SPOKANE (WA)
National
Words matter. More for a church than for other institutions because religion purports to be about truth. These truths, especially in the Catholic church, are largely conveyed through words -- scripture, pastoral letters, encyclicals, books, homilies, even newspapers.
And, of late, in court documents.
In the two-plus decades we have reported and commented on the clergy sex abuse scandal, we have witnessed church leaders torture the language to avoid accountability.
“Mistakes were made,” say some bishops, wary of attaching a personal pronoun to the criminal behavior of church officials who transferred child molesters from one kid-rich environment to another.
“We treated the problem as a sin, not a crime,” say other church leaders, as if the two are mutually exclusive.
“We relied too heavily on the therapeutic community,” say some bishops, which may be true but is hardly exculpatory.
Most famously, perhaps, was then-Bridgeport, Conn., Archbishop Edward Egan’s 1997 testimony that the priests of the diocese were not employed by the church, and therefore answerable to him, but were instead “independent contractors.” Egan subsequently became the cardinal archbishop of New York.
On the other side of the country, the language is as tortured in the bankruptcy proceedings of the dioceses of Spokane, Wash., and Portland, Ore. There, the church’s high-priced legal teams designed a too-clever-by-half, two-pronged strategy: First, forestall civil litigation against the church (and define its parameters) by voluntarily seeking the protection of federal bankruptcy courts and next, limit potential payments to creditors by shrinking the size of the pot established to pay off claimants.