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What is most disturbing about this report is not the fact of abuse, nor the utter failure of Guiliani to empathize with the victims of abuse, but the total failure on his part and on his friend's part to recognize the importance of a distance between the Church and society. This priest is not apart from society, a shepard of souls, but a player in the civil society he is supposed to be providing some judgment and perspective upon. he isn't an activist, protesting the immrialities of power, but a corrupt power player. The Catholic Church is authoritarian in character, which is simply its history. Modernity meant, as Max Weber discussed at length in his major work Economy and Society, that theocratic authority was to be divorced from political authority. In the US, that difference was well in the minds of the enlightened founders, many of whom were merely deist, and almost all of whom were suspicious of the Catholic Church. This article isn't so much about loyalty as it is about faith and its viscissitudes, the terrible blindness of blind faith, and the corruption of the souls of those who seek to judge all of us. It frightens me that this man is a serious candidate for president.
