Papal Tensions

The pope came and went. Two aspects of his proclamations stood out: on the one hand, his call for more authority and obedience, especially when it comes to the demands of the Catholic church; on the other hand, his condemnation of the sexual abuse inflicted by his priests. Did he not notice a tension between these two sentiments? He’s supposed to be logically astute, but it’s pretty obvious that the latter thing followed quite smoothly from the former: unquestioning obedience to the authority of the representatives of the church, i.e. priests, is what made possible the sexual abuse they so easily and revoltingly practiced on their “parishioners”. You would have thought the pope’s message might have been “Don’t blindly do what priests tell you!”. But then contradictions have never been much of an impediment to the skilled theologian (problem of evil and all that).