Crittenden on institutional responsibility (Main Forum)

by James, Australia, Monday, June 11, 2012, 13:07 (346 days ago) @ James
edited by James, Monday, June 11, 2012, 17:57

There is another comment in Crittenden’s book referring to institutional responsibility, which, as I have pointed out below creates its own problems for the claims that the Church makes about itself. After talking about the Church’s involvement in corruption and scandals, particularly the sex abuse cover up, he writes,

Faced with the evidence of moral failure, the institutional Churh is drawn to distinguish between the Church as holy ,as means of salvation and grace, and the Church as sinful, in so far as its members, including church officials, are sinners. But one aspect of sinfulness in the Church might be the attempt to rely on this distinction as a way of escaping institutional (and personal) responsibility.

.
It is one thing for the Church to say that a Pope is "bad" (eg. Alexander VI), and quite another for the Church leadership to be involved in what we now regard as crimes against humanity (Innocents III, VIII and many others), and in more recent times the cover up of clergy abuse by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, as deliberate Church policy. The whole point of this distinction is, as Crittenden points out, to escape institutional responsibility - and because the Pope is the Vicar of Christ - his personal responsibility.

There is no clearer evidence of this than in the cover up scandal where the finger is pointed at the bishops who were only doing what Canon Law told them to do. The problem with Benedict owning up to this institutional and his own personal faiing is that it quite seriously undermines its claims to be the spokesperson for the Creator of the Universe.