In the 40 years since Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council, Roman Catholic theologians have fiercely debated how the church should be run. The council encouraged a sweeping series of reforms aimed at democratizing the church, but those who supported its conclusions have often felt themselves at odds with subsequent popes more committed to centralized power, most notably John Paul II.
The current scandal over sexual abuse by some Catholic priests may have tipped the balance back in favor of liberal reformers, at least within the United States. Several theologians said this week that reformers who have pushed for changes on a range of fronts — from giving the laity more power to re-examining longstanding policies on celibacy and female priests — have gained new momentum.
"There's no doubt it strengthens reformers," said Stephen Pope, a theology professor at Boston College. "What begins with a desire for more participation by the laity extends first to personnel questions like greater inclusiveness in decisions about where pastors go and the appointment of bishops. But from there it goes right to institutional issues. You have priests and even bishops raising issues like celibacy that they never wanted to discuss before. If this scandal continues to spread, and I've just seen reports about it emerging in Mexico, there's going to be some serious soul-searching at every level, including among theologians."
Yet if liberal reformers were hoping that the scandal might spur their ideological opponents to switch sides, they are likely to be disappointed. One of the striking features of the debate that is swirling among theologians themselves is that the same events are cited as evidence for completely different viewpoints.
"This situation can be used to spin the argument for either side, and they've both been fueling the fire, which I don't think is particularly helpful," said Therese Lysaught, a theologian at the University of Dayton. She said that she hoped next week's extraordinary meeting in Rome between the pope and American cardinals would begin a reconciliation.
"The Rome meeting will be a pivotal opportunity to depolarize it," she added.
Others are skeptical of a meeting of the minds. "Theologians have all staked out positions either for the status quo or for reform in the church," said the Rev. Thomas Reese, editor of America, a Catholic magazine, "and I don't think this is going to change the minds of very many of them."
Some traditional Catholics, for instance, say that weakening the authority of the church was a cause of this scandal, and should not be considered a solution.
"What you call `reformers,' others might just as well call `deconstructors,' " said George Weigel, a biographer of Pope John Paul II who maintains close ties to the Vatican.
"A great many cases of clerical sexual abuse in the U.S. seem to have happened from the mid-60's through the late 1980's, a season of confusion in which a culture of dissent took hold in a large part of the Church in the U.S., and especially in seminaries," Mr. Weigel said. "When men began to think that they could legitimately dissent on crucial doctrinal and moral teachings, even if they had to pay lip service to these teachings, a kind of self-deception sets in, and it's little wonder that some men sooner or later started giving themselves passes on behavioral issues, too.
"That there have been very, very few cases from the 1990's suggests that the reform of the seminaries initiated in the late 1980's by John Paul II is having an effect."
Linda Pieczynski, a board member and former president of Call to Action, which has about 25,000 members and is the largest liberal Catholic group in the United States, acknowledges that there have been no major defections from the conservative to the liberal camp.
"I haven't seen anything like that," Ms. Pieczynski said. "There are still conservative traditionalists who chalk this scandal up to individual sin and the sins of a secular society, and they aren't changing their minds as far as I know."
Still, Ms. Pieczynski insists that the shocking cases of sexual abuse have greatly strengthened the liberals' position.
"Groups like ours are using this as an illustration of why we need to rethink many of our institutionalized positions," she said. "It makes it harder for theologians on the other side to marginalize us."
Arguments for changing church traditions are strengthened, some liberal reformers say, by the revelations that bishops — whom the pope normally names without consulting lay Catholics — failed to prevent sexual assaults on children.
"The quality of the discussion which begins with responding to the victims now examines the power structures that promoted silence, secrecy and deference," said the Rev. James F. Keenan, who teaches moral theology at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Mass.
Bernard Cooke, professor emeritus of theology at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., said that the scandal strengthened an already well-developed consensus among Catholic theologians that there should be "moderation if not reform" in some church practices.
"It gives more weight to arguments for local rather than centralized responsibility," Mr. Cooke said. "There's a great deal of discussion about this among theologians. Most of them would agree that the church will look different in 50 years. Certainly these latest events are going to accelerate the process."
Some theologians argue that the charged debates in which they are currently engaged in are ultimately secondary to those occurring among the faithful.
"I don't know in what order they're going to happen, but all great change in the church happens from the bottom up, not from the top down," Lawrence S. Cunningham, a theology professor at the University of Notre Dame, said. "It's difficult to think of an example of a pope getting up in the morning and making a radical change in the Catholic Church.
But pressure from below has often led to huge changes. There was a time when it was unthinkable that women religious would leave the cloister and go out into the streets the way they do now. It's not clear to me that there's an intimate connection between this current scandal and priestly celibacy, but other people disagree, and these issues are now really coming to the fore."
The tension between the role of the hierarchy and the laity has been simmering ever since Vatican II. American Catholics, like those in other developed countries, began pressing for a greater role in church affairs long before the current scandal erupted. According to a survey published by The National Catholic Reporter in 1999, a majority of all Catholics in the United States favored more participatory decision-making at the Vatican as well as at the parish and diocesan levels.
To Mr. Cunningham, "the idea that the laity is going to be a bunch of sheep that the hierarchy can control seems to me harder to defend now than ever." He added, "For better or worse, bishops have lost a lot of their moral authority. At the same time, we now have in the United States a better educated and more concerned laity than we have had in the whole history of the church. People are making more demands, and now it's going to be harder than ever to ignore them."
Despite the palpable sense of crisis within the church, some specialists continue to doubt that this scandal will produce any fundamental swing in theological opinion, religious teaching or church policy.
"There are only 11 American cardinals eligible to participate in electing the next pope," Father Reese said. "Certainly they've been affected very strongly by this, but there are a lot of other issues facing the church around the world. Anyone who expects radical change by the next pope is going to be disappointed. This pope has appointed 93 percent of the cardinals, and he's done exactly what you or I would do if we were pope, which is to appoint people who agree with his views."