UNITED STATES
The American Conservative
By ROD DREHER • July 18, 2014
In a must-read column, Damon Linker explores the role that the Internet plays in undermining the authority of the Catholic Church (and by extension, all hierarchical, authoritative religions). Excerpt:
What matters is that, regardless of whether faithful members of traditionalist churches should be working to conceal scandalous facts, today’s technologies of publicity render such efforts effectively impossible.
Someone somewhere inevitably learns the scandalous truth and either publicizes the information directly or passes it along to someone who will. And the next thing you know, everyone’s heard the foul and filthy news.
A nasty story now and then wouldn’t do any lasting harm to the churches. But a seemingly endlessstring of scandals, especially when each new outrage seems to confirm a consistent pattern of hypocrisy, cruelty, and corruption among the men (always men) who run more traditionalist churches? That can do serious, even fatal damage.
Consider: Church attendance is already in decline. How long will the remaining parishioners keep returning to the pews when they’re confronted by a persistent drip of scandal implicating people at all levels of the institution?
Damon puts his finger on a profound truth, one that I see little evidence is understood by contemporary religious leaders. The reason the US Catholic Church was upended by the sex abuse scandals that began to be unraveled in 2002 was not because the scandals were new. It was because those revelations happened in the age of the Internet, when it was possible for everyone to know virtually everything. When Judge Constance Sweeney, presiding over the abuse trial of Boston priest John Geoghan, declined the Archdiocese’s request to seal the trial record, and instead made it public, those documents hit the Internet, and the Catholic world had crossed the Rubicon. Everyone, anywhere in the world, could read the Boston Globe’s excellent reporting. Everyone could read what ordinary Catholics were saying about the scandal. Reporters in newsrooms across the country saw what was happening in Boston, and wondered if it might be happening in their own backyards — and went looking for it.
Here we are 12 years later, and there are still bishops and church leaders who think they can do what they want, and keep everything quiet. And some can — but it is an extremely reckless bet. From the NYT’s report this week about the hot mess Minneapolis Archbishop Nienstedt finds himself in:
Ms. Haselberger, a canon lawyer who has worked in other dioceses, said that in her more than five years as chancellor for canonical affairs in St. Paul and Minneapolis, Archbishop Nienstedt and his top deputies disregarded warnings about priests accused of inappropriate contact with children or with vulnerable female parishioners; declined to report suspected abusers to civil authorities; failed to monitor sex offenders in the clergy; and in various ways violated the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People written by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.