Pain of Abused Lost in Wisps Of Vatican Fog

Jimmy Breslin

April 23, 2002

Rome - I was walking down the hallway to get on the plane to Rome on Sunday night and some people were talking about the day's news and now in the plane's doorway a man in a black suit turned around. He was - Avery Dulles, a cardinal.

"Press," he said.

"The worst," I said.

He wasn't being particularly abrasive, nor was my retort meant to be, either, but the fact he went to the word, "press," revealed that, as smart as he is supposed to be, he doesn't realize the dreadful condition of his church right now, and that defensive references are outmoded.

For people are saying everywhere you turn that they cannot look at any priest without wondering if he's sexually sick.

No story in the newspaper, nor column nor cartoon, and no television report can cause havoc of this magnitude.

And the people who are the most to blame are in Rome, which is in Italy, and that entire country wobbles and a tiny part of it, the Vatican, has been telling 40 million American Catholics how to live in a religion.

They have here in the Vatican a pope who is beloved, who fought communism as nobody ever did, but who now appears to be out of it. Age and illness have left him with an instinctive dislike of anything to do with women.

He wants men to live without them, and that can't be done. Then the other day, after weeks of Americans calling for celibacy to end, for women to be priests, he slammed his hand down and said the idea was not to be discussed.

He has no reason other than some voodoo belief and a fear of women and thoughts from a mind far too old to be in today.

These wretches he and everybody else in the Vatican is so fearful of merely comprise about 60 percent of American Catholics.

And probably a lot more of the common sense. If we had women running the church, they wouldn't get us into all this trouble.

This made a Vatican press conference yesterday appear to be an exhibition of self-complacency. Here you have the worst threat to the institution in America. And the answer was to have Bishop Wilton Gregory of Belleville, Ill., on the stage, doing as he was told, talking about the meetings that start today. Talking as vaguely as possible.

The curia, he said, have made themselves available to assist the cardinals in their discussions about pedophiles in America. The curia is a group of Italian men who tiptoe through the Vatican hallways, who despise America and whatever it is that they think we stand for. They count their greatest days as those when the pope is not up to it.

When asked about women yesterday, Bishop Gregory said that the meetings this week were going to be so focused -- so directed -- that there would be no room for such peripheral subjects. In his home area, Gregory lost 10 percent of his priests to sexual transgressions. People report that he handled it well.

But he was here yesterday because of cover-ups and lying by people over him, yet he didn't speak about it except in this bureaucratic language that comes at you one-half notch off true meaning and with wisps of fog clinging to the words. They had him out there to brush up on the words and tones of subterfuge and delay until you and your people go away.

The auditorium was on the ground floor of the eight-story North American College, which has a courtyard of grass and trees that is so pleasing to the eyes that you almost forget what brings you to Rome - all these broken people and their desperate families that these cardinals refuse to speak to or recognize.