Let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action ~ 1John 3:18
I.
The first recorded mention of clerical sex abuse of children as a problem confronting the Catholic Church dates back to 309 C.E. when the Council of Elvira attempted to deal with this issue through legislation.
But, it would be a mistake to take this date for anything resembling the onset of the crisis. At best, it is merely the epicenter. It marks the point when the hierarchy acknowledged the necessity of outing its own scandal because the only alternative it could perceive was far worse. If the enemies of the Church went public first, they would bring to light that this wound had been festering in the ecclesiastical body for some time.
The use of children to satisfy adult sexual cravings was common in the Roman empire and its environs at the time of the Gospels. No less a luminary than Julius Caesar had been subjected, while a teenager, to the erotic attentions of powerful men. Such activity was generally deemed licit and harmless. Just as common, and perhaps even more ancient, was the use of young girls as temple prostitutes. Thus when Christ spoke of placing a millstone around the necks of those that would harm little children (Lk. 17:1-3, Mk. 9:42, Mt. 18:6-7), he was not speaking in a cultural vacuum. Things like this were hardly rare, and in the Temple and Synagogues of Israel as much as in the worship houses of their neighbors and conquerors.
Therefore, sexual exploitation of children in pre-Christian times was not the real problem. No efforts were made to hide the practice, or to rationalize it as being something it was not. But, it became a problem for Christians, and something that dared to speak its name in public, because it contravened the explicit teachings of the new religion. Christianity was built on love, and on the inestimable value each individual--child or adult--enjoyed in the eyes of God. This religion also paid closer attention to the regulation of sexual behavior. Abstinence and celibacy were accorded a higher moral value than marriage some 1000 years before celibacy became mandatory for the priesthood in the Roman rite. While pre-Christian sects, like the Essenes, had espoused similar values of sexual asceticism, their teaching had not been for everyone. Only a select few were worthy to follow the path of mortification toward self-perfection.
Christianity revolutionized this teaching by making the particular universal. All members of the human family were expected to strive for the goal of controlling, if not curbing, their sexual appetites and practices. Although St. Paul had publicly permitted marriage with all its trimmings, he did so reluctantly, and made it clear he thought it was the lesser way. St. Augustine, after an allegedly licentious (i.e., normal) youth, sublimated his urges into a mystical longing for union with the divine, which, he maintained, constituted the common ground for all human desires. It is noteworthy that these two church fathers, that became the principal authorities on sexual morality, were both, in a sense, converts to the Christian religion, and demonstrated, in full measure, the concomitant zeal of the converted.
It is no exaggeration to say that the dichotomy created by these teachings went well beyond anything taught by the eponymous founder of the new religion. Nowhere in the Gospels, or in the Book of Acts, can one find a bright line rule stating that whoever is not an ascetic must be a libertine. It seems that by creating a prototype of what would later emerge in Orwell's 1984 as the "Anti-Sex League," these early church fathers had substituted their narrow predilections for the more reasonable--and realistic--provisions set down by their Founder. After all, Christ had turned water into wine to enhance the enjoyment of the participants at the wedding feast of Cana, thus establishing that he was neither against marriage, nor against alcohol. By promoting their emendations on the basic teaching, his later disciples institutionalized a standard that was virtually impossible to follow, even for them, much less for the ordinary faithful. Also, it would not be the last time the church came to deviate from the core message it had been established to proclaim.
II.
The French have a saying, "chassez le naturel, il revient au galop." Nature will not be denied. Or suppressed. Any attempt to drive it out will cause it to return with a roar. Homo sapiens sapiens is a sexual species. The sublimation of the intimacy-cum-reproductive urge for the expression of power, especially clerical power, leads, in many cases, to the abuse of both. The confusion of sex with power, ultimately translates into a lack of fulfillment through either. That, in a nutshell, is most likely how the Christian version of child sex abuse by clergy was engendered, and the existential consequences that happened to the perpetrators as a result.
Prominent on the list of what did not happen to the perpetrators—or, at least, what did not happen often enough—was the regulation of this conduct by the supervisorial (lit. episcopal) clergy. To understand why so few of the bishops curbed this practice (which, after all, went against celibacy as well as against civil law, not to mention the fifth commandment) requires yet another trip through history.
The institutional character of the church—though it may have been inevitable—was not present at the beginning. But after Constantine established Christianity as the official state religion, the political power of the church grew so rapidly it soon became a state unto itself; in effect, a state within a state. Eventually, social governance split into two systems of laws, and two separate and independent jurisdictions: civil and ecclesiastical. Almost all the current legal problems arising out of the clerical sex abuse scandal can be traced back to the tension between these two systems.
As Marci Hamilton explains in her recent book, GOD vs. THE GAVEL: Religion and the Rule of Law, the most famous—or infamous—instance of this tension is the murder of Archbishop Thomas a Becket in 1170 by a group of enterprising nobles hopeful of gaining the king’s favor. Instead, they let loose such an outcry upon the kingdom that Henry II was thwarted in his effort to assign sole jurisdiction of criminal justice to the royal courts. Ultimately, Henry was forced to compromise by instituting a privilege known as “benefit of clergy,” which provided for more lenient sentences for clerical offenders in criminal convictions. In addition, accused clergy were allowed to mount a defense by “compurgation,” in which character witnesses offered (frequently perjured) testimony of innocence that the prosecution was not permitted to contradict. Not until 1576, after Henry VIII declared himself Head of the Church of England, was the travesty of compurgation finally abolished.
Overall, the Reformation began a process that weakened the ecclesiastical court system. In England, for example, the Puritan revolution abolished all prerogative courts in 1641, including the Anglican Church’s High Commission. Even in Catholic Spain, the machinery of the Inquisition served under the ultimate authority of the crown. But these developments did not altogether strip religion of its judicial power. In addition to the remaining vestiges of the “benefit of clergy,” now extended to first-time offenders and to all literate persons, religious entities were able to effect the enactment of “charitable immunity” statutes which held all organized churches, along with select other institutions, harmless to tort claims, or, at least, limited in their liability. This was the case in Massachusetts, where court awards for sex abuse victims had been statutorily capped at $25,000.
Presently gaining ascendancy in the United States, where separation of church and state is constitutionally mandated, is the “No Harm Principle.” Because the state has the ultimate duty to prevent harm, it has a legitimate, if not a compelling, interest in intervening in the activities of all other institutions, including religions, when these activities lead to the occurrence of harm. This principle applies not merely to obvious cases such as clerical sex abuse, but also gives the state jurisdiction over issues involving Native American sacramental peyote, and standard of medical care for minors born to Christian Scientist parents.
III.
Burdened with the baggage of this history of clerical privilege and power, the Roman Catholic Church has been slow to adapt. As a result of this inaction, constitutional and criminal crises have emerged, revealing yet a third: the moral crisis that lies at the root of the problem.
Constitutionally, the church still behaves as though the establishment clause deprived the state of all jurisdiction in matters that touch and concern acts of the clergy. Bishops are known to keep a separate set of personnel files that record the delicts of problem priests, and, when these files were subpoenaed, hierarchical responses ranged from baldfaced denials of their existence to the creation, out of whole cloth, of a quasi-penitential “formation privilege” allegedly protecting them from discovery. A Vatican organ, Civilta Cattolica, even went so far as to propose, a few years ago, that bishops destroy these files, or ship them to the Vatican in diplomatic pouches, to prevent their disclosure to civil authorities.
In the criminal arena, church personnel have regularly failed to report child abuse to civil authorities (something they are now required to do under penalty of imprisonment). Instead, they claim to have conducted in-house reviews, which were skewed toward exonerating the accused. In rare cases where the evidence was too compelling to dismiss, offenders were sent to rehab, or simply transferred to other parishes, or different dioceses, to be foisted on an entirely new crop of unsuspecting believers.
That brings us to the matter of moral outrage. According to church teachings, any form of sex outside marriage is a mortal sin. Compounding a cleric’s molestation is the violation of the vow of celibacy. By any standard, the church should be severe in chastising its wayward clergy. Instead, it seemed actually to have been protecting them—in some cases even rewarding them with promotions—and has not done enough to weed out unsuitable candidates from pursuing clerical careers.
What is even worse, the church did little, if anything, to help victims of the abuse. To the naïve layperson, this kind of neglect is counterintuitive. Isn’t it an integral part of the church’s mission to comfort the afflicted—even more so if the affliction comes at the hands of one of its own anointed?
But it gets even more troubling. Instead of alleviating the pain of its victims, the church has compounded their agony by shamelessly accusing them of hysterical fantasies, or cynical greed, or simply of not being able to tell fact from fiction.
If church officials actually believed the accusations they hurled at complaining abuse survivors, it might explain, if not excuse, their viciousness. But, time and again, subpoenaed church records have supported the claims of victims, and exposed the dissimulation of the churchmen. The latter’s lack of access to the records is irrelevant, as familiarity with the facts would not have altered the mendaciousness of their message. That is exactly what happened in Boston, as is recounted in the book BETRAYAL published by the investigative staff of the Boston Globe.
How does one explain this behavior of the church, which, in other contexts such as abortion, same-sex marriage, or stem cell research, claims an absolute monopoly on Truth? The only answer that fits the facts is that the church is not operating in the realm of ordinary reality, but in a landscape of the mind as powerful and as elusive as the “separate reality” Carlos Castaneda attributed to his brujo don Juan. In this reality, the church was not only founded directly by God, but is, at every moment, controlled by God, in the person of the Holy Spirit, behind the scenes. Thus, like God, the church cannot err, and it cannot sin.
While little of this hypothesis may be comprehensible to the average person—or even comfortable to the average churchman—the church hierarchy appears to require assent to it as a matter of faith. It follows, therefore, that a priest who sexually molests a child is either fulfilling the incomprehensible design of the deity, or he is acting privately and not as an agent of the church. In either case, the church, per se, is not a participant in the abuse, and is not liable.
The reasoning goes further: clerical sex abuse survivors that turn to the church to be made whole do so either in error or in bad faith. For, if the molestation was God’s will, every cry of protest represents disobedience to the divine will; and, if the priest was off the reservation, any attack on the holy priesthood or on God’s church is sacrilege, and amounts to an attack on God himself.
Church documents bear out this analysis of the church’s self-comprehension. In their book, SEX, PRIESTS, AND SECRET CODES, Tom Doyle, Richard Sipe, and Patrick Wall recite the five functions of a diocesan priest, as determined by church legislation from circa 1517. These are, in order of importance: 1) avoidance of scandal through priestly misconduct, 2) protection of church income, 3) maintenance of the “sacred” character of church buildings, vestments, vessels, and the like, 4) care of the souls of the flock through administration of the sacraments, and 5) serving as a reliable conduit between bishop and his diocese.
Reduced to their bare essentials, these priorities amount to image, money, mystique, service, and communication. The highest of these is not service. Instead, image rules, perhaps because the effect is the same whether there is substance to sustain it or not.
After what we have seen of the bishops’ response to the clerical sex abuse crisis over the past two decades, there is little doubt this hierarchical quintet of priorities continues to operate as the blueprint for ecclesiastical management at the present time. Nothing better exemplifies the moral bankruptcy of the church than its continued predilection for style over substance, money and mystery over humility and compassion.
It is no great leap to conclude from this litany of duties that, for at least five centuries—and likely far longer—the church has not been living up to the standards of love and selflessness set down by its founder. Several recent books by respected thinkers who remain practicing Catholics adduce compelling evidence for that conclusion. Noteworthy among them are Garry Wills’ WHAT JESUS MEANT, James Carroll’s TOWARD A NEW CATHOLIC CURCH, and Robert Blair Kaiser’s A CHURCH IN SEARCH OF ITSELF.
In the history of the Roman church, there have been crises that served as defining moments for the future direction the church was to take. Three of them stand out: the schism with the eastern orthodox churches, the Reformation, and the loss of the Papal States to an irredentist Italy. Each time, the church responded with a counteroffensive. The eastern schism gave birth to the crusades, whose greatest success was the repeated sacking of the very “Christian” city of Constantinople; the Reformation generated the heightened mystique of the Counterreformation; and the loss of territory inspired the pope to declare himself fideistically and morally infallible. In each instance, a religious motive was put forward to justify a very worldly result. In the case of the Reformation, it was to keep the operation of a diocese free from the kind of “lay interference” that had become the hallmark of many protestant denominations. The year 1517 marked the beginning of Luther’s campaign against rampant clericalism, and culminated with the posting of his “Ninety-five Theses” on the Wittenberg church door. This item of fact goes a long way toward explaining the promulgation of the church’s quintet of diocesan priorities. If there is no cause-and effect-connection between the two, there certainly is one of synchronicity.
Applying the lessons learned from this excursus to the current sex abuse crisis, it is safe to generalize that the church’s lack of compassion toward the victims of its own wayward clergy is directly proportional to the mandate to protect its income and assets, to say nothing of its reputation. That is the inherited reality of history, and all must come to terms with it.
In 2003 former Oklahoma governor Frank Keating, a catholic and appointee of the U.S. bishops to oversee the implementation of the Dallas Charter with regard to the protection of children, declared his frustration with his employers by comparing their tactics to those of cosa nostra. As a reward for his perspicacity, he was driven to resign. His successor, the noted jurist Ann Burke, ran into similar problems with her principals, but at least was allowed to serve out her term. Little has been heard from or about her successor. The promise of Dallas has become a fading memory—perhaps what the American bishops intended all along.
It looks like the clerical sex abuse crisis will join the schism, the Reformation and the territorial losses to constitute the fourth major eruption in the life of the Roman catholic church. Unlike then bishop, now archbishop, Wilton Gregory’s comment that the crisis is “history,” we are approaching only the end of the beginning. It is hard to imagine now what the church will look like when the real end comes for this crisis, but it is unlikely to be shaped by the clergy or the hierarchy. It will require a truly radical restructuring, by which I mean a return to its roots, both in theology (especially the theology of the body) and in the assignment of power and authority. For such a result, we must trust in the maxim vox populi, vox dei, and look to the laity to transform the present geopolitical enterprise into the “people of God.” Until then, survivors of clerical lust and rape will continue to suffer, but it will not be in silence any longer!