Enough Is Enough Really, Janice Kennedy, The Ottawa Citizen, October 11, 2009

Enough Is Enough. Really.

By Janice Kennedy
The Ottawa Citizen
October 11, 2009

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Enough+enough+Really/2091333/story.html

Janice Kennedy

You could hear the sorrow, anger and frustration last weekend in Anthony Mancini's voice.

"Enough is enough!" said the Halifax archbishop, reading his pastoral letter to Nova Scotia Catholics -- a statement on former Antigonish bishop Raymond Lahey and his alleged possession of child pornography. "How much more can all of us take?"

Mancini's question is a good one. And here's the answer: No more. I say this as a lifelong, if frequently critical, Catholic. True, like most liberals in the church, I am not a Catholic whose beliefs hinge on the reverence of ornate structures, opulent vestments, rigid rules, dead languages and an attribution of timelessness to things that are merely historical. But I am Catholic. And I am deeply ashamed of my church.

Yet the pool of poison seeping out of it has revealed itself to be so vast that its effects are felt by more than just Catholics. The victimization of children is not just a dirty little secret of someone else's religion.

The fact is, pedophilia is evil, criminally evil, no matter how convincingly self-serving pedophiles -- priests, as well as others -- tell themselves, "Where's the harm, really?" As millions of battered little souls could attest, the harm is nothing less than lives destroyed. That's the reason we call it a crime.

So why has this criminal abuse of children gone on for so long in the Catholic church? If you can answer that, you can figure out the solution, which is not as complex as it looks in the bureaucratic behemoth that is the Roman Catholic Church. It's actually simple: Stop excluding the non-male half of humanity. And stop demanding celibacy as a priesthood norm. Both constrictions are unnatural and morally reprehensible. And they attract freaks, as well as naive people who can become freaks. A life of enforced celibacy encourages men to deny a fundamental part of their being -- with the inevitable explosive result that many end up catering to it in secret and illicit ways.

And for what? The Catholic church was not founded on an exclusionary mission of denying women and married people the opportunity to serve as priests. It only began this desiccating process after some early churchmen, presumably wrestling demons of their own, decided somehow that God must have erred in creating human sexuality. In the fourth century, the church gradually began marginalizing women and turning up its nose at married men on the altar.

And yet there were married priests -- not to mention some women priests, though in diminishing numbers -- for another 10 centuries, despite the institution's growing enthusiasm for celibacy. And there was early criticism of imposed celibacy, too. In the 10th century, Bishop Ulrich of Augsburg, a canonized saint, is said to have argued in a letter that permitting priests to marry was the answer to such side-effects of monastic celibacy (or the surreptitious perversions it fostered) as infanticide and abortion in convents. Some say the letter was forged, but either way it is evidence that celibacy was, even then, viewed by some as not only unnatural but socially harmful as well.

And nothing has changed. Transforming its priesthood into a celibate men-only club, the Catholic church has obviously attracted a disproportionate number of pedophiles, as we discover day after depressing day. Ordinary Catholics have no idea how many (even though we find ourselves wondering, in genuine sorrow, about every single priest we ever admired in our lives), but it's clearly infinitely more than the "few bad apples" church authorities cite so zealously as scandal after scandal erupts around the globe.

"A few bad apples" just doesn't wash any more. The freaks long ago assumed positions of power within the organization, creating and entrenching their freakish -- and criminal -- culture, one that either permits the surreptitious victimization of innocent children, or (nudge-nudge-wink-wink) turns a blind and tacitly forgiving eye to it.

Father X has been caught, again, diddling little boys? Send him to a new parish. Father Y (it was reported 20 years ago) has a predilection for child pornography and condoms in his house? Make him a bishop.

No amount of anguished frustration from Mancini, or any other Vatican representative, can whiten the blackness of that hypocrisy and what it reveals about the rot below the gilded surface. And what's truly sad is that nobody within the church hierarchy can claim complete innocence. There have been centuries of crimes and collusion, and centuries of wilful indifference.

If the Catholic church doesn't begin a deep and serious process of self-reformation, one that goes far beyond the laughable surface measures of recent years (Psychological testing? That should do the trick!), the culture of these criminal perverts will continue to eat away at the church core, which will crumble. When betrayal, indictable exploitation and cover-ups become the modus operandi of an organization supposedly founded on the solid rock of love and doing for others, the dissolution of the institution is not a question of if, but when.

Without profound change, the end is coming. And even those Catholics who held out for the longest time -- those fervent optimists who kept praying that someone somewhere in the power structure might have the moral courage to start sweeping out the accumulated filth and begin the crucial reform process -- even they will give up. Their hearts heavy, even they will be thinking, "Enough is enough. Good riddance."

Janice Kennedy writes here on Sundays.

E-mail: 4janicekennedy@gmail.com