NEW YORK
Syracuse.com
R.M. Douglas is a professor of history at Colgate University in Hamilton.
By R.M. Douglas
Bishop Robert Cunningham has been taking a great deal of heat in the past week for saying, in a case involving a 13-year-old who was orally raped by one of the Diocese of Syracuse’s priests: “The boy is culpable.” In the face of repeated incredulous questions by the victim’s attorney, His Excellency went on to explain that the child could be regarded “an accomplice to [the perpetrator] in a sexual sin” and that he “cooperated” in his own assault.
Confronted by the predictable firestorm of criticism, the Bishop is now in full damage-control mode, protesting that we should not be misled by the plain meaning of his words. But perhaps we ought not to be too hard on the poor man. After all, he said nothing on that day four years ago that many other high-profile Catholic clerics have not also said, in almost identical terms.
Six months after Bishop Cunningham’s deposition, for example, the famous TV priest Father Benedict Groeschel declared: “People have this picture in their minds of a person planning to [commit sexual abuse] — a psychopath. But that’s not the case….A lot of the cases, the youngster — 14, 16, 18 — is the seducer.”
Similarly, the Vicar-General of Dallas, Monsignor Robert Rehkemper, angered when his diocese came out in 1999 on the wrong side of a $119.4 million child rape lawsuit, pronounced: “They [the victims] knew what was right and what was wrong. Anybody who reaches the age of reason shares responsibility for what they do. So that makes all of us responsible after we reach the age of 6 or 7.”
The problem, then, is not that Bishop Cunningham carelessly shot from the lip. To the contrary, his testimony is solidly in the mainstream of Catholic hierarchical opinion, and has been advanced over and over again as part of its response to the clerical sexual assault scandal. Various calls are now being made for the Bishop to resign. That is unlikely to help. Cunninghams come and go. The distorted ideas with which his name is now indelibly associated, however, are solidly embedded in the structure of the church, both in the United States and internationally.
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