O'Connor clearly has some serious unresolved emotional problems that she projects onto the Church, especially that either on a visceral or an intellectual level she clearly can't distinguish between it and her abusive mother.
The Vatican't? She grins. "Yes, as in they can't admit anything, they can't stand up for anything." Where to start? Women priests, homosexuals, contraception and, of course, child sex abuse. "You can go back centuries, but the way they've behaved just in the last 20 years, over this issue of sexual abuse, shows they don't give a shit. They feel untouchable. And to me it seems they don't believe in God at all. Because if you did believe you couldn't stand in front of that spirit covering up and moving priests and doctoring reports to psychiatrists and not telling them there was a suspicion of abuse, you just couldn't do that."
Frankly, I just don't get it. On the one hand, people like O'Connor want to call themselves Catholics, on the other hand they insist that the Catholic Church conform to their own ideals and undergo radical transformations to mirror their society's changing norms and the secular humanist beliefs that they happen to subscribe to. That strikes me as a very unhealthy, possessive and infantile demand: regardless of the fitness of the individuals who have run it, the Church is above all the historic guardian of a specific religious tradition that reflects a particular view of the relationship between Man and God, with the relationship between persons as secondary and subordinate. It has its own complex identity forged over centuries, and its own logic that is fundamentally irreconcilable with the humanist one, and its own unique view of the world and of the Church's mission in that world.
For example, the Catholic Church believes that the temporal world is ruled by Satan and subject to his wiles, that it is an arena in which Man must struggle to free himself through penance and self-denial and spiritual practice and by accepting the gift of grace, from the burden of sin that he carries from the moment that he is born into a human body.
The Church is the custodian of the sacraments that transform Man's interactions with the intrinsically sinful world into acts of communion with the Divine, and thus the intermediary through which Man receives God's grace. Marriage is one of those sacraments, in which two separate people are miraculously transformed into one, and in the context of which the sex is transformed from a profane and sinful activity into an expression of the sacred union between two married people where its primary purpose is not the individuals' pleasure but submission to the will of God. It is from this perspective that homosexuality, sex outside marriage, contraception and abortion are rejected by the Church, for the exact same reasons that they are accepted within humanist logic, which replaces human will and reason and human values for the divine will as expressed in the holy scriptures.
Essentially, what people like O'Connor want is to have their cake and eat it too: they not only want to force the Church to abandon its core values and live up to humanist ideals, but at the same time they want to appropriate the Church's spiritual authority and blessings to sanctify those humanist ideals which are alien to it. It's like a self-described communist insisting that communist doctrine be modified to incorporater the bourgeoisie's right to accumulate property and the means of production. If the Church is to maintain its identity and integrity, in other words if it is to continue to exist, then issues like whether there should be women priests should be decided on the basis of Catholic theology rather than secular humanist ideals.
As someone who happens to subscribe to those humanist ideals (within limits), and as a non-Catholic, I nevertheless am dismayed by O'Connor's attitude. Her hostile zeal would be more understandable if she were living in a theocracy, where the Church was the ultimate authority in civil and legal matters and had coercive power to impose its will, because then humanists would be obliged to choose between either coercing the Church to radically change and become whatever they want it to be or taking away its temporal hegemony, but that's not the case. Nobody's stopping people who disagree from leaving the Church and finding a more agreeable spiritual home. Instead, idiosyncratic "Catholics" like O'Connor, along with militant atheists and other hostile outsiders are using the issue of some priests' pedophilia and the Church authorities' shameful response as a pretext to launch a comprehensive attack on the Church's very raison d'etre, especially its mission to safeguard and interpret the teachings of Christ in the way that it sees fit, regardless of how they think it should, with people like O'Connor wanting to slap on the new, unrecognizable thing a label that says "Catholic Church".
Where those men who sexually abused children and those other men who covered up and protected the abusers violated society's law, they must be punished by the Society which they have offended. Where they have violated their own sacred vows and committed grave sins, they must also be punished according to the religious law of the Church to which they belong. Neither one endangers the very existence and integrity of the Church, on the contrary: in my view a scrupulous implementation of these measures would revitalize the Church and substantiate the Church's role as a spiritual guide in a dark world. But whether one believes that the Catholic Church is something worth saving or not, demanding that it no longer have the right to embody its own interpretation of the gospel of Jesus Christ, to administer the sacraments and to pursue its charity work around the world in the way that best expresses its unique core spiritual beliefs, is to demand that the Catholic Church be eradicated and replaced with a phony substitute. In my opinion, it's dishonest and hypocritical.
"If you're not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing." - Malcolm X
