A scandal for one man but no crisis for the church

So now the Roman Catholic Church has been "plunged into deep crisis" by the news that one of its bishops has fathered a child. Not embroiled in a juicy scandal, you notice, but plunged into a deep crisis.

The quotation comes from one of yesterday's broadsheet newspapers. "Mother rocks Catholic church," screeched another. "The Roman Catholic church stands accused of hypocrisy," pontificated a third. We need not concern ourselves with the tabloid verdicts.

There is no doubt that a celibate bishop with a 15-year-old child is a great story. But what impels people to elevate it to the level of an institutional crisis?

Contrary to what most commentators insist, Catholicism is not "in turmoil" over this sad case. The church is a body with a clear code of rules. One of its leading figures has broken the rules. The result may be a scandal, but the errant behaviour of one bishop is hardly, by any stretch of the imagination, a crisis.

There will be those who will protest it is not just one. There was in 1992 the former bishop of Galway, Eamonn Casey, who had been dipping into diocesan funds for 17 years to support his illegitimate child.

Just last year there was the Swiss bishop Hans-Joerg Vogel who was discovered to have a girlfriend he had made pregnant. There have been a couple of others. But that is out of a total of 3,292 bishops throughout the church. All this is small beer.

Through almost 2,000 years the Catholic Church has weathered all manner of sexual scandal. Several popes installed their mistresses in the Vatican. Homosexual popes made cardinals of their catamites. Charges of incest, rape, sodomy, bestiality have dogged the papacy over the centuries. Despite all this the church has survived as one of history's most robust institutions.

But there is something in the modern mindset that is unable to distinguish between individuals and institutions. We have an incorrigible tendency to extrapolate the universal from the particular. The hypocrisy of an individual cleric does not constitute the hypocrisy of a church.

The same failure in metaphysical imagination is evident in our inability to separate the shortcomings of individual members of the Royal Family from the constitutional role the monarchy plays in our polity.

Just because a churchman has broken the rules does not mean - whatever over-heated newspaper reports say - that the rules on celibacy are likely to be altered.

The church has, at the instigation of its founder, a long track record of distinguishing between the sinner and the sin - and suggesting that no mortal is fit to cast the first stone.

Indeed it might be thought rather reassuring that a body which has in the past been so keen to arrogate to itself notions of infallibility reveals such mundane fallibility on behalf of those it places in positions of authority.

All this is not to say that the Catholic Church does not have grave problems. This week's protests against the Pope during his visit to France - over his stance on contraception, abortion, homosexuality et al - reveal the tensions with which it wrestles.

The modern church is divided into two camps. There are those who see the values of the Gospel as immutably linked to certain social norms and behaviour. And there are those who see them manifest in changing ways as society changes.

The real debate is thus between absolutists and proportionalists, but you are hardly likely to find that straying on to the front pages of the nation's newspapers.

Yet the theological differences are intense and their consequences are profound. They will surface increasingly in two areas - sexual and ecclesiastical.

On the sexual front we can expect increasingly stubborn dissent on the nature of sexuality, largely led by the growing sense that developing thought on gay and lesbian sexuality will slowly alter theological thinking on what it means to be in a loving relationship and what the implications of this are for Christian notions of love.

The church is already under siege for its old notion, ensconced in Catholic natural law, that sex is only about human reproduction. In recent years it has nuanced the position, but its essence remains. It is on this principle that the papal ban on contraception rests - a ban which lay Catholic society has rejected as it has embraced secular notions that love is about more than reproduction. The church's position here can only become more untenable.

All this has implications for ecclesiology. It will feed the debates on the role of women in the church and the desirability of married priests. It may make more disgruntled the large numbers of married ex-priests who are at present denied real status by Rome.

These will be the tectonic plates in this classic conservative versus liberal struggle. As the Pope becomes more ill they will no doubt intensify as thoughts focus on his successor. Then perhaps we might have a real crisis to write about.