All the Pope's Men (27 page)

THE TOLL OF THE CRISIS

The sex abuse crisis has been the most painful episode in American Catholicism since its foundation. One can say this with confidence, despite the many ways the story of the Catholic Church in the United States was distorted during the
annus horribilis
of 2002. That distortion can be glimpsed from the following:

The American press invested incalculable resources broadcasting the failures of the Catholic Church, but made no similar effort to publicize anything the Church did right. To provide just a bit of context, in the same year that the sex abuse scandals finished on the front page of the
New York Times
for forty-one days in a row, 2.7 million children were educated in Catholic schools in the United States, nearly 10 million persons were given assistance by Catholic Charities USA, and Catholic hospitals spent $2.8 billion in providing uncompensated health care to millions of poor and low-income Americans.

The percentage of priests guilty of sexual abuse, whatever the final number, is almost certainly comparable to that of other clergy or other professions. Research in the field of mental health care, for example, shows that between 1 to 7 percent of female professionals and 2 to 17 percent of male professionals sexually exploit their patients. A 1998 study by
Education Week
found there are as many as nine cases of sexual abuse in the public education system in the United States each week. The mental health care and education professions, however, were not subjected to twelve months of witheringly negative media attention.

While some Catholic bishops failed to protect the most vulnerable members of their flock, others dealt with the scourge of sexual abuse aggressively and effectively. Yet while American reporters wrote extensively about Bernard Law, Rembert Weakland, John McCormack, Thomas Daily, William Murphy, Anthony O’Connell, and other bishops tarred by the scandals, most never heard of Sean O’Malley until he was appointed to Boston, or Michael Sheehan until he took over in Phoenix—two bishops with a track record of outreach to victims and firm responses to allegations of abuse.

It’s little wonder that some Catholics, inside the United States and out, concluded that the treatment of the Church during the course of the scandals was unfair.

Yet there is no evading the truth that this crisis produced an unparalleled hurt in the heart of the Church. After all the explanation and all the gloss, the bare facts remain: thousands of children were abused by priests, bishops who should have known better let it happen, and the Church too often attempted to protect itself rather than to accept its failings and make efforts to repair them. Compassion from Church officials was too little and too late. Images of the bishops engaging in hardball legal tactics and Nixonian damage control speak for themselves. As Archbishop Sean O’Malley of Boston said in his July 30, 2003, installation Mass, “The whole Catholic community is ashamed and anguished because of the pain and damage inflicted on so many young people, and because of our inability and unwillingness to deal with the crime of sexual abuse of minors."

The crisis has left many rank-and-file lay Catholics confused, weary, and dispirited. At its most profound, it has permanently alienated a group of sexual abuse victims, their families and friends and supporters, from the Catholic faith. Many of these people are psychologically and spiritually incapable of ever setting foot again in a Catholic place of worship. A much wider circle of Catholics, not personally caught up in the sex abuse issue, will continue to take part at least sporadically in Church life, but has nevertheless experienced its own crisis of confidence. They find themselves newly suspicious of priests and newly skeptical of bishops. The crisis has also deepened the ideological split in American Catholicism between a left that diagnoses the situation in terms of antiquated sexual teachings and a dysfunctional hierarchy, and a right that insists instead on doctrinal dissent and pervasive homosexuality as the principal causes. The recrimination, in a perverse cycle, makes the atmosphere of resignation and weariness that much worse.

Priests also have been hard hit, although too often in recent months the public climate in the United States has made any expression of sympathy for the clergy sound like complicity. Not only do priests second guess themselves about any gesture of intimacy with a young person, but they feel depressed about the priesthood itself, wondering how an institution to which they have devoted their lives could have gone so badly off the tracks. They also worry about a cultural climate in which any accusation of sexual abuse, however unfounded or ill-motivated, could be enough to ruin their lives. A 2002 report by the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
revealed that sixteen priests accused of sexual abuse had committed suicide since 1986, and in the almost two years since that time, a handful of others have followed suit. They are simply the most dramatic examples of widespread demoralization. This despite the fact that, as noted author and sociologist Fr. Andrew Greeley points out, American priests who like being priests are generally among the most satisfied professional classes in the country.

Catholic bishops in the United States have also been badly wounded. Those who should have been aware of the sexual misconduct of priests and yet allowed them to do harm have been disgraced. To date, a small number has resigned, but more face civil and potentially even criminal procedures that will forever mar their legacies, regardless of whether they survive in office. Bishops not personally culpable in the crisis nevertheless face criticism for their failure of leadership and of imagination in responding when it broke out. Many priests are angry for what they perceive as the bishops’ collective decision to adopt punitive policies for priests, but to do little to address their own culpability. Priests thus feel hung out to dry by the men who should be their last line of defense, who according to the traditional Catholic theology are supposed to be their father and brother. Many laity, meanwhile, feel unable to trust the leadership of the Church. They want to respect and honor their bishops, but in too many cases recent experience has made that difficult. The bishops, who are overwhelmingly caring and pastoral men, realize this. One American bishop who sits on the Ad-Hoc Committee on Sexual Abuse of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops said in 2002 that the last nine months of his life had been like “a nightmare from which I can’t wake up." A further cost has been exacted in terms of the bishops’ moral authority. They are less capable of bringing a critique to social questions because their moral standing has been compromised.

In times of crisis, Catholics instinctively turn to Rome for solace. Too often, however, a climate of mutual incomprehension and distrust between Rome and America has made the situation worse rather than better. During the early period of the crisis, from January 6 to March 21, 2002, the Vatican kept silent, feeding public perceptions in the United States that the Holy See and Pope John Paul II were out of touch. When the Pope did eventually speak, in his annual Holy Thursday letter to priests, the language was indirect, circumspect, and unsatisfying. At a Vatican press conference to present the Pope’s letter, Colombian Cardinal Dario Castrillón Hoyos, head of the Congregation for Clergy, the Vatican office that supervises priests, seemed defensive and combative. From that point forward, an adversarial dynamic set in, with the American press and a large sector of public opinion accusing the Vatican and the Pope of being in denial, of regarding the crisis as an “American problem," of not caring enough to take the problem in hand. Such impressions were exacerbated by the Pope’s physical condition, which led many Catholics to believe he was incapable of addressing an out-of-control situation, and by the rhetoric used by some foreign cardinals in complaining about media persecution of the Church, likening it to the worst of Hitler and Nero’s oppression. Some pundits began to speak about a mar on the Pope’s legacy. For average American Catholics, the impression of having been abandoned or misunderstood by Rome added to their dismay.

From Rome’s point of view, meanwhile, the crisis deepened reservations that many in the Holy See already felt about American culture. Some saw the ferocious reaction in the press as an extension of the same puritanical hysteria about sexual misconduct that produced the Clinton/Lewinsky fiasco. Others saw it as an extension of the historical anti-Catholicism that has always percolated among American elites. Still others regarded it as a form of payback to the Church for her countercultural stands on abortion, birth control, women’s ordination, and a host of other issues. The deepest thinkers in the Vatican have always harbored their doubts about the United States, seeing it as a culture forged by Calvinism and hostile to a genuinely Catholic ethos. The sexual abuse crisis compounded that impression. One archbishop put it this way: “Americans have a bad combination of youth, wealth, power, isolation and very little serious Catholic intellectual tradition. It’s a recipe for a lot of mischief."

Observers in Rome watched as lay groups such as Voice of the Faithful arose to demand reform and interpreted such activism as another instance of Americans seeing the Church in terms of power and class struggle rather than as a communion. Many Vatican officials reacted with shock to the June 2002 meeting of the U.S. bishops in Dallas, and especially the norms for sexual abuse adopted there, which seemed a capitulation to a lynch-mob mentality. Aware of the drumbeat of criticism in the American press that the Vatican was wrong to put up roadblocks, these officials resented the apparent assumption that two thousand years of tradition should give way so the institution could be reshaped according to American exigencies. Despite being a mere 6 percent of the global Catholic population, American Catholics seemed convinced that their problems should trump everyone else’s. From a Roman point of view, that could look like American narcissism. It did not help that the crisis was unfolding at a moment in which European stereotypes about American isolationism and arrogance were being revived by the foreign policy choices of the Bush administration, a point to be developed in the next chapter about the war in Iraq.

While it is flippant to say, “Americans are from Mars, the Vatican from Venus," there is nevertheless a cultural gap between the two worlds that was enormously consequential as the crisis unfolded. Quite often, American Catholics and the Holy See found themselves speaking two different languages, usually without realizing it. They thought they were talking to each other, but in many instances they were talking past each other, making deceptively similar statements that were in fact rooted in different psychological and sociological assumptions and that meant very different things to each of the two parties. There was a work of translation necessary to bring the two sides into genuine dialogue that too often was missing, so that statements intended to be helpful ended up making things worse, and policy choices designed to promote healing sometimes actually deepened the pain.

This chapter will review the various ways in which American Catholicism and the Holy See misunderstood one another during the sexual abuse crisis. Ultimately, the hope is to promote better communication between Rome and the English-speaking Catholic world. This is not to justify individual positions on either side, and no amount of improved communication will paper over the real differences in perspective and priorities that sometimes divide mainstream American Catholic sentiment from the Vatican’s way of thinking. But perhaps some of the acrimony generated by mistaken assumptions can be reduced, so that at least conversations can unfold on the basis of clarity, and disagreements can be rooted in differing approaches to shared values.