The Sex Abuse Tangle, by Ross Douthat, New York Times (September 09, 2014)

My Sunday column dealt with the extremely grim subject of the recent revelations about rape and official indifference in the English city of Rotherham, where Pakistani gangs “groomed” and sexually assaulted hundred and hundreds of (mostly white) girls and young women while social workers and cops seemed to look the other way. My piece tried to contextualize the grievous failure of the English authorities by linking the disaster to other high-profile cases of sexual abuse — in Roman Catholicism, of course, but also in New York’s private schools, at Joe Paterno’s Penn State, in Hollywood, elsewhere — and after the column appeared I noticed a few readers and Twitterers suggesting that as a Catholic I have an ulterior motive in generalizing about sex abuse, because generalizations are a good way to evade or minimize the particular sins of my own church.

I don’t think that’s a particularly fair reading of what I actually wrote, and I don’t think a browse of my past writings suggests that I have any interest in evading the issue of the church’s scandal. But there’s a grain of truth here, in the sense that I doubt I would have as strong an interest in these kind of stories, or have accumulated as much knowledge (perhaps more than is healthy, I sometimes think) about the ways and means of sexual abuse, if I weren’t a Catholic journalist with a vested interest in understanding exactly what happened in my own church. And to self-scrutinize a little bit, when you’ve spent a long time in the darkest basements of a family you still proudly belong to, an institution whose fundamental claims you still accept, there probably is a horrible, “it’s not just us” reassurance that comes with researching different-but-similar horrors in other contexts, recognizing commonalities and patterns and the universality of certain kinds of sins.

So readers should, by all means, keep that background and those possibilities in mind when I (or other Catholics, for that matter) write on patterns of sex abuse and rape in society writ large. But at the same time, they should also recognize that it’s possible to come up out of those dark basements with some hard-earned wisdom, wisdom that might be particularly worth sharing with those precincts of the culture — liberal, secular, tolerant, cosmopolitan — that pride themselves on being least like the ancient, hierarchical, dogmatic Catholic Church. Because it was very easy, I think, for people in those precincts who paid a kind of cursory attention to the Catholic scandals to come away with the assumption that there wasn’t all that much there that was applicable to their own contexts and situations — that Catholicism just had a celibacy-plus-hierarchy problem, which created warped people and warped incentives that wouldn’t have existed in a more egalitarian and less repressed environment.

And the thing is, that cursory/casual perspective did and does have truth to it: The evidence that celibacy per se was a problem is pretty weak, but the link between aspects of Catholicism that are usually coded as “traditional” or “conservative” — the emphasis on hierarchy and obedience, the focus on not “giving scandal,” the distinctive aura of authority around the priesthood — and the scale and scope and persistence of abuse is as obvious when you look in depth as when you skate along the surface. (Any conservative Catholic whose attitude toward clerical authority has been unaltered by the scandal has not, I think, reckoned sufficiently with what happened … and sometimes still happens, even if the overall landscape has improved.)

But when you leave the surface and go down into the basement, you realize how many other things were true as well, how slippery and protean and adaptable the evil within the church actually was, how many different forces and personalities and ideas and attitudes were implicated in its spread and its persistence. Predator priests exploited tradition and innovation with equal facility; they took advantage of both the confessional’s ancient seal and the therapist’s ultra-modern reassurances; they relied on Catholicism’s highest ideals (forgiveness, absolution, second chances) as often as they depended on its “pray/pay/obey” dark side; they were protected by the (otherwise) most admirable of leaders as well as the most cynical or craven; they protected themselves by playing to progressives and seducing conservatives depending on who they were and what suited their situation. All of which means that you could tell not one but many stories about the scandal, and all them would contain a measure of the complicated, mysterious and brutal truth.

And that means, in turn, that any wisdom drawn from the Catholic experience won’t take the form of some easy checklist for avoiding predation and abuse elsewhere in Six Easy Steps or Less. But what the complexity of the Catholic experience, the sheer mystery of the iniquity that unfolded within the church, can teach the wider world is twofold: First, the importance of vigilance no matter what kind of institution or environment you inhabit, and second, the necessity of being unsurprised.

Do not be surprised, to take the Rotherham example, that a culture of rape can be enabled by well-meaning multiculturalism, that wicked men among the seemingly culturally “weak” (recent immigrants, religious minorities) could exploit and weaponize their status to prey upon a still-weaker element in that society. Do not be surprised that charismatic private school teachers, gay and straight and pedophilic, can traffic in the same kind of exploitation of their devoted students, and enjoy some of the same protections for their depredations, as priests violating altar boys. Do not be surprised — to draw on New York Magazine’s long piece this week on sex abuse allegations in Hollywood — that networks of pederasts can take shape, flourish and find their own sort of quasi-official protections in officially liberal, ostentatiously gay-friendly Hollywood, a context that has very little in common with the all-male, celibate priesthood. Do not be surprised that the worship of football and the aura around an iconic coach can protect a rapist as effectively as a more explicitly-religious sort of cult.

Unsurprise, crucially, is not the same as cynicism. I did not lose my own religious faith because of the sex abuse scandal, thank God, and I don’t expect anyone who believes in different principles and precepts or premises to reject them because of Rotherham or Horace Mann or any other sexual scandal in our all-too-fallen world. The one-liner that I offered in my column — “show me what a culture values, prizes, puts on a pedestal, and I’ll tell you who is likely to get away with rape” — is not, emphatically not, an argument against having prized ideals or cultural pedestals or doing away with a sense of the sacred altogether, not least because I don’t believe (on religious grounds, but not on them alone) that such elements of human affairs can be done away with; they just mutate and return. (As the church of Terasem, for instance …)

But it is an argument for how to think about the intersection of sex, violence, power and the sacred — for being more skeptical and less docile around that nexus than traditional institutions and societies have often been, while also defining what counts as “power” and “the sacred” much more capaciously than progressives convinced that they’ve transcended traditionalist errors are sometimes prepared to do. And the latter point especially … because in a society like ours, where cultural liberalism is increasingly ascendant and unchallenged, it is on the latter sort of vigilance — against the exploitation that flourishes at tradition’s ebb — that tomorrow’s victims may increasingly depend.