The Case Against the Catholic Church
BY CHRISTOPHER LOCK
12.11.2002 | RELIGION
THE SCENE: An eleven-year-old boy goes to confessional. Probably he doesn't want to, but he's been raised Catholic, so he's taught to believe it's an important universal mechanism for absolving sins. He sits down in a dark, intimate chamber, and the priest asks about his misdeeds. When he can't think of any off hand, the priest asks whether he has ever masturbated. To tell the truth, he has. Then the face behind the screen asks him not to give penance, nor to reflect on the church's teaching that masturbation is a sin. No. He is instead asked to give a demonstration.
Kingdom Come
This not the set-up for bar jokes, a la two priests and a nun. It is court testimony, and it is coming now at a sickening pace. Once considered an isolated event, we're now quite aware that the abuse of minors by Catholic priests was and is of epidemic proportions, and that the hierarchy of this judgmental faith systematically covers up the misdeeds of its chosen officers. One result is that countless youth, raised in a religious atmosphere hostile to homosexuality, were left to wonder whether they were really gay, whether they led a trusted Father astray, OR whether their immortal souls have been damned—and most kept this horrible torments secret for the balance of their lives.
We are not, it should be said again, talking about a dozen publicized cases across the country. We are talking about two hundred victims of just one priest. There are East Coast parishes with hundreds of cases pending—one has five hundred—and as early as 1985, a 92-page report warned of lawsuits totaling over a billion dollars. The cases against the church now number in the thousands, and every diocese has faced lawsuits or victims speaking out. "Bad priests" have been hastily dismissed, attendance has plummeted, and now—where it really hurts—the financial well is running dry. The Boston Archdiocese, which has been at the epicenter of this deceit, is on the verge of filing for bankruptcy protection. The bishops are gathering, the Pope has been notified, and a series of tepid proclamations have issued forth, reassuring us that the matter is being addressed. But the tone of the proclamation's tell us more about the Church than does their content, and this may be prove to be its undoing. An incredible institutional arrogance, once only directed at the victims, is now being directed at the public as well.
This seems to be an institution devoted more to the care of priests, from insane relocations of predators to well-padded retirements for men who cost millions. The human damage is mostly ignored or bought-off, new assignments are arranged for these pedophiles, often placing them with children, and the Church's priority seems to be preserving its image. A financial crisis is looming amidst a public relations meltdown. Many are now calling for major reforms, not just in policy but also in structure. There is a cry for power-sharing with the laity, and for a total reorganization of the Church itself.
There remain some voices, usually from the Church's conservative wing, who will call such proposals overwrought histrionics. The issue, they will still say, is overblown, the transgressions nothing more than the misinterpreted embraces of naive but well-meaning priests. Those who cling to such delusions would do well to read Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church, which was put together last summer by reporters at The Boston Globe. It reads, chapter by chapter, like a rogue's gallery of pedophiles, with Jekyll-and-Hyde scenarios that unfold over the decades: ghoulish men who'd won the trust of loyal families, single mothers, faithful children—priests taking sick advantage of their special access to service a strangely shared craving.
There is Father Geoghan grinning with his saintly smile, the molester who moved from town to town, bringing tears to the children who couldn't tell their parents why they feared the local priest. In one family he molested all seven kids, in another his target was a five year old. The Archdiocese hushed complaints against him and shuttled him from parish to parish, protecting itself at the expense of countless young men. Then there's the Reverend Gauthe. Imagine discovering that your nine year-old son had been sexually traumatized while acting as altar boy, only to slowly realize that all the older children of your household held their own terrible secrets as well. There's also Father Paquin, who "roused four boys from their alcohol-induced sleep" after an evening in which he "crawled into Jimmy Francis's sleeping bag" and on driving them home fell asleep, crashing the car and killing Francis. There's James Porter of the Fall River Diocese who, thanks to over 100 people stepping forward in 1992, was sentenced to 22 years in prison. And David A. Holley, the New Mexico priest now serving a 275-year sentence. And Father Shanley, whose settlements included one for $100,000 and another for anally raping a twelve or thirteen year-old boy. And the molester Father Tourigney. And Father Birmingham. And Reverend Bernard Lane....
In the past fifteen years, allegations of sexual abuse have surfaced against an estimated fifteen hundred American priests. Can we emphasize again that these instances are not the result of misunderstood signs of affection, nor of awkward children uncomfortable with a friendly embrace? Betrayal will tell you about the boy who was handed train fare by a priest who had just anally raped him, so he could ride home bleeding. In 2,200 pages of recently-released internal documents, the Boston Archdiocese details, in all its horrid splendor, the career of the Reverend Robert Meffan, who encouraged young women preparing to be nuns to have sex with him, by telling them to imagine it was intercourse with Christ himself. He invited them, according to the Church, to be "brides of Christ." He described himself—showing his capacity for punning—as "the second coming", and called sexual acts with him "spiritual stages" in the nuns' development. He was hounded into retirement in 1996, chased by both complaints from his victims and the opinion of senior Church officials that he was dangerously unbalanced. But in steeping down he was warmly praised by Cardinal Bernard Law, and even now remains unrepentant for what he did, having told the Boston Globe:
What I was trying to show [the women] is that Christ is human and you should love him as a human being. Don't think he's up there and he's spiritual and he's not human and physical. He's human, he's physical. That's what I was trying to point out to them. I felt that by having this little bit of intimacy with them that this is what it would be like with Christ.
These are, clearly, the words of a deranged man, and the question of why he did these things will likely never be answered. Other questions, however, can and should be answered, including if and how the victims' will overcome their buried confusion and guilt, and particularly what will become of a Church more concerned with cover-ups than with real remedies or even punishment. For the overarching theme of Betrayal is not the crimes themselves, but the Church's the inexplicable toleration of them, and its disturbing tendency to place blame, however subtly, on the young victims. For decades the solution has been to hush the wounded party and call the matter resolved, and in watching the Church grapple with the current crisis—with some official body making a policy proclamation and Rome then nullifying—we can't help but see this pattern continue. There remains a greater concern for protecting the church—its treasure, its reputation, and mostly its power structure. Even under the harsh eye of the media, the Church's concern for the victims remains secondary to its concern for itself. A strengthening of hierarchical authority, through "zero tolerance," is the proposed solution, but we are told also that "zero" doesn't really mean zero, and that there will be some room for negotiation and forgiveness. What rings from congregants again and again is that this is the problem: a secretive, authority-based command structure, one that thinks repression and conformity will end an already repressed problem. The real answer, these critics say, lies in the long-called-for sharing of responsibilities in this suffering institution, an obligation many devout Catholics have been waiting for.
Let Us Prey
One can't help but think of these errant priests as modern-day vampires. Beloved Fathers are invited into the homes of unsuspecting parishioners, encouraged to form close bonds with children, sometimes ascending to bedrooms for "prayers" and "discussion," enjoying almost unlimited access to children and pubescent teens at bedside or office quarters. For the vast majority of healthy, dedicated priests this is a glorious trust put to good use. The use of physical comfort—be it children on lap, or consoling arms of strength and assurance—are tools akin to a parent's, the Father's namesake, and reminders of a secure universe in which young charges are always in the hand of their creator, always embraced, and never alone. How needed this reassurance is in a modern world of broken families, where teachers are forbidden physical contact for fear of lawsuits, and institutional responses are restricted to bureaucratic paperwork. The Church's teaching that it exists most real when "two or three are gathered" stands in contrast to the modern doctrine of independence and individualism, which is promoted to the point of inevitable isolation. In a world of salvation-through-consumption, where a new identity is promised with the acquisition of a pair of jeans or expensive car, the presence of men who eschew materialism, and live for faith and service, can indeed be redemptory. It would be tragedy if this were tossed aside. But this is the danger of cataloging crimes and missteps, as Betrayal does: it risks us acting out of anger, and using fear the way we once used faith. If we are not careful in our solutions, we will let go of faith in lieu of repairing it, and the only rock left to hold will be a steering wheel, or a new sweater, or the cans and pill bottles that silence most objections to this arrangement. The medical profession heals our pain at arm's length, but we have long known that the human soul requires something more intimate. The Apostle Thomas needed physical contact for faith, needed to put his hands on the risen Christ and feel his wounds before he could believe. In this respect he was tragically human. We are, whether we like it or not, a race of Doubting Thomases. The priest restricted from touching becomes representative of a Church in idea only, not a tangible manifestation of the Word, accessible as an embrace.
This, in other words, is what we may lose. Not just the "laying on of hands for Christian healing", nor the warm embrace, the affectionate touch or the other signs of physical presence. Not just the coming restrictions of a hand on the shoulder, the idea that no one should be left in a room alone with a priest, or that all people must hold back with a certain reserved "air space" around others. What we will lose, and what was in precious short supply to begin with, is trust. Trust is an outgrowth of faith, and the foundation of civilization, and if it goes, so goes too the main rationale for humanity living together.
This is the second wave, the aftershock, the slower damage that will arrive after all the destruction visited on innocent people's lives. What is at risk now is society's already tenuous faith in itself and its institutions. And the best that can be said for the Catholic Church, amid this crisis of faith, is that it does not seem to care. Time and again, when the hierarchy of the church was shown the problem, it responded not with the attention that fellow-parishioners might—as anyone might toward a criminal in need of hospitalization, restriction or prison—but with a bureaucratic incompetence that denied a remedy and shuffled the perpetrator to new, unsuspecting flocks. What is at work here is a long history, an astonishingly out-of-touch upper management structure, literally formed in the Middle Ages and trapped there still, clinging impossibly to those remnants of an authoritarian need-to-know mindset. Preserved behind layers of dogma, old age and privilege is an order incompatible with free-thinking societies, liberated congregations, or democracy. Though the victims of the pedophile priests will relate horrible stories, what they are describing is only a symptom. The real disease emerges between the lines, and it is an unresponsive and out-of-date hierarchy. We are now no strangers to ancient ideologies that cause havoc in their friction with modernity, and we have in the Catholic Church a new example of this problem: an institution unable to address evils within its midst, incredibly unaffected by the storms that reshaped other institutions.
I wish Betrayal had addressed the obvious question of why. Why pedophilia, of all things? Why don't we hear of thousands of harassed nuns, rather than thousands of abused children? What conflicts must arise in this small but nevertheless significant number of clergy that would make them act out on innocent children? Is this common manifestation a result of similarities in the priests' childhoods, in common vocational stresses as celibate priests, or—as some have charged—is it the result of predators who subconsciously work in fields that give them access to vulnerable people? Since so many of the victims are pubescent, one can't help but wonder if these celibate men suffered some arrestment of their own sexuality, if perhaps inside they are approximately that same age, and that in bonding inappropriately with these young people they are somehow trying to continue their own permanently stalled growth. And why, for that matter, is this happening almost exclusively to the Catholic Church? While the vast school networks and unique structures of Catholic institutions might lend themselves more easily to predatory behavior, the fact that similar instances in other denominations just don't happen with anywhere near this frequency beg questions this book barely touches upon. Do other nations have this problem? Are they, too, in denial? Or is this ours to own, the fallout from a "sexually liberated" society?
Brotherly Love
It is inevitable that much of the discussion will dwell on sexuality. One of Catholicism's most obvious features is the celibacy of its priests. Though considered "a gift" for most, it is obviously a curse for some. But the Church's quick dismissal of celibacy as an element in the present crisis casts still more doubt on its ability to judge and correct itself. Celibacy, after all, was no divine mandate: it was a medieval solution to church lands being ever-divided by the feuding children of the priestly class. Now it lingers, entrenched in path-dependency, long after Church lands are inherited and long after the priestly class, for all intents and purposes, has ceased to exist.
Homosexuality, on the other hand, has been attacked in the Word; it is castigated viciously in the Book of Exodus. (The Book, lest anyone take its teachings to heart, also advocates the selling of firstborn daughters into slavery). Still, many Catholics would be surprised to learn that in spite of official Church teaching against homosexuality, as many as one third of their priests are categorized as such, though the Church tries to keep such measurements murky. The gay population is so numerous and "out" that conservative groups often target specific seminaries for closure, calling them "mostly gay"—a tactic that scares some straight priests from the calling and needlessly harasses others. And complicating the issue is a conservative ideology that insists pedophilia is a "gay crime", ignoring statistics that show it perpetrated overwhelming by married men. If the homosexual priests could be removed, the hard-liners say, none of this would happen. Never mind that there is no evidence to support such ideas. Never mind that it would result in loss of up to a third of the Church's priests in a time of severe priest shortages. Never mind that there is no "test" that lets people know absolutely if someone is gay. And never mind, finally, that most priests who are gay function without a trace of scandal. It seems that like their hierarchy, people with this agenda are more interested in preserving ancient systems than dealing with living reality. How else can they reconcile teaching that certain God-given forms of sexuality are unacceptable, when some of their own seminaries are rife with them?
It is here that the Catholic Church, officially disdainful of divorce, divorces itself from the world known to most of its members. It is difficult for many Catholics to confront such blatant contradictions, and to take seriously the Church's idea of what is a problem and what is not. In a world of violence and inequality, most people see masturbation as a natural outlet of pressure and a source of off-color humor, but the Church still sees it as a grave sin. Likewise with contraception, which in the developing world (where it is desperately needed) has been stifled by Church crusading, while in the First World Catholics use it with the same frequency as Protestants, even while it is officially forbidden. The same is true of abortion. And gay rights. And feminism. In almost every parade, the Church and its members walk out of step.
The all-male hierarchy of old, nearly-all white superiors comes into even greater question when confronted with the illogical exclusion of women from their ranks. That a female can never be a priest may be the greatest failing of the present institution. In a time when one priest may have to serve four different congregations due to the severe lack of clergy, over half the population is barred from serving in this capacity, and all for lack of male sexual organs—which are, in any case, never to be touched, used or aroused. The logic astounds, if only for its absence.
Catholic Lite
Of course, many Catholic Priests are happily married, conduct healthy sex lives, and live in perfect accord with Church law. Kissing the wife and then heading off to perform the Catholic rites incurs no loss of status and certainly no diminution of their capacity. These pillars of the community were simply Episcopal priests first ("Anglican" outside the U.S.) who converted.
Happy to recruit needed priests from a denomination that is liturgically so similar, the Catholic Church allows for this loophole, though many long-suffering celibate priests may look on their brethren's many children and loving wives with some conflicting emotions. The church finds nothing wrong in allowing these converts to perform Catholic duties and keep their sex lives intact. In these cases, being married and having sex suddenly isn't an obstacle to being a good priest. In fact, most report congregants who appreciate being able to share marital issues with those who are married as well, and sexual issues with a person who has actually had sex. But for the lifelong Catholic priest, sex is forever forbidden.
How unquestioning these priests must be in adhering to the wisdom of their superiors and the uncompromising Church law. Do they never wonder about the legitimacy of their own authority? In almost every other societal institution, the complete absence of experience in a given subject usually means that one recuses oneself from debates about it. When will this change? Since the Episcopal Church is happy to welcome women and openly gay men as priests, one wonders if a truly desperate Catholic Church could eventually make an allowance for them too. I think we all doubt that. Though this existence of a Catholic "back door" is fascinating, the powers of the Roman church seem eternally inflexible in the matters of sexuality and gender equity. As time goes by, this disconnect between reality and teaching may become too great for many, leading to great migrations to more open-minded faiths. Indeed, this may already have begun. It is all too easy to find a bitter ex-Catholic in most places, and most happy Catholics remain so only by dismissing major aspects of their Church's teaching. Of course, as an Episcopalian myself, I see many "ex-Catholics" in our congregations, celebrating masses that are often more "Catholic" than those held by the Church of that name. I also see ex-Catholics following their callings to priesthoods and ever-higher Church offices, and I begin to wonder if the time will come when those who tire of papal decrees simply hop the fence, acknowledge their living relationship with God, and leave the rigid institutions behind. With rosaries and genuflecting encouraged; confessionals in some places; many of the same hymns, rituals, language; and nearly identical services, the Episcopal Church is a welcoming home for those weary of Catholicism's hidebound strictures.
On This Rock
Most Catholics, however, have not given up on the church of their birth. The most vocal critics and organizations of the present scandal are devout Catholics determined not to abandon their church but to repair it. These are loyal parishioners, and if the Church has within it the means to its own salvation, it will come from them. But they have a daunting challenge before them. The Church has responded tepidly and reluctantly to the child abuse scandals, and has made abundantly clear that its primary goal is its own protection. A March 27 email from Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahoney to the LA Archdiocese's legal counsel said the Church's "biggest mistake" was in not "consulting" with the police early in the investigation, so as to avoid a PR blowup later on. Now, Mahoney worried, "I can guarantee you that I will get hauled into a Grand Jury proceeding and I will be forced to give all the names, etc. The Vatican had made plain its opposition to the prosecution of priests, and the US Conference of Bishops has issued only a vague policy on punishing sex offenders. A group in Boston called Voice of the Faithful has urged new power for the laity, under the mantra "We are the Church," but they have been greeted mostly by suspicion and condescension. Thomas Mallon, a contributing editor at Inside the Vatican magazine, wrote a sneering op-ed in the Boston Globe about Voice of the Faithful, saying that they "are not the Church." Mallon sees reform as little more than "the ordination of priestesses and the blessing of promiscuity, adultery, abortion, or contraception," and asks "What part of 'Infallible Teaching' don't they understand?... Demanding change of unchangeable church teaching is incompatible with being faithful." Unfortunately for Mallon, and fortunately for the Church, there are legions of Catholics whose idea of faith is far broader than adherence to the shopworn intransigence of power-hungry old men. Whether their Church will be graced by their determined work to save it or eventually be free of them—to sink slowly with its own certainty, and the dwindling, unmoving defenders who cling to it—remains to be seen. As Betrayal hints, with a defensive power structure at the root of the problem, this is only one of many growing contradictions that will come crashing upon an embattled establishment. Indications are that this crisis is far from over. Despite conservative insistences that this is the outgrowth of sexual liberation, any reading of Irish literature, or French literature, or anywhere the Catholic Church has done such good for so long, a history of molestation unfortunately accompanies—when given the freedom to tell. When local parishes exhaust resources remedying the damage caused by sick men—betrayers of a trust who were excused with hush money, housed with resources meant for the poor, and placed in communities by their own hierarchy to prey on more Catholic children—problems will compound faster than they'll go away. There are other countries, with vaster congregations, with millions of trusting children, and some of them, too, have stories to tell. And all too often, they will have Church leaders defending a system that has something seriously wrong with it.
I can't help but think of the life of a priest, sacrificing a rich lifestyle, sacrificing a wife, sacrificing children of one's own, dedicating his life to the ancient service of others, mostly to the very least of us, in the name of something great—and how very petty the frail white-haired bureaucracy must seem from these trenches. I imagine that none hope for change as much as these men, who have seen such waste from an institution that possesses so much. I wonder at the guilt and self-recrimination that comes upon those who heard the rumors, saw the suffering of their sick fellow servants, the damage inflicted on innocents, and turned the blind eye. And I wonder about those who knew nothing, just did their work, and now see their sacred calling turned into the butt of crude jokes, the chum for a frenzied media, the target of lawsuits and suspicion. All of this adds a burden to the mission, hampers progress, siphons away money, turns away new blood, disillusions further a generation already not interested in joining the ranks, at a time when priests are aging, overworked, and overwhelmed by a callous world. And on top of this they see their leadership consistently risking, for the sake of old decrees and policies, every good thing they have accomplished. It must be a lonely time indeed for an honest priest. The Catholic Church needs men like this, but it is worth wondering whether they need it. There are other outlets for benevolence and good works, other avenues to religion and spirituality, and these alternatives must grow more appealing by the day. The leaders of our good priests do them no credit, and match their dedication to society with only a revolting dedication to themselves. For the Church, literally and figuratively, the trials have just begun, and they will not end when all the victims have had their day in court; the victims, after all, as awful as their ordeals have been, have only been damaged. The Catholic Church is being killed. It is killing itself, and it is killing faith as well.
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| Christopher Lock is a freelance writer and screenwriter in Los Angeles. |
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