RETROSPECTIVE ON CLERGY CHILD ABUSE

A priest friend who is a lot braver than I am moderated a forum on clergy sexual abuse. While I have discussed the issue, I would never in a million years want to moderate a forum on it. What could one expect from it but a great deal of anger and maybe igniting fuses to bombs that need not go off? I would not count myself enough of an expert to deal credibly with the concerns and questions that might arise. It could become an occasion for calumny and gossip. I would defer to someone like Fr. Stephen Rossetti, although I do have personal reservations about some of the things that are said to occur at St. Luke’s Institute and similar facilities charged with the care of problem priests. I would suspect that the archdiocese would also want to be consulted before any such enterprise was undertaken. Further, I am not sure I could appropriately contain my own rage and disgust toward the perpetrators or to those churchmen who protected them and enabled their mischief.

Putting ourselves into the place of ecclesiastical authority is easier said than done. I would not have wanted their jobs. I am sure a great many scenarios ran through their heads: the question of salvaging a priest, the scandal of revelation, and the financial costs in liability, etc. Hopefully, among the many concerns was also the central matter about victims, potential victims and their families. However, it seems that this critical part of the analysis was often lost in the mix. People were paid off to be silent while others were placed in danger. Money does not heal lives and souls. Silence sometimes just allows evil to hide and later to reemerge. Here I might come to a parting of ways with some of the so-called experts. I do not believe that child abuse is simply an illness or psychiatric disorder of the priest. It is more than a stunted psycho-sexual development. It is a serious moral evil. It is a sin of the highest order and a priest, above all men, should know this. Suicide is a grievous wrong, but I would count it better for a man to throw himself in front of a speeding truck than to molest a child. I know this would usher angry responses, but even our Lord said that it would be better for a man to have a millstone tied around his neck and that he be thrown into the sea before he would lead one of the little ones astray. Priests are not supposed to hurt children and damage the faith of their charges! It is a contradiction to their very identity and the heart of the Gospel. That is why the scandal has been so terrible. Even non-Catholics took us for our word and priests were viewed by millions as the living embodiments of Christ. Now we are ranked among the greatest hypocrites. The damage from even one Judas priest is inestimable; however, when the scandals hit us, there was charge after charge after charge. It became a nightmare that did not seem to end. Making it worse, certain bishops dismissed their own responsibility, shifting it to the lower clergy or to the laity with the imposed penitential days. Even now the bishops are thinking about an annual Sexual Abuse Awareness Sunday. It is insane; there is no other word for it. People wanted to hear their high shepherds explain what happened and yes, even to say they were sorry. Instead, words were carefully crafted by lawyers and admissions measured by the calculations of prospective litigation.

Critics claim that generations of rewarding paper-pushers and chancery men with promotions added to the dilemma at hand; the Church was deathly afraid of scandal and those who were the best at problem-solving and pacifying situations got the long pointed hats. Many of them had never been pastors of a parish and they hated any type of confrontation. They were passive men. They protected the boys in the club. Any decent priest in the trenches could have told them that any man who molested a child should NEVER be trusted in a parish with children again! It did not take pontifical degrees or honors to figure this out and yet those in charge sometimes made matters worse. Even now, despite most cases of priestly child abuse being deceptively catalogued as pedophilia; the truth according to many critics is that the rascals were overwhelmingly pederasts and homosexuals. This seems authenticated by looking at the details in public cases. But the experts and certain high churchmen have defined the problem differently. Why are we afraid to offend sodomites?

My priest friend thankfully had his forum with no ill effects. He is a better man than I am. As I said, I would not have the nerve. I wonder though, given that it was 2004, if the attendance was minus those who had since left Church practice over the scandals? He served at a parish where I was once an associate to a pastor who was convicted as a pedophile. The cases were thirty years old and the parishioners and I had trouble believing it. But he pled guilty and went to prison. It marked me and all who knew him in a permanent way. If men we counted as saints could do such terrible things, who could be trusted? The Church is holy because Christ is holy. Yes, she is a divine institution. But she is also a human one, and composed of sinners. The trouble is that the priest signifies Christ. Jesus can work through a bad priest, but more often than not, his work is distorted by priestly sinfulness. The face of Christ in the community of faith is possibly blurred and disfigured.

My priest friend gave a good answer about why a priest could not absolutely be stripped of his priesthood. The sacramental character is permanent. Even Judas remains a priest, albeit probably in hell. Men who abuse children, indeed, I would add those who commit homosexual acts with adults, should not be allowed to continue in ministry. Many of these older men are warehoused in Church gulags (sorry, treatment centers), some are in prison, and others are laicized. The misnomer is that laicization strips away priesthood; all it really does it reduces a man to the lay state in terms of his activity. He cannot offer the sacraments or dress as a cleric. The canon law is a bit peculiar about this because laicization now requires the determination that the man should never have been ordained. Piety once contended that a man could trust that he was called when the bishop uttered his name at ordination. Thus, he was to brush aside any lingering doubts. Given the scandals, this way of thinking is shelved; evidently mistakes are sometimes made. The argumentation here is somewhat similar to that used in annulments; however, while some marriages are not valid, even the ordinations of poor candidates remain valid. Why? Otherwise, if a man’s priesthood was judged null-and-void, then all the Masses he offered, the absolutions extended, etc. would also be invalid. Goodness, think of all the stipends that would require new Masses or return to the donors!

My priest friend wrote, “The fact is that when someone does something really bad, we are not satisfied unless there is retributive justice.” He hit it on the head, although I think the big bucks hurt the wrong people— those in the pews, not those at the top of the pyramid. Look at all the viable churches closed in Boston! Across the country, people have lost their parishes to pay for the misdeeds of priests. Despite our historical fear of trustees, I think the corporate sole approach may have cost us too dearly.

My friend continued: “It is not enough to take steps to ensure that the offense is not repeated—though obviously that needs to be done. When someone commits a terrible crime, the harmony of the world is disturbed, and only a fitting punishment can restore order.” Okay, but what can make proper restitution for stolen innocence and violated trust?

He mentioned jail time, but what is appropriate… 3 months, 11 months, 20 plus years? We have priests who have abused young people and the amount of incarceration varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction? What about proof? Unless the man confesses, it is one person’s word against another. Many of the cases are decades old. Often the priests are long dead and cannot defend themselves. What about innocent priests who have their vocations destroyed by false charges? So-called victims have recanted, sometimes long after a man has been suspended and removed from ministry. The news reports the charges but rarely the recantation. Cardinal priest Avery Dulles thinks the current policy of the bishops throws such men to the dogs. Where is justice?

My priest friend wrote that the priest should face punishment from the Church: “…a punishment delivered over and above the boom that the state lowers. Such a punishment is necessary in order to restore the order of justice within the human institution of the Church.”

Laicization is considered the greatest censure a priest can face, next to formal excommunication. But my priest friend wrote: “If I were a bishop or religious superior who judged after careful investigation that one of my priests had abused a minor, I hope and pray that I would be man enough to call the priest into my office and beat him up right then and there, before I turned him over to the police.” Gulp!

Oh boy, what can I say? We might sympathize with such an attitude, but the priest would probably charge the bishop or his pugnacious assistant with assault and battery, right? Bishops do not like doing jail time. I suppose he could send him to a Third World assignment, feigning concern to get him out of the country. The clandestine operation, managed by an underling to allow deniability, would re-channel social justice funds in a secretive fashion to the local militia hit squad. They would take care of the rascally priest, making him hurt plenty in the process. One might even be able to re-image him as a martyr falsely accused. Of course, all those concerned would probably go to hell for doing such a thing. Such retributive justice sometimes comes awfully close to revenge. It might also make for a cheap dramatic film, but is far from real life.

I understand the sentiment, but the Church is not authorized to issue corporal punishment. I hope my friend’s remarks were somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But again, how much is this to teach the villain a lesson, and how much to appease our own anger and disappointment? Even when it comes to divine justice, as much as we might damn him, the priest abuser might repent and merit God’s mercy. People really get upset about this, that they might have to share heaven with perverts and child molesters! Ah, we really do not like the good thief story all that much, at least not when we are not imagining ourselves as the thief.

It may be that flogging had its place, but such would be hard to argue in the United States today. Where it is still practiced—and not by the Church—there is the matter of physical health. Many of the priest abusers are elderly and have heart conditions. All silliness aside, I would suggest that the best action would be one directed toward the mind and heart—not simply to the body. These men should no longer deny the truth about themselves or what they did. They should be compelled to reflect upon how they hurt children. Every waking moment should be filled with tears and remorse. Although there should be monetary compensation, the answer is not for victims to sue dioceses and to hurt more innocent people in the pews. Rather, these men should live austere lives of prayer and mortification. Any profit derived from their work ought to be given to those they hurt or to those agencies or persons who care for abused children. They should not simply be laicized and released into the public where they might continue as a threat to others. No matter whether in a prison or a monastery, they should resolve that their public lives are over. We cannot trust them. They should know that they cannot trust themselves. The Liturgy of the Hours and the General Intercessions in the daily Eucharist offered for them could include the lists of names of those they harmed. They would pray daily for the healing of the children and the souls of those young people who are now adults. A life of reparation is not too much to ask of men who robbed children of their innocence, of their faith and of their prospect for happy and productive lives.