Fr. Maciel: Not so Strange Happenings

As I mulled my previous post on the stories and counter stories regarding the supposed clearing of Fr. Marcial Maciel (What a name!) of sex abuse charges, it occurred to me that this isn't the first time that news from the Vatican has trickled out amid a cloud of rumor and contradiction.

When JPII lay dying, Italian news agencies jumped the gun and reported his death a day early. Fox News jumped on the band wagon and prompted some premature mourning here in America; which included yours-truly.

When Cardinal Ratzinger was elected to replace JPII, there was confusion over why smoke and no bells? Why weren't the basilica doors thrown open immediately? Just what color was that smoke? And didn't that happen when JPII was elected?

When B16 selected Archbishop William Levada to replace him at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: first he was selected, then it was only a rumor, then he was selected but there was a rumor that Fr. Joe Fessio would replace him in San Francisco.

And now we have Fr. Maciel. He was investigated in the 1950s, the 1990s, and again this last few months; all repeats of investigations of the same basic charges by the same alleged victims. First he was cleared; then the investigation reopened. Then he was cleared again, and then the clearance was reported as a hoax perpetrated by the Legion of Christ.

I doubt that. I suspect Fr. Maciel was, indeed, cleared. I believe that what is going on is not so much some war of whispers as a Vatican communications system which badly needs to streamline itself and join the new millennium. The habit of the sinecured clerics in Vatican City to use twentieth century (and earlier) techniques simply throws us Americans for a loop every time.

I recall reading an article by papal biographer George Weigel several years ago (I will attempt to locate it) in which he discussed how discouraged he was when he visited Vatican City in the midst of the sex scandal in 2001 and found several high ranking Cardinals who had only a passing knowledge of the scandal and tended to write it off as American newspaper sensationalism. He wondered about this attitude until he realized that not a single one of those clerics used e-mail, relied on Internet news, or was conditioned to instantaneous information processing in a fashion that even distantly approached what the average American assimilates on a daily basis.

We Americans like our information to be mainlined into our arteries. We are so conditioned (and addicted) to the "Information Superhighway" that when we come across a culture that doesn't yield volumes of data upon demand (like the Vatican) then we tend to rip it out of every source we can find connected to the group in question.

And what we get is not good information, but a jumble of rumors and counter rumors.

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UPDATE (Tuesday, 5/24/05, 7:53 AM):

The article mentioned above was not by George Weigel, but was by Terry Mattingly and discussed Weigel's impressions of the Vatican. Mattingly quotes:

"Suddenly it dawned on me that the Vatican is simply not, to this day, a part of the Internet culture," said Weigel. "There are a few people who take the trouble to go online every morning or evening. ... But in the main, what we have become used to and what frames our emotional responses to these questions, namely real-time information and a constant flow of chat, commentary, argument and so forth, ... none of this exists over there."

The complete article can be found here on Terry Mattingly's web site On Religion.