How Will Church Attone for Pedophile Priests?

By Charles Rogerson
Intelligencer
December 16, 2018

https://bit.ly/2BlHLxy

In a slow bleed, the Catholic Church is prying open secret files and releasing the names of “credibly accused” pedophile priests. The sheer numbers are staggering. Last summer, the report out of Pennsylvania listed 300 predator priests, with a number of names redacted. That eye-popping list didn’t include priests who had been named earlier.

The Wheeling-Charleston diocese listed 31 names. If nothing else, the revelations put the kibosh on the few-bad-apples excuse the church had lamely offered while still actively covering up the scandal.

And a coverup it was, of monumental proportions, conceived at the highest levels of the church hierarchy. The basic strategy was a cynical transgression of justice and decency: First, take advantage of the unassailable status of the priest to repress victims’ accusations. We’ll never know how many victims there were, because, to this day, may of them have never breathed a word about the crimes perpetrated upon them, body and soul.

Even on the family level, some parents have traditionally (and still do) send a sinister message to their children: Don’t make trouble. Don’t cause a problem. If a child victim hurdled these formidable obstacles and made the complaint, bishops and the police would often conspire to sweep the mess under the rug. Protecting the church’s reputation was always paramount. All too often, lay Catholics persecuted what few victims had the nerve to speak out.

If a particular case continued to fester, the lawyers stepped in with cash settlements, always with a non-disclosure gag-clause fastened to them. Afterward, they simply waited it out, and one could almost hear the sigh of relief which emanated from the clergy each time a specific statute-of-limitations date was reached. Meanwhile, the church would transfer the offending Father Can’t Help Himself to another parish — and not tell anyone about his penchant for molestation.

One wonders how they got away with these crimes for so long. But even the biggest, darkest closets can hold only so much baggage before it spills out into the light of day. Now the civil authorities are sniffing around and issuing subpoenas. In Houston and elsewhere, prosecutors are serving warrants and seizing files. We’re still waiting for a stampede to the confessional.

Alas, nobody keeps secrets like Catholics and Southerners — because they have a lot to keep secret.

In all the years the church covered up this throbbing pedophile tumor in its midst, its clergy have stridently moralized against the sins of premarital sex, homosexuality and abortion. I guess they missed the one about forcing sex on children.

Simultaneously, the church hierarchy has been living the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Their residences feature a level of luxury that might make a Kardashian blush. Locally, reports surfaced about millions of dollar spent to renovate the bishop’s Wheeling residence, under the auspices of a man now banished in disgrace. On a global level, the clergy became so shameless in gilding their palaces that the Pope himself had to tell them to cut it out.

This is a church, by the way, founded on the words and deeds of an ascetic Jew, who famously drove the moneychangers out of the temple and never owned much more than the clothes on his back. While the church is being forced to cough up the pedo-files (so to speak), maybe prosecutors should subpoena their financial books for a peek at all that wealth and property which enjoys a tax-free status. If that ever happens, it would indeed be a miracle.

Don’t forget the legal settlement money paid to molestation victims came from that secret cash reservoir. In another context, it might be called the world’s biggest slush fund. In a sense, that tax-exemption made us all complicit in the settlement payoffs. This is a contemporary echo of a primal Catholic crime: the selling of indulgences that was responsible in part for the Protestant Reformation. Only in this scandal, the “indulgences” (child molestation with impunity) were “sold” to the priesthood itself, a perquisite to the criminally inclined.

All these wounded Catholics are claiming to be shocked by the odious revelations. Perhaps they’re feeling guilty about financing the hush money settlements. But I’m not buying their denials. They at least heard the whispers and rumors about the pedophiles. Over at the nunnery, the good Sisters stayed remarkably quiet about the whole salacious mess. Are you going to tell me the nuns didn’t know anything about the molester-priests?

Patriarchal institutions with great wealth and power, unrestrained by democratic checks and balances, can breed corruption and sexual abuse.

When Catholics banish women, the primary protectors of children, from all supervisory posts, then bestow an aura of infallibility upon mere men, they practically invite child molestation.

The skeptic Nietzsche wrote: “They did not know how to love their god except by crucifying man.” How will the church atone for the crucifixion of the children and make real changes to ensure it never happens again? In his Sonnet 94, the Bard warned: “For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;/Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”

Rogerson is a professor of English at West Virginia Northern Community College in Wheeling.