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	Irish Abuse: Asylums and Spirituality By Anthony Stevens-Arroyo Washington Post May 28, 2009 http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/catholicamerica/2009/05/irish_abuse_asylums_and_spirituality.html The 2,600-page final report of Ireland's Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse reported decades of mistreatment described by commentators as "off the scale." The abuses cited are mostly non-sexual in nature - about 82% of condemned acts were in the form of imposed physical pain and punishments. Commenting on this overview, Catholic League President, Dr. William Donohue draws the conclusion that the Commission's use of the word "abuses" feeds into an anti-Catholic bigotry that offers "a huge market for such distortions." No doubt some Catholics will agree with Dr. Donohue. The temptation is to interpret such scandals the work of "a few bad apples." This approach leaves the institution off the hook and places all blame on low-level staff. I suspect others in Catholic America will agree with Cardinal Sean Brady of Armagh that the "publication of this comprehensive report and analysis is a welcome and important step in establishing the truth, giving justice to victims and ensuring such abuse does not happen again." Prevention of future occurrences is also behind the comments of Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin. Calling for a comprehensive self-searching by the Church, he said Catholics need to "seriously examine how their ideals became debased by systematic abuse." The words "systematic abuse" are important here. It is what links Ireland's children abuse with the U.S. clerical pedophile scandal. Unless such problems are fixed by changing the system, they are not being fixed at all. My analysis relies on the classic sociological text, Asylums (1961) by Erving Goffman. If you haven't the time to read this book, you can rent the DVD of the 1975 movie, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," staring a young Jack Nicholson. The basic idea is that in some self-contained institutions, a close-minded mentality takes over. The only behavior permitted is what allows the institution to operate without conflict. Not only asylums but also seminaries, convents, hospitals, military training camps, etc. risk suppressing considerations of individual rights, concern for particular needs and any semblance of common sense. I suspect Asylums helps answer the question posed by Archbishop Martin of how "ideals became debased." The closed institutions in Ireland, I would say, were unable to fix the problems because they suppressed any information about the abuses that would have disturbed the status quo. To the systematic process found in Asylums, I think we have to add the damage done by an antiquated Catholic spirituality. Like a machine that malfunctions because of a defective power source, Catholic behavior can be damaged by ill-suited conceptions of virtue. Before the II Vatican Council, a pernicious form of spirituality dominated convents and seminaries. It's the sort of thing parodied in Off-Broadway productions like "Nunsense." But there is a dark side to this distortion of Christianity. A vulgarized form of "Catholic Calvinism" presumed that what was human was sinful; that pleasure of any kind was always suspect; that the more one suffers, the holier one becomes. And, as any viewer of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit will tell you, the line between inflicting pain and perverse sexual pleasure is a thin one. Add to that the requirements of celibacy and you get a combustible mix for persons who lack sufficient virtue. Professor Leslie Woodcock Tentler of the Catholic University in Washington has researched old Catholic marriage manuals and found instances where women were instructed that in order to remain holy, they should not derive any enjoyment during sex with their husbands. Really! I believe that mixing distorted spirituality into a self-contained institution inflamed the systematic abuse we so lament today. Tragically, some conservative Catholic voices call for a return to the flawed spirituality of the past. Under the slogan, "Few, but good!" Catholicism is to be shrunk so that only the most obedient of its members remain. The Catholic faithful must resist any tolerance for differing non-Catholic moral convictions because this would surrender Catholic claim to possess absolute truth. No lay person can criticize mistakes of the clergy because that disrupts the hierarchical nature of the Church. Conformity is confused with unity, criticism with disloyalty, and faith commitment is reduced to blind obedience. Such is not Catholic America: it is the cuckoo's nest.
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