Where Was the Outrage?

M. Lester O’Shea

      M. Lester O’Shea is a businessman, lawyer and writer whose most recent book is A Cure Worse Than the Disease: Fighting Discrimination Through Government Control (Halberg).

      By now there have been so many revelations of sexual misconduct by Catholic clergymen with boys, youths, and other men (and, occasionally, females), and of seemingly incomprehensible tolerance and the covering up of them by bishops, that a certain numbness has set in.

      Even so, anger simmers. Outrageous as the conduct of the clerics was, even worse, in many peoples’ view, was the widespread and persistent failure of church authorities to react appropriately to it. Where was their outrage? How could bishops, who look like no-nonsense men of God in their black suits and clerical collars, merely move to another parish a priest who has imposed unnatural acts on an altar boy, when any normal, red-blooded man with a healthy moral sense, regardless of his religious affiliation, would be tempted to break the degenerate’s jaw?

      Alas, it has become clear that American Catholic bishops cannot be relied on to be normal, red-blooded men with a healthy moral sense.

      Some are perverts themselves. A recent New York Times article discusses the resignation of the bishop of Tucson, leaving a diocese on the brink of bankruptcy after paying out $14 million to settle sexual abuse lawsuits. Responsible for a significant part of the total was a monsignor whom the bishop had allowed to continue in ministry despite multiple accusations. Why was nothing done? According to the lawsuit, because the monsignor had threatened to reveal a sexual relationship with the bishop of Phoenix (now deceased).

      Up in Milwaukee, Archbishop Weakland, a longtime crusader for a variety of leftist causes foreign and domestic, resigned last year in disgrace after it was revealed that he had paid $450,000 of church funds to a young man with whom he had been engaging in sex acts.

      The diocese of Santa Rosa, California, like that of Tucson, is financially troubled after paying out millions of dollars to settle sexual abuse lawsuits. Some of the money went not to a youngster but to a priest. After he had been caught stealing money from his parish, according to the priest’s lawsuit, his bishop began insisting that he engage in sex acts with him, the alternative being, the priest understood, being reported to the authorities. According to the SF Weekly newspaper, the priest’s hidden microphone recorded a conversation in which the priest reproached the bishop for twice giving him a venereal disease, and the bishop said he was “sorry to hear that.”

      On the other side of the continent, Palm Beach has the distinction of having had two bishops in a row resign in disgrace after revelations of their sexual activities with seminarians and others.

      It is hardly to be expected that a church official who is an active homosexual himself is going to explode with righteous indignation at conduct similar to what he is likely to be rationalizing or justifying in his own case. He also may fear prompting retaliatory exposure. Even a homosexually inclined cleric who has remained celibate may well sympathize with one who has not. But it seems hardly believable that this orientation is so common in the American episcopate as to make this the general explanation.

      Nor do feelings of solidarity with fellow members of an elite fraternity, perhaps fellow graduates of or classmates at a seminary, bureaucratic incompetence, and desire to avoid scandal seem an adequate explanation where such grave offenses are concerned.

      A large part of the explanation, I am afraid, is that many in the American clergy simply did not consider these to be grave offenses. They were, in the expression common at the time of the Clinton scandals, “just about sex.” In the view of many modern clergymen, an overemphasis on sexual morality was one of the many unfortunate things about the old pre-Vatican II church. In the new era, it is “social justice,” matters relating to war, racism, and income inequality that are what is important; sexual irregularities, however firmly condemned by longstanding church doctrine, are no big deal. This outlook is not what most would consider a healthy moral sense.      

      As a young priest, Cardinal Bernard Law went to the South to take part in the civil rights movement, and as a bishop in the South, he fought zealously against racial injustice. But his apparent indifference to numerous shocking cases of sexual abuse by his priests in the archdiocese of Boston aroused such outrage that he eventually was forced to resign.

      I hear sermons on racism, poverty, and war fairly frequently; the last time I heard a sermon focused on sexual morality was about 25 years ago. The very fact I still remember where and when it occurred suggests how unusual such a sermon was even then.

      Many of today’s church leaders were inspired to enter the priesthood not in order to save souls by promoting personal sanctification in accordance with traditional church teaching but either to be social workers or to promote leftist causes.

      The well-known Father Philip Berrigan devoted himself wholeheartedly, and ultimately successfully, to promoting a Communist victory in Viet Nam via the “anti-war movement.” At demonstrations, he was very visible in his clerical garb, but his real enthusiasms had nothing to do with traditional Catholicism. (Ultimately he was defrocked after marrying a nun.)

      Neither does the left-wing political advocacy dressed in religious language typical of the American bishops’ “pastoral letters.” The now-disgraced Archbishop Weakland in fact had a major role in “Economic Justice for All,” which attacked, among other things, income distribution in the United States. On every subject from nuclear arms and war in Iraq to the criminal justice system and welfare reform, the position of the bishops has been that of the left wing of the Democratic Party. The archbishop of Los Angeles denounced California’s Proposition 209 doing away with race and sex preferences. The churchmen have shown no comparable enthusiasm for issuing pastoral letters concerning the church’s basic moral teachings.

      Of course the bishops would have it believed that their positions are the product of Catholicism. This is complete and, to one with a knowledge of history, transparent nonsense. The Scriptures and historical church tradition are the same as they were in the days of the Bourbon and Habsburg monarchies and the alliance of “throne and altar,” when the church was a pillar of the ancien regime; or in 1864 when Pope Pius IX systematically denounced liberalism in his Syllabus of Errors. St. Paul’s epistles still urge slaves to obey their masters and wives to be submissive to their husbands, and refer to his rule that “if any would not work, neither should he eat.” (Not that Catholics are likely to hear these passages at Mass.)

      But the bishops are really not very concerned about the Bible. Last year, together with “rabbis from the country’s two largest Jewish denominations,”

. . . the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops declared unequivocally that the Biblical covenant between Jews and God is valid, and therefore Jews do not need to be saved through faith in Jesus. . . . the church has rejected its longtime position that Christianity superseded Judaism, and it instead has embraced Judaism as a legitimate faith both before and after the life of Jesus. (San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 13, 2002.)

Efforts to convert Jews, therefore, are no longer acceptable.

Rabbi Arthur E. Resnicoff, director of inter-religious affairs for the American Jewish Committee, hailed [the document] as “groundbreaking.” Some Catholic leaders have renounced proselytizing among Jews in the past, but “this is the first time the Catholic leaders of a whole country have stated it officially,” he said. (Washington Post, Aug. 17.)

      But how can any rational person find in Scripture, the basis for Christianity and for Catholicism, any indication that Jesus intended his message only for Gentiles? He was a Jew himself, on his mother’s side. His disciples, almost without exception, were Jews, and it doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that they ought to stick with the faith of their fathers. “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe and are sure that thou art the Christ, the son of the living God,” said Peter (John 6: 68-69).

      Nor did the apostles act as if they believed that Jews had no need to accept Christ and his teachings. Poor Stephen, the first martyr: had he had the bishops’ view of the matter, he would not have been stoned to death by Jews enraged by his efforts to convert them.

      And what of the repeated references to Jesus’ fulfillment of the Scriptures: that is, to his being foretold in the Old Testament? Jesus himself claimed to be the Messiah promised to the Jewish people; if he wasn’t, then he was lying. The claim that Judaism retains its pre-Coming validity is preposterous. If the New Testament is telling the truth, Judaism has been superseded by Christianity; if the New Testament is not telling the truth, then it is Christianity that is lacking in validity.

      It is not really surprising that people who are this indifferent to the very basis of their religion (how can the term “catholic” be appropriate, in the Creed or elsewhere, if the religion is strictly optional for an important group?) do not take its scriptures and longstanding teachings on the subject of personal morality seriously either.

      A couple of years ago a newspaper article shed interesting light on the attitudes and value system of many priests formed in the 60s, contemporaries of today’s bishops. The thrust of the article was that these veteran priests were dismayed at the attitudes of the newly ordained priests with whom they were coming into contact. In essence their lament was,

All my life in the priesthood I’ve focused on the things that really matter—poverty, race, social justice, oppression in Latin America, American imperialism. But these young priests are all preoccupied with Catholicism.

(Of course, they didn’t put it quite that way, deploring instead the new priests’ focus on doctrine and worship.)

      Finally, there is another reason for the mishandling of clerical sex offenses. Many clergymen, whether or not they are enthusiastic about left-wing causes, and whether or not they take Scripture and church doctrine seriously, are simply constitutionally unequipped to deal appropriately—that is, here, necessarily firmly and harshly—with outrageous misconduct.

      Basically they are social workers. And they can be good social workers, leading youth groups, counseling parishioners from a generally Christian perspective, encouraging the troubled. (They also of course perform what Catholics consider the vitally important task of administering the sacraments.) As social workers, they are nonjudgmental: they do not think in terms of sin but in terms of illness; and when people “act out,” in the current jargon, they think in terms of therapy, not punishment. Liberals like to quote Nietzsche’s maxim, “Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.” But where positions of responsibility involving the protection of the innocent from wrongdoers are involved, “Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is absent” would be better advice.

      Clergy with causes and priorities that are quite apart from the fundamental basis and teachings of their religion are in no way peculiar to Catholicism. Certainly the focus of the ministers such as Martin Luther King who led the civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s was Negro advancement rather than traditional Christianity.

      The primary thrust of much of mainstream Protestantism today is leftist politics. The late Episcopal bishop of New York, Paul Moore, according to the lengthy New York Times obituary, “spoke out against corporate greed, racism, military spending and for more assistance to the nation’s poor” and “was the first Episcopal bishop to ordain a gay woman as an Episcopal priest.”

            He opened the cathedral for rallies against racism and on behalf of nuclear disarmament. Some of his critics asserted that the bishop had used the church for political purposes, but Bishop Moore said that religion and progressive social policies were inexorably linked.

      This is the line taken by other liberal clergy, including the American Catholic bishops: pretending that God is a leftist with a particularly dim view of the United States and its efforts to influence world affairs.

      The people in the pews have a different view. On the subject of the Iraq war, for example, a nationwide survey conducted between March 13 and 16 by the Pew Research Center and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life showed support of the war at 62 percent among Catholics and “mainline” Protestants despite overwhelming opposition to the war among these religions’ leaders. Among evangelical Christians, whose clergy have not taken an anti-war stand, support for the war was at 77 percent. Overall, two-thirds of those attending church at least once a week supported the war.

      The difference between the two groups to some extent can be attributed to the differing positions of their leaders, but one suspects it is primarily due to the fact that some portion of the Catholic and liberal Protestant church memberships are members because of their clergy’s advocacy of liberal views that they share. Many a Catholic parish has a popular and active “Social Justice Committee,” which can safely be assumed not to be concerned about the problems of small landlords squeezed by rent control but rather to be promoting the usual liberal agenda.

      A number of churches in the San Francisco Bay Area, Catholic and Protestant, as well as some Jewish religious groups, recently joined in an effort to promote, inter alia, subsidized housing for the poor. Why haven’t the evangelical churches joined their cause? “It’s a mystery,” said the public policy coordinator for the California Council of Churches. But, as a spokesman for the evangelicals stated, “liberals may consider these good ideas but they have nothing to do with religion.”

      Just as the great hope of America lies in the common sense of her people, so the great hope of its churches lies in the common sense of its churchgoers. They can enjoy the services and sacraments and tune out the politics.

      Nor is their patience unlimited. Religions that are focused on religion have more appeal. According to Robert L. Bartley, writing in the Wall Street Journal, in the 90s, among evangelical churches, the Christian Churches and Churches of Christ gained 18.6 percent in membership and the Assemblies of God 18.5 percent; whereas the Presbyterian Church and the United Church of Christ (whose new hymnal eliminates masculine pronouns and other “politically incorrect” language) lost 11.6 percent and 14.8 percent respectively.

      Catholics, despite their general respect for the moral teachings of Rome, are independent enough to largely ignore them when they think they know better, whether on birth control, capital punishment, or war in Iraq. It was an outraged laity, after all, that finally forced the complacent and nonjudgmental bishops who had been so derelict in their responsibilities to take clerical sex abuse seriously.

      It is not my intention to argue that the clergy of the mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches of the United States are predominantly pacifists, socialists, bleeding hearts, wimps and/or indifferent to Scripture and their churches’ official doctrines. But it needs to be kept in mind that such clerics are indeed plentiful. Ordained status does not guarantee accuracy even as to basic church teachings, and when church leaders make pronouncements on subjects far afield, on political issues, great skepticism as to their basis in religion is appropriate.      Ω