The Courage To Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform And The Future Of The Church by Weigel George

Author:Weigel, George [Weigel, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2007-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

CULTURE WARS

The sluggish Vatican response to the U.S. crisis in the early months of 2002 was also due to important differences between American and European attitudes toward public scandal, including ecclesiastical scandal.

One way to parse that difference is to note that Americans remain capable of being shocked by the sexual shenanigans and misconduct of public personalities (including clergy), while European cynicism and world-weariness have generally muted similar reactions. That a recent president of France lived with a mistress for years was considered a non-story by the French press. The European media’s bafflement over American outrage at President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky was another example of a cultural divide as wide as the Atlantic. Europeans simply don’t take these things as seriously as Americans.

That dimension of the difference may account for the fact that the European press paid little attention to the U.S. Catholic crisis even when it dominated the front pages of virtually every newspaper in the United States. An American coming to Europe in the first months of 2002 sometimes had the feeling of arriving on a different planet, not simply a different continent. What had become an obsessive topic of media attention and widespread public conversation simply didn’t exist in Europe. Even those Europeans (and officials of the Roman Curia) who took the trouble to follow the U.S. cri-r sis on the Internet necessarily missed a lot of the texture of the crisis, including the anger and dismay it was generating among faithful Catholics. One simply had to have been in the United States, to have experienced the crisis emotionally as well as intellectually, to sense that texture.

Europe’s different legal environment also shaped and misshaped Vatican perceptions of the U.S. crisis. Liability law functions very differently in Europe, where awards of vast sums for “damages” of various sorts are not the norm, and where the phenomenon of lawyers making tens of millions, even billions, of dollars from malpractice or malfeasance suits is unknown. Europeans have many questions about the American legal system, but modern American liability law is something most Europeans find incomprehensible. That, in turn, led some in the Vatican, and in the Vatican nunciature in Washington, to the view that the whole crisis in the United States was manufactured by disturbed individuals and predatory lawyers who were primarily interested in money and media attention. On that analysis, this was something the Church could just ride out.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.