April 19, 2010

The Pope’s Tears
by Pastor George Van Alstine

This past Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI met with eight men of Malta, who had been sexually abused as boys by the priests who ran the Catholic orphanage where they grew up. Witnesses report that during these interviews, the Pope wept openly and expressed his “shame and sorrow” at the suffering the men and their families have had to endure. Some who have followed the unfolding stories of multiple incidents of abuse and the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy’s consistent pattern of minimizing the offenses and covering up for the offenders have been quick to accuse the Pope of hypocrisy and to brush off his tears as part of a contrived drama of phony contrition. Personally, I have no trouble believing that the Pope’s tears were real.

Pope Benedict is theoretically the shepherd of over one billion sheep who are baptized Catholics. But no one can be a hands-on spiritual shepherd to that many people. So, the Pope, as the chief administrator of a massive international organization, has spent many years in isolation from the individual sheep of his flock, while defending and securing the institution that is supposed to care for their needs. Over the years, as these types of incidents came to his attention, he responded to them in terms of handling problem priests and doing damage control for the organization. When these stories of abuse started to escalate, he and his lieutenants did the instinctive thing—they circled the wagons to protect the institution from attack. They went so far as to label the concerns being raised as anti-Catholic attacks.

Now, all of a sudden during a routine pastoral visit to the predominantly-Catholic island of Malta, he was confronted, one by one, with eight individual sheep who had painful stories. I have no trouble believing that the enormity of the priestly abuse overwhelmed him as never before, with the result that he spontaneously and sincerely wept. For those few minutes at least, he was not the CEO of a complex global entity, but a vulnerable human being who had empathy for what a little boy would feel at the mercy of an imposing authority figure he was taught to trust and respect. So the tears came.

I have no idea whether the Pope’s tears will have any permanent effect on his policies. He may go back to the same denial and defensiveness. That’s a problem that one billion Catholics will have to resolve, if they can.

For me, this is a reminder that I must always see my ministry in terms of individual people, not as my vocation or career. The moment I put the institution—even a small one, like ABC—over a person’s spiritual well-being, I am no longer doing the Lord’s work, no matter how noble the project or cause may seem. Jesus told a story about a loving shepherd who left his other ninety-nine sheep to look for one little lamb that was lost (Matthew 18:10-14). In a sense, he left the institution, the flock in the fold, vulnerable in order to care for that one needy individual. I hope I will always have this shepherd’s heart.