From August 21 The Fish Rots From The Head
(From August, 21. 2018) The Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report and the Catholic Church
THE FISH ROTS FROM THE HEAD
I
August 21, 2018
The recently published Pennsylvania grand jury report chronicles more than 300 alleged sexual assaults on more than 1,000 victims (and likely many more) over a period of several decades. The first reasonable question to pose is: “Why didn’t bishops who knew about these sex crimes report them to law enforcement?” The two-fold follow-up question might be: “Who at the Vatican was in charge of investigating and addressing sexual abuse cases internally, and why did concern for the victims involved not prompt them to investigate more strenuously?” Yesterday the pope released a three-page letter to from the pope to “the faithful” in which he spelled out a plan to meet with victims. Pope Francis to the rescue. This letter prompted some Catholics to rejoice. The problem with the letter is that nothing the pope is saying about this wave of assaults and sex crimes is new. What Pope Francis offered in yesterday’s letter is a more lyrical version of what his two predecessors and many other prelates along the way have said.
It is hard for me to suggest, here, that Pope Francis is a part of the problem, because I am aware that many of the most wrong-headed Catholics have been waiting for the day the “liberal” pope might be unseated.
But Pope Francis is a part of the problem, and he must act.
II
The Institutional Catholic Church is, at least in part, a criminal organization.
Many of those currently targeting the pope are Catholics who want a pre-Vatican II church. They preach anti-LGBTQ prejudice, misogyny, and antisemitism. They insist on a quasi-fundamentalist reading to the “rules and regs” of Roman Catholic "teaching." Jorge Bergoglio, on the other hand, is no rebel. He is a company man. He was a member of the College of Cardinals for 17 years before being elevated. There are a only a little over 200 cardinals. They speak to each other. Many have known each other for several decades. It is likely that a few have been friends for half of the past century, and many serve as each others’ confessors. Can Pope Francis get away with an “Is there gambling, here in Casablanca?” response to the Pennsylvania grand jury report?
No. He can't. This fish rots from the head.
Catholic Worker co-founder Dorothy Day wrote the following lines in 1968, at around the time Vatican II changes were taking hold, in a letter to Gordon Zahn, a professor, scholar, sociologist, pacifist, and author and co-founder of Pax Christi:
“As a convert, I never expected much of the bishops. In all history popes and bishops and father abbots seem to have been blind and power-loving and greedy. I never expected leadership from them.”
I’m no convert, but two days ago I added my signature to a petition currently circulating which calls for the resignation of all of the United States bishops. I had mixed feelings about signing it mostly because I knewit was pro forma, and that nothing would come of it. I went ahead and signed it anyway, on principle. The United States is not Chile. There is way too much money to be had in the United States, and if there is anything thing the U.S. Bishops like almost as much as God and Jesus — it’s money.
Much of the Vatican sexual abuse scandal boils down to money and holding onto it. The institutional Roman Catholic Church is, in many respects a criminal organization, and every person employed by a Catholic publication, Catholic university, or religious order is, whether directly or indirectly, on its payroll.
Like Day, I have never had much faith in the bishops, and now I have less than none. I continue, however, to have faith in and love for the church of Dorothy Day. The institutional Catholic Church is not “the Catholic Church.” The two are not one and the same.
III
Why continue to beg bishops to police themselves? The myth of the “liberal” pontiff.
I know several survivors of clergy sexual abuse (In the case of forcible penetration of adults, and all assaults of children, it is critical that we call it “rape.”) and I attended a few Voice of the Faithful meetings in 2000 in support of a friend who was a survivor of sex crimes committed against him, by a priest, as a child. This friend, now in his eighties, was brave enough to report, as a child, that he was being abused by priests. He was arrested by NYPD, at the time, and taken into custody. This is an extreme case of punishing the "victim" but the institutional church has been punishing victims and survivors for coming forth for generations.
Here are my post Pennsylvania grand Jury Report predictions: The prelates will apologize for a while, then hit the mattresses. They will ask for prayers. They will remind us that the church and Jesus are all about forgiveness. Soon they will emerge again, not out of ashes, but out of hiding, once the shooting dies down, to ask for peace. Even as a father, grandfather, and rather model citizen and Catholic, my friend was regularly insulted, scorned, and ridiculed by Catholics, six and seven decades after his abuse, both within and outside of his, relatively speaking, welcoming parish.
I was moved by the devotion and dignity of all who spoke out about this abuse at VOTF meetings, but I found the pattern of requesting support from bishops to be absurd and, in truth, masochistic. Why continue to beg bishops to police themselves when they have failed over and over again at this?
I see some of this same religious masochism among some Women’s Ordination advocates. (Why beg a hierarchy maddened by its own quasi-royal power to return to us the freedom to worship and minister which was stolen from us in the fourth century?) Martin Luther King Jr.’s words from Letter from a Birmingham Jaildo apply:
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
The authority of bishops emanates from one of the most (if not themost) wealthy and powerful business operations in the world, the Vatican. The U.S. bishops, some of whom are also members of the College of Cardinals, are the very last people to whom Catholics should run in search of relief and remedy in the matter of the Vatican clerical child rape scandal. These prelates have been covering up these crimes for years.
A difficult question arises; is it fair to ask the U.S. bishops to resign without asking the College of Cardinals and Pope Francis I to resign? I’m not sure. Even many “liberal” or “progressive” Catholics writers, religion experts and and clerics who know the pope probably is complicit in the coverup are loath to call for his resignation because 1. He’s the pope. 2. They know Pope Francis is the best pope Catholics are likely to obtain. That Pope Francis is not really progressive, doesn’t matter, because the “liberal” Catholic Church itself is not progressive. It still upholds misogyny, homophobia and the idea of a maintaining a measure of chauvinistic feeling regarding Catholicism’s priestly caste. There's also a problem with groupies in the Catholic Church. By no means all, but many academics working for Catholic universities and people working in Catholic media become infatuated and intoxicated by things Vatican. If you have watched the Sopranos or Goodfellas, you know how this works. The secrecy, the costumes, the power attract a kind of blind allegiance.
Pope Francis took five whole days to respond directly to the grand jury report. In a letter made public on August 20, he invited “the faithful” to engage in fasting and prayer. He accepted responsibility in the manner every other bishop who has been forced to speak has.
The day before the pope’s letter came out, I turned to my husband in the car shared by predictions re: “the strawberries on the cake” angle. “Watch. They’ll all go ham on the Blessed Mother in their rhetoric, focusing on her gentleness and forgiving nature. Then, they’ll make the move of inviting the women to come in and bat cleanup.”A few days later, I had the not very satisfying opportunity to hear him say, “Well you sure called it!”
Once Pope Francis did decide to come forward, multitudes of Catholic writers waxed prosaic on the “Francis to the rescue” bluntness, power, and beauty of the pontiff’s letter (in which he, of course, name-checked Mary). I stopped expecting anything much from Pope Francis the moment (in 2014) I read that he had described the women of the church as “strawberries on the cake.” No man who is not a misogynist says such a thing.
Some Catholics — even some who identify as feminist! — somehow find this excusable, citing the “It takes a long time to turn a big bus” rationale. Some have built whole quasi-scholarly careers of turning this prejudice into a polite defense for the misogyny that morally compromises the entire Roman Catholic Church. If I were not a woman, perhaps the “five Church doctors and it takes a long time to turn a big bus” argument might strike me as sound. It is not sound. It is bigotry, and bigots rarely confine their bigotry to one category of bigotry.
To defend Catholic magisterial teaching on the matter of an all-male priesthood is to defend sexism, misogyny, and the practice of conditioning Catholic children in Catholic school classrooms that to be female is to be less than. The popes and prelates like to haul out Mary when they sense a need to extol the merits of womanhood, pointing, usually, to her feminine docility. I doubt that any bishop who promulgates misogyny under the guise of “complementarity” (most do) can ever fully grasp the full significance of Mary.
Nonetheless, I give Pope Francis credit for at least knowning he should try. He reminded the world this week, that Mary was “the first disciple.”But don't get your hopes up ladies, Pope Francis is a company man through and through.
In the wake of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report, Pope Francis also pointed to Pope Benedict XVI, the brilliant man on whose watch so much mass torture of children went unaddressed:
I make my own the words of the then Cardinal Ratzinger when, during the Way of the Cross composed for Good Friday 2005, he identified with the cry of pain of so many victims and exclaimed: ‘How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to [Christ]!’
Between 1981 and 2005, before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, Josef Ratzinger served as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under whose jurisdiction tracking and addressing sexual abuse cases falls. Benedict VXI was constrained in this because his superior, “Saint” John Paul II who was the more culpable pope, for he was soft on rapists like Maciel Marcial and Theodore (“Uncle Ted”) McCarrick.
Pope Francis I has been a member of the College of Cardinals for more than seventeen years. Again, there are olnly about 200 cardinals and many have been around for many years. In the United States, there are only about 450 active bishops. Some are members of both the USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) and the College of Cardinals. These men speak to one another. Some are each other's confessors. Some have ordained and consecrated (made bishops of) each other. Some have been friends for years, decades —It is the naive in the extreme to imagine that what was chronicled in the 2002 Boston GlobeInvestigation, in the 2004 John Jay Report, the 2011 Cloyne Report, or the many other investigations, surprised any prelate. Were any of them shocked by the Pennsylvania grand jury report? Unlikely. Watch them pretend to be.
IV
The genius Vatican optics of elevating Jorge Bergoglio
NOT Bergolio! but close.
Elevating a cardinal who refused to live, as his two predecessors had, two floors up from the Vatican Bank, just as Vatican Bank money laundering news was making headlines in the Financial Times, was a stroke of Vatican Public Relations genius. The new pontiff’s choice to take the name from the saint most associated with poverty, to jump-start his pontificate with a “greed is sin” message, to be a “1st” (as in Pope Francis I) was a stroke of genius, too, and sent a walloping 'out with the old in with the new' message.
As a progressive Catholic I have sometimes felt encouraged by the words of our current pope, but I believe he was chosen to serve as a brand ambassador for a novel, contemporary but still essentially medieval brand. The Vatican has been losing Catholics in Latin America to Pentecostal and other Protestant churches in recent years and is desperate to slow the exodus out of the church. The humble Bergoglio is Latin American. Elevating this cardinal who refused to live, as his two predecessors had, two floors up from the Vatican bank just as Vatican Bank money laundering news was making headlines — elevating this cardinal who took his name from the saint most associated with poverty, and who jump-started his pontificate with a “greed is sin” message —was a stroke of Vatican Public Relations genius.
Unlike his predecessor, Pope Francis lacked the regal countenance and austerity Catholics had come to associate with out-of-touch, corrupt hierarchs. Pope Francis presents as a human being, a man, not a prince. Francis I rode the bus, washed prisoners’ feet, and publicly exhibited other impressive Christlike conduct. Even Bergoglio’s status as a Jesuit was part of the plan. (Educated liberal Catholics love the Jesuits.) I knew several lapsed Catholics who returned to church shortly after Francis was installed. Sometimes I saw the inauguration of Bergoglio as encouraging. At other times I more saw it as a Machiavellian move designed to keep “Cafeteria Catholics” in the United States and Western Europe in the pews, tithing and spawning Catholics.
In 2012, secular newspapers and mainstream media reported on the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s surveillance of women religious. The Vatican was looking for heretic women involved in the growing women’s ordination movement. Even conservative Catholics found the Office of Inquisition’s spying on nuns in their own homes, looking for such heresies as Reiki andYoga, repugnant. At the time Bergoglio became Pope Francis, fraud investigations involving the Vatican bank were under way. In June of 2013, three priests — one of them a bishop — were arrested for laundering money through the Vatican bank.
Then debuted the film Habemus Papam. While not normally one to subscribe to conspiracy theories, I can't quite stop wondering whether some of cardinals who helped to elect Pope Francis might not have screened and been inspired by Nanni Moretti’s charming film, Habemus Papam, which was released a year before the emeritus pope resigned. The film depicts the journey of a reluctant, newly elevated pontiff, a charming, humble cardinal/priest who sees a therapist and rides a bus through Rome. I do not mean to suggest that Moretti’s film served as a blueprint for the selection of the pope — I offer it as musing, again, not as a conspiracy theory.
The papacy was in trouble. The film was directed by an Italian, does feature the church, and was reverential enough in tone to perhaps influence, those who might be searching for a way to re-brand the papacy.
What was most needed from a Vatican optics standpoint when Benedict XVI resigned in quasi-disgrace, was a pope as telegenic as John Paul II, and, at least on the face, less interested (than were John Paul II and Benedict XVI) in policing Catholics’ private conduct. The policing was chasing Catholics out of the pews in Western Europe and the Americas, and they were taking their wallets and Catachumen spawn with them. Ratzinger’s/Benedict XVI’s smaller, purer church ideal obviously appeals to many of the cardinals, but it is problematic in practice from a fiscal standpoint.
The hierarchy of the Catholic Church has its greatest hopes pinned on growth of the global church, but it is Catholics in the Americans and Europe who fund missions and ministries in those regions. The cardinals may not miss the amoral, hyper-secularized Catholic defectors of North American and western Europe when they depart, but they sure do miss their money. Pope Francis was perfect for the job of keeping “liberal” Catholics enthused. I imagine he was chosen also for his talent for changing the message (by changing its tone) without challenging teaching.
Saint Pope John Paul II with Cardinal McCarrick
V
Moving Forward, How to Clean the Temple
Once installed, Pope Francis kept Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, whose alleged sexual misconduct began to come to light as early as 1994, in place. Pope Francis did not merely attend Bernard Law’s funeral in In 2017, he offered the (deeply solemn and significant) final prayer of commendation over the body of the pedophile-shuffling fugitive prelate. (Pope Francis’s predecessors helped Cardinal Law elude prosecution for his alleged crimes against children by fleeing to Vatican City, a sovereign nation.) Once safe in Vatican City, Bernard Law, a fugitive, received a church and a posting from Pope Benedict XVI. Law should have been tried for his crimes, but with papal support, he was permitted to live out his life as a priest, in the Vatican, a sovereign nation from which he could not be extradited.
Francis contributed to the hasty effort to make a saint out of Pope John Paul II, an express canonization which, was performed in the interest of sanitizing the latter’s legacy (I don't think it will not work.) As of today, August 21, 2018, Pope Francis has not removed Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the bishop in charge of the Diocese of Pittsburgh (from 1988 to 2006) who was implicated in the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report. Wuerl, head of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., is named more than 200 times in Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report for transferring priests he knew had engaged sexual misconduct to new parishes, for silencing survivors and for mishandling complaints against predator priests under his watch. In any other legal context he would be an accessory to endangering children, sex crimes involving children etc. Despite that the wrongdoing which is more than enough to warrant his removal, Wuerl he has not been removed from his position.
People charged with crimes have a legal right to be seen as innocent under the law until they are proven guilty, and several accounts this week suggest the possibility that not every United States bishop knew what their priests were raping children. Most however probably did know, and an adult man who knows that a child is endangered and fails to inform law enforcement is guilty of a heinous crime. Such a man is an accessory after the fact. Any bishop who puts costs before justice in this regard is unfit to serve.
Any bishop who knowingly placed a child within reach of a predator, is guilty of child endangerment. Any pastor or bishop who transferred a pedophile must step down and be held accountable under the law.
Secular law.
A society that claims to care for its children errs on the side of (legally) protecting them. Should not guidelines for protecting children in religious organizations at least meet the standards secular criminal law aims to uphold? Mandatory reporters of abuse — classroom teachers, doctors, nurses — who fail to report such abuse as that which clerics like Donald Wuerl ignored, lose their jobs.
Yet today, it is likely that a few hundred bishops or more who are guilty of failing to report these crimes are still in place. All but a few will be in place one year from now, and they will still insist that they can be trusted to police themselves. Some will even be assigned the task of leading the purge.
To allow a man who failed to report the rape of a child to continue to minister is deeply sinful. To allow such a man to preside over investigating or dispensing remedies for the sex abuse problem is to put a fox in charge of a hen house.
VI
By now, it is obvious now that every bishop in the United States, given the circumstances at hand, should have been militating vigorously to help a Child Victims Act pass into law.
Bishop DiMarzio tries to muscle local pols. NY Post, May 31, 2009
Each time there is a report of widespread clergy child rape and coverup, various bishops offer their own variations on the heartfelt commentary. The statement made by Timothy Dolan, Cardinal of the Archdiocese of New York, begins with a quasi-defense/clarification of details pertaining to Archdiocese of New York personnel named in the report, and ends with the pro forma remorseful lament. Dolan moved money in Milwaukee to hide it from plaintiffs. Dolan paid abusive priests to disappear. Dolan supported an accused priest in suing a plaintiff for slander. Once Timothy Dolan cleaned up the Milwaukee diocese’s fiscal troubles, he was dispatched to New York, where he took over for notorious pedophile-shuffler Edward Egan. (Egan’s Bridgeport diocese was one of the first to be exposed in 2001–2002.) Dolan’s substantive, up-close experience with so many suffering victims of clerical sexual abuse was not sufficiently moving to deter him from strenuously opposing the Child Victims Act, legislation designed to expand “the window” for “looking back” and the statute of limitation for reporting incidents of child sexual abuse. Should New York Catholics trust Timothy Dolan to support efforts to obtain justice and healing? They must not.
Nicholas DiMarzio, the (allegedly) Opus Dei bishop in charge of the Brooklyn diocese in which I have worshipped and worked in ministry for two decades, has also lobbied tirelessly against the Child Victims Act. About ten years ago, he sent his representatives into the church I have attended for two decades to campaign, on the altar, for a candidate who had won the bishop’s (DiMarzio's) support by resolving to oppose this legislation which would expand the statute of limitations for reporting sex crimes committed by priests. DiMarzio wrote about his concern that the Child Victims Act would bankrupt his diocese in his column in the diocese newspaper and made robocalls (for notoriously corrupt and now deceased Brooklyn/Queens assemblyman and kingmaker Vito Lopez and one of Lopez’s proteges) as part, it appears, of a quid pro quo agreement.
It is obvious now that every bishop in the United States, given the circumstances at hand, should have been militating vigorously to help a Child Victims Act pass into law. Any bishop who even gave the appearance of fighting this legislation is suspect.
In 2015, I sponsored my goddaughter/niece in the Sacrament of Confirmation. The bishop who leads the diocese of Wilmington, Delaware presided. After the mass, the niece and I shook his hand, and took a photo with him. Something about this bishop caused me to cringe, but I didn’t quite know quite what. Two years later I watched 2017 film The Keepers, and realized Bishop Francis Malooly — who denies the wrongdoing dramatized in the film — was the creepy prelate in our Confirmation photo! The Keepers’ depicts Malooly as having taken part in a Baltimore Diocese coverup (He was an auxiliary bishop in Baltimore before taking the helm in post-bankruptcy Delaware.) of both serial child rape and the murder of Sister Catherine Cesnik, a nun engaged in investigating sex crimes committed against children by Baltimore priests known to her. The film has led the Baltimore police to investigate anew. Has the Vatican moved to further investigate Malooly? Does it matter to them?
How committed is William Lori, the current Archbishop of Baltimore, to helping to crack this case? The current archbishop of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, William E. Lori, also recently responded to the Pennsylvania grand jury report. He is one of the relatively “clean” bishops. (This may explain why he was sent to clean up Edward Egan’s dirty Bridgeport.) In Lori’s video address, he asks for forgiveness, but neglects to mention that in 2002, in Bridgeport, he sent three men credibly accused of sex crimes back into ministry; this he did in the wake of a vigorous effort mounted by his predecessor’s legal team to conceal their identities and prevent their files from being obtained by lawyers for plaintiffs. William Lori is an admitted accessory to sex crimes involving children. Why is he still running a diocese? Why hasn't he been defrocked?
One interesting aspect of the Vatican response to the various investigations is the way relatively “clean” prelates like Lori and Dolan, who have a knack for fiscal management (“earners” as the racketeers in the Bronx and uptown Manhattan where I grew up would call them), are moved around the chess board like . . . bishops. Lori was sent to clean up Egan’s mess. Egan was sent to New York, as a reward, perhaps, for his silence and imperious defiance in the face of questioning, and Dolan was then sent to clean up the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. He did such a good job protecting (moving, hiding) Milwaukee money that the Vatican posted him in New York where there was a lot more money to move and to hide in order that it not be used for damages awards in child rape cases.
The Vatican has never been interested in policing itself. The reasons are complex, and discussion of these reasons goes beyond the scope of this commentary. It is helpful to point out however, the enduring concern for protecting “the church” from scandal is often at the root of this secrecy, as is a belief that the sacrament of Holy Orders changes a man in a deep essential way that renders him ontologically extraordinary, supernaturally different, not subject in the same way those who have not been ordained are, to secular law. Many of the men now in charge of cleaning up Catholic church child sex trafficking literally see themselves as being above secular law. This is not explained, necessarily, by psychological disorders like Narcissism or sociopathy —it's the theology. They are indoctrinated with this idea. It is teaching.
Catholic doctrine holds that the church is eternal, supernatural, and, in a sense, changeless. Under this view of things, the obligation of the those who lead the Roman Catholic Church to shield it from scandal. The Catholic Church, they believe, offers a path to redemption. If the “Church Militant” (the earthly church) falls, human souls lose access to the “Church Triumphant.” Heresy is seen as a mortal sin, because it is thought to suggest a lack of perfection in the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church must be perfect because it was instituted by Christ himself. Some of these lying bishops may actually believe that in dissembling, in remaining silent about child rape, they choose the lesser of two evils.
Bringing scandal upon the church is, for many Catholics, a more egregious transgression than that of raping a child is. Those who believe this are often reluctant to declare it publicly.
VII
The Role the Theology plays
Roman Catholic/Christian theology accords the body special importance insofar as it is “the Word” is, through Christ, made flesh and the flesh Jesus is believed to have chosen to inhabit is human. The body is evanescent, and the body of a child is no exception. But the church is eternal. The Roman Catholic Church Militant makes eternal salvation possible, extends its opportunities for grace to all initiated human creatures. Without the institution of the church, the boys in that “circle of secrecy” whom clerics allegedly photographed nude on a cross for pornographic photos, who were condemned to suffer in this life, would lose the hope of eternal life. Further complicating this analysis is the enshrinement and really, the fetishization, in Catholic cosmology and theology of suffering, martyrdom, and Clericalism itself.
Furthermore, the way leadership works in the priesthood is highly defective. When men are ordained, they make promises or take vows of obedience to either their diocesan bishops (in the case of diocesan priests) or (for many who join orders) or the superiors of their orders. (If you are thinking that “superior” sounds faintly militaristic, you are not wrong. “Superior General” is the formal title, for example, of the superior of the Jesuit order.) Priests promise or vow, as part of their ordination rites, never to refuse the orders of their bishops or superiors. It is easy to see how this vow or promise to obey protects predators. If a bishop directs a priest under his charge not to report a crime against a child, that priest is obliged to obey. Bishops and superiors, in turn, must obey the Vatican — and the Vatican muscles everyone.
We saw how this worked in in 2012 when Maryknoll priest Roy Bourgeois was defrocked for refusing to recant his support for ordaining women. Pope Benedict XVI moved decisively and quickly to laicize (defrock) Bourgeois despite the fact that many of his brother priests petitioned the Vatican in his defense. I suspect that Bourgeois’s Maryknoll superior did not want to defrock Bourgeois, but Benedict XVI insisted.
While the Vatican will wait decades to laicize a man who rapes a child, it acts immediately in the case of heretics because heresy poses a threat to the institutional church. The sin against the child, though horrific, jeopardizes the existence of the child, but bringing scandal to the church jeopardizes the survival of the entire institutional church. Father Bourgeois was defrocked for attending a woman’s ordination and subsequently refusing to publicly recant on his public support of women’s ordination. That’s heresy. Heresy imperils Mother Church.
VIII
The survival of the global Catholic Church will require the ordination of women.
Once a priest is ordained into the priesthood, his secrecy profile, so to speak, changes. We might compare it to security clearance. We all know about the extent to which priests are bound to maintain the seal of confession, but the secrecy involves more than what happens in confession. Seminarians enter a male-only club. They are strongly encouraged in their seminary formation to develop friendships with brother priests who understand the unique challenges and stresses of the life of a cleric, and a sense of fraternity, as one might expect, develops around this. Many priests live on call, and spend inordinate amounts of time around the sick, suffering, and dying. For those who do it right, it is not an easy job. All Catholic priests are required to be chaste. Most are not permitted to marry. (By the way, priests in orders take chastity vows. Priests who answer to a diocesan bishop do not. The promise of celibacy is a promise or vow not to marry, not a promise to be chaset.) It is also useful to know that the Vatican has allowed select married Roman Catholic priests to serve since 1951. The current effort to ordain more married men on a viri probati basis is a hedge against pressure to ordain women or allow women to become deacons.
The combination of obedience and secrecy yield a toxic, warping mix. The refusal to ordain women and the handling of the clergy sex scandal are related. If the Vatican were to honor women’s call to ordination, women priests would have to be complicit with the secrecy or break the silence. Having grown up around NYPD cops, I find the secrecy of among “brother priests” to be reminiscent of the “blue code of silence.” Most priests I count as friends would welcome women priests, but the fear that women will blab, push back against the hierarchical structure, be soft, apply moral ethics to the analysis of the evils at hand, challenge the Magisterium’s teaching on contraception and abortion — on which the current hierarchy of the church literally banks— is what the institutional hierarchs most fear. Women, in short, can’t be trusted to join the secret society that is Roman Catholic clericalism. Increasing the fold is everything, and, again, we are, as Pope Francis says, “the strawberries on the cake.”
Many people are unaware that the current pontiff’s is not only head of a church that refuses to ordain women; he has also reaffirmed his predecessor’s choice to prohibit formal discussion of ordaining women in Catholic educational settings, this while preaching regularly on the sins of bigotry and hypocrisy. There’s no substantive, legitimate impediment to ordaining women. (See my Open Letter to Pope Francis.) It is a holdover — the vestiges of the patriarchy of of the Roman Empire and late antiquity. Would women clergy have allowed the crimes described in the Pennsylvania grand jury document to remain veiled in secrecy? We can never know for certain. but I say, "No." I do not believe women priests would have remained silent about the Vatican’s child sex trafficking.
IX
Why continued homophobic scapegoating of gay priests will catalyze the decline of the education, caring male cleric capable of ministering in the manner Christ exemplified.
It is now clear that some bishops and priests keep silent in an effort to keep lids on their own personal scandals. In 2002, shortly before the Milwaukee clergy sex scandal in that dioceses came to light, Timothy Dolan’s predecessor in Milwaukee, Rembert Weakland, paid $450,000 of diocese money to silence a man who had been his (consensual, adult) lover. It is hard to know whether or to what extent the fear of exposure led this particular bishop to shrink from acting decisively when priests in his diocese sexually assaulted children, but this example demonstrates how the potential for blackmail and fear of bringing scandal to the church connect. Over and over again, we see this dynamic play out in secular politics. (This potential for blackmail and his sexual sin was what got President Bill Clinton impeached.) How many hungry people might that $450,000 have healed, fed, housed over the course of a year?
The "traditional" wing of the Catholic Church often tries to pin the depravity on gay men. (Most of these charges, in my opinion, originate with closeted or ‘converted’/’former homosexuals.”) Some priests are chaste and many are not. Sexual activity among priests falls under two categories: consensual sex and harassment (“Me Too”). Some priests engage in consensual sex with adults; some don’t. Many a young seminarian has experienced the kind of treatment to which unctuous film and television executives and outright rapists with clout subject young “actresses.” That is harassment. When a man engages in sexual conduct with a child, it is “rape.”
It is likely that many of these clerics who kept silent when they should have called law enforcement agencies did so out of fear of exposure, or in exchange for favors/support. (The smart investigator of the bishops’ culpability in sexual abuse cases will always pay close attention to who “consecrated” whom. Theodore McCarrick, for example, consecrated Nicholas DiMarzio.) A lapse in chastity, once it has been addressed, confessed, and absolved, is probably not, in the view of most Catholics, grounds for defrocking a priest, but for gay priests, this is more complicated, as the Magisterium still views LGBTQ people as “disordered.” It is still dangerous for even a chaste gay priest to come out.
It is hard to know whether this will improve as people as a whole begin to evolve and catch up with what scientists and psychologists have long known about sexual attraction and sexual identity, but it is not clear because men entering the Roman Catholic seminaries now tend to be more doctrinally traditional. It is imperative, today, that gay priests not become the sacrificial lambs in whatever purge may be forthcoming. A gay man is no more likely to abuse a child than straight a man is. Most pedophiles identify as heterosexual.
Many orthodox and traditional commentators blame Vatican Child Sex Trafficking on Vatican II and the "Sexual Revolution." This is absurd. It is more likely that the advances of media, Sex education in Catholic educational settings and the piercing of the veil of clericalism reduced sexual abuse. I am old enough to faintly remember the Vatican I church. My Irish relatives often spoke of priests molesting children as if it were a norm. (This is the church which, just a century ago, still had castrati in their choirs. Catholic nuns throw more than 700 dead babies in a mass grace without a funeral between 1920 and 1960. In other words the sanctity of children's flesh and the the church's concern for their safety did exactly dissolve with advent of the folk mass and Summer of Love.
Caligula Obelisk in Saint Peter’s Square, Vatican
X
What’s Next? The best Vatican Optics money can buy.
How will the Vatican proceed in the aftermath of the new report? I believe the Vatican will wait it out. Pope Francis will find it necessary to ask for a few resignations, pro forma. McCarrick and Wuerl will top the list. Lots of bishops will skate. and beyond that the Vatican will do what it always does: look for a sacrificial lamb or two, and then — radio silence.
Look for the best Vatican optics money can buy. Look for shiny objects that deflect attention away from the findings of the Grand Jury Report. Ireland just made abortion legal. Many Catholics construe this development as a collective thumbing of the nose at the Vatican. Pro-lifers care a lot less for a baby once it passes through the birth canal, so notice the several ways in which Catholic reporting on Ireland eclipses the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report. The pope will soon meet face-to-face with survivors of clergy sexual abuse. This is a good Vatican Public Relations move.
Look for pro forma, pro-women lip service from the Vatican. Expect the dangled carrot of talk of “deaconesses” and female deacons (not the same thing). Catholic feminists will chase that carrot for a spell before the hype quiets down. Expect that the humility of Mary will be stressed, and her discipleship and apostolic nature alternatively stressed and downplayed as Catholics all over the world are reminded that that women can do all of the work of the church, possibly better than men can. If only they were not unfit for priesthood. Look for more “greater role for women” palaver. Expect many women, even “feminists,”to play along.
Following the show of humility, the imperial Vatican will behave imperiously, as it always does in the wake of a scandal. Look for the “We are the Church of Rome” show of defiance. This show of force enables the hierarchy to announce that external investigations don’t really matter. The Catholic Church belongs to them; they do what they please.
I see story after story in news outlets today asking, “How could this happen?” I have been watching this crisis closely for more than fifteen years. I have been hearing from survivors for fifteen years. I was not at all surprised by Pope Francis’s choice to take part in Bernard Law’s Mass of Christian Burial, because I know that asking the bishops to address the clergy child rape crisis is like asking the fox to guard those chickens. This fish rots from the head.
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Can the temple be cleansed?
How would it look, were the Catholic hierarchy to decide to address Vatican child sex abuse crisis in substantive and appropriate ways? What might the penance be? Catholicism takes seriously the matter of forgiveness. How might those who abused be absolved? Can the clerical hierarchy of the church be absolved? Is it possible for he clerical hierarchy to rebuild trust and good faith?
Not without full admission of guilt, repentance, amends, resolution not to sin again and a dramatic change of personnel. Forgiving the bishops does not require that we allow them to remain in positions of power in the Catholic Church.
Those who rape children have compulsive disorders, and must be removed from ministry, treated and prohibited, permanently, from working in any context that might place them in proximity to minor children.
Those who who failed to report these crimes are, to some degree, more culpable still. If the clerical hierarchy of the church is ever to be forgiven, any cleric — this especially pertains to heads of dioceses —must be removed, permanently from ministry for the sake of the larger church.
This is what needs to happen:
Any prelate who reassigned a pedophile would be removed.
· Any prelate who concealed records from law enforcement would be removed.
· Any prelate who aimed to smear or sue plaintiffs for slander would be removed.
· Any prelate who actively campaigned against bills that would expand statutes of limitation in order to report them, would be removed.
· Any prelate who moved money to insulate it from seizure would be removed.
· Any prelate who used information gathered in counseling sessions or via confessions to be used against clerical sex abuse plaintiffs would be removed.
· Any prelate who subjected any child to avoidable harm would be removed.
· Remaining prelates would turn over all records to the appropriate law enforcement agencies in their states.
· Dioceses would pay court/legal fees of plaintiffs who prevail in clergy sex abuse cases against clerics in their dioceses.
Dioceses tithe to the Vatican, and parishes tithe to the dioceses in which they are located. One effective means for forcing the institutional Catholic Church to take the moral course is to withhold contributions.
Prelates’ resolutions to self-correct, at the present time should be ignored and rejected. These resolutions are empty, made for the sake of optics. The foxes are incapable of delivering justice on behalf of the hens. Clerics play by their own rules. The theology of the Catholic Church confers a "supernatural" stature through ordination. Some rise above this, but doctrine supports them in failing to do so.
A year from now, the Bishops will be whining, playing innocent and dumb. They will be making the same promises, dissembling in the same manner, and somehow, for some reason, Catholics will continue to drop tender into the offertory basket on Sunday.
Unfortunately Catholics will continue to fund the "circle of secrecy" Vatican child sex trafficking cover up, and that from that gift, the clerical caste of the Vatican will infer that they are in the clear.
I pray that Catholics will begin to refuse, that they will continue to worship, continue to give directly to organizations that help the needy without staking the middlemen. I pray we will find the courage and decency to force the dirty U.S. Bishops to resign in order that we might cleanse the temple.
Michele Somerville, August 21, 2018
Provincetown, MA
UPDATE: On October 18, 2018, Donald Wuerl resigned. Pope Francis called him “a model bishop.”