By Jove! contributor Robert Wallis attempts to address a controversial religious issue. This article has the potential to cause offense, though it’s intended, as every article on this blog is, in the manner of enlightened debate. This is dangerous ground, we know, but some things just can’t be talked about on a sure footing.
Before I begin in earnest, let me qualify the following by saying that I do not believe that all Catholic priests are pedophiles. What I’m going to attempt here is a frank if somewhat brief discourse on a few of the problems currently facing major world religions, amongst them Catholicism – other well-known offenders, such as Scientology, will be addressed in future installments – and, amongst the church’s major issues, the specter of child abuse. It is not my intent to offend anyone but I think this is a discussion worth having. It’s a largely due to the defensiveness of the religious community, as well as the Catholic Church’s own reticence in dealing with them, that has perpetuated these abuses, that has made them into the cliche they’ve become. When you say to some, “You know the religion notorious for child molestation?”, there should not be a recognized answer. Similarly, I’m not saying that followers of the church are enablers – many if not most of them are, I’m sure, outraged in demanding a solution -; the blame here lies with the culprits of the offenses and with the Catholic Church itself for its failure to deal with them. Secrecy and lack of accountability are rarely conducive to the conquering of ancestral evils.
Apologies aside, what’s up with the Catholic Church and child abuse? There’s a Wikipedia page that runs into the thousands of words detailing specific cases, lawsuits, etc. It’s telling, though, that under the section titled “Vatican responses”, as opposed to outright condemnation and wide-scale investigation, instead opens with a quote from John L. Allen, Jr., Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, accusing the American media of hysteria and anti-Catholic sentiment, that demands for the Church to apologize are fed by “other factors that they don’t want to capitulate to”, and that the Church’s refusal to make amends is down to this. A 1960s edict by a Cardinal suggests that Church’s response to homosexuality should be the same as their response to pedophilia; it wasn’t until 1983 apparently that sex with a minor explicitly became a canonical crime. Twelve years ago Pope John Paul II declared child abuse a mortal sin yet in 2005 Pope Benedict sought and obtained immunity from prosecution for his alleged role in covering up the molestation of three boys in Texas. More than the Catholic Church simply failing to deal with suspect pedophiles, the image here is one of complicity: the National Review Board estimates the presence of up to 5,000 abusive priests in the US alone – to date only 150 have been successfully prosecuted. “Successfully prosecuted”: an therein lies the rub.
According to BBC Panorama, Rick Romley, a district attorney in Phoenix, initiated an investigation into church abuse cases in the diocese. He learned of the existence of whole archives of documents, of incriminating evidence, which, under the law, could not subpoenaed. “The secrecy, the obstruction I saw during my investigation,” Romley says, “was unparalleled in my entire career as a DA… “The Church fails to acknowledge such a serious problem but more than that, it is not a passiveness but an openly obstructive way of not allowing authorities to try to stop the abuse within the Church. They fought us every step of the way.” Even relating back to my opening paragraph, it’s difficult to understand the Vatican’s approach. For an organization that claims the ultimate moral arbitration, they seem to have a habit of preventing wicked deeds being brought to light. Any rush to judgment, as such – assumptions of guilt on the part of the general public -, have come about as a result of the Church’s failure to tackle the issue head-on; any efforts they have made seem, at least to me, to be entirely symbolic. John Allen characterizes the Vatican’s primary concern as, to quote “wanting to make sure ‘that everyone’s rights are respected, including the rights of accused clergy’… that it is not acceptable to ‘remedy the injustice of sexual abuse with the injustice of railroading priests who may or may not be guilty.'” That would be great were it not for the Church’s record of inaction in the matter.
It’s probably about time I stopped rooting through the Church’s proverbial garbage and instead to try and suggest a solution to what is, after all, still a complex issue. My solution is nevertheless simple: openness. When a priest is accused of pedophilia within the Church in an ideal world it should immediately become a legal issue, as it is when a teacher is accused or anyone else in literally any other profession. The desire to handle it internally is understandable but not condonable. For instance, in his biography of Pope John Paul II, David Yallop makes the argument that it takes 18 months to merely get a reply from the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the body charged with dealing with allegations of child molestation. The Church cannot and will not handle it. The only solution is transparency. I somewhat cynically address this as a PR issue, which it is in part, but such abuses can only thrive without demands for culpability. News has recently come to light surrounding abuses at the Magdalene laundries in Ireland where thousands of Irish women were beaten and abused by Catholic nuns for many years. The religious congregations that ran it have now refused to pay compensation to its victims.
The Vatican needs to bring its full power to bear and make them: their ongoing good works mean nothing if they refuse responsibility for past sins, a sentiment that should resonate with the Church as a whole.
