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Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Panelists Urge Inclusion of Female Voices in Church

Incorporating diverse voices, especially those of women, into Church hierarchy is essential to healing and progressing beyond the clerical abuse crisis, panelists said Sunday.

Members of the church, especially women, are willing to challenge church tradition, according to Fr. Hans Zollner, S.J., founder and president of the Centre for Child Protection at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.

“You have, now, a new generation of the religious who take ownership of their church and are not submitted and submissive to the bishops anymore,” Zollner said. “There is a new understanding and a new self-assurance on the side of the female religious.”

INITIATIVE ON CATHOLIC SOCIAL THOUGHT AND PUBLIC LIFE | Panelists spoke on the importance of challenging church tradition when necessary at an event held by Georgetown’s Initiative for Catholic Social Thought on March 24.

Zollner is also a member of the organizing committee for the meeting on the protection of minors in the church, which recommends policies to address the sexual abuse scandal to the Vatican.

Kim Daniels, the associate director of Georgetown’s Initiative for Catholic Social Thought and Public Life, moderated the event in Copley Formal Lounge, which began with a one-on-one discussion between Zollner and Daniels.

Following Daniels and Zollner’s conversation, Kathleen Coogan, a member of the Parish Pastoral Council, a consultative body for Holy Trinity Catholic Church in the Georgetown neighborhood, and Michael Nugent, a member of the Washington, D.C. Archdiocese’s Child Protection Advisory Board and a survivor of clerical sexual abuse, joined in a panel discussion of clerical abuse.

Lay members have the potential to enact real change in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, Nugent said. Concrete guidelines, like those Nugent developed into a handbook and child policy waiver, are the key to safeguarding minors, Nugent said.

“You can go to this, and it’ll direct you to exactly what you need to do,” Nugent said. “This is really invaluable, and we’re very glad because if someone doesn’t do it, they wind up goofing things up — that’s happened once.”

The Archdiocese of Washington has a 32-page “Child Protection Policy” booklet outlining the Archdiocese’s policies for screening clergy before service, reporting abuse of minors and enforcing accountability. The guidelines in the booklet require any adult seeking employment or volunteer work with an Archdiocesan school, parish or agency interacting closely with children to undergo a criminal background check and complete for a child protection workshop.

While women are excluded from many leadership roles within the Catholic Church, their continued participation is critical, according to Coogan. Coogan said she hoped women did not leave the church in the face of the abuse crisis.

“That many of us own this in our hearts, as Father Zollner stressed, is important if we’re going to make progress,” Coogan said. “I hope that by staying, I can also make a difference with my colleagues to make the church better.”

The Catholic Church does not allow women to hold any clerical positions, though more than half of Catholic women who attend church believe women should be allowed to be ordained as deacons, according to a 2018 study by Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.

The key to the church’s sustainability lies in incorporating more voices into the church, particularly those of women, according to Zollner.

“I don’t think it is a generational problem in the sense that it will grow out,” Zollner said. “It has to do with how much, for example, women are present in seminary formation, how much human formation is really taken into account as much as it is necessary for religious and Christian formation.”

The Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life has hosted multiple events this year addressing clerical abuse, including a Sept. 25 panel on the connection between Catholic social teachings and the sexual abuse crisis, an Oct. 24 panel on the need for change in Church culture and a Dec. 4 event on political and social turmoil.

This panel was also the first hosted by the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life since The Hoya reported that Georgetown had failed to acknowledge 10 members of clergy with records of abuse and ties to the university.

Despite the important role laypeople can take on within the Catholic Church, addressing the problem requires conviction from priests, Zollner said.

“The point is how can we learn to understand that you also need to own the issue with your heart,” Zollner said. “And you are not only obliged because the law or the norm tells you to do so, but because you are fully convinced that needs your full attention.”

Much of the anger in the American Catholic laity toward leadership is related to the Church’s inability to resolve the issue since a 2002 Boston Globe report uncovered decades of clerical abuse and the subsequent coverup, according to Zollner.

“The great disillusionment and the huge disappointment and the fervent anger about your leadership partly comes from the fact that you believed in 2002 that it was over — we have done it, we found the system and solution to this,” Zollner said. “And then you find out that bishops still covered up and did not do what was even in the guidelines, even in the norms, even in the charter, and so on.”

The ultimate consequences of the Vatican’s inability to resolve the sexual abuse crisis not only fall on survivors of abuse but also on the sustainability of the church as a whole, according to Nugent, who is skeptical of whether substantive reforms have been implemented.

“I’d need evidence,” Nugent said, referring to progress on sexual abuse prevention in the Church. “But I do know, on my own account, that the nine o’clock mass is not as well attended as they used to be.”

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