“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

What if the residents of a large urban neighborhood could be assured of continuing to live in their own homes even into extreme old age?

This actually is the aim of Beacon Hill Village, a newly formed community of people over age 60 living in this area of Boston. Only four weeks ago, the first members signed up to receive services that will enable them to stay living where they now reside.

Judith Willett, the executive director of this “virtual retirement community,” expresses the high hopes behind the new venture. A dynamic woman, highly experienced in providing services to older people, she recently explained to visitors how the community will function. Although the organization’s active phase is only four weeks old, its structure has been carefully planned over the last few years.

“We are the access point,” she says of her office at Beacon House on Myrtle Street. A board of directors made up of older people will have responsibility for steering the new venture and seeing that it develops according to plan.

The idea behind Beacon Hill Village is one long familiar to specialists in the field of aging. They refer to it as “aging in place” and many of them regard it as the ideal for later life. Research has shown that large percentages of older Americans want to live out their most mature years in this fashion.

Many other people, of course, prefer to move away and live in places planned exclusively for older people, but they are clearly in a minority. I myself find the virtual community idea intensely attractive and would welcome having one in the urban neighborhood where my family lives.

The new community has three main providers.

The first is the nonprofit organization known as Rogerson Communities. It takes responsibility for financing, accounting, and fundraising. This agency has also contributed the office site, free of rent for the first year of operations.

Secondly, Houseworks, an agency based in Newton, will furnish a wide variety of direct service providers. These provide home health, transportation (including escorts), home adaptation and repairs, concierge services such as errands, and housecleaning.

The third component of the system is the Massachusetts General Hospital with its Senior Health program. This MGH program features an interdisciplinary approach whereby physicians, nurses, social workers, therapists, and others will work together to benefit patients.

If this new community sounds utopian, in many ways it actually is. Already inquiries have come from the far reaches of the country with people wanting to know how it works. Some other people in the Greater Boston area have begun fantasizing about how such a program could serve people in their own communities.

Of course, utopia costs money. The initial yearly fee to join the community is currently $500 for a single person and $600 for a household. Starting July first, the price will rise to $750 for an individual, $1000 for a household.

And the individual services will come at a price as well, though Houseworks will discount its standard fees by ten percent and the MGH services will be covered by patients’ standard health insurance.

To make community memberships affordable for people whose income falls short, Judith Willett has been applying for grants.

But money remains an important issue. Middle income people are the most at risk population, she says, because they lack the safety net provided to those lower on the income scale.

To get a skilled and objective view of the Beacon Hill plan I called John O’Neill, the veteran director of Somerville Cambridge Elder Services. To his mind, the new venture has a good chance of succeeding. “It could actually work there,” he says, after pointing out how difficult this kind of plan has been to pull off in other places. And it’s much better than expecting the state or federal government to do anything: “If they wait for a public solution – – who knows?”

On the visit to talk with Judith Willett my wife and I were joined by two of our friends, Clare Corbett and Clare Chapman. They were interested in exploring how the Beacon Hill virtual retirement community might possibly serve as a model for their parish church. My wife and I, for our part, were interested in learning how residents in our own urban neighborhood might think about starting such a venture.

To her credit, considering that her community has had only a few weeks’experience, Judith Willett agreed to speculate with us about the Beacon Hill model being applicable to our communities.

“I think you would need larger groups of people than one church and one neighborhood,” she said. To meet the annual budget of some $250,000, her community needs at least 300 people. And members of her board have contributed $100,000 toward the expenses of the first year.

But we can still dream of ways to emulate the creativity and adventurous spirit of our friends on Beacon Hill.

Further information about the new community is available at 617 723-9713.

Richard Griffin

Appointments with a doctor always make me nervous. Even when they are routine checkups, like the most recent one, my anxiety mounts with arrival at the clinic.

On this occasion my blood pressure has shot up to new heights, with the diastolic figure (the lower one) breaking the hundred barrier for the first time ever. “White coat syndrome,” they call it, but they could be wearing purple and it would still happen.

Why such anxiety? It’s elemental, irrational, based, I suspect, on fear of them finding something dire, an unknown lethal enemy lurking within my organs that will sooner or later do me in.

I always had fantasized that by this advanced age of mid-seventies, a kind of statute of limitations would have taken hold. This concept I imagined as working to quiet anxiety with arguments such as this: “You have lived longer than 95 percent of human beings in the history of the world, so why should you complain about the prospect of your life coming to an end?” But rationalizations like this never work.

Other professionals at the clinic, as they record my weight and height, undoubtedly see me as just another 73-year-old male but my primary care physician knows better, recognizing me as a unique, not to say peculiar, person.

By now, she has attended to my health for some fifteen years and we enjoy an excellent working relationship. Long on a first-name basis, we show patience with one another: I did not even mind her being a half-hour late for this appointment and she, for her part, puts up with my chatter.

She inquires for my daughter, as I do for her son. She also asks if I am still writing and gently wonders how my wife’s recent retirement has affected our household.

All of this conversation much pleases me, not only for itself, but because I place greater confidence in physicians who know the whole person rather than just the physique. Perhaps she is helping me, even at this late stage, develop a greater appreciation of my bodily self.

Body image tends still to be a problem for me, though much less as I age. The injury to my left arm suffered at birth does not loom nearly so large in advanced years as it used to in adolescence and young adulthood. Growing older has its rewards, after all.

After finishing her top-to-bottom examination of me, my doctor tells me something I have never before heard from her: “You seem younger than your age.” These words refer not to an immaturity she has observed in me, I hope, but rather correspond to my own image of myself as a person gifted with unusually good health and a buoyant appreciation for life.

But still, the doctor prescribes a pill for blood pressure control. Because of a bias against medication, I feel reluctant to take anything, unless absolutely necessary. In this instance I will go along with her prescription, at least till the next appointment.

She also wants me to undergo a test, one that strikes me as especially nasty. Probably, I will resist doing it for a while, without telling her, and then, after summoning up the courage, submit to the unavoidable. Being a devout coward when it comes to medical procedures, I have to steel my soul each time.

Routine blood tests, also ordered by my doctor, will pose no problem for me so long as I can have Joe, a veteran technician, do them. He is marvelously skilled at finding small veins without poking around, probing for them the way physicians and others are wont to do. This friendly, beneficent Dracula makes of the bloodletting no ordeal at all.

Had this visit been anything other than a routine check-up, I probably would have asked my wife to come with me. It’s not just that she would be a strong advocate, if I needed one, but she would be there for me in other ways as well. Her emotional support might make all the difference were a dire diagnosis to emerge.

Even a routine medical exam makes us confront ourselves as body. Inevitably, you reveal yourself as you really are, at least as far as can be seen and measured.

There is undeniably something humiliating about it, even when the physician is thoroughly discreet and sympathetic. We are confronted with our bodily self in all its ridiculousness and vulnerability.

Even though this latest check-up was quite upbeat, I do not feel complacent about my health. “The center does not hold,” the poet Yeats said in a different context, but the statement applies here too. I await the inevitable next crisis with a mixture of resignation and hope.

And, always, the question of identity lurks just offstage. Who am I, this embodied ego? How can my spirit be so intertwined with this physical structure?

Richard Griffin

“These are not easy days in which to stand up and be counted as a Catholic in Boston.” These words, written by the pastor of my church, appeared in our parish bulletin last Sunday, understated testimony to the pain, confusion, and anger felt by so many people in our faith community.

Just that day, reports of two more priests accused of sexual abuse against children had emerged, bringing past seventy the number of Boston Catholic clergy thought to have committed this terrible crime. Making matters worse, the Cardinal Archbishop, by his own admission, had assigned priests with a documented record of pederasty to positions in which they could victimize even more children.

Growing up Catholic in Boston suburbs, I never imagined the existence of such crimes. That priests would violate the innocence of young people in this way lay outside my mental horizons.

Later, I went to a high school where the faculty was made up exclusively of priests belonging to the Archdiocese and, though I had an unfavorable opinion of some as teachers and mentors, I never heard of any one of them showing the least sign of sexual impropriety toward me or my fellow students.

This continued to be my experience in adulthood. All during the years when, in my first career, I belonged to the ranks of the clergy myself, I never had any knowledge of sexual crimes against children.

Recently, however, I have read reports about crimes attributed to some priests of the archdiocese with whom I was acquainted. The graphic details of one priest’s alleged criminal activities have hit me hard because the actions were so sordid, evidently damaged so many children, and violated the trust that many of us had in him.

What does it mean for people in later life to have their certainties exploded, as many of us have through these revelations of evil?  How can we cope with massive disillusion in matters of crucial importance to us, such as faith in the Church and trust in its ministers?

Having our confidence in sacred persons and institutions shown to be undeserving ranks as one of later life’s most upsetting experiences. No wonder newspaper photos have shown senior members of parishes in tears when revelations about their pastors are made.

When our devotion turns out to be without foundation, we can feel at sea, deprived of our bearings. The scholar Peter Marris, in a new book treating  meaning and purpose in later life, writes that “the loss of this assumptive world is deeply threatening, even if nothing outwardly has changed.” He compares the experience to a death in the family that can throw us into sudden crisis.

But I believe it is also an opportunity for possible breakthroughs toward deeper meaning. I believe that, for Catholics reeling from unwelcome disclosures about the Church, the current crisis can lead toward some valuable outcomes, both for ourselves and for our faith community.

The revelations of corruption among church leaders can serve as a powerful reminder that religious faith is directed, not toward human beings, but to God. One of my favorite sayings of Jesus applies here. Correcting a young man who called him good he said: “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.”

It is possible to come out of the crisis with a purified faith. Discovering the radical thrust of what Jesus said to the young man can help strip us of illusions about the integrity of human beings, even sacred figures in priestly vestments and bishops’ mitres ordained to lead the Church.

On the community level, the anguish of Boston’s Catholic people and those in many other places raises urgent questions that seem not even to be under discussion by Catholic leaders now:

Should the Catholic clergy be exclusively male? Why should not married people be priests in the Roman Church? How can lay people exercise greater influence in the Church, instead of being dominated by clerics? What changes need to be made in the Church’s teaching on sexuality?

As to the first two issues, it is hard to believe that women, were they in positions of pastor, would have behaved the way so many men have done. And married clergy might have been less likely to abuse children, though that is less certain.

Readers of a certain age may remember how, in the middle 1960s, the church adopted far-reaching changes that showed remarkable creative energy. The Second Vatican Council, bringing together bishops from all over the world, surprised everybody with its willingness to alter many long-established ways of thinking and acting.

Now may be the time for the Church to show bravery and vision similar to that evident at Vatican II so as to set right those elements of the institution that cry out for change both in the Boston Archdiocese and elsewhere.

Richard Griffin