Rod Dreher has a discussion How Blunt Should We Be?
He included a picture of a man falling from the World Trade Center to remind us of the horror of 9/11. I was at the Denver airport on 9/11/2010, and the airport asked from a moment of silence for all those who dies in the attack. An eerie hush fell over the airport. We need to be reminded.
Rod began my book, Sacrilege, but was unable to finish it – and this was the response of many readers. It described what exactly children experienced, and many people were unable to read it. If adults aren’t even able to read it, can you imagine what the children felt and what horrors their memories hold? And I didn’t even include the worst examples – I couldn’t bring myself to type them out.
The abuse in itself was bad enough, but many abuser deliberately involved sacrilege in the abuse. This poisoned the victims against God. In a more energetically Christian age, the abuser would have been burned at the stake. Instead they were reassigned and made Boy Scout chaplains.
The failure of bishops to respond to the sacrilege made me question their faith. I think many of them are mediocre, comfortable careerists who can say soothing words but never reflect upon the deep mysteries of life and sin and death. That is what the little old ladies of both sexes want, and they continue writing the checks to support this situation.
The Vatican was sent dossiers on abusive priests whom bishops wanted to laicize. I wonder of these dossiers were sanitized and phrased in canonical language: delict against the sixth commandment and phrases like that, rather than accurate descriptions of the crimes.
A documentary (trailer here) has been made about the abuser Lawrence Murphy:
Set to premiere in September at the Toronto Film Festival, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House Of God looks to be a chilling expose of the Catholic Church’s systematic cover up of decades of sex abuse by Rev. Lawrence Murphy (trailer video below). Murphy worked as a priest at a Catholic school for deaf boys in Wisconsin, and preyed upon hundreds of boys during his tenure there, from 1950 to 1974.
Rev. Murphy’s abuse, and the Church’s organised cover up, was written about extensively in the New York Times in 2010. As far back as the 1950s, Murphy’s victims told everyone they could think to tell about what Murphy had done to them: other priests, nuns, priests, three archbishops, two police departments and a district attorney. But the allegations were repeatedly shrugged off or not believed.
The Vatican never defrocked Murphy, even though word of his abuse travelled as far as the Vatican, and to then-future Pope Benedict. In fact, Benedict appears to be at the center of the Church’s non-action and cover ups of sexual abuse for more than a decade now. He ignored two letters sent to him in 1996, detailing Murphy’s abuse.
“From 2001 forward, every single priest sex abuse case went to [current Pope Joseph] Ratzinger. He has all the data,” says testimony in Mea Maxima Culpa’s trailer.
What did Ratzinger in fact have on his desk? Did he learn what was really going on?
Barbie Nadeau in The Daily Beast writes:
In fact, it [the film] should be compulsory viewing for all Catholics, whether they blame or defend the church, for its clarity and insight into just who holds responsibility for decades of child abuse at the hands of clergy. Gibney does not rely on the usual broad strokes of anti-priest propaganda that has come to define this scandal. Instead, he meticulously attends to the details of the biggest cases, giving voice to the victims and even revealing the rarely heard frustration by the “good priests” who tried to stop the sins of their colleagues.
Gibney opens with scenes that any Catholic will recognize immediately: crisp white dresses of little girls making their first communion, burning candles as altar boys prepare for mass, the haze of smoke so familiar one can almost smell the incense. Then he reveals what’s going on. He uses family movies, faded pictures, and actors to paint a portrait of how innocent children were offered up like sacrificial lambs to known “devils in disguise” by unwitting parents who blindly trusted a church they believed would protect them.
The film, which has been banned from festivals in Venice and Rome, focuses heavily on the well-documented abuse at St. John’s School for the Deaf in St. Francis, Wis., where Father Lawrence Murphy systematically molested young boys beginning nearly 50 years ago. Gibney uses both voiceover and subtitles for the victims’ stories, but he leaves the audio high to better articulate the sound of the men’s hands as they fervently sign their tales. One doesn’t need to read sign language to comprehend the pain and disgrace these men suffered.
Some vignettes are nauseating, like one in which a victim says he was chosen by Father Murphy while watching Bambi in a dark theater. He felt Father Murphy bumping the back of his head for attention throughout the film. Years later, he realized that it was Murphy’s erection he felt against the back of his neck. Other men tell tales of how Murphy masturbated them in the confessionals, which in the school for the deaf had an opening between priest and penitent in order to facilitate visual communication through sign language. One man remembers Father Murphy telling him that ejaculation relieved him of his sins.
Gibney illustrates the acts of abuse through hazy images and shadowy figures. Flowing cassocks catch the light as a figure meant to be Murphy tiptoes through the boys’ dorm late at night to find a boy to molest while the others lay still in their beds pretending not to notice. At one stage, according to a victim’s recollections, Murphy relocated the confessional at St. John’s from the tiny cabinet to a closet. Gibney illustrates the point with a young boy kneeling in front of a character portraying the priest. But he is not asked to pray. Instead, he is to open the priest’s cassock and perform fellatio.
Murphy was not alone:
While the focus of the film is weighted heavily on Father Murphy’s sins, several other recognizable scandals are used to bolster the point that sexual abuse was not an anomaly that happened only in America. Gibney nods to the Irish church’s problems with a glance at Father Tony Walsh, an Elvis impersonator who sang with a group called All-Priests Show and was sentenced to 16 years for horrific sexual abuses, including tying a 7-year-old boy to an altar with a monk’s rope belt and sodomizing him.
Why wants to hear about such things? But our desire to protect ourselves is what abusers count on.
“In a more energetically Christian age, the abuser would have been burned at the stake.”
Yeah! Finally someone says it!
If the Bishop were truly Christian, these men would have been hauled to the grounds of the local seminary in chains and placed on a bonfire and then lit as an example to those who would follow.
That is if the father’s of the victims had not killed the abusers first in a fit of rage.
I’ve been a priest for over 33 years. The last ten years I’ve been working as hard as I can to get rid of priest abusers in my diocese. I am lucky to have a bishop who is willing to risk his life for this work, because the abusers are very vindictive. I live in a country where the law is not enforced. If capital punishment were reserved for priest abusers it would be the proper way in any country to redress this horrendous crime.
I’m sick to death of my fellow Catholics hiding being euphemisms when it comes to the sexual abuse of children.
If these children had to endure it, the least we can do is have the guts to read about it instead of hiding being vague terms that allow us to live in our little bubbles of comfort.
So often I have wondered, “Where is the outrage?” But I guess when you hide yourself away from the disgusting details of what was actually done to these victims, it’s easy to remain in your happy place of complacency.
Reading a facebook entry from a fellow Catholic the other day who was commenting on the Finn/Ratigan case but clearly hadn’t read one word of the actual documents made me want to scream. He was waxing on about forgiveness and the fact we are all sinners; when somebody called him on it and asked if he had actually READ what Finn knew and when or if he had actually read about what Ratigan had done, he piously replied, “I don’t like to read about the details of child abuse. I personally find it to be morbid.”
With so many Catholics refusing to act like thinking adults with even a small amount of fortitude, it’s no wonder so many people turn away from the faith.
“…turning away their faces”:
Moral theologian Germain Grisez also used that expression to describe what the American bishops were doing as they studiously (intentionally?, criminally?) avoided looking at the abusive and abusing Catholic Relief Services.
“Who wants to hear about such things? But our desire to protect ourselves is what abusers count on.”
And it’s not just the clerical abusers of children and adolescents who count on it. The bishops who abuse their authority through illegitimate organizations such as Catholic Relief Services also count on us to avert our faces from the “unpleasantness.” They count on our silence, on our timid “respect” for their office, on our blind “obedience,” and on our absolutely futile, misguided, decades-long-and-counting letter-writing campaigns that meekly ask the bishops for the “reform” of scandalous organizations such as the CCHD and CRS. Such anti-Catholic organizations can no more be “reformed” than can the child-abusing priests referred to in this post. The proper, manly, Catholic response to a CRS is not to “reform” it, but to burn it at the stake, along with those child-abusing priests (the ones whom our good-shepherd bishops had sent to St. Luke’s to be “reformed”).
“The failure of bishops to respond to the sacrilege made me question their faith. I think many of them are mediocre, comfortable careerists who can say soothing words but never reflect upon the deep mysteries of life and sin and death. That is what the little old ladies of both sexes want, and they continue writing the checks to support this situation.”
“That’s what the little old ladies of both sexes want…”
And we are all now – all of us respectful, obedient, fully-canonical, completely-regularized Catholics – we are all now “little old ladies of both sexes.”
“The Groeschel Memory Hole”
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/benedict-groeschel-memory-hole/
“UPDATE: A conservative Catholic friend passes on this from a review of the Leon Podles book “Sacrilege”:
Podles is not saying anything new in Sacrilege by bringing to light the fact that men sin, and that the clerical state makes a sin committed that much more ghastly. Where Podles breaks new ground in this book is in his insistence that the problem of ongoing abuse of the young by a single priest would not be extant if it weren’t for the complicity of the laity. Podles recounts hundreds of cases of abusing priests being aided and abetted by their congregations — e.g., of parents disregarding their children’s claims of abuse, of families of the abused being threatened by their fellow parishioners, of priests seen as above reproach. This book brings to light an attitude found among much of the laity that an abused child would simply “bounce back” from grave sexual abuse once he grew up, that it really wasn’t that big of a deal anyway. Surely not big enough to prevent Father from preaching his wonderful, self-esteem-boosting sermons.”
We are seeing the Catholic Church implode. It started with Vatican II, which was to the church what glasnost and perestroika were to the Soviet Union. Trying to make an inert, rigid system more open and accountable has resulted in both a reactionary conservatism and a chaotic sense of freedom that rejects even legitimate governors on behavior.
As someone once said, it’s like putting new wine into old wineskins.
What does this have to do with clerical sex-abuse? Simple. Bishops have been used to acting arbitrarily for centuries. Rome has no interest in correcting them or holding them accountable. The ecclesiastical institution breeds isolation, corruption and entitlement — the same things that afflicted the Soviet system.
Another subject: Why is the laity silent or complicit? Because the clergy has manipulated the doctrines of alter Christus and apostolic succession to keep the laity co-dependent. If the clerics are the only legitimate dispensers of sacramental grace, lay people will not want to cross them. The clerics use the sacraments as weapons to intimidate the laity. Whenever clerical corruption manifests itself, the first instinct is to blame the laity for providing the “raw material” for the clergy, for not praying or fasting enough, etc.
That kind of blame is the kind that an abused spouse would display.
Joseph, I think your comment above is more insightful than even you realize.Excellent observations!
I remember traditional Catholic teaching distinguishing between “culpable” and “inculpable” ignorance. In the first type, one is ignorant because he wants to be, his mind is deliberatley closed to truth he doesn’t want to admit to or face. Because the ignorance is the result of a free choice, the one thus ignorant is held accountable by God for what he “didn’t know”.
……and in the second case Father,” Oh my Jesus forgive us our sins and lead all souls to Heaven,ESPECIALLY THOSE MOST IN NEED OF THY MERCY.”
The scales are tipping and are becoming heavily weighted down by the sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance and the dwindling excuse of invincible ignorance.
“The clerics use the sacraments as weapons to intimidate the laity.”
NON -SENSE!
As long as bishops and cardinals are NOT accountable for their actions, changes will not happen.
If the Pope don’t stop bishops and cardinal in protecting the abusers the CIVIL AUTHORITIES must do it by sending the bishops and cardinals to JAIL.
Tony ,you are right about the Sacraments being used as weapons. Year ago when the Catholic homeschool movement began to grow fueled by parent’s realization that their children were not learning Catholicism in the schools or CCD classes.A meeting of catechists and clerics was held in Pittsburgh.
A Sr Dudick openly stated home schoolers could be controlled by refusing to allow them to receive the Sacraments unless they used the prescribed religious ed materials.
The home schoolers eventually countered by requesting clerics should just question the child to see if they were adequately prepared for Sacramental reception.Depending on the parish pastor , it went different ways in different places .
I still find it quite odd and somewhat laughable that Fr Peter Stravinskas continues to belittle home schooling generally in his articles, while I watch a growing number of advertisements on tv to teach your child at home online with the PA Public and Charter School Systems.
Mary, I think you mean “I” was right about the sacraments being used as weapons, not Tony.
Joseph….Correctamundo!
Mea Culpa!