Inside
NCR
Sometimes I feel as if NCR is
comparable, week to week, to the joke about the group of blindfolded people
trying to identify an elephant by touching its parts -- trunk, tail, ears.
Its hard to get a fix on the whole thing. So it is with covering the
church. Mention Catholic church these days and most of the United States is
focused on the scandal in Boston. It deserves attention and will receive more
in this paper in weeks to come. NCR broke the priest pedophilia story in
the mid-1980s and has been covering the awful saga ever since. We have someone
reading through the thousands of pages of documents recently released by the
courts and we will continue our coverage of developments there.
Our hope, as we have stated editorially, is that this case will
force the kind of examination by the hierarchy and clergy of not only how
better to deal with abusers but also of the culture that has attracted and
protected abusers over the years.
The church, however, is not all scandal. In its best moments it is
the activists speaking for the least among us. Last week, we highlighted a
bishops program calling attention to poverty. This week, the Catholic
Health Care Association sounds a warning about the need for basic health care
to be available to all as a matter of fundamental justice.
In a news brief we report that an official at another Catholic
agency, the U.S. bishops Migration and Refugee Services, went before a
congressional subcommittee to argue the case for increasing the number of
immigrants allowed into the country and increasing the pace at which they are
processed.
I presume in months ahead that the bishops and other religious
groups will be among the few voices to speak out against the enormous defense
expenditures anticipated in coming budgets.
It is difficult, week to week, to see the whole picture, the
enormous breadth of just institutional activities, not to mention the
activities of everyday Catholics, inspired by faith, involved in works of mercy
and justice. Scandals aside, the world would be different -- and for the worse
-- without the whole elephant.
Advocates of participatory
government won a major victory last week with the passage of the Shays-Meehan
Bill in the House during the wee hours of the morning Feb. 14. Campaign finance
reform still faces obstacles in the Senate and would need to be signed into law
by a president who, at best, is lukewarm to the idea. Nevertheless, the House
passage, possible now in the wake of the Enron meltdown, is uplifting -- and
needed. The Democratic and Republican national committees raised a record $160
million in soft money during the first half of the 2001-2002 election cycle,
according to a Feb. 13 statement by Common Cause. The figure is more than twice
the $67.4 million raised in 1997, the first year of the most recent
non-presidential election cycle, and almost 50 percent more than the $107.2
million raised in 1999.
-- Tom Roberts
My e-mail address is troberts@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, February 22,
2002
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