BishopAccountability.org
	Come On, It Was Only Fondling By Daphne Caruana Galizia Malta Independent October 29, 2006 http://www.independent.com.mt/news.asp?newsitemid=41082 Fr Anthony Mercieca, the priest at the centre of the Mark Foley storm, told American reporters that he had been naked in a sauna with 13-year-old Foley, massaged him, gone skinny-dipping with him, slept naked in the same room with him on overnight trips, "taught him some wrong things about sex", fondled him, and even, on one night, might have gone further, but he doesn't remember because he was on tranquillisers and alcohol at the time because he had a nervous breakdown, and the whole thing is a blur. Then he said that the relationship wasn't sexual, because there wasn't any penetration. "It was just fondling," he told WPTV of West Palm Beach, Florida. The last person to make that kind of distinction to the US media was Bill Clinton, who infamously said of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky: "I did not have sex with that woman." This curious belief that sex begins and ends with what everybody is so subtly calling 'penetration' is mirrored in the words reported on l-orizzont: "I would not be wrong in saying that (Fr Mercieca) had an inappropriate relationship, but this does not mean that he performed a sexual act, with penetration." This mangled thinking has its roots in what is perceived to be a loophole in the Roman Catholic ban on sex before marriage, contraception, and one assumes, sex with children: that you can run right through the Kama Sutra and the Joy of Sex, and as long as you leave out the bit that involves penetration, then you're fine. That's why, for generations, you had frustrated young couples getting involved in acrobatic contortions, even with their clothes on, to get what they wanted without going to hell in a handcart (as though God cared). Oddly, Fr Mercieca seems to have applied this weird thinking to his relationship with boys. Fr Vella Gauci went on to say that Fr Mercieca is a "very quiet person who never caused any problems" and that "his statements were naive". This is a very strange way of looking at things. Fr Mercieca has caused problems. Those problems are currently being reported all over the US media. The fact that he is introverted does not make him less likely to be a child molester but more likely. And what did Fr Vella Gauci mean when he said that Fr Mercieca was naive to say what he did? Surely not that he should have denied everything or said nothing, like the cliched Gozitan. Some months ago, when the lawyer Michael Grech was killed with such unbelievable cruelty and savagery – and nobody heard or saw anything – I wrote that Gozo needs to be opened up to the world, no matter what the "let's keep Gozo as it is" campaigners have to say. Every new story that emerges about perversity, cruelty, twisted thinking and omerta serves to reinforce this view. Gozo has a tiny population, yet over the past two or three years it has provided us with the most scandalous news reports. I know it is unfair for the good and decent people of Gozo to be tainted along with the backwater weirdos, but then they should be the first to speak up, instead of defending this disgusting priest. Fr Mercieca told The Herald Tribune that he and Foley became fast friends when he moved from Brazil to Florida in 1966. They "loved each other like brothers", he said, apparently oblivious to the fact that since the days of Socrates society has not regarded such a relationship between a man of 32 and a boy of 13 without considerable suspicion. "I was his only good friend at the time," he told our own Times of Malta. He told The New York Times that he considered his actions to be innocent. He appears to have thought of the relationship as being one between equals: two boys, that is, rather than two men. The situation was most aptly summed up by Richard Sipe, who counsels abusive priests and their victims: "It's a lack of development. This is not what an adult reasons about sex." * * * The New York Times reported Fr Mercieca as being confused about why Mr Foley had decided to come forward after almost 40 years. "Why does he want to destroy me in my old age?" he asked. The only answer to that is the same answer that any person who was "only fondled" as a child could give you: that the experience is profoundly disturbing and dogs you for decades until you can get some form of relief by talking about it. It must have been impossible for the boy Foley to speak about what was going on to his family, given that they were fervent Catholics and church-goers who invited Fr Mercieca round to their home for dinner. The boy's grandmother "was delighted to see me all the time," Fr Mercieca told The New York Times. They must have been pretty innocent themselves, not to wonder what this priest in his 30s was doing, hanging around with their pubescent son. Fr Mercieca's "oh please feel sorry for me, I'm an old man now" approach elicits little sympathy, except among his friends on the priest-ridden island of Gozo. It would have been a lot more dignified if he had had the good grace to show a few signs of regret. Mark Foley is now a raging alcoholic who is himself in trouble for sending inappropriate messages to teenage boys. His lawyer has said that he does not blame his own behaviour on what happened to him with Fr Mercieca. Well, no – because we all have free will and are, as adults, responsible for our actions and their consequences. Yet we cannot say that fondling and intimacy between a boy just entering adolescence and a priest in his 30s leaves no psychological traces on the boy, even if it leaves none on the priest. The boy Foley was at the time almost certainly coping with the emotional confusion of adolescence, made worse by the emerging signs of his homosexuality. In such an oppressive Roman Catholic household, where priests came to dinner and were encouraged to hang around with the young son, he would have found it difficult to cope with the emotional problems of pubescent sexual awakening, more so answers to questions about why he felt different to other boys. All he needed in that situation was to be fondled and massaged by his grandmother's favourite priest. He may have acquiesced, rather than resisted, precisely because of that sexual confusion. I am not surprised that he is now an alcoholic. Fr Mercieca described him to one of the US newspapers as "allegro – a happy boy" and one "who knew how to do things." That only makes the story more tragic – though Fr Mercieca and his neighbours appear to think that the tragedy is his, and not Mr Foley's, the damaged boy who grew into a damaged man. * * * The neighbours who have been rushing to defend Fr Mercieca might wish to take note of the fact that the Archbishop of Miami, to whom he is answerable, has banned him from performing priestly activities anywhere in the world, and has condemned his behaviour in forthright language. Either they don't read the newspapers, or in their simplistic way of thinking, they fail to understand that the Roman Catholic Church is one, and is not divided into the Roman Catholic Church of Victoria, Gozo and the Roman Catholic Church of Miami, Florida. The decision of the Archbishop of Miami is not foreign interference that can be ignored. One neighbour of Fr Mercieca's actually told a reporter to buzz off and "let the bishop decide about it". Well, the bishop has decided about it, and it's not the Bishop of Gozo – though he's the one that this fool must have meant. If he doesn't read the New York Times on-line, and prefers to stick with Lehen is-Sewwa, I'll quote the Archbishop of Miami's words here. He described Fr Mercieca's "intimate contact" with Mark Foley as "repugnant", saying that "such behaviour is morally reprehensible, canonically criminal and inexcusable." He asked other victims of Fr Mercieca to come forward, by asking every parish to make an announcement about him. And guess what? After a brief silence, another man has come forward in Florida, and unlike Mark Foley, who left it up to Fr Mercieca to say what went on, this man gave a full description. He said that when he was a boy, Fr Mercieca took him out on a bike ride, took him to the top of a bell tower to look at the bells, then began to touch him and performed oral sex on him (no penetration, so that's OK, I suppose). He tried it on again another day, but the boy ran off and never went back to that church again. He said that when he saw the old photo of Fr Mercieca splashed across the media, it brought the whole horrible episode back overwhelmingly, and he decided to speak after the Archbishop of Miami's appeal. The Malta Independent last Thursday carried the full report, with all details, so you can find it on line if you missed it. * * * Compare and contrast the approach of the Archbishop of Miami with that of our own archbishop, who has stayed completely silent on this matter, leaving the Bishop of Gozo to face what is already the second such case in his brief tenure. The priest in this other case fled to the USA, after being accused of fiddling with boys in his Gozo parish. When the news broke that time, we were fed a lot of bumph about private investigations by the internal response team, and a veil of silence – not to say a conspiracy – was drawn over the whole thing. The Curia fought its pitch by saying that it had no right or duty to report these crimes to the police, that it was up to the victims to do so, and that it did not discourage the victims from doing so. What a load of rubbish. The Archdiocese of Miami conducts internal investigations, too – but it also makes a point of reporting the allegations to the State Attorney's (our equivalent of the Attorney General) office, and counsels the victim rather than the perpetrator. The Bishop of Gozo, left to flounder alone, made a strange-sounding statement: "Bishop Grech, conscious of the gravity of paedophilia, reiterates that he will cooperate with those responsible for investigating such cases so that justice is done to the victims, the perpetrators are reformed, and the common good is safeguarded." What does he mean? Justice should be done to the perpetrators and not to the victims. The perpetrators can never be reformed because this is their sexuality. They can no more be made to stop fancying boys or girls than heterosexual men can be made to stop fancying women, or homosexual men to stop fancying other men. All you can do is keep them away from boys and girls, and strap a health warning to their foreheads. * * * The Malta Tourism Authority might as well not have spent all that money on advertising our wares on CNN. Fr Mercieca has ensured that everyone in the USA now has a rough idea where Malta is. The pity is that they are also left with the impression that we are a bunch of in-bred perverts who feed our boys to priests for a little light fondling, and think of it in the way our ancestors might have done when feeding their pagan priests a steady diet of 10-year-old girls to keep the gods happy. "Maltese Islanders Back Accused Priest" ran the headline in The Washington Post, and then the opening paragraph: "People on the Maltese island of Gozo defended a native priest accused of molesting a former US congressman as a boy, saying that he was a well-liked, private man with a quiet demeanour." Well, that's logic for you: if somebody is private, quiet and well-liked, then he is incapable of fondling boys, and even if he is, then he should be forgiven for it. I was so embarrassed that the rest of us are being lumped with those "Maltese Islanders" that I wrote to The Washington Post to point out that the only people they interviewed are from a part of Maltese society that is considered culturally and socially backward, and they are definitely not representative of Maltese opinion, because we are disgusted by paedophiles especially if they are priests, and think they should be jailed. * * * How's this for logic from one of Fr Mercieca's neighbours? "Their mother was a saint. She was always at home, always praying and always at church. She was a very good woman. She used to say the rosary, and their father was a good man, too," she told The Washington Post. Oh, for a minute there, I though she might have been one of those dreadful working mothers. Well, that kind of undermines the Archbishop's pronouncements about stay-at-home mothers producing a superior kind of person, doesn't it? The poor boy might not have been so f***ed up – and I really have to use that vulgar expression here because it's the only one that fits – if his mother had gone out to work and lightened up a little, instead of sitting around praying and reciting the rosary all day, busily turning her boys into priests and covering their young lives in a wet blanket of religiosity. Saying the rosary isn't what makes a good woman, still less a good mother, my dear people of Library Street, Victoria. Fr Mercieca's brother, another priest, actually told an American reporter that the story was a "political invention" because Mark Foley is "one of Bush's men". Clearly, he hadn't read the reports of what his own brother had described, or perhaps he's in denial, too. "We have big respect here for priests and religion," another neighbour said. "It's very important here and everyone here knows priests." Talk about a non sequitur. What does that have to do with the price of eggs? The great respect they have for priests should only serve to make Fr Mercieca's actions more condemnable, not less so. And then there were the lovely old men, the sort you get in picture postcards of Gozo, those living pasturi, who said: "Why crucify him for something that happened 40 years ago?"; "You are like Draculas, sucking blood out of him"; "He never did anything wrong in Gozo" (so that's all right, then); and best of all, "There are a lot of people like this. Everybody has sins. What is the big fuss here?" Then there was Fr Anton Gauci, who after celebrating Mass without mentioning the biggest case ever to hit Victoria after the World War II bombs, told an American reporter: "Why would we say something? We know nothing about what happened. Certainly I don't think anything grave was done." The trouble with these people is that they don't think their priest is accountable to anyone, or that he should be protected because he is a priest. * * * I think we should leave the last word to the very document that is supposed to govern the lives of Fr Mercieca and his rosary-reciting neighbours in Library Street: "If anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea." Perhaps they don't understand what Christ was talking about here, though it's clear enough.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.