UNITED STATES
Spiritual Politics
Mark Silk | Jul 2, 2013
Yesterday brought big developments in two ongoing sexual abuse stories: the resignation of Rabbi Norman Lamm as chancellor of Yeshiva University and the revelation that Cardinal Timothy Dolan shielded a pile of cash from legal claims when he was archbishop of Milwaukee.
Lamm’s resignation came six months after the Jewish Forward reported that in late ’70s and early ’80s two senior staff members who had abused students at Yeshiva’s high school for boys were permitted by Lamm to resign and take jobs at other Jewish schools. “If it was an open-and-shut case, I just let [the staff member] go quietly,” Lamm told the Forward. “It was not our intention or position to destroy a person without further inquiry.”
Not that anyone was admitting that the resignation had anything to do with the cover-up. To the contrary, the official version was that it had been arranged for Lamm to step down three years ago. Who knew?
Still and all, in a letter to the Yeshiva community, he did repent for what he had done: “True character requires of me the courage to admit that, despite my best intentions then, I now recognize that I was wrong.” And indirectly, he acknowledged that he is in fact paying a price for what he did: “You submit to momentary compassion in according individuals the benefit of the doubt by not fully recognizing what is before you, and in the process you lose the Promised Land.”
So, despite giving himself too much credit for good intentions, and permitting himself some Mosaic self-aggrandizement (no Promised Land), Lamm did the right thing.
Meanwhile, the release of thousands of pages of documents on the handling of abuse cases by the archdiocese of Milwaukee revealed that in 2007 Archbishop Dolan obtained the permission of the Vatican to transfer a nearly $57-million cemetery fund off the archdiocesan books and into a special trust. Dolan’s request came just a few weeks before the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued a ruling that allowed victims of sex abuse to sue the archdiocese. Seventeen days after the ruling, the Vatican approved the request.
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