Lenten spiritual exercises leader Bishop Erik Varden has offered Pope Leo XIV and the Roman Curia a searing reflection on the duty of Church leaders to face the ongoing crisis of abuse and coverups. Source: Crux.
“Falls can humble us when we are puffed up, showing God’s power to save,” the Norwegian Bishop Varden said in his opening remarks yesterday in the Pauline Chapel of the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican.
“They can become milestones on a personal journey of salvation, to be recalled gratefully,” he said, quickly warning, however, that Christians – especially churchmen – “cannot afford to be gullible”.
“Not every fall ends in exhilaration,” Bishop Varden continued. “There are falls that reek hellishly,” he said, “bringing destruction to the guilty and carrying ruin in their wake. That wake is often broad and long, pulling in many innocents.”
“Nothing has done the Church more tragic harm, and compromised our witness more, than corruption arisen within our own house,” Bishop Varden said.
“The worst crisis of the Church,” Bishop Varden continued, “has been brought on, not by secular opposition, but by ecclesiastical corruption. The wounds inflicted will take time to heal. They call out for justice and for tears.”
Bishop Varden said it is possible to see “great and joyful good often manifest in the beginnings of communities now linked with scandal,” and ought not “presuppose that there was structural hypocrisy from the start” or that founders of communities and congregations were rotten from the start, “as white-washed sepulchres,” he said, a bracing allusion to Jesus’s condemnation of the Pharisees’ hypocrisy.
“Sometimes,” Bishop Varden went on to say, “we do find signs of inspiration, even traces of holiness.”
Recently, in light of numerous cases, Church leaders have called for legal reform to make spiritual abuse a specific crime at Church law and to consider spiritual manipulation an aggravating factor in abuse cases.
“The integrity of a spiritual teacher will be attested by his conversation, but not only; it will be evidenced as much by his online habits, his comportment at table or at the bar, his freedom with regard to others’ adulation.”
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In Lenten meditation, Bishop Erik Varden addresses abuse, corruption (By Christopher Altieri, Crux)
