By Paul Schneidereit
Chronicle-Herald
March 16, 2010
http://thechronicleherald.ca/Columnists/1172497.html
THE Vatican is right.
Catholic priests aren't the only adults, secular or non-secular, who've ever been guilty of sexually abusing minors.
Now that we've established that factoid, let's add another. The Catholic Church represents the world's biggest centrally directed organization whose business model is based on exhorting people to live by the highest moral standards.
In other words, if the Vatican feels as if it's under siege and being unfairly picked on, it's missing the point.
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Yes, people in positions of authority in other faiths — as well as many secular workers in a vast range of job descriptions — have also sexually abused children and underage teens, and that's wrong, period.
But one of the things that has outraged people the most about the ongoing Catholic sex-abuse controversy is the very size of the scandal. That and evidence of the Church's attempts, in nation after nation, to hide the problem and allow, misguidedly or not, offenders to continue their abuses.
All of this, let us not forget, from not just any organization, but one committed to doing God's work on this Earth.
And in an organization as big and hierarchical as the Catholic Church, of course, the buck stops with the Vatican.
You know what's weird? Think of everything that has happened over the last two decades, from the horror of Mount Cashel to the billions of dollars in damages paid by the U.S. Church to the decade-long investigations of misconduct by Irish Catholic officials. After all of that, you might have thought the highest echelons of the Church would have wanted to pre-empt future scandals in other places by aggressively outing problems, wherever, while at the same time making global apologies and vowing global solutions.
Yet now the Church has been rocked by fresh stories of sex abuse of minors by its priests, alongside allegations their superiors often merely moved offenders around instead of reporting them, in a number of European countries — Austria, Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland and, sensationally of course, the current Pope's home country, Germany.
I guess the infamous quote by Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, when the prestigious Vatican official suggested to reporters at the height of the scandal in the U.S. in 2002 that the sexual abuse problem seemed largely an anglophone matter, reflected more of the Church's thinking than one would have been hoped.
Given the Vatican's historic reluctance to tackle this issue publicly and firmly, I would not be surprised if every country with a significant Catholic congregation had a problem with clergy sexually abusing, based on most cases elsewhere, boys between 12 and 17 years of age.
The Church has also hurt itself with some of its tone-deaf public comments, such as when, last year, it chose to insist that most of its clergy who had abused youngsters under their watch were not pedophiles but homosexuals with a preference for teenagers, a desire known as ephebophilia. Call it what you like, but to the general public, seeking sex with a minor when you're the one in a position of authority and trust is still defined as despicable.
It's not that the Vatican has done nothing. From what I can tell, there is genuine horror among many in the Holy See about what has been emerging in country after country about this abuse — behaviour that strikes me could be termed as blasphemously hypocritical.
But it's not as if there haven't been, for many years, more than mere warning signs that this ugly monster, once unleashed, would threaten to destroy all that Church officials — or at least those who knew enough to know better — had misguidedly tried to protect with all their secrecy.
An Irish commission that spent nine years investigating hundreds of cases of abuse found, in a report filed in 2009, that Catholic officials in that country had been primarily interested in the "maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the Church and the preservation of its assets."
Protect reputation, avoid scandal, preserve assets: We all know how that worked in the Diocese of Antigonish.
So, yes, Catholic priests aren't the only people to ever be caught sexually abusing kids, but that doesn't mean the Church, like it or not, doesn't now deserve the consequences.
Contact: pauls@herald.ca
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