Tag: Fall 2002

If all the world’s a stage, then Cathy Springfield is one happy woman. The ever-ebullient Springfield lives for the theater, and now—as the University’s director for performing arts—she’s got a new one of her own. A theater, that is.

The opening of the new Gallagher Student Center in April included a 325-seat theater that is home to Xavier’s performing arts programs—as well as Springfield’s dreams. “We have been talking in earnest about this new theater for six years,” says Springfield. It has been a long time coming, true. But considering where the program was when she first arrived on campus in the late 1980s, just having a new theater is nothing short of a miracle.

“We used to borrow costumes from a high school,” she says.

Through Springfield’s persistence, though, performing arts are now to the point where students can earn a minor in theater. She can even envision the program being its own major or being big enough to reach across the University and mesh with all disciplines. Because of the theater, she says, “We have an excellent opportunity to create something unique.”

There are exciting signs of promise, to be sure. For now, however, she has plenty to keep her busy. Her various projects include the Xavier Players, the Comedy Toolbox featuring improvisational skits, Blackbox Productions, with students submitting plays for one-hour productions, and Voices for Change, where students create performance pieces based on volunteer activities or social projects.

Her first priority, though, is to make the best use of the new dramatic space. The philosophy has been: “Build a theater and they will come,” she says. They being an audience, certainly. But also future drama students. Finally, after years of holding productions in Kelley Auditorium, the Fieldhouse, Armory or wherever they could find a stage, current and future Xavier Players now have a place to call their own.

And what a home it is. The theater is a state-of-the-art “thrust style” facility, with the stage projecting forward leaving no patron more than a dozen rows from the center of action.

“It’s a much more intimate feel,” Springfield says. The $4 million theater, which the University is still offering naming rights to, also includes an orchestra pit, rehearsal space, lighting and sound booths, dressing rooms and a prop design shop. Exposed catwalks and a full- fly floor provide the ultimate flexibility and creative staging possibilities.

Its long-awaited development had become a source of frustration for Springfield. Not having a great facility for presenting theater, she says, “is like physics students without a lab.” Her frustrations, though, are understandable—theater is her passion, and always has been. Her rich and varied biography includes taking period dance at the Julliard School and stage combat at the Royal Shakespeare Company. She helped start a cabaret, cofounded the American Repertory Theatre of Cincinnati and its Peanut Butter Theatre, and performed as an equity player in regional theater.

Born in Charlotte, N.C., in 1952, she was raised in the Cincinnati neighborhood of Finneytown and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Eastern Michigan University and an education degree at the University of Charleston in South Carolina. And, in addition to all her current work, she’s also pursuing a master’s degree in directing at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Her greatest challenge, though, won’t be directing, but organizing—trying to conscientiously program the University’s performances without overlapping the surrounding college and professional theaters. There is little room for duplicate efforts, and she’s not allowing that to happen. Recent productions included the regional premiere of A Midwinter’s Tale by Kenneth Branagh, as well as Talking With by Jane Martin, The Laramie Project by Moises Kaufman and the world premiere of the musical The Perfect Game by alumnus John Grissmer. Upcoming productions include To Kill a Mockingbird, which is being done in collaboration with the Children’s Theatre, The Royal Hunt for the Sun and The Cyclops, which is being adapted from Euripides by classics professor George Harrison and presented in conjunction with a classics symposium that’s taking place on campus.

Whether it be talk of expanding professional collaborations with area theaters or—of course—the creation of a theater degree program, Springfield remains enthused and focused. Asked for her one, overriding vision, she seems to keep coming back to three words: “Theater changes people.”

And it’s through that change that she thinks she can have an impact on the University. Chancellor James E. Hoff, S.J., had a great affection for theater, she says, and saw it as a faceplate for the University, an expression of the mission. She agrees. That’s what she sees for the future, and what has kept her going in the past.

“The real measure of our Jesuit universities lies in who our students become,” she says, “so it behooves us to talk about this mission—theater as an agent of change. What theater does best is move people. That’s why I’ve been doing this 30 years and still find it fascinating.”

Paul Fiorelli sat behind his desk grading papers when he suddenly became excited. Grading papers is a monotonous task, but occasionally a good paper comes along that makes the effort worthwhile. For a moment, Fiorelli, a professor of legal studies, thought he stumbled onto just such a paper.

As he continued reading, though, a cloud of doubt began settling over his mind. He started comparing the quality of the paper with the student who wrote it, and the two weren’t matching up. “I thought it was really good,” he says. “And then I thought perhaps it was too good.”

Turning to his computer, he logged onto a legal research database, and his instincts proved correct. Five pages of the student’s seven-page paper were lifted from a Harvard University civil rights law review. Fiorelli’s heart sank.

“I don’t want to say I was mad, but I was disappointed,” says Fiorelli. “I confronted the student, and he admitted to it. My syllabus was very specific about that. I went through the dean and the academic vice president, and we had him removed from the program. It was a troubling incident.”

That was more than 10 years ago. And though he didn’t know it then, Fiorelli was seeing an early ripple in the new wave of academic cheating—stealing from the Internet. On campuses around the country, university administrators are trying to combat this growing problem. Last year, the University of Virginia found itself in the news after catching 122 students plagiarizing term papers in an introductory physics course. Ohio University made the news in 2000 when it reported 35 cases of cheating after averaging just 12 per year in the five years prior. Wesleyan College in Middle-town, Conn., also reported 32 violations of its academic honor code.

It’s an age-old challenge that has developed a 21st century twist. And even though New-Age technology offers high-tech ways of dealing with the problem, simply catching the culprits isn’t enough because the problem’s roots are deeper and the implications wider. Universities must place a greater emphasis on teaching ethics, say those who deal with the issue, because if a student graduates thinking it’s all right to cheat, he’ll carry that mentality into the corporate world.

While a number of web sites that sell complete research papers exist, the most common problem revolves around mosaic-style papers with bits and pieces of information lifted, uncredited, from a variety of sources, says John Barrie, founder of Turnitin.com, a service that helps detect Internet-related cheating. Barrie’s company analyzes nearly 10,000 papers daily. Of these, about 30 percent are “less than original.”

It’s “cut-and-paste plagiarism,” says Donald McCabe, a management professor at Rutgers University and founding president of the Duke University-based Center for Academic Integrity. McCabe has been studying student cheating since 1990. He’s surveyed more than 25,000 students and found that students begin cheating as early as the fifth grade. The percentages reach a staggering 97 percent of high school students if behavior such as copying another student’s homework or turning in homework done by parents is included.

Though the college numbers never reach the levels of high schoolers, they’re hardly comforting. The most common offenses are longstanding ones—sharing questions and answers on tests, nonpermitted collaboration. But, says McCabe, cut-and-paste papers from electronic sources are quickly catching up. Internet-related plagiarism is the fastest-growing form of academic cheating over the past five years.

Still, McCabe argues there’s no hard evidence that the Internet actually creates new cheaters, despite some reports to the contrary. Instead, he says, the Internet is just increasing the frequency among those who already cheat. Its convenience is a mighty temptation and hard for them to pass up.

There are no statistics on the frequency of cheating at Xavier, but Mike Webb, dean of the Williams College of Business, says his experience mirrors McCabe’s research. “We haven’t really seen a rise in plagiarism overall,” he says. “But we have seen more of the electronic plagiarism using the web.”

Like Webb, Xavier colleagues Janice Walker, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Neil Heighberger, dean of the College of Social Sciences, have also seen an increase in the number of reported cases of Internet-related plagiarism in recent years. But, Heighberger adds, it’s difficult to know whether to attribute it to more students actually plagiarizing from the Internet or to an increased awareness among the faculty.

For administrators and faculty, this raises two questions: How can cheating be detected? And how should the attitudes behind it be dealt with? Ironically, the Internet, which provides a convenient avenue for cheaters, has also made detection easier. The establishment of Internet-based tracking services such as Barrie’s Turnitin.com are helping to level the playing field. Xavier subscribes to PlagiServe and Turnitin.com, which requires instructors to set up individual accounts. That allows for easier tracking. Thus far, the service was used 76 times with several positive hits.

If fear of detection isn’t enough of a deterrent, disciplinary consequences exist for those caught. The University has three disciplinary options in cases of cheating: students may be given a zero on the test or project, failed for the course or expelled from school. Walker says that in most cases, instructors choose to give students a zero. In a few more extreme cases, instructors fail the student. Expulsion, like Fiorelli’s case, is rare.

Changing the attitudes behind academic cheating, however, is a much deeper and more global challenge. “Everybody does it” is a popular excuse among students caught cheating, says Walker. McCabe agrees.

“Students generally see an erosion of ethics and standards in the larger society,” McCabe says. “So clearly, even in cases where they know it’s cheating, they’re able to justify it quite readily. And then there’s just this feeling of intense competition. Certainly students feel that the competition to get into better colleges, to get the better jobs, is much more intense today than it has been historically. It’s a pressure that many of them just can’t resist, particularly if they see other students getting away with it.”

It’s this erosion of values that concerns Turnitin.com’s Barrie. “That’s the biggest problem that we are going to face as a society in the future, that we’re breeding all of these students—not just students, the high-achieving students—who have a philosophy that cheating is the way it works,” he says. “I think, whatever problem we have right now with Enron and Arthur Andersen and Firestone is going to seem like a baby problem compared to what we’re going to have in the future. I think it’s naive to believe that once you get your high school or college diploma, suddenly you become an ethical person. So you combine that with a lack of critical thinking skills and people reaching positions of power, and you get future leaders with a shaky ethical foundation. I don’t think it’s pretty.”

To be fair, there are gray areas. Walker believes that most students know when they’ve done something wrong because most deny doing it. But she also admits there are some cases where students clearly don’t understand the impact of their actions. McCabe says that most students readily agree that sharing information on a test or plagiarizing constitute cheating, but adds that they don’t always agree that using uncited sources—or even fabricating a bibliography—rise to that level.

Even so, Heighberger says, the University has taken steps to boost its value-laden curriculum with an even greater effort to provide students with a solid ethical foundation. He points to the ethics, religion and society block of required courses that addresses ethics in philosophy, theology and literature.

Last year, the University also established the center for business ethics and social responsibility, with Fiorelli as the director.

“We’ve done a good job with ethics in the past, but we really hadn’t coordinated it and encouraged the faculty to do more of that,” says Fiorelli, who is also a senior fellow for The Ethics Research Center in Washington, D.C. “The goal is really to give more exposure to ethics to the students. And the way we want to accomplish that is by making the faculty more comfortable incorporating ethics into their classroom material.”

The center launched a program to bring in experts from finance, marketing, management and accounting to talk to the different departments. The center also awarded six grants to faculty to work on incorporating more ethics into their particular classes.

Faculty members already “talk about ethics and values across the spectrum of courses that we do,” says Walker. And although there’s no uniform policy, Walker believes that faculty are being more explicit in conveying their expectations concerning plagiarism.

“They don’t tell them right up front, ‘If you try this, I have the means and methods to catch you,’ ” says Walker. “You want to make sure that they understand plagiarism first of all. If they’re aware of it, then they make a deliberate choice not to engage in it. That’s the hope. However, we know that there are some students who clearly understand and for some reason choose to do it.”

In spite of the best efforts of all involved, no one is foolish enough to predict the end of cheating. “You’ll never stop it completely,” McCabe says bluntly. “The objective is to reduce to as low a level as possible the more significant forms of cheating.”

Walker got a potent reminder of this at the end of the spring semester. Her office typically gets “a couple” of cases of cheating a year. It dealt with “a half-dozen or so” around exam time. Ultimately, Walker says, part of the difficulty in dealing with a dynamic issue like cheating is that instructors, who are on the front lines, have to strike a balance between dealing with ethical issues and covering the required course material.

“It’s a lot like raising children,” she says. “You think you’re doing the right thing, but how do you know until they’re grown and you look back?”

For eight hours every day, work is the priority for the University’s faculty, staff and administrators. But at the end of the day, well, it’s the end of the day: Time to unwind, test the boundaries and exercise something more than gray matter. For some, this means jumping in a canoe and navigating raging whitewater rapids. For others, it means sitting down for a game of Japanese chess or standing up in front of a crowd and singing great choral works. Their interests are as diverse as the University itself, but they all share one thing in common: Whatever their pleasure, they pursue it with passion.

A DOSE OF H2OHHHH

Susan Namei’s Mecca isn’t the National Road, but the National River—West Virginia’s New River Gorge National River, to be specific. Among the oldest and most challenging waterways in North America, it’s become a second home to the nursing instructor and veteran whitewater canoeist.

Prompted by what she calls a “near fiasco” canoeing trip in Canada, she took paddling lessons with the local Sierra Club chapter in 1989 and immediately became hooked. The sport, she says, is a free-flowing adventure, avocation and psychological expedition all in one.

“Since each river is different and various water levels create different dynamics on the same river, it is very much an intellectual as well as a total body sport,” she says. It also creates great stories to spin while sitting around the campfire.

“The first time I was on a trip after canoe school, we went about 100 feet and got pinned on a rock. I asked my partner what to do, and he had no idea. Someone soon came to our rescue and gave us instructions to lean down-stream. So we did and off the rock we came. Later, we were among several boats that capsized because of a big wave. It was somewhere between 4 and 10 feet high.”

“As someone was trying to pull me into their canoe, I couldn’t get my leg up because my pants had fallen down around my knees. After some pulling and tugging by the rescuer, the pants came back up enough so I could get in. We had a lot of laughs that night. After that, I was hooked.”

What life lessons does Namei take from her avocation?

“Our lives are like the river—there are many turns and twists with obstacles appearing out of nowhere. With the right skills, you can use the current to your advantage and maneuver around the obstacles. Canoeing a river is a journey and not a destination.”

BRUSH WITH GREATNESS

The idea of wall murals immediately conjures up images of gigantic art forms such as those in the Cincinnati Museum Center—grandiose artistic statements that dominate even the museum’s massive rotunda. For Dorinda Giles, however, wall murals are as simple as a child’s plaything.

The associate vice president for information systems spends her free time painting and recently tackled a wall-sized mural in her grandson’s bedroom. The painter spent most of her Saturdays last spring on the endeavor, creating a literal Jurassic Park—or, more accurately, Cretaceous Park—filled with T-rexes and long-neck bronto-sauruses on his bedroom walls.

“My grandson is very into dinosaurs, and his room is a real dinorama,” she says.

Giles’ tyrannosaurus rex, for instance, is a real looker—almost 60 teeth, all serrated. As an artist, she’s had to reach back 70 million years or so for her subjects.

“My inspiration has come from a number of posters and books, but all the pictures are done freehand,” she says. “It is great fun.”

If you find yourself lucky enough to wangle an invitation to view Giles’ handiwork, don’t forget to bring your video camera. And, of course, be sure to pack the raptor repellent.

HEAVENLY VOICE

If you’ve ever heard a wedding singer crooning “Ave Maria” in Latin, or a soloist performing Mozart’s “Wait on the Lord” in the pews, you might well have been listening to Kara Rettig-Pfingstag. The coordinator of pre-professional health advising in the department of biology began singing in choirs 14 years ago. Today, she sings in churches twice a month as well as on all major church holiday services. Plus the occasional wedding.

“I’ve always loved to sing,” she says. “In fact, my dad has an old reel-to-reel tape of me singing my heart out to all kinds of kids songs. It was just about the same time I started talking, so it’s almost like I skipped the ‘learning to talk’ stage and went right into singing.”

So why just limit her talents to liturgical songs? “I enjoy the fact that liturgical singing is all about what your voice, your gift from God, can bring to the service and to the worship of God,” she says. It’s also given her the chance to learn a few things about life.

“I’ve learned to not be afraid of taking risks and to just put your fears and insecurities aside and just sing your heart out,” she says. “That’s how I think everyone should live life. Don’t be afraid to live and to jump in and do something new or something you never imagined yourself doing, because you never know—you might just enjoy it and have fun.

“Whatever life gives you, throw yourself into it and enjoy because before you know it, you might be 85 years old and sitting in a retirement home full of ‘what ifs’ and regrets, wondering how you let life get away.”

ON THE MOOOOOOVE

When Phil Glasgo leaves behind his role as associate professor of finance, he puts himself out to pasture. Literally. Glasgo raises Angus beef cattle on a farm in Indiana. Glasgo comes by his side interest honestly, growing up on a central Ohio dairy farm. When Glasgo was 12 years old, his dad switched to raising beef cattle.

“As a result of baling hay in the hot summer sun, milking cows twice a day, 365 days a year and performing other objectionable farm chores such as hauling manure, I knew the one thing I didn’t want to do was end up on a farm,” says Glasgo. “In fact, as a math major at Ohio University, when the guys were going out partying on Friday night, I thought about pitching manure, baling hay and milking cows—and went back to studying.”

Why then the hobby? “As much as I hate to admit it, apparently farming was still in my blood, and I get a lot of pleasure out of seeing the calves born in the spring,” he says.

After earning a Ph.D. in finance at Ohio State, he met his wife, Dana, whose family had a farm near Guilford, Ind. The two moved onto the 114-acre farm, and by 1982, he had a herd of about five cows. That number grew to 70 cows and calves.

Even with fences, cattle escape from time to time. “Last year, we had a knock at the door at 3:00 a.m. Sunday,” he says. “It was the neighbors telling us that we had about 25 cows in our front yard. With the boys’ help, we held an impromptu roundup—still in our pajamas—and returned them to the field.”

It keeps Glasgo on his toes. “I refer to them as my organic lawn mowers, and in the fall I eat one of the lawn mowers,” he says laughing. More seriously, Glasgo adds, “I do insist that my family finish any meat dish they eat, but not the vegetables.”

LESSONS IN SHOGI

To say Alan Baker plays chess is akin to saying Ken Griffey Jr. plays a little baseball—a gross understatement. An assistant professor in the department of philosophy, Baker indulges in the complexities of “shogi,” or Japanese chess.

“In my opinion, shogi is actually a better game than Western chess,” says Baker. “The most important difference is that in shogi the pieces are all the same color. Different Japanese characters are written on each piece to distinguish them from each other. The two players’ pieces point in different directions. When you capture your opponent’s pieces, you can turn them around and drop them back on the board as your own. This ‘paratroop’ aspect of the game makes it much more tactical and aggressive than chess.”

The game is actually a distant cousin of Western chess—both derive from an ancient form that started in India. Shogi, however, is played very rarely outside of Japan. Inside the nation, though, it is extremely popular, with a flourishing professional circuit, world championship, TV programs and newspaper columns.

“I was given a plastic shogi set for my 13th birthday, but I did not start playing regularly until my mid-20s when I visited Japan in 1996,” says Baker, who has been playing Western chess since he was 6 years old and competing in numerous tournaments.

Indeed, Baker won the Eden Park chess tournaments in Cincinnati in 2000 and 2001. By pure coincidence—and to Baker’s good fortune—Cincinnati is also home to one of only four shogi clubs in the United States. The others are New York City, Wash-ington, D.C., and Los Angeles.

“The other place I play shogi is on the Internet. I can log onto Japanese shogi servers and find thousands of potential opponents at any time of the day or night,” he says. “These online games are played in real time, with the board and pieces appearing on the screen in front of you.”

Once, while visiting Japan, Baker was invited by the local shogi club to a match against the teacher in charge. “We played a hard-fought game that lasted over three hours, a game which he eventually won. We had no language in common.”

“I found out later from a friend that the teacher had been amazed to find a foreigner who could play shogi to a reasonably high standard.”

Since January, when the Boston Globe broke the story about Bernard Cardinal Law’s handling of cases of sex abuse by former priests, an almost continuous series of disturbing stories has been repeated nationwide. In the wake of revelations of sexual abuse, nearly 300 priests and bishops have been removed from their ministry or resigned. 

The shock at the magnitude of these abuses has been matched, if not surpassed, by the anger at the way some bishops dealt with cases—moving guilty priests to new parish assignments without informing parishioners, using legal negotiations and out-of-court financial settlements to keep victims from making allegations public, giving the impression they were more concerned about protecting the church’s reputation than children.

It’s created a backlash. Laity are protesting, demanding more of a voice in church matters. They’re collecting funds and distributing them on their own to Catholic charities, bypassing church channels. Abuse survivors are fighting back. In Kentucky alone, approximately 150 lawsuits have already been filed against church officials. Nationally, as much as $1 billion may be paid in settlements, says Thomas P. Doyle, a military chaplain who co-authored a 1985 report on clergy sex abuse.

With such serious and ongoing struggles, questions abound: Where does this scandal leave the church? Can this be overcome? What is its future? Only time will truly answer these questions, but a peek at the church’s past may also provide a preview. In its 2,000 years, the Catholic Church has endured numerous crises. Most were effectively resolved, and the church often evolved into a stronger institution morally and structurally.

As the current crisis reminds us, the church’s call to holiness is—and always has been—an ongoing challenge. Through its two millennia of history, many examples of grace and goodness, as well as sin and corruption, can be found. Thus, studying the present crisis through an historical lens can be quite instructive. One point of reference: the events leading up to the 16th century’s Protestant Reformation, when there were repeated calls for the church’s reform “in head and members.”

At the time, papal nepotism and corruption were manifest. From 1378-1414, three different popes claimed simultaneously to be the true pope, each giving away or selling benefices in order to secure allegiances. During the papacy of Leo X between 1513-1521, some 2,000 church jobs “were literally sold over the counter at the Vatican,” Thomas Bokenkotter observed in A Concise History of the Catholic Church. “Even a cardinal’s hat might go to the highest bidder.”

Bishops acquired multiple bishoprics to increase their wealth, meaning they were regularly absent from other dioceses, thus allowing spiritual decay and priestly misconduct to multiply. Clerics were immune from the normal jurisdiction of civil magistrates, despite committing felonies. Monks and nuns failed to live according to their religious orders’ rules. Men were ordained despite being ignorant of scripture and theology. Priests lived openly with mistresses. Even Pope Alexander VI was openly promiscuous, fathering six sons and three daughters with different women.

Not all of these mirror the issues of today, but some parallels can be drawn.

Then, as today, moral misconduct was not an isolated event.

Then, as today, clerics guilty of misconduct were not necessarily more numerous than those in other occupations, nor were their crimes more heinous. Yet abuses certainly seemed worse—and still do today—when committed by clerics. As Owen Chadwick observed in The Reformation: “The clergy were the keepers of the public conscience.”

Then, as today, the failure of church leaders to curb corruption and effect real reform during the councils of Constance, Basel and Lateran V fueled discontent among church members. They became more critical, impatient and outspoken in support of reform.

Then, as today, the stories of misconduct were disseminated widely through the media. With the invention of the Gutenberg press in the 15th century, it became possible to print multiple copies of treatises more quickly and economically than ever. This made it possible for Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses to be distributed throughout Germany in a matter of weeks.

Then, as today, many people of faith persevered in their pursuit of holiness despite egregious cases of misconduct. Some, such as St. Catherine of Siena, combined personal virtue and love of the church with a critical call for church reform. The same is true today—Archbishop Oscar Romero being an example.

Of course, differences between then and today exist, many of them significant. The Reformation involved doctrinal matters—issues believed to affect one’s eternal destiny—and not simply matters of moral and ecclesial reform. The Reformation was also fueled by politics and nationalistic aspirations. But does this history provide any insight into the future of the church? I think so. When the crisis of the 16th century couldn’t be silenced by papal admonitions of Luther and others, the church convened a general council at Trent. It addressed the doctrinal issues so important to Luther and Calvin as well as the church’s moral and administrative problems.

Trent mandated the establishment of seminaries, where priests could be properly trained; it promoted a careful study of scripture and the dissemination of biblical knowledge; and it required bishops to make authentic preaching of the gospel their chief duty. It also required members of religious orders to adhere assiduously to a pious lifestyle; it exhorted bishops and prelates to live modestly; and it gave bishops the authority to remove from the active priesthood those clerics guilty of “grave crimes” and the power to hand them over to the civil court.

The 25th Session of the Council in December 1563 specifically addressed the public scandal of priests and bishops cohabitating with mistresses. If they didn’t reform their moral lives, such clergy were subject to penalties that ranged from losing one-third of their income to suspension, excommunication or imprisonment.

The measures enacted by the Council of Trent rooted out many pastoral, moral and administrative problems because the church’s leaders dedicated themselves indefatigably to making those measures effective. The reforms strengthened the church and enabled it to confront subsequent challenges with renewed vitality.

In response to the present crisis, Pope John Paul II summoned U.S. cardinals to Rome in April, where he called sexual abuse a sin and a crime. He expressed the hope that the church, through its response, would demonstrate “there is no place in the priesthood and religious life for those who would harm the young.”

In June, the U.S. Catholic bishops met in Dallas, where Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, delivered a fervent apology to survivors of abuse and promised effective measures to prevent future abuses. The bishops approved a Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People and established norms for dealing with sexual abuse allegations. A national review board comprised of prominent Catholic lay leaders was appointed and charged with monitoring the bishops’ implementation of the policies.

The promulgation of legislation by itself will not resolve the problems, of course. At the very least, church leaders must demonstrate through consistent and long-term actions that their words in Dallas were sincere. If church leaders want to avoid the permanent disaffection of large numbers of Catholics, they must not only enforce this charter, but also create structures and procedures by which the laity can be more fully engaged in the church’s decision-making processes.

A key difference between the crisis today and the crisis in the 16th century is the ecclesiology—the understanding of the church—that has taken hold among contemporary laity. The “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church,” promulgated by Vatican II in 1964, broke down the wall between clergy and laity, which the Protestant Reformers had breached nearly 450 years earlier. The Catholic laity have since assumed a much more active role in the life of the church. Whereas most Christians were illiterate at the time of the Reformation, the “democratization” of education has created a laity today who can read the scriptures, theological traditions and media reports for themselves. Education and the spirit of the Enlightenment, coupled with the American emphasis on civil liberties such as freedom of speech, have made Am-erican Catholics outspoken in their criticism of church problems. They want change. They want the church to be more open, less secretive; more participatory, less authoritarian.

Despite these aspirations and the pronouncements of Vatican II that undergird them, the perception lingers in some quarters of the church that the proper role of the laity is simply to “pay, pray, and obey.” It was barely a century ago that Pope Pius X claimed that the church is “essentially an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the Pastors and the flock . . . [and] the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the Pastors.”

Yet as the first national convention of Voice of the Faithful in July made clear, many American Catholics are unwilling to be docile followers when their bishops are perceived to be poor leaders. The 4,200 Catholics from about 40 states who gathered in Boston for the convention resonated when James E. Post, a Boston University professor and president of Voice, declared: “Today we assert our right and our responsibility as baptized Catholics to participate in the decision-making processes of each parish, each diocese and the whole Catholic Church.”

Vatican II acknowledged the legitimacy of such lay responsibility. Yet it suggested lay input should be channeled through church structures. But what happens when the structures don’t exist or are inadequate? What happens when the laity, as in Boston, begin to collect money for church ministries from Catholics who are unwilling to give that money to the local cardinal for disbursement, and the cardinal, in turn, forbids archdiocesan charities to accept that money?

History teaches us that the church needs dedicated leaders who will confess to any crimes committed, make restitution and establish and enforce procedures to ensure abuse is unlikely to recur. But we can’t just look to the past. We also need to discern the current signs of the times, such as a deep desire of many Catholics for greater transparency in church structures and greater lay participation in decision-making. The Vatican II assertion that the church is the entire people of God—and not simply the clergy or the hierarchy—and its admission that the church is human and sinful, and not simply a divine sign and instrument of communion with God, must be reaffirmed.

The urgency of the task that faces the church and the humility with which it must be confronted are expressed well in the words of Vatican II’s “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.” It confessed that the church “is well aware that in the course of its long history it has not lacked members, both clerical and lay, who have been unfaithful to the Spirit of God. Even at present the church is not blind to the large gap which exists between the message which it delivers and the human frailty of those who are entrusted with the gospel. Whatever may be the verdict of history on these failings, we ought to be aware of them and assiduously combat them to prevent their harming the spread of the gospel.”

Church reform is not simply a human-inspired agenda, nor can it be effected by a single part of the church. As the body of Christ, the church needs the full participation of head and members in responding to the call of Christ who, in the words of Vatican II’s “Decree on Ecumenism,” summons the church to “that continual reformation of which she always has need.”