Sacred Silence: Denial and Crisis in the Church By Donald B.

If one can read only one chapter of Cozzens, the most important is chapter 7, 'Clerical Culture.' Lay Catholics have caught whiffs of the various pathologies in seminaries, rectories and chanceries for years, but Cozzens' account still. Donald Cozzens, a priest and writer, is the author of several books. He has read Rahner and Schneiders, Sipe and Ruether, Wills and Kennedy, the very best analysis available from those highly-educated Catholics grieving over church behavior, tenacious in their critical analysis of its roots, and yet imbued with a stubborn hope for the future. His chapters deal with child abuse and its cover-up the exclusion and humiliation of women the abuse of nuns in Africa the denial of a homosexual culture in clerical systems (as the hierarchy condemns homosexuality) and the wholesale failure of leadership in the American church. He has been undaunted in entering the very darkest corners of our situation. Cozzens is sincere, well-informed and experienced in church politics. The feminist insight that social, ecclesial and professional location is a determining factor in how and what one sees is very useful here. Having known this in our bones with increasing certitude over recent years, many are now seeking good historical explanations for this crisis and looking to pick the brains of good people as to the future.ĭonald Cozzens is an insider, a seminary rector from the Cleveland archdiocese. The church is on the brink of destabilization.' (National Public Radio, December 13, 2002) McBrien of Notre Dame has called 'the most serious crisis since the Reformation, certainly in US Catholic history. They were published in response to what Richard P. BOTH OF THESE SHORT BOOKS (Cozzens: 200 pages Carroll: 130 pages) are fine reads by leading American Catholic, reform-minded men.

Sacred Silence by Donald Cozzens