The Roman Burden

By Dick Gross
Brisbane Times
April 23, 2012

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/opinion/blogs/godless-gross/the-roman-burden-20120423-1xg3m.html

It was embarrassing to observe Australian society trying to avert its gaze from the deaths of more than 40 young men. These men are purportedly suicide victims whose deaths appear to be consequent to sexual abuse in their churches. As the faces of the deceased stared out at me from reports in The Age, I felt that this loss of young life could surely not go unexamined in any civilised society.

I blogged on this matter last year based on some personal testimony I had heard about the suicide of a young victim relative of an abusing priest. Now my anecdotal evidence appears to have found support in police investigations. This is an epidemic of self-slaughter that cannot be ignored.

Yet without constant advocacy and evidence from affected Catholic parents, police and some innocent clergy, the dead and their stories would have gone unexamined. Now the growing forensic evidence of a link between Catholic child abuse and the apparent suicides of victims raises issues of church and state that could no longer be ignored.

The ponderous voyage to an inquiry was awful to behold. Why were we so squeamish about interrogating this issue? If suspicion of such losses of young life occurred in, say, an accident or epidemic, there would be no question of an inquiry.

Broken Rites, formed in 1993 to fight church abuse, documents 150 criminal cases on its website and almost as many civil cases. That is a huge number given the barriers to legal action.

The government terms of reference, a few short paragraphs, would have been drafted in an instant.

Though apparently precipitated by the Age articles on police investigations into the Catholic suicides, the inquiry includes other organisations. There have been allegations about a Jewish school which will be included.

Non-government organisations will also be open to scrutiny. But the impetus to investigate and the organisation most associated with this inquisition is Catholicism.

Before I embark on an orgy of self-righteous sermonising, let me foreshadow that I end this piece by turning the spotlight on secular society. Secularists will look like sleazy opportunists if we use this slaughter for the purposes of evangelical atheism. But with this caveat in mind, let us go back to this tale of reluctance to scrutinise priestly carnage.

The church itself ought to have supported an independent inquiry. Without one, the church cannot know about the extent of the abuse and its handling of the abuse victims in the past and into the future, and the community cannot have any confidence in the institution itself.

As it is, this Victorian inquiry is pretty limited, only focusing on the issue of how organisations responded to allegations and the future. This is only a part of the story. The history of the abuse is not included in the Victorian inquiry. Causation is not included. The terms of reference are narrow.

I have surveyed the global search for truth on this matter from the John Jay report in America to the Ryan report in Ireland. Denial and deceit have been widely documented. Protection of mates and the church’s assets clearly drove the church hierarchy in Ireland. But every diocese is different isn’t it? Or is it?

Notwithstanding that paedophilia is everywhere, there seem to be three attributes of Catholicism that make it susceptible to provide both a cause and a haven of abuse: the vow of chastity, the vow of obedience, and the sacrament of penance.

The vow of obedience makes the powerful too potent. Abuse is often related to a power relationship and too much power leads ineluctably to abuse of many types.

Sexual abuse may be just a subset of an unrestrained hierarchy. The Ryan report was overflowing with tales of all sorts of cruelty, not just sexual abuse. This was abuse of power uninhibited because of the obedience of the suffering and the misplaced loyalty of the leadership to the organisation.

Obedience has its role in the world, but to elevate this value to one of the pre-eminent vows is asking for trouble, as the notion of obedience alleviates the leadership of accountability.

The vow of chastity makes the church attractive to those who wish to avoid, with dignity and power, the stereotypical marital destiny. Often there are lofty and legitimate reasons to take another path than marriage. But logic also tells me that for paedophiles, the church bestows power, prestige and opportunities to those whose sexual drives might make marriage unattractive.

And even if you were devoid of deviant tendencies at the start of your priestly journey, lifelong abstinence must at best arouse insatiable curiosity, and at worst, according to psychiatrist Wendell Watters, pathology. The Canadian Professor Watters has linked these sexual prohibitions to undermining contentment and sexual health in his book Deadly Doctrine.

Finally, Victorian forensic psychiatrist Dr Bill Glaser, who specialises in this area, is concerned about the sacrament of penance. If one separates one’s life from Christ by sin, a Catholic can get back into the good books by confession, contrition and penance. This allows sin to be too quickly consigned to history and by implication, because the slate is clean, can work as a form of permission giving.

For the great majority of Catholics this is not an issue, but could be doctrinal slippage in the mind of the paedophile.

Would a parliamentary inquiry, led by people with one eye always cocked at the electoral consequences, fully explore fundamental vows and sacraments of the world’s largest church? I am pessimistic. I hope I am wrong, but it would have been better with a judicial rather than parliamentary membership. Judges are not prone to electoral influences.

But to be fair to Catholicism there are widespread sexually abusive practices throughout the world. In Perth, there is a judicial inquiry under Justice Peter Blaxell into the rampant abuse at a government run hostel, St Andrews in Katanning, by a former citizen of the year.

This stuff is everywhere.

So while I am happy to assert that global Catholicism has been institutionally terrible on sexual abuse, it is not the only institution at whom accusations could be levelled.