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Sins of the Fathers — Holding Catholics Accountable
By Nicole Chardenet, Bristol
My Catholic co-worker told me she has instructed her children always to stick together when around their parish priest. She has no reason to believe he’s a pedophile; she just thinks you can’t be too careful these days.
For some strange reason I can’t fathom, everyone is up in arms right now about pedophile priests. What’s the big deal, I ask? I thought everyone was okay with this.
It was almost twenty years ago, back in 1984, when the first pedophile priest story broke out of a parish in Louisiana. I say "first" in the sense that it was the first publicly acknowledged Catholic pedophile case; child-molesting priests have been with us for much longer than that, even going back to the Middle Ages—an Italian bishop named Faventino liked to bring little girls into his bed, where he fondled and molested them for hours on end, decorating the features he liked most with gold coins, which the children were allowed to keep.
Of course, most of the old medieval European stories told about randy clergy involved women. Today, no one thinks of priests engaging in illicit acts with adult females—we all know by now that the preferred prey of supposedly celibate clergymen is young boys.
The Church and its hierarchy are being properly excoriated in the media now for a long and ugly history of doing little about pedophile priests, choosing to shuffle them from one parish to another where they can molest more children, rather than actually defrocking them—or, better yet, sending them to jail where they belong.
One particularly disturbing news story last week notes that part of the Church’s reluctance to get rid of those guilty of the ugliest of human sins is because they’ve been suffering from a shortage of priests for decades, and defrocking their pedophiles would just make the condition worse. Considering that the Pope has declared the subject of the ordination of women to be off-topic, closed, not up for discussion, end of story, what message is he sending? I’ll tell you what it is. The Pope wants us to understand that pedophiles are still preferable to female clergy.
It’s the worst form of hypocrisy coming from a religious institution that has preached long and hard against most expressions of sexuality—even, until the last few decades, against married relations for other than procreative purposes. A Church that preaches one of the highest standards of sexuality can’t keep its own clergymen from—pardon the bluntness here—buggering altar boys.
Did that strike you as offensive? Are you angry that I put that so frankly and graphically? I hope you are. Because it’s about time everyone—and particularly Catholic laypeople—gets as infuriated as I am over child-fuc —er, I mean child-screwing priests!
I’m not particularly interested in haranguing the Vatican hierarchy over this; the media is doing a fine enough job. I want to know when people are going to start pointing fingers at Catholic laypeople and ask them, "What are YOU doing about pedophile priests?"
Do I detect a quiet culture of tolerance among Catholics? Why is it the protests about pedophile priests in the media come from non-Catholics, and only the occasional priest? Why am I not seeing anger and fury from the people who put money in the church coffers every week at Mass, never being certain whether it’s going to the poor or to Father McFeeley’s legal defense fund? Why aren’t Catholics screaming blue murder from the local bishop up to the Pope about the lousy job the institution has done keeping their children safe? Who dares to let their son be an altar boy anymore? Do they warn their sons that it’s inappropriate for Father McFeeley to touch their private parts?
In A Gospel of Shame: Children, Sexual Abuse, and the Catholic Church by Elinor Burkett and Frank Bruni, a book I urge everyone who actually gives a damn about child-molesting priests to find, they detail the elements of the Church that allow this sick and dysfunctional perversion to flourish. It quotes frequent critic and Catholic clerical gadfly Father Andrew Greeley, who notes: "Priests can do anything they damn please to lay people and feel pretty confident they can get away with it." They know their superiors will cover up for them and do anything in their power to hide their shame and protect the reputation of the Church. They know that many Catholics regard their parish priests as their very channels to God, in whom they’ll entrust—with complete faith—the care of their children. The priest is the complete moral arbiter of right from wrong. Nobody wants to believe a man of God could act in such an evil manner, and when children come forward to rat out Father McFeeley, like children who squeal on their incestuous fathers, they are often not believed. God help the family that does believe their child and dares to blow the whistle on the molester; they may well find themselves ostracized from the entire Catholic community.
A particularly courageous editorial in the Boston Archdiocese’s official newspaper questions the need for celibacy in the Church and wonders whether they’re attracting large numbers of homosexual men. This is a questioning of official Church doctrine, which some worry is going to get them in trouble with Rome.
Hello? I don’t think Rome is in any position to be coming down on those who challenge its supposedly done-deal doctrines on sexual matters. Not when it comes to dealing with their pedophile problem, which Rome is clearly unwilling to do. If anything, the Boston Archdiocese (the former home of Father John Geoghan, the pedophile recently convicted of molesting countless young boys) should stand up to Rome, look the Pope directly in the eye, point their collective finger at him and say: "The subject of priestly celibacy and ordination of women is NOT a closed subject. You WILL open up a dialogue on this, and NOW."
I don’t want to see anyone lose their faith over this, as I understand Irish youths and young people in other heavily Catholic countries are. I don’t want to see Catholicism destroyed; as much as I may disagree with the Church on matters of sexuality and human relationships, I admire it for being far more progressive than some other religions in matters of science. The Church keeps close tabs on the latest findings of science and evaluates them for their impact on Catholic theology—making very sure they do not say or do anything to make Christianity look stupid, which is why they can finally forgive Galileo for being right. I was impressed this past week with a Sicilian archbishop who called in scientists to evaluate claims of an icon crying blood. You’ll never see the fundamentalists trying to debunk their own weird claims.
The Catholic Church has finally taken to heart St. Augustine’s remonstrance to early Christians: "Now it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn." It’s something to remember as non-Catholic religious nuts set up the U.S. to be the laughingstock of the world by attempting once again to exorcise evolutionary science, this time from the Columbus, Ohio educational curriculum.
And the Catholic body itself should stop quietly tolerating this. It’s time to stop pretending your Pope is infallible; clearly he is not, when he can permit such gross abuses of your children. It’s time for Catholics to make their feelings known to the hierarchy, that they will no longer tolerate priests molesting their children. If they won’t listen to your voices, protest by refusing to come to Mass, and refusing to put money in the collection plate. Trust me, nothing speaks to religious leaders like a lack of bodies in the pews, and a lack of money in the coffers—especially considering how expensive lawyers are …
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