It WAS easy to let my imagination run wild about "Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus," written by retired prelate Geoffrey Robinson, auxiliary Catholic bishop of Sydney, Australia, for two decades.
The book has generated swift reaction and harsh words from leaders in the Roman Catholic Church. Robinson's fellow bishops in Australia labeled his positions problematic, claiming that his views question "the authority of the Catholic Church to teach the truth definitively."
And the Vatican and a dozen American bishops -- including Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, Tod Brown of Orange and Robert Brom of San Diego -- recently asked him not to speak out on his book tour lest he "be a source of disunity and cause of confusion among the faithful," in Brown's words. (He ignored their wishes.)
With that dramatic buildup, reading the first few chapters of Robinson's book was like watching a horror movie where the spooky music swells as someone slowly opens a closet door, only to find no monster there.
It's a little disappointing, because the boogeyman created by church leaders turns out to be a thoughtful, gentle, humble theologian and canon lawyer with a deep love and respect for the church. His scary ideas that caused so much consternation within the Vatican and among fellow bishops can be boiled down to one premise: The church needs to understand and address the root causes of the clergy sexual abuse scandal in order to heal itself.
The only scary part of the story is that Robinson, himself a victim of sexual abuse as a child (not by a cleric), stands virtually alone among the world's Roman Catholic bishops in openly questioning a system that has resulted in thousands of children being molested and raped and the crimes of the perpetrator priests being covered up by church leaders.
Under an avalanche of lawsuits and media coverage, Robinson's colleagues (surrounded by a battery of attorneys and public relations specialists) were forced to enact reforms such as not allowing priests who had molested to serve in ministry. But the underlying causes have, for the most part, not been addressed.
In "Confronting Power," Robinson explores how the church could get it so wrong.
As the title suggests, Robinson believes the molestation scandal was the result of an abuse of power and sex. He argues that the church over the centuries has concentrated too much authority within the clergy and especially within the papacy -- leaving no room for debate on church teachings that, in theory, could be changed.
