Pope Benedict XVI held a private meeting yesterday with a small circle of victims of clergy abuse, which, following a surprisingly large number of references to the issue in sermons and speeches, steered the mainstream media coverage in a totally different direction here in Washington, D.C.
The meeting was more than symbolic, but it was largely content-free, in terms of the press being able to talk about the pope’s take on this issue. The actual content came the night before, when he spoke to the U.S. Catholic Bishops (full text here). Thus, in a strange way, the best story about the meeting with the abuse victims came a news cycle before anyone knew that it was going to happen.
I am sure that quite a few Catholic conservatives inside the Beltway were mildly surprised when they picked up their copies of the Washington Post and found an A1 story that seemed to get the point. Here is the key passage, a long one:
(Benedict) said the abuse of minors by U.S. clergy was “evil” and “immoral” but had to be eradicated in a broader attack on the degradation of modern-day sexuality. He also spoke of his overall admiration for the United States “from the dawn of the republic,” he said at the White House. “America’s quest for freedom has been guided by the conviction that the principles governing political and social life are intimately linked to a moral order based on the dominion of God the Creator.” …
The pope also seconded the words of Cardinal Francis George, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who said in introducing the pontiff that the scandal was “sometimes very badly handled.”
“It falls to you … to address the sin of abuse within the wider context of sexual mores,” Benedict told the church leaders. “Moreover, by acknowledging and confronting the problem when it occurs in an ecclesial setting, you can give a lead to others, since this scourge is found not only within your dioceses but in every sector of society. It calls for a determined, collective response.”
But he said earlier that an even broader response is needed.
“Children deserve to grow up with a healthy understanding of sexuality and its proper place in human relationships,” he said. “They should be spared the degrading manifestations and the crude manipulation of sexuality so prevalent today. … What does it mean to speak of child protection when pornography and violence can be viewed in so many homes through media widely available today?”
In other words, fighting the clergy abuse scandal must, says the pope, be part of a wider defense of the Catholic church’s own doctrines about human sexuality. This is not to let the clergy off the hook or to downplay their sins. Just the opposite. It is to say that the bishops have failed to hold their own priests (and themselves) to the doctrinal standards they expect of others. The church is failing to live out its own teachings as well as teach them. Both. And.
Then you have to see what the pope is saying inside the framework of one of the other main messages he is delivering — the defense of absolute, eternal standards of truth that can be defended with human reason as well as biblical revelation.
This is very strange stuff to see on A1 in one of America’s major newspapers and, frankly, presented quite well.
Is is true that the Post had to remind readers that all of this is coming out of a strict, orthodox pope who is, well, you know, strict and orthodox. Check this out:
Yesterday, many U.S. Catholics were hearing the pope speak in English for the first time. Despite the pontiff’s strong Bavarian accent, some people were surprised by the softness of his voice and his gentle, even shy, demeanor, so at odds with his image as a fierce defender of Catholic orthodoxy.
There is a missing word in that last sentence — “media.” It should say, “so at odds with his media image as a fierce,” etc.
So the symbolism of the meeting with the victims is crucial. By all means read those stories — here is the Post report — and let us know what you think.
But read the pope’s address to the bishops. They face the same question as always: What will they do to defend the faith (and the children)? That’s the story.
On to New York City and the United Nations.
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Comments (10) |
April 18, 2008, at 12:00 pm
I thought a large part of the scandal was that members of the church conspired to cover up the abuses. That’s why the church itself is blamed, rather than a few individual priests. Covering up your organizations misdeeds is not a particularly modern, “degradation of modern-day sexuality”-related problem.
April 18, 2008, at 12:49 pm
The cover up is a sin. The failure to teach the faith is a sin.
You also have to ask the question of WHY they covered it up. There are several elephants in the sacristy.
April 18, 2008, at 3:50 pm
I’m surprised to see Get Religion missing an important implication in the Pope’s message. These three phrases:
show how the Pope is framing the sexual abuse scandal. It’s the result of the degradation of modern-day sexuality. There are two implications from this, and both are wrong.
First, the Pope’s framing implies that sexual abuse by priests is a modern thing. All we can say for sure is the revelation of it is modern. Sexual abuse and cover ups have undoubtedly been going on from the Church’s foundations. Do any of us really believe pedophiles and rapists entered the Church only in the 20th century? It didn’t take modernity to create abusers and a cabal of men to hide it. It did take modernity to speak truth to power.
Secondly, the framing implies the abuse and cover ups were the result of sexual desire. But sex between authority and its subject doesn’t exist by mutual consent and is therefore more appropriately examined as a power relation. Like rape is about violence, not sex, these priestly transgressions are about eroticized inequality. Dominance is the turn-on, not a relationship.
Pope Benedict XVI is a brilliant thinker and writer, so this framing is deliberate, and therefore, shameful. He means to imply abusive priests arise from a culture with a liberal sexuality, so he’s using the scandal to further his agenda.
The more his notion of “moral relativism†is spoken of in the press, and the more it’s linked to sex and abuse, the less culpable the Church will appear. Soon, Catholics will have a scapegoat who is not the Church. That is, if we didn’t have such a liberal culture, maybe the priests wouldn’t have abused children and the bishops wouldn’t have needed to lie.
April 18, 2008, at 4:08 pm
I am quite disappointed that the pope did not explicitly address the coverup, which is the most significant sin in the abuse scandal. Had superiors turned errant priests over to law enforcement or removed them from the priesthood, then the abusers would not have been able to continue to abuse again and again.
Pedophiles will always be with us. It is imperative that the bishopric understand in no uncertain terms that a priest who abuses must be investigated by authorities from outside the church, and they must not be shipped overseas or traded around the country.
It is shameful that the pontiff blamed society instead of the ecclesiastical bureaucracy.
April 18, 2008, at 4:39 pm
Bravo, Teresa and Karen. I find myself, uncharacteristically, with nothing to add.
April 18, 2008, at 10:28 pm
What you folks are missing is the fact that the great majority of cases involved male teens. In my diocese this involved big parties in rectories with priests and high school boys. This is not pedaphilia. This is not people slinking around in the shadows - it was almost an open secret. The sexual zeitgeist of society did have a lot to do with it.
I agree the existence of pedophilia has nothing to do with our permissive society - except the availability of pornography on-line stirs up and aggravates the situation - lessening any self-restraint that might have been present.
None of this excuses perpetrators.
April 19, 2008, at 12:04 am
#1 -
The substance of the scandal was always the wicked cover-up by many bishops. These were men who acted as corporate CEOs, listening to their lawyers rather than their people. They were men who listened to psychologists tell them “therapy” would solve the problem, instead of the Tradition they were supposed to teach. It does, however, amaze me that people can separate the sexual misconduct from our cultural obsession with sex. Quite possibly both aspects of the scandal are facets of the disintegration of Catholic culture into the materialism of the larger American culture.
April 19, 2008, at 11:08 am
Julia, we can argue how many of each age was involved, but don’t get confused by excuses. Some were pedophiles, some just molesters and rapists. A pubescent teen is not a “child”. However, a teenager also isn’t an adult. The power imbalance remains, and U.S. law, if not the Church, still calls an adult male who has sex with a teenage boy a criminal. Anecdotes about such incidents pepper history, but only the modern era is willing to believe children.
I live in the Davenport Diocese, where one of the worst offenders managed to move about from parish to parish for decades. I know the stories of these “parties”. The boys involved were not there having fun. They were coerced, lied to, threatened, and also confused about God and their sexuality, as is anyone involved in an act that feels both good and wrong with someone who speaks for God.
The Diocese is paying for its coverup. They just went into bankruptcy. They sold a building, used up their insurance, and are now assessing local parishes to cover the other 3 million they couldn’t. If those churches can’t come up with it, it will come from the other parishes.
By the way, the Diocese is assessing the parishes where the worst offenses happened. Their screwy logic is that those parishes would want to help the victims the most. Of course it looks to me like the Diocese is really just getting even, since that means those parishes are getting screwed twice.
FWKen is right. The worst sin here are the bishops, and I don’t really think I really heard an apology from the Pope on that score. Not that his apology for the priests was real, either. Bill Maher’s apology was better and more accurate.
April 19, 2008, at 12:43 pm
[…] Here’s what I mean, a few quotes from the Washington post via Get Religion: […]
April 19, 2008, at 6:47 pm
Many bishops did not just coverup the scandals. They ENABLED them by their actions, secrecy and overwhelming need to protect the organization at virtually all costs.
Until those bishops are punished by removing them from any functions as bishop, all of B16’s words will be window dressing that falls short of true concern and shame.
The bad old boys’ club has to suffer for it’s role in this mess, not just the offending priests (and not a few bishops as well.)