I haven't blogged on the abuse scandals yet. Partly because, down here, we really weren't directly affected to the extent that the Northeast (and other parts of the country) was; at times, it seems like the worst is past. Of course, that is a stupid illusion. For one, this affects all of us, and we will be living with the consequences for decades. Perhaps we have heard of the rumblings in Philadelphia (where a Grand Jury last month gave a most horrific account of the extent of the cover-up in the Archdiocese, under the leadership of Cardinals Krol and then Bevilacqua), and more recently in Los Angeles.
It is extremely disheartening to see how one's perceptions of the scandal are skewed by one's own ideological biases. Liberals would rather see this as stemming from repressive sexual moralizaing, or lay the blame on the discipline of celibacy; conservatives blame it on the opposite -- liberal attitudes towards sexual deviancy, heterodoxy and the like. One side would blame only the culture and structure, and ignore real issues of fidelity; the other would focus only on the errant behavior of priests and not the structures that enabled this behavior and put institutional image over the victims. Each story becomes an excuse to trot out the old agendas. The response is either "it's church teaching" or "church structure" on the liberal side, or "we need greater fidelity and holiness" on the conserative side. The truth (as it often is) is probably somewhere in the middle. Do read Amy Welborn's great post on these two stories: "Enabler's Row" where she unpacks some of the structural issues that enabled this behavior to continue, and that continue, unchecked and unreformed in the institutional culture of the Church. These are things that the Dallas Charter doesn't address, that the seminary visitation doesn't address (indeed, it might seem to foster a yes-man mentality):
It's the way the system works. Or has. Radically and courageously following Christ is not important to Church bureaucrats. If it were, they wouldn't be Church bureaucrats, after all. What has been important is maintaining image: maintaining the institution's image, as well as the image of individual priests. Not only maintaining the image of those priests, but keeping their egos intact and, dare we say, keeping them quiet. We can only hope that the price paid now has been high enough that this is changing. Judging from the continued obfuscations and self-justifying cries emanating from both coasts, it doesn't seem as if the lesson has been learned quite yet.(Do read the comments to her post, especially from the the couple of priests who've shared their thoughts. I might add that Whispers in the Loggia has a closer, more personal look on the Philidelphia stories this month.)
2 comments:
“I haven't blogged on the abuse scandals yet. Partly because, down here, we really weren't directly affected to the extent that the Northeast (and other parts of the country) was....”
Yes and no.
There is no excuse, and that the former former Cardinal Archbishop of Boston is comfortably retired to a Vatican sinecure is as scandalous as Christopher Hitchens would suggest. (Actually I very often entirely agree with Mr Hitchens as to his theses –- even as to Mother Teresa: his criticisms of her were old hat to me: I had heard them years before and in not much less dire terms from Catholic missionary brothers and nuns in the field, who considered her disgraceful; it’s just that his nasty rhetoric totally puts me off.)
There is no excuse for these terrible men –- these emotional cripples and retards (let us resurrect the old politically incorrect terminology now that we have people to whom it properly belongs) are entirely correctly consigned to the pit for life. But do we correctly ascribe fault to the institutions themselves?
I think there is room for doubt, that notwithstanding the very proper tort compensation of abuse victims of Catholic parishes and Catholic and Anglican aboriginal residental schools, requiring Catholic and Anglican parishioners all these years later to cough up the dollars is problemmatic. Especially in regard to the aboriginal residential schools. The culprits were, after all, a mere handful of rotten apples and the Catholic and Anglican orders which undertook this mission to aboriginal people were, when all is said and done, doing God’s work to the very best of their ability at enormous cost and for the most part doing it out of the very best of motives. An aboriginal Canadian chief (and Anglican priest) of my acquaintance goes so far as to say that the residential schools were on the whole a very good thing: and even that the aboriginal leaders of today including himself are the residential schools’ best products and that it was a tragedy when they were closed.
It was the governments of the day which delegated responsibility for educating aboriginal North Americans to the Anglican and Catholic churches; other Christian bodies were busy proseletysing, teaching and healing in Africa and Asia all the while (so were the Anglicans and Catholics, of course) and they are totally off the hook as regards the abuse scandals. It seriously riles me when the Deputy Prime Minister of Canada now piously says, “We don’t want to destroy the Catholic and Anglican churches but we do think they need to hurt.” Her name is MacLellan. Guess what her church background is.
Well, the whole point is that it wasn't just the bad eggs who did the nastiness, or just some individual bishops who covered-up. There seems to be some systemic issues that helped contribute to and magnify the problem. Apart from Cardinal Law (who did resign), all other prelates are still in office (or retired; well apart from the couple who were directly implicated in scandal). I said nothing at all about damages, torts, or making the church hurt a bit. That is absurd and vindictive, and was not the point of my post. The goings on in the Spokane bankruptcy case are of grave concern as well, especially for parish assets elsewhere.
Post a Comment