Sense and Nonsense

Irish Cardinal, Pedophile Enabler, Won't Resign

That's what the New York Times is reporting:

The leader of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Cardinal Sean Brady, said on Wednesday that he would not resign despite new accusations that he failed 35 years ago to alert the parents of victims of a serial pedophile priest, allowing the abuse to continue for at least another decade.

It's no surprise that Brady refuses to resign. One of the sicknesses of the Catholic church is that its institutional culture leads those in positions of power to believe that they can do no wrong and are accountable to no one.  It's a sick, sick institution. 

Faith, Lies, Denial, and Secrecy

Faith, Jennifer Haigh's new novel, is about the past decade's crisis in the Catholic church involving priests who abuse children. Haigh is a superb writer, and I have been a big fan of her previous novels, including Mrs. Kimble, The Condition, and Baker Towers. I think highly of her writing in this book, too, but am conflicted about the story she tells.  

I'm wary of giving away too much of a complicated plot, so I'll simply say that the narrative involves a priest who is accused of abusing a young boy whom he had come to know through the boy's mother and grandmother.  But the whole story isn't known to the authorities.  Nor is it immediately known to the priest's family members, some of whom crumble under the news that the priest might be one of the church's pedophiles.

The characters are vivid and the plot is engaging.  But what makes me uneasy is this book's blithe explanation for the accusation in this case.  Surely it is the case that some of the priests around the country -- indeed, throughout the world! -- who have been accused of abuse are innocent of the charges, victims of unscrupulous people looking to make a profit from salacious accusations. But it's also surely the case that such cases constitute a small minority of the whole. As much as I admire Haigh's skills as a writer, I really dislike what she has done with this story. 

In interview notes on the Amazon website, Haigh says: "I was raised in a Catholic family, spent twelve years in parochial schools and had extremely fond memories of my interactions with Catholic clergy. It’s no exaggeration to say that nuns and priests were the heroes of my childhood."  That's quite apparent from her book.  It's too bad that, instead of offering up a story, as she did, that delivers an unexpected explanation for this one case of fictional abuse, Haigh didn't train her formidable powers of observation at the members of the church hierarchy, whose corruption and evil should put them in an even hotter place in hell than that reserved for the child predators they enabled.

To be fair to Haigh, I read this book in the week following the latest absurdity involving the Catholic Church.  I'm referring to this widely reported news item:

A five-year study commissioned by the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops to provide a definitive answer to what caused the church’s sexual abuse crisis has concluded that neither the all-male celibate priesthood nor homosexuality were to blame.

Instead, the report says, the abuse occurred because priests who were poorly prepared and monitored, and were under stress, landed amid the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s.

There you go!  There's a reasonable explanation for you: the Sixties are to blame! Never mind that clergy of other denominations and faiths also went through the 1960s and 1970s without being turned into pedophiles.

Whatever the explanation for the extraordinary concentration of this problem among Catholic clergy, there is no denying that an equally egregious crime was its cover-up by bishops, cardinals, and other people high up in the Catholic hierarchy.  And THAT is a problem of institutional culture. The Catholic church is a morally bankrupt institution that is based on a culture of secrecy and deceit. I know this all too well from my own observation of the Catholic institutions in which I have worked most of my adult life. Leaders of Catholic institutions tend to be secretive, duplicitous, and protective of their own power and that of others around them. They're abusive toward those without power.  They pay lip service to Christian virtues but violate them constantly in their day-to-day interactions with others.

I was interested to find my view affirmed recently by Rev. Bob Hoatson, a Catholic priest who is  co-founder of an organization called Road to Recovery, which provides support to victims of sexual abuse. He is also a survivor of sexual abuse himself. Recently, interviewed on National Public Radio about the bishops' report that shifted blame outside the church, placing it on the looseness of the Sixties and Seventies, Hoatson said: 

This report does not get to the heart of the issue, and the heart of the issue is deceit, cover-up, silence, secrecy and an internal culture that doesn't let anybody else in.

He's right. Dead right. And Haigh comes close to acknowledging as much in her novel at the end when she alludes to the secrecy, cowardice, and perfidy of Cardinal Bernard Law and his coterie of mitered enablers in place when the Boston scandal exploded.  

So, Haigh's novel is well done and it addresses an important contemporary social problem.  But in my view it trivializes the problem by offering a benign -- even romantic! -- explanation for what happened in this fictional case, and fails to grapple head-on with an even more serious problem in the Catholic church, a problem that will exist long after the abuse crisis fades from the news.  Still, this is a novel, not a nonfiction analysis of the church and its problems, so it would be unfair to judge Haigh's work on anything but her writerly craft.   She's a master.  ★★★★☆

 

More Catholic Insanity, from the Vatican to Boston

I was traveling in the Pacific Northwest this past week and didn't have the time or inclination to blog.  But there was one item in the news that I made a mental note to return to when the chance arrived.  A week ago Friday (on July 16), the New York Times reported a story out of the Vatican with this lead paragraph:

The Vatican issued revisions to its internal laws on Thursday making it easier to discipline sex-abuser priests, but caused confusion by also stating that ordaining women as priests was as grave an offense as pedophilia.

Honestly, are these the sickest fucks on earth, or what? It would make one laugh if it weren't so horribly sad and twisted.

A couple of days later, Maureen Dowd offered spot-on commentary about this in her Sunday op-ed column. (Be sure to read the whole thing.)  She wrote, in part:

The church still believes in its own intrinsic holiness despite all evidence to the contrary. It thinks it’s making huge concessions on the unstoppable abuse scandal when it’s taking baby steps.

The casuistic document did not issue a zero-tolerance policy to defrock priests after they are found guilty of pedophilia; it did not order bishops to report every instance of abuse to the police; it did not set up sanctions on bishops who sweep abuse under the rectory rug; it did not eliminate the statute of limitations for abused children; it did not tell bishops to stop lobbying legislatures to prevent child-abuse laws from being toughened.

There is no moral awakening here. The cruelty and indecency of child abuse once more inspires tactical contrition. All the penitence of the church is grudging and reactive. Church leaders are merely as penitent as they need to be to protect the institution. 

The Catholic diocese in Boston chose this past week to announce that it is about to launch a major advertising campaign to urge inactive Catholics to "come home" to their Church.  Good luck with that.   I recall a similar campaign about fifteen to twenty years ago, which didn't produce much in the way of returns to the fold.  This campaign is simply likely to produce derision and incredulity. Today's Boston Sunday Globe carried some letters to the editor, reacting to the church's planned campaign.  As Claire Callahan of Topsfield wrote:

Would you accept an invitation to “come home’’ again, if, as a woman, you were regarded as only a partial member of the family, and one for whom ordination to the priesthood is described as a grave sin in the same category as pedophilia?

Would you “come home’’ again, if there were a “funny uncle’’ protected by the head of your family, at your children’s peril?

 

Would you “come home’’ again if you were gay or lesbian, and knew that the “family’’ does not accept you, or may not admit your child to a parochial school?

 

 

People will come home again in countless numbers when the leaders of the family embody in their behavior the message of the family founder: “Come to me, all you who labor and are overburdened, and I will give you rest.’’

Public-relations media blitzes and blogs are no match for Christ’s words that sustain my faith.

Patricia Garrity of Somerville wrote:

A thread running through the front-page report on Catholics being invited to “come home’’ seems to imply that many Catholics have lost their faith. Catholics have not lost faith in the gospels and their enduring message. They have lost faith in the church bureaucracy. But the hierarchy from Rome to Boston does not listen to such rumblings.

 

Ratzinger: Criminal in Chief

Yesterday's New York Times carried a compelling article about the failures of the Vatican to deal with the sexual abuse scandals that have infected the Roman Catholic Church throughout the world.  This sick church has been rotting from within for decades, and Joseph Ratzinger, now known as Pope Benedict XVI, sat around the Vatican, breathing in the stench of that rot, but ignoring it: What smell?  I smell nothing!

From the article:

The office led by Cardinal Ratzinger, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had actually been given authority over sexual abuse cases nearly 80 years earlier, in 1922, documents show and canon lawyers confirm. But for the two decades he was in charge of that office, the future pope never asserted that authority, failing to act even as the cases undermined the church’s credibility in the United States, Australia, Ireland and elsewhere.

. . .

But the future pope, it is now clear, was also part of a culture of nonresponsibility, denial, legalistic foot-dragging and outright obstruction. More than any top Vatican official other than John Paul, it was Cardinal Ratzinger who might have taken decisive action in the 1990s to prevent the scandal from metastasizing in country after country, growing to such proportions that it now threatens to consume his own papacy.

Ratzinger deserves to have his papacy undone by this cancer.  The Church is dying from it -- and from the hierarchy's staunch rejection of modernity and simple justice, as evidenced by its grotesque marginalization of women.  If I were a modern-day Pontius Pilate, and this Church were brought before me for judgment, I would order its death.   

Clear-thinking people left the Catholic church years ago. Let's hope tens of millions of others see the light and do the same.  Only if enough people exercise their "exit" option will the men who run this church -- many evil, many simply wrong-headed -- wake up to what they have wrought.

How To Save the Catholic Church?

That's the question Peggy Noonan asks in her op-ed piece in today's Wall Street Journal.  She writes, in part:

In a way, the Vatican lives outside time and space. The verities it speaks of and stands for are timeless and transcendent. For those who work there, bishops and cardinals, it can become its own reality. And when those inside fight for what they think is the life of the institution, they feel fully justified in fighting any way they please.   . . .

But in the past few decades, they not only fought persons—"If you were loyal you'd be silent"—they fought information.

What they don't fully understand right now—what they can't fully wrap their heads around—is that the information won.

The information came in through the cracks, it came in waves, in newspaper front pages, in books, in news beamed to every satellite dish in Europe and America. The information could not be controlled or stopped. The information was that something very sick was going on in the heart of the church.

Once, leaders of the Vatican felt that silence would protect the church. But now anyone who cares about it must come to understand that only speaking, revealing, admitting and changing will save the church.

She's right: that's the only way the church can be saved.  But maybe the church isn't worth saving.   Maybe it is too morally and spiritually bankrupt.  Maybe it should wither up and die, killed by its own leaders.

The Pope Blames the Victims

Every day brings new abominations from the lunatics at the Vatican.  Yesterday, the Pope essentially blamed the victims of clergy abuse.  That's my reading (uncharitable as you may think it to be) of what he meant when he said that it was necessary for Christians to “repent” in light of “the attacks of the world, which speaks to us of our sins.”  What kind of nonsense is that?  Christians don't need to repent.  The Catholic faithful don't even need to repent.  They didn't do anything.  The Catholic clergy and hierarchy need to repent; they are the predators, the enablers, the sick criminals who prey on the vulnerable. 

One of the best commentaries on the current pope and the sorry state of the Catholic church is by Philip Stephens in today's edition of the Financial Times.  Here is what Stevens has to say:

For a time I was puzzled by Pope Benedict’s response to the crisis in the Catholic church. We might disagree about the course of Catholicism. In uncharitable moments, I might mutter that the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was politician as much as priest; his piety merged with ambition some time ago. Yet the Pope indisputably was highly intelligent. Surely he could see what was happening.

Now, I think I understand. The pontiff is a globaliser. He can feel the world’s geopolitical plates shifting. He grasps as well as any politician or business leader that the west has had its day. The opportunities to spread the gospel lie elsewhere – in societies more respectful of authority and less questioning of past crimes.

Pope Benedict, after all, cannot be blind to the crisis of faith among his flock in Europe and North America. He must have known as well as anyone else how many tens of millions had walked away even before the revelations of clerical child abuse and episcopal cover-ups.

He has seen what has happened in Ireland where unerring fealty to Rome has given way to revulsion and disillusionment. He knows seminaries across Europe are empty, and Catholicism in the US convulsed.

No, the dismal reality, I now think, is that the Pope does not care – or at least does not care enough to bend from the unflinching defence of temporal power that described his personal path to the throne of St Peter. If the eventual choice is one between the implosion of the church in the west and a dilution of the blind obedience he sees as an anchor of papal authority, Pope Benedict is ready to stand in the ruins.

Church Leaders are Truly Sick

The Vatican keeps making gross missteps that would be comical if they weren't so horrendous.

From today's New York Times:

Tensions rose Wednesday over comments made on Monday by the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who called homosexuality “a pathology” and linked it to pedophilia. The comments came as the Vatican was trying to calm a scandal over sexual abuse by priests.

Gay rights and victims’ groups protested the comments — and on Wednesday even the French government weighed in, calling the remarks by Cardinal Bertone, the Vatican’s second in command, “an unacceptable conflation, and one that we condemn.”

Everyone should condemn this sort of tripe.  Shame on this church. 

A Hideous Church

See Maureen Dowd's column in the Sunday New York Times. It starts like this:

When I was in Saudi Arabia, I had tea and sweets with a group of educated and sophisticated young professional women.

I asked why they were not more upset about living in a country where women’s rights were strangled, an inbred and autocratic state more like an archaic men’s club than a modern nation. They told me, somewhat defensively, that the kingdom was moving at its own pace, glacial as that seemed to outsiders.

How could such spirited women, smart and successful on every other level, acquiesce in their own subordination?

I was puzzling over that one when it hit me: As a Catholic woman, I was doing the same thing.

I, too, belonged to an inbred and wealthy men’s club cloistered behind walls and disdaining modernity.

I, too, remained part of an autocratic society that repressed women and ignored their progress in the secular world.

I, too, rationalized as men in dresses allowed our religious kingdom to decay and to cling to outdated misogynistic rituals, blind to the benefits of welcoming women’s brains, talents and hearts into their ancient fraternity.

To circumscribe women, Saudi Arabia took Islam’s moral codes and orthodoxy to extremes not outlined by Muhammad; the Catholic Church took its moral codes and orthodoxy to extremes not outlined by Jesus. In the New Testament, Jesus is surrounded by strong women and never advocates that any woman — whether she’s his mother or a prostitute — be treated as a second-class citizen.

Negating women is at the heart of the church’s hideous — and criminal — indifference to the welfare of boys and girls in its priests’ care. [emphasis added] Lisa Miller writes in Newsweek’s cover story about the danger of continuing to marginalize women in a disgraced church that has Mary at the center of its founding story:

“In the Roman Catholic corporation, the senior executives live and work, as they have for a thousand years, eschewing not just marriage, but intimacy with women ... not to mention any chance to familiarize themselves with the earthy, primal messiness of families and children.” No wonder that, having closed themselves off from women and everything maternal, they treated children as collateral damage, a necessary sacrifice to save face for Mother Church.

See all of this fine column.

Rescue Catholicism from Vatican

POPE BENEDICT XVI has denounced the predator priests with due severity, but he cannot credibly chastise their enabler bishops because he has been one of them. The whole Catholic Church seems to be in crisis, but what is really at stake here is the collapse not of Catholicism, but of Catholic fundamentalism.

That's from James Carroll's informative op-ed piece in this morning's Boston Globe.

A Diseased Church

The Vatican is so sick, so insulated, so far removed from reality that it takes one's breath away.  You've seen the news that a senior Vatican priest compared the world's outrage at the rampant sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church to the persecution of the Jews.  All clear-thinking people recognize this as a sick comparison, a symptom of the pathology that pervades the church hierarchy.  Outrage is the only proper response. As the New York Times reports:

A leading advocate for sexual abuse victims in the United States, David Clohessy, called comparing criticism of the church to persecution of the Jews “breathtakingly callous and misguided.”

“Men who deliberately and consistently hide child sex crime are in no way victims,” he said. “And to conflate public scrutiny with horrific violence is about as wrong as wrong can be.”

Another American victims’ advocate rejected the Vatican’s statement distancing itself from the remarks. “Father Cantalamessa chose to equate calumny against the Jewish people as the same as criticism of Pope Benedict,” said Kristine Ward, a spokeswoman for the National Survivor Advocates Coalition. “It is incomprehensible that Father Cantalamessa did this and that Pope Benedict, the ultimate authority in this church who presided at the service, did not stand during the service to disavow this connection to anti-Semitism.”

The comments also ruffled Vatican-Jewish relations, which have often been tense during Benedict’s papacy.

Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni, the chief rabbi of Rome, who was host to Benedict at the Rome synagogue in January on a visit that helped calm waters after a year of tensions, laughed in seeming disbelief when asked about Father Cantalamessa’s remarks.

“With a minimum of irony, I will say that today is Good Friday, when they pray that the Lord illuminate our hearts so we recognize Jesus,” Rabbi Di Segni said, referring to a prayer in the traditional Catholic liturgy calling for the conversion of the Jews. “We also pray that the Lord illuminate theirs.”

Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League in the United States, attributed the remarks to ignorance, not malice. “You would think that a senior priest in the church would have a better understanding of anti-Semitism than to make this hideous comparison,” he said. 

No wonder people have left this sick church in droves. Its leadership is hideously warped.