SACRED SILENCE: Denial and the Crisis in the Church

"How is it that a church that is the bearer of the Word and the champion of the oppressed can maintain unholy silences while denying that obvious pastoral and ecclesial problems, indeed crises, exist?" Cozzens answers that pressing question with a call for the Roman Catholic Church to break through its wall of silence and acknowledge its leadership problems with "redemptive honesty." What follows is a sensible and thorough discussion of some of the hot-button issues facing the Church: "the perennial muting of women's voices," the crisis of vocations, the well-publicized sexual abuse scandals, the numbers of gay men in the priesthood. Cozzens, who was in seminary during Vatican II but whose education was "decidedly pre-conciliar," has a gift for placing contemporary debates within a longer historical frame of discussion. He also has a deep understanding of human psychology, which enables him to write sympathetically about why people are complicit in the "culture of silence"—even detailing instances when he has participated in such silent conspiracies himself. (Nov.)