Betrayal

Betrayal: the Crisis in the Catholic Church by Boston Globe reporters covers the Catholic church child-sex abuse scandal. The scandal was concentrated in—but hardly restricted to—the Boston archdiocese, the only US archdiocese where Catholics are a majority of the population and the Cardinal Archbishop was expected to be a tribal leader.

At some point, gay folk tend to take the hateful, deceitful and hypocritical nature of the Catholic Church—and particularly the Church hierarchy—for granted. Yet the story that Betrayal tells is so shocking and outrageous, that it goes beyond one’s worst expectations. The title itself comes from a quote from Cardinal Archbishop Law, driven out of office by the scandal:

Betrayal hangs like a heavy cloud over the Church today.

The book starts with the Rev John J. Geoghan case as the trigger point for the public explosion of the scandal. Geoghan was an unrepentant serial predator. In a court case, the role of Cardinal Law in protecting Geoghan came to light. A story about a child molesting priest became a story about the Church hierarchy protecting a child molesting priest which became a story about a pattern of abuse, abusers and the complicity of the hierarchy.

Which turned out to extend way beyond Boston and way beyond Cardinal Law—Bishops resigned in the US, Poland and Ireland (p.4). The moving of accused priests from parish to parish was a common pattern (p.5). The Santa Fe archdiocese and Dallas diocese were both threatened with bankruptcy over law suits from victims (pp.42-3).
Read More...
There is a chapter on the Geogham case. Geogham was a completely un-self-reflective offender: regularly being accused, regularly being moved and “cured”, regularly re-offending. A pattern ultimately extending across decades.

A chapter on the pattern of cover-ups follows. Then a chapter on the predators, focusing on various individual priests. One Paul Shanley is a pin-up boy for everyone’s prejudices. Openly gay, sexually radical, connected to the man-boy “love” movement, Shanley publicly and flagrantly contradicted Church doctrine. Yet was protected every bit as thoroughly as any other of the paedophile priests. Doctrine wasn’t important: protecting the authority of the priests and the standing of the Church was.

The chapter on the victims is fairly harrowing. Then a chapter on the eruption of the full extent of the scandal in to the public limelight—particularly after the Boston Globe Jan 31 2002 report that scores of priests were involved—and the resulting public anger.

Chapter 6, The Decline of Deference looks at the damage in the standing of the Church. One theme is that career women—naturally pre-disposed to be a bit askance at the claims of the Church hierarchy—were important in various breakthrough prosecutions and judgements. While married men had been very much part of the soft-complicity the Church had relied on (such as exempting priests from mandatory reporting laws, p.134). However, once the extent of the problem became increasingly obvious, it was precisely such married men who felt most betrayed and very angry.

Kevin Burke, DA in Essex County puts it well:

… what really struck me, in communications with the archdiocese, was that there was never any concern shown for the victims. Not the slightest nod of concern for these young people whose lives were turned upside down by this abuse. In hindsight, it’s striking and shocking that Church leaders failed to meet their moral responsibility. … They weren’t sorry for what happened to those kids. They were sorry they got caught. I don’t think the cardinal and the rest of the hierarchy ever really got that they were dealing with kids here. I don’t think they see that even today. They see them as adults coming forward, not as kids to whom this despicable stuff was done (p.130).

As does Attorney-General Reilly:

What really offended me was knowing how the Church had been harsh on and intolerant of people who had done things which, by comparison, paled in significance. Look at the way the Church treats divorced Catholics, like pariahs, not allowed to remarry in the Church. Look at how intolerant and tough they were on gay people< (p.130).

Or on a 72-year old nun who was evicted for baptizing two boys:

This was a nun who gave her life to the Church. And then look at how they treated priests who raped children. We throw this word abuse around, and it’s a nice, inoffensive word. In many of these cases, it wasn’t abuse. It was rape. They were raping children. Where’s the indignation? Where’s the moral outrage? The intolerance and the hypocrisy of the Church lies at the heart of a lot of this. All of this came to a slow boil for me. To be covering up for those who rape children while being so judgemental of others, the hypocrisy is just breathtaking (p.131).

Of course, both protecting paedophile priests and expelling the nun protected the authority of priests. While dealing with the pain caused by Catholic doctrine would imply the Church had been wrong on major matters, with all sorts of implications for its authority.

The chapter ends with a chilling case of a brother and sister whose abuser was prosecuted. The prosecutor in question became a judge and was shocked, ten years, later to find the girl suicidal and the boy working on the streets as male prostitute (pp 138ff).

A chapter on Cardinal Law follows: his ambition (he wanted to be the first American Pope) and moral failure. Then a chapter on sex and the Church, including issues such as homosexuality, celibacy, use of in-house treatment centres and seminary training. (The last has clearly improved greatly in recent years.) The wish by the hierarchy to scapegoat homosexuals and homosexuality was clear early on. Not helped by a refusal to separate paedophilia from homosexuality, despite lots of evidence that homosexuality has no more to do with paedophilia than heterosexuality does.

It is certainly true that much of the betrayal of trust with adolescents was homosexual and that the priesthood is disproportionately homosexual. But the priesthood always has been. St Peter Damian denounced a secret “sodomite” church-within-the-church in the C11th. Ladurie’s classic study Montaillou reports networks of homosexuals who were urban and clerical. Given that Catholic doctrine decrees no social place for the same-sex oriented—and for centuries the Church successfully laboured so that there would be no public place for them—where else did they have to go except the Church?

The ninth and last chapter is about efforts for change in the Church either encouraged or created by the scandal. It includes the (correct) suggestion that the Cardinals would likely choose an elderly successor to John Paul II upon his death, in part to encourage decentralisation from Rome, since long reigns encourage centralisation (p.201). An Afterword brings things up to date.

There is no equivalent in the Protestant Churches in the US for this sustained indifference by the Catholic hierarchy to the molestation and rape of children. In the words of a sociologist who studies clerical misconduct:

There are absolutely no Protestant equivalents … You don’t have rapacious serial predators and the Protestant establishment doesn’t tolerate it the way the Catholic establishment has (p.167).

Why? Betrayal reports rather than analyses. Still, conclusions can be drawn.

The most obvious reason is a simple, even banal one: the Protestant establishment is overwhelmingly married-with-kids. They were much more likely to empathise profoundly with any abused children and the parents because they were parents themselves.*

The second reason is the centrality given to priestly authority. It is clear that, again and again, protecting the authority of the priesthood trumped protecting children. It is the same outlook which effectively holds that one can kill any number of Jews and not get excommunicated (Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich and Eichmann were all born and raised Catholic, none were ever excommunicated): but threaten priestly authority and excommunication will be wheeled out.

There is a third, less obvious, reason: the patterns of Catholic doctrine.

Catholic doctrine on sex is not a structure of morality based on human purposes, but one of taboos based on form and function: one based profoundly on ignoring people’s (inconvenient) feelings and aspirations, no matter how intense and heartfelt. Not merely ignoring them, but deeming them of no warrant (or worse).

Any system of taboos parading as a system of morality must be fundamentally based on the denial of human feeling and aspirations, no matter how intense such feelings. The Catholic hierarchy were just doing what comes naturally according to the underlying patterns of Catholic doctrine. It was just a matter of ranking taboos, and the taboos of priestly authority and the standing of the Church came first.

So, again and again, people in priestly authority steeped in Catholic doctrine ignored the (inconvenient) intense feelings and experiences of the victims of sexual predators, not despite being steeped in Catholic doctrine but as a natural consequence of being so steeped. The (inconvenient) experiences of the children—not matter how intense—could be (and were) systematically treated to be of much lesser importance, indeed discounted and ignored: sacrificed to maintaining priestly authority. Thereby following the underlying pattern of Catholic doctrine: with no parental feelings to counteract them.

A couple of thousand years ago, some words were uttered to another group who thought rules about forms and taboos were the best way to serve God: were, in fact, the Word of God. Words that have certainly not lost their potency.

* One may then well wonder if that does not have wider implications for Catholic doctrine. Yes, of course it matters for Catholic doctrine that it is the creation of celibate males. That truth-is-true regardless of who propounds it shields Catholicism from considering this point. If however, Catholic doctrine is seen as something other than merely The Considered Truth, that doctrine on sexual matters is only-decided-by-celibate-males immediately becomes more problematic.