UNITED STATES
The New York Times
Ross Douthat
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.
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.