“Archbishop So-and-So would never lie except for the good of the Church.” A quotation like this one, as I recall, appeared in a New Yorker magazine article written in the early 1960s by an American Catholic priest using the pseudonym Xavier Rynne. This article and succeeding ones published by the same magazine provided material for a book that still rates as the best account of the Second Vatican Council, 1962-1965.

The quotation from the unnamed archbishop has lodged in my memory because it summarizes so well the attitude called “clericalism.” It refers to a mentality on the part of many clergy, and not a few lay people, that places the needs of the institutional church ahead of the need to be truthful and honest.

That kind of thinking has surely been a large factor leading to the  enormous crisis engulfing the Catholic Church in Boston. And not just Boston. Like a seismic shock that crisis is now spreading across the country, shaking diocese after diocese with revelations of sexual crimes against children and of church efforts to sweep those crimes under the rug of secrecy.

Bishops and other authorities acted out of a false sense of institutional loyalty. They judged it better, by whatever means they could find, to keep everything secret rather than divulge the truth of the evil that was being done by their clergy. This secrecy covered the inexcusable assigning of priests with long records of pederasty to be assigned to local churches as pastors.

My reason for writing about this situation again in a column focused on aging is its continuing effect on us older church members and others who care about our morale. It is not easy in our later years to have the institutions and the people in whom we have trusted for a lifetime suddenly revealed as unworthy of confidence.

In July 1963, I landed in Southampton, England after a five-day voyage from New York on the great ocean liner The France. Almost 40 years later, I still remember what it was like to walk on the ground after disembarking. For the next several days, as I visited London, I felt the earth moving under my feet. The motion of the ship to which I had become accustomed lingered on in my body, making the ground seem shaky.

That same feeling is what some of us Catholics, and perhaps others, are now experiencing with the crisis that is shaking the Church. We have lost our moorings, our sense of solid ground, our confidence in tomorrow. Every week, sometimes every day, new revelations emerge to strike us in the gut. What sense, if any, can we find in it all?

I like to think that we are living through the death of one kind of institution as it slowly and painfully gives way to another. The implosion of the Boston archdiocese reveals the need for radical change as nothing else could have. To our astonishment, we elders have arrived at a time when the old certitudes can no longer serve us.

Of course, I am not talking about the faith that remains the bedrock of the Catholic Church. Basic belief and valued traditions of spiritual practice remain solid. But, even if we do not welcome it, we face the challenge of change in other areas of our religious life that have proven false.

Catholics continue to look toward Rome for guidance in crisis. In this instance, however, pope and central church government seem more a part of the problem than of the solution. A culture of secrecy and institutional duplicity have characterized many of the Vatican’s policies and activities for too long.

Internal change cannot very well take place in the current Vatican. Though it may seem ageist of me to suggest it, I have to think that a man burdened by crippling disability and disease has become ill equipped to take the lead in bringing about necessary reforms. The pope, I am convinced, should long since have been subject to a term of office as, in effect, other Catholic bishops throughout the world are. In the modern world, no one person can serve indefinitely long, no matter what his eminence and his record of past achievement.

Mind you, I would never take this critical stance were the Church not vitally important to me. In my later years, I continue to look to this faith community of mine for support and enlightenment, and I still find both there.

Though in the middle of a crisis like this one it may seem unrealistic to expect good to come out of it, that is what, in fact, I do expect. This agonizing time seems to me perhaps the Church’s best opportunity in decades to make  changes that are desperately needed.

In the meantime, it may help to us elders to look back on our record of success in adapting to previous large-scale changes. There is abundant reason for confidence that we, for whom church remains important, can do the same in the face of new challenges.

Richard Griffin