priest talked a group of us into painting the steel railing in front of the church. He said he would buy us pizza. When a friend replied, with a big smile, "Oh, Father, you’re so kind,"" the priest slapped him hard across the face. We were horrified.
Shortly after, he was transferred. He left behind unforgettable lessons of crude power and hypocrisy as far from the Gospel as one could get. What strikes me now is how common such experiences have been with the Catholic Church, even though a minority of priests is to blame.
The first person I interviewed in Montreal for this story was Yves Côté, a man whose church history I did not know. He grew up in a small town in Lac-Saint-Jean, a northern Quebec region where Jesuit missionaries began recruiting souls in the early 1600s. "My parents were more Catholic than the pope," he says, "especially my father." A big bald man with a hearty laugh, Côté tugs at the top of his ear to demonstrate the way his father enticed his children to Sunday mass.
“Everything was in Latin back then; we understood absolutely nothing,” says Côté, 60. “So what were we doing there? I would tear up the service booklet to make little paper boats.”
One day, when Côté was a child, the parish priest came to visit. “He said to my mother, ‘When will you give a child to the church?’” Côté recalls. “My mother said that after her eighth child the doctor told her another one might kill her. And the priest replied, in a raised voice: ‘I said, when will you give a child to the church?’”
Côté’s father stepped up to back his wife. “I don’t think you heard what my wife said,” he told the priest. The priest replied, “Yes, but you must.”
“My father took the priest by the back of his collar, opened the door and said, ‘It’s certainly not you who will decide when my wife dies,’” Côté says.
“That’s how we emptied churches in Quebec,” he adds. “Priests always wanted to enter people’s bedrooms.”
Years later, when he was 14, Côté began questioning his sexuality. He went to the parish priest for guidance.
“I told him I thought I was a homosexual.” The priest practically lunged at him. “He tried to stick his hand down my pants! “He thought I was easy prey,” Côté says. “I told him I was a homosexual and he saw me like a lamb going to. . . ” He cut his sentence off with a disbelieving shake of his head.
Côté had the courage to report the incident to the main parish priest.
“He put his hands over his ears and said, ‘I’ll make as if I heard nothing. Pray to the Lord to cure you of your illness.’ “The next day I told my parents: ‘I’m not going to church anymore.’” Most Quebecers have made the same decision as Côté since the early 1960s, when francophones transformed Quebec society in a modernizing burst known as the Quiet Revolution. Weekly church attendance went from an estimated 90 per cent of Catholics to less than 5 per cent today. In Montreal, 40 Catholic churches have closed in the last decade alone, according to Most Reverend Christian Lépine, archbishop of Montreal.
“The resentment is very strong,” Lépine says, referring to how most Quebecers feel about the Catholic Church.
“We’re in a post-Christian society,” laments Msgr. Raymond Poisson, Auxiliary Bishop of the Diocese of Saint-Jérôme, north of Montreal.
The Catholic Church’s fall from grace in Quebec reflects the challenge it faces in most western countries. Pews are empty, vocations are at a trickle, and child abuse scandals continue to reveal church authorities more interested in protecting the institution than victims. The Vatican, meanwhile, is mired in the kind of infighting and backstabbing that makes medieval courts look tame.
The last year of Pope Benedict’s reign was characterized by leaked papal documents linking the Vatican to money laundering, blackmail, a notorious gangster buried in a Roman basilica, the kidnapping of a 15-year-old Vatican resident and plots to kill Benedict and his predecessor, John Paul II. Benedict’s butler was convicted of stealing the documents. Few believe he acted alone. In mid-February, when the 85-year-old Benedict shocked the Catholic world by announcing his abdication — the first pope to do so in 600 years — he left the impression of someone fed up with division and scandal.
“The face of the church,” he lamented in his last sermon, “is sometimes disfigured.”
Fixing that twisted image — beginning with taming an unruly Vatican bureaucracy — will preoccupy cardinals gathering in Rome to elect a new pope. But most remain stubbornly silent about the Catholic Church’s biggest challenge — fixing its shattered relationship with modernity.
He sexually assaulted my friends, boys and girls. He abused them in his car, in the sacristy, in his office, in the game room; he abused them anywhere he could. I escaped being molested partly because I wasn’t an altar boy.
When my friends and I talked about it, it was always in confusion and anger. It never crossed our minds that we could do something about it. No one I knew told their parents. The abuse went on for at least a couple of years.
One day, the priest talked a group of us into painting the steel railing in front of the church. He said he would buy us pizza. When a friend replied, with a big smile, "Oh, Father, you’re so kind,"" the priest slapped him hard across the face. We were horrified.
Shortly after, he was transferred. He left behind unforgettable lessons of crude power and hypocrisy as far from the Gospel as one could get. What strikes me now is how common such experiences have been with the Catholic Church, even though a minority of priests is to blame.
The first person I interviewed in Montreal for this story was Yves Côté, a man whose church history I did not know. He grew up in a small town in Lac-Saint-Jean, a northern Quebec region where Jesuit missionaries began recruiting souls in the early 1600s. "My parents were more Catholic than the pope," he says, "especially my father." A big bald man with a hearty laugh, Côté tugs at the top of his ear to demonstrate the way his father enticed his children to Sunday mass.
“Everything was in Latin back then; we understood absolutely nothing,” says Côté, 60. “So what were we doing there? I would tear up the service booklet to make little paper boats.”
One day, when Côté was a child, the parish priest came to visit. “He said to my mother, ‘When will you give a child to the church?’” Côté recalls. “My mother said that after her eighth child the doctor told her another one might kill her. And the priest replied, in a raised voice: ‘I said, when will you give a child to the church?’”
Côté’s father stepped up to back his wife. “I don’t think you heard what my wife said,” he told the priest. The priest replied, “Yes, but you must.”
“My father took the priest by the back of his collar, opened the door and said, ‘It’s certainly not you who will decide when my wife dies,’” Côté says.
“That’s how we emptied churches in Quebec,” he adds. “Priests always wanted to enter people’s bedrooms.”
Years later, when he was 14, Côté began questioning his sexuality. He went to the parish priest for guidance.
“I told him I thought I was a homosexual.” The priest practically lunged at him. “He tried to stick his hand down my pants! “He thought I was easy prey,” Côté says. “I told him I was a homosexual and he saw me like a lamb going to. . . ” He cut his sentence off with a disbelieving shake of his head.
Côté had the courage to report the incident to the main parish priest.
“He put his hands over his ears and said, ‘I’ll make as if I heard nothing. Pray to the Lord to cure you of your illness.’ “The next day I told my parents: ‘I’m not going to church anymore.’” Most Quebecers have made the same decision as Côté since the early 1960s, when francophones transformed Quebec society in a modernizing burst known as the Quiet Revolution. Weekly church attendance went from an estimated 90 per cent of Catholics to less than 5 per cent today. In Montreal, 40 Catholic churches have closed in the last decade alone, according to Most Reverend Christian Lépine, archbishop of Montreal.
“The resentment is very strong,” Lépine says, referring to how most Quebecers feel about the Catholic Church.
“We’re in a post-Christian society,” laments Msgr. Raymond Poisson, Auxiliary Bishop of the Diocese of Saint-Jérôme, north of Montreal.
The Catholic Church’s fall from grace in Quebec reflects the challenge it faces in most western countries. Pews are empty, vocations are at a trickle, and child abuse scandals continue to reveal church authorities more interested in protecting the institution than victims. The Vatican, meanwhile, is mired in the kind of infighting and backstabbing that makes medieval courts look tame.
The last year of Pope Benedict’s reign was characterized by leaked papal documents linking the Vatican to money laundering, blackmail, a notorious gangster buried in a Roman basilica, the kidnapping of a 15-year-old Vatican resident and plots to kill Benedict and his predecessor, John Paul II. Benedict’s butler was convicted of stealing the documents. Few believe he acted alone. In mid-February, when the 85-year-old Benedict shocked the Catholic world by announcing his abdication — the first pope to do so in 600 years — he left the impression of someone fed up with division and scandal.
“The face of the church,” he lamented in his last sermon, “is sometimes disfigured.”
Fixing that twisted image — beginning with taming an unruly Vatican bureaucracy — will preoccupy cardinals gathering in Rome to elect a new pope. But most remain stubbornly silent about the Catholic Church’s biggest challenge — fixing its shattered relationship with modernity.
