Donald Cozzens -- seminary rector, professor, and priest of the diocese of Cleveland -- begins his recent examination of the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church with a question posed by Los Angeles Archbishop Roger Mahony, who had asked him, "What are we afraid of?"
SACRED SILENCE is Cozzens's effort to respond. He also reflects on the sources of larger and more deep-seated dilemmas in Catholicism today: institutional defensiveness, authoritarianism, internal polarization and destabilization, hierarchical resistance to the insights and full participation of women, sexual repressiveness, and, perhaps most damaging of all, the persistence of a debilitating and counterproductive clerical culture.
The result is a book that is at once readable and insightful, providing perhaps the best overview to date of the roots of what Cozzens calls "a systemic or structural crisis that threatens the current lines of [Church] power that have gone unchallenged for centuries."
According to Cozzens, "unholy silence and unhealthy denial have held sway" for far too long ("in every century of the church's long history") to lend themselves to easy answers or quick fixes. His exploration is therefore broad in scope, encompassing preliminary discussions of forms of denial and the meanings of silence before moving on to treatment of matters such as the voices of women, religious life and the priesthood, and ministry and leadership. In this context, and with comparable attention and emphasis, Cozzens discusses the factors that are generally presumed to be more directly at the heart of what is going on today: abuse of our children, gay men in the priesthood, and clerical culture.
This wise approach enables the reader to see that what dominates the current headlines is only part of what troubles the Catholic Church. That can only be understood and addressed in a comprehensive and holistic way, and Cozzens begins the process in his final chapter, "Sacred Silence, Sacred Speech," where he calls for a Church that is "true to its prophetic calling," for "honest conversation" among all the Church's members (laity, religious and clergy; women and men; married couples and parents), and for a willingness to "speak the truth in love" and to be open to the fundamentally subversive message of Christianity ("to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable").
Cozzens, who was ordained in 1965, is hardly a revolutionary or a radical. In this book and in his previous writing (most notably THE CHANGING FACE OF THE PRIESTHOOD in 2000), he speaks comfortably in the first person about Catholicism and addresses his message most directly to others who share both his concern and his love for the Church. People who are familiar with the plethora of recent works on Catholicism, sexuality, and clericalism -- particularly by authors such as Eugene Kennedy, Garry Wills, Michael Crosby, Walter Brueggemann, and John Cornwell -- and those who read regularly in such mainstays of the Catholic press as AMERICA, COMMONWEAL, and the NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER, will find little that is new or surprising in SACRED SILENCE. 
