Stardate 20021214.1142

(On Screen): In response to learning of Cardinal Law's resignation, John Farrell posts an article commiserating with all the moral and dedicated priests who have had their reputations tarnished by association with the few who are responsible for this scandal, and expresses the hope that now they can get on with their work.

I'm afraid that the resignation doesn't end their travails. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. For one thing, as the full extent of what happened has been revealed, prosecutors are beginning to take a step previously inconceivable of considering indictments of a substantial proportion of the Catholic bishops in the US on charges of obstruction of justice because of the coverup. Law himself has been served with a subpoena to appear before a Grand Jury in Massachusetts.

There's also the prospect that the entire US Catholic Church might become the defendant in a RICO prosecution.

But even worse is the fact that all of this has caused and will continue to cause a substantial decline in contributions to the church from its members. Revenues in Law's own (ex)archdiocese are substantially down, and I have read that it's down overall nearly everywhere. That doesn't just affect the US church, it affects the entire Catholic Church worldwide, because the US Catholic Church has traditionally been a major contributor to Rome which has redistributed much of that money to other places. (In fact, remittance from the US has traditionally supported a substantial part of Rome's overall budget.) If American Catholics stop giving because they've lost confidence, the Church everywhere will suffer.

The long term timebomb for the church is recruiting for the seminaries. The Vatican is seriously considering a ban on all homosexuals being permitted to be priests. (Not just practicing homosexuals, but even those who remain strictly celibate.) If that happened, it would significantly reduce the number of acceptable applicants, and depending on how it was worded might lead to a large part of the existing priesthood being discharged. And with the priesthood itself being seriously tarnished, it has to be expected that the number of quality heterosexual applicants to seminary will seriously decline. Recruitment for the priesthood has been a serious problem for the Church for decades anyway, and now it's going to get substantially worse. It is by no means certain that they will be able to sustain the size of the priesthood without reducing their standards for candidates. (This may already have happened; it may be part of why so many pedophiles seem to have crept into the ranks.)

What all of this suggests is that the Church is going to shrink. There will be less money, fewer good works, fewer priests, less of nearly everything.

And it will take decades to rebuild, if it can recover at all.