The late Father Richard Neuhaus spoke of the sex-abuse scandal that broke out almost 10 years ago in the American Church as “The Long Lent.” I think he would have been astonished to know not only that it has not completely ended here (although we may finally be in the endgame), but that this sickening plague went viral into Ireland and continental Europe, bringing down not only abusing priests and religious but members of the hierarchy implicated in cover-ups that destroyed families and crippled dioceses. In the U.S., recent sexual scandals have also brought down several well-known media priests familiar to the readers of the Register through radio, television or personal appearances. And scandal has seriously hampered the operations of a well-known modern religious congregation whose late founder sadly was found to be a fraud and accused of several grave sexual crimes.
This is the background against which we need to look at the interplay of two very important virtues especially relevant for the Catholic laity today: justice and mercy.
The long history of the Church has seen, as Archbishop Sheen put it, “a thousand Crucifixions and a thousand Resurrections.”
If I were to propose two principal causes for the priestly sex-abuse scandal, I would point to a profound misapplication of the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and the secularization of the West.
Both coincided with exhaustion from the wars and genocides of the last century, leading people to look for pleasure and security as ends in themselves — and thus making them ripe for the “Dictatorship of Relativism,” as Pope Benedict terms it, which inevitably leads to violence, sexual license and (as C.S. Lewis put it) “The Abolition of Man.”
Should all of this shock us?
Well, in one sense, perhaps, but not fundamentally, if we understand human nature and the reality of original sin assumed by each one of us at conception. The truth is that only four human beings have ever been born or created without that original sin that inclines us to commit sins of our own: Adam and Eve, Our Lord and Savior, and his Mother, the Immaculate Conception. The rest of us are born sinners.
Therefore, it would be hypocritical to be “shocked, shocked” (see Casablanca for the reference) that anyone commits even the most grievous crime. We may be disappointed and disgusted, but not surprised. After all, did not even Peter, the Rock upon which the Church is built, deny his Savior three times in his moment of greatest need? Didn’t Judas, one of the original Twelve, betray the Lord for a handful of coins?
No, as Catholics aware that our own perhaps less newsworthy sins also nailed Christ to his cross, we are called to mercy, to forgiveness.
The Lord says in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” (Matthew 5:3-12). The Church is an engine of mercy for those who see forgiveness, offering three sacraments — baptism, reconciliation and the anointing of the sick — that apply God’s grace at various times during life for those who repent of their sins.
When I was a priest at the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C., some years ago, I placed behind my office desk one of the great photos of the last century: Blessed John Paul the Great, whose feast day we celebrate Oct. 22, in conversation with his would-be assassin in his jail cell, whispering words of forgiveness, whether asked for or not.
Everyone who walked into my office knew that there was no sin that could not be forgiven, except the sin against the Holy Spirit that is despair of forgiveness.
In Blessed John Paul’s encyclical Dives in Misericordia (On the Mercy of God), written near the beginning of his papacy, in 1980, he foreshadowed what he exercised so nobly after the attempt on his life. There he says that merciful love for all human creatures “constitutes the fundamental content of the messianic message of Christ” (64). The scriptural passage that he more often preached upon during his pontificate than any other was that of the Prodigal Son and Merciful Father (Luke 15:11-32).
Finally, for those of you more academically inclined, I recommend a book on anger and forgiveness written by two fine Catholic men, a psychiatrist and a psychologist: Helping Clients Forgive: An Empirical Guide for Resolving Anger and Restoring Hope by Robert D. Enright and Richard P. Fitzgibbons.
Father C. John McCloskey III is a Church historian and fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His website is FrMcCloskey.com.
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Father McCloskey’s article is one of the best on this subject that’s ever been penned since the Church has been put on the ropes for the past ten years dealing with its direct and indirect after effects.
If I can offer an encouraging word here, I’m a “revert” who returned to the Church during its darkest hours in Massachusetts where the Church had lost nearly all of its credibility (read: old fashioned “clout”) and respectability due to the criminal behavior of a small handful of men with very sickened souls. Adding to their criminal abuse of minors, was the cover-ups pulled by their superiors within the Hiearchy. Many people up here are still shaking both heads and upraised fists when they even contemplate how Cardinal Law not only for how got out of Boston in time to escape a possible indictment, but also how on earth could the Vatican reward him with a sinecure post in one of Rome’s top basilicas.
Being a former reporter/columnist for the Springfield MA Diocese’s Catholic Observer (but prior to even the first scandal involving the late James Porter in Fall River), and also as a small three-town weekly news editor/reporter/columnist, I’m well aware of how easy it is to become cynical, presume the worst first and do whatever it takes within reason to cover the news.
Unfortunately, the major papers and electronic media didn’t feel any restraints when it came to covering the clerical sex abuse cases and their subsequent cover-ups. The old if it bleeds, it leads “rule of thumb” applied first and foremost. Sad to say, some of the worst possible kinds of reporters (yes, they call themselves “journalists,” ha!) were assigned to cover these stories. Many of them lacked any form of sensitivity to these kinds of stories. Ironically enough, the way they reported their stories, in many respects they wound up…however inadvertently so ... covering the alleged incidents as fact before they were adjudicated by the courts, much in the same manner female rape victims were long treated before the 4th estate realized the extent of so much secondary (“collateral”) damage that resulted due to very insensitively handled coverage of predominately “routine” rape cases involving a male attacker on a female victim.
Thankfully over the years, much coverage involving the “routine” cases improved greatly, thus resulting in more convictions due to fewer cases being tossed out due to too much pretrial publicity that often tainted jury pools.
STOP THE PRESSES when it came to showing any sensitivity towards the priests, bishops and lay religious. To be honest, one of the reasons I left for a decade-plus was the Church’s mishandling and coverup of Porter’s cr imes. It was worse than Watergate when one considered the ramifications of what crimes like this could do to the faith of so many; myself included, then. Watergate could be relatively brushed off as the final “Crisis” Richard Nixon couldn’t overcome and NOT shamelessly give his signature victory wave to. There were no “winners” only losers in Porter’s case and the ones to follow.
So I thought. Call it the work of the Holy Spirit, whatever you desire. This (by then)... ca. 2002, sometime reporter/editor whose earliest goal was to become a “big shot” political reporter/columnist (even spent three months at the National Journalism Center to better prepare myself… and chances) still angry, upset and outraged over the Porter case (I was married to a Protestant with four children, and then an active 3rd Degree Knight) felt stabbed in the back, stomach and punched in the face. I’ll bet lots of us did and still do.
The louder the drumbeat of the Globe, its colonial owner, the New York Times, and other MA news outlets, became ... not to mention how softly and deftly the media tucked in any retractions or exhonerations at the back of their respective papers, “under the fold” and next to the probate notices, the smellier the coverage and whole affair became. Now and then, the “journalists’” biases, especially if they’d “suffered” from some priest or nun, and I’m not talking about real suffering, from actual beatings, or far worse, sexula abuse and the pressures to keep silent afterwards, but mostly the usual “parochial school war stories” stuff, the more I found my faith awakened. It also helped that a good Protestant friend caught me in one of my darker moods recalling the betrayal I felt from the Porter case, especially when he said I’d been carrying that load which however horrible, wasn’t hadn’t even directly impacted my life or home. That key word “directly” opened the door to a part in my heart that’d long been locked. Yes, I was upset and rightly so. But I let my feelings overwhelm my better sense of justice, fairness and even acceptance of the quintessential logic of Catholicism.
Yes, our hiearchy botched this like they botched the daily life of Renaissance Rome and let its depravities eat away at the faith of so many. However, with apologies to Blessed Cardinal Newman, did one illegitimate kid fathered by a cleric, one case of contemporary abuse and its proven cover-up by our clergy today result in the changing of one article of religious doctrine involving matters of both faith, and even morals? A moral crime against God committed in 15th Century Rome is no more or less a moral crime against God committed just as you’re reading this reply. The truths contained and taught by the Church are immortal, just as God Himself is immortal. I need not go into defending the Church’s doctrines on infallibility, indefectability, etc. to elaborate more on why my desire to return to Rome actually increased as my disgust as “knowledge” of the second and more damaging wide-spread nature of clerical abuses became known.
Why did I put “hooks” around knowledge? Well, let’s be honest, how much did we ... the reading/viewing/listening public really learn from so much biased and one-sided “coverage”? And it was almost as if the American press had a tele-conclave in the offices of the Globe and Times to select Jason Berry as their preferred “pope.” There’s a real unbiased source. Sure, did he crack open cases that needed cracking. I won’t doubt it, but the overwhelming biases shown not only by the liberal media, but even the conservative side, Fox, (somebody take it, please!) was no help. Have we forgotten Sean Hannity’s and Bill O’Reilly’s rants and cheap shots? Hope not.
But have we…media and its consumers alike… also learned to forgive them? Well, that’s an answer we’d all better have in the positive column; no matter how odious we find the coverage of the Church’s biggest, smallest and worst critics who have taken their level of criticism down some notches to simple rants and cheap detractions.
My heart goes out to all involved indirectly and most significantly, directly as actual victims of the perpetrating cleric’s criminal behavior, the cover-ups, priest shufflings and the lasting psychological and spiritual damage. And yes, my heart and soul mandates that I also learn how to forgive the perpetrators, too. It’s what Jesus told us to do. We can argue all we want about “peronally opposed to but” regarding abortion, but Jesus didn’t leave any ambiguities when he gave St. Peter his numerical solution to the “how many times must I forgive” question or for all of us, his final plea that we “forgive those who know not what they are doing” or have done.
Indeed, the adults who committed the crimes are already wearing their millstones. That ought to be enough for us who do not have a direct link to these cases. Emotional outrage arising from reading about these cases is both good and necessary, but it’s not enough to put us in the “direct” catagory. Sadly we, society in general, forget that the victims, of these particular crimes against them, are also carrying millstones and have been for years. Sometimes many if not most added to the weight of these millstones due to drinking, drugs, promiscuous behavior ... which they know and knew they were wrongful acts when committed ... all of which makes the enormity of such crimes perpetrated against them in their innocent youthful years so huge.
Sadly, I’ve noticed a tendency of some contributors to the Register, and include me in if I’m guilty, too, of taking a high n’ mighty tone that borders on outright puritanical/pharisiacal finger-wagging and “thou shalts” or “shalt nots” or “shouldn’t haves” and “regardless of whatever happened to you/them” judgmental bombs. There’s a time and place for such bombs, preferably in matters of war/peace, economics/social justice, the environment, the “general stuff.” Not when it comes to how we perceive reactive behaviors and lifestyle choices momentarily committed/or permanently embraced in the aftermath of sexual abuse cases. After all, didn’t Jesus save something along this level of severity for the only time he made any kind of “approving” comment concerning capital punishment? And, was He speaking literally insofar as what we should do physically and legally to people caught, and properly found guilty? Or was Jesus speaking allegorically about the spiritual weight of such sins to be borne out of such depravities? After all, many abuse victims have behaved much like the unforgiving debtor and became abusers themselves to others, or even their own children, the kids of others or became enablers of such repetitive behavior.
Still, Jesus also commands us to forgive them, as we ask His Father to forgive our sins.
Thus the crying need for greater understanding and sensitivity shown by the press, pols and ambitious headline seeking prosecutors and tort lawyers must scream the loudest to be heard over the din. Also, thus the Lord’s command for all of us to understand what forgiveness really means and put it to practice in our daily lives also screams loudly for attention, if not moreso simply because this mandate comes directly from Jesus, Himself.
Truly and heartfully, I hope my reply didn’t betray any lack of necessary understanding and sensitivity. For those who believe I had, I beg your forgiveness. I’ve never been abused and/or witnessed such depraved criminal behavior. As a reporter, former corrections official and church volunteer, I’ve come to know many people who were abused, and their life’s picture has been anything but pleasant to observe. Let us all pray for them. And let us all pray for reporters and editors to serve their Creator, the Catholic Church, all other faiths and society better by raising their bar of professional conduct when it comes to covering these stories. Sorry for the length of this reply: But this has long been percolating in my head n’ heart.
It’s not just a “long Lent” for America. Clergymen, priests and bishops, have been sexually active with young boys, women and other men, since the time of St. Peter Damian, who wrote “The Book of Gomorrah” to the pope in his day, complaining about it. How can anyone say this is new?
This topic is old news. With Bishop Finn facing up to one year in jail, for his part in not reporting one of his priests had pornographic photos of young girls in his possession, the church in America, and all over the world, may finally be cleaned up. Priests fathering children out of wedlock is common in Italy. Even in the US, retired priests spend a lot of time with their “secretaries”. I know one.
The Vatican should spend less time rewriting liturgies, and put more study into Bible verses specific to those men in ordained ministry, such as the Pastoral Letters Paul wrote to Timothy and Titus.
A married male priesthood will help our church greatly. Any clergyman, be he a deacon, priest, bishop or pope, should be able to marry at any time in his life. If St. Peter wanted to be a parish priest today, he would be rejected at Latin rite seminaries, because he was married, and he’d not be accepted in the Eastern rite as a bishop,for the same reason.
I just learned that and it is ridiculous to think St. Peter could neither be a priest nor a bishop. It’s time for everyone to wake up & smell the coffee. The handwriting is on the wall and St. Peter Damian wrote it, 1500 years ago.
We can only pray for repentance involving change. Mercy enables bad behavior, if change never happens. Only courts will give real justice. Bishop Finn may experience justice. Up to one year in jail.
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