In his “Address to the Bishops of the United States” in Washington on April 16, 2008, the Pope said: “Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted.” That was unfortunate as a separate sentence although its actual meaning is clear in the following one: “Only when faith permeates every aspect of their lives do Christians become fully open to the transforming power of the Gospel.”

That theme came up again when he warned against “a form of piety which sometimes emphasizes our private relationship with God at the expense of our calling to be members of a redeemed community.” And also of a redeeming community?

It was repeated even more clearly in one of the Pope’s responses to episcopal questions after his address. “In Christianity,” he said, “ there can be no room for purely private religion: Christ is the Savior of the world ….To the extent that religion becomes a purely private affair, it loses its very soul."

That is absolutely accurate and profoundly biblical. Think, for example, of the parallelism in the opening line of Psalm 24:

The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it,
the world, and those who live in it.

And notice the sequence: not us alone or world alone but us-within-the world. Or again, think of the sequence in that most famous line from John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Christ and Pope agree: “It’s about the world, dummy.”

Based on that completely correct principle, the Pope criticized materialism, individualism and secularism in the United States That triad does not represent mere private problems for individuals but systemic and structural problems for our society. But when the Pope spoke about sexual abuse by the clergy that distinction of private and individual versus systemic and structural went into reverse.

First, there is not a hint in his address that any fault lay with members of the hierarchy who spread that infection by moving criminal priests from one parish to another, who obstructed justice—morally if not legally—by paying for silence, and who attempted in every way to keep the crime “purely private.”

Second, there is nothing about what did the (late) Pope know about the abuse and when did he know it? Did bishops not reveal those crimes to the Pope on their official ad limina visits? If yes, what did he do? If no, why were they silent?

Third, it is not enough to focus only on criminally abusive priests and even on guiltily indifferent bishops. It is not even enough to say that it was “sometimes very badly handled”—when was it ever handled otherwise? What is necessary from the Pope—and what was never even hinted behind his mention of “deep shame” (a private matter)—was some awareness of structural and systemic problems within the episcopal and papal hierarchy which facilitated the depth and breadth of the crime.

Finally, then, while the Pope looked outward and made several very accurate structural criticisms of society, he never looked inward and made similar criticisms of his own hierarchy. Here is the question: is the Roman Catholic hierarchy deeply flawed by an abuse of power and authority of which clerical pederasty and episcopal complicity are but one terrible manifestation?