By James F. Drane
GoErie
March 27, 2010
http://www.goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100327/OPINION08/303279995/-1/opinion01
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| Jim Drane |
Scandals have an amazing durability. They never seem to go away. They affect ever larger groups of people.
The latest news about the priest pedophile scandal is an effort to link Pope Benedict to immoral priest behavior. Vatican officials have responded forcefully to protect the Pope against what they describe as an unfair campaign to smear him.
According to his critics, while Benedict was archbishop of Munich, a pedophile priest was permitted to practice rather than being suspended and reported to civil authorities. After being sent for therapy, the priest was returned to pastoral work. When the accusations were made against the pope, the priest was still doing parish work in Bavaria.
Suddenly, the priest was suspended from the priesthood and disappeared. The pope's critics claim that as head of a Vatican office (Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith), many cases of priest sexual immorality were tried in Vatican courts and kept secret. The pope, in effect, is accused of being part of the scandal.
A scandal is an immoral behavior that brings discredit on a broader group: a church, a university, an industry, etc. The pedophile priest scandal certainly hurt the Catholic Church. After 35 or 40 years, the scandal now threatens to discredit the highest level of Church authority.
First bishops, then archbishops and cardinals, now the pope, are all accused of worsening the scandal by not publicly revealing the priest immoralities and not removing them from the priesthood.
The most common reaction to scandal is disgust. A large percentage of Catholics have followed the direction of their disgust and have simply left the church.
This reaction is understandable, but because the consequence of following gut reactions can be disastrous both for individuals and for the larger church community, it makes some sense to think beyond the immediate emotional reaction.
There is no doubt about the immoral sexual behavior of pedophile priests being scandalous. The behavior is disgraceful, and offensive. After the initial emotional reaction of disgust comes a string of other emotions: anger, indignation and shame.
In Luke's gospel, Jesus' response to scandalous behavior is similar to what all humans feel. Jesus said, "Scandals will inevitably arise but woe to him through whom they come: he would be better off thrown into the sea with a millstone around his neck than giving scandal to one of these little ones" (Luke 17: 1,2).
What should the bishops, archbishops and Vatican staff have done when they learned about the scandalous priest conduct? What was their moral responsibility? We know that in case after case they tried to control damage to the Catholic Church by keeping the priest sins secret. Sometimes keeping a secret is the right thing to do. And sometimes keeping something secret is wrong and creates all kinds of added problems.
Lawyers have to keep secrets even about criminal behavior of clients because lawyers are entrusted with secrets and are obligated not to violate this trust. Such a violation would destroy the legal profession. But sometimes an entrusted secret threatens innocent lives, perhaps the whole common good.
Then what? How are these two basic moral obligations to be reconciled? Respect for human lives and public good is necessary, and so is respect for a client's secrets.
Doctors have to keep secret the information that patients disclose. Unless the doctor can be trusted to keep patients' secrets, patients will not be forthcoming, and neither diagnosis nor therapy will be possible. But sometimes a patient's secret threatens the public good, or the lives of many innocent persons. Then what?
In both the above instances, a delicate moral balancing has to take place. Sometimes the evil that will occur from keeping an entrusted secret is so overwhelming that it cannot be justified.
In classical western culture, law is a profession, medicine is a profession, and priesthood is a profession. In the first two professions, the obligation of secrecy is not absolute. Balancing has to take place. Sometimes secrecy has to be sacrificed for a greater good or to avoid a greater evil. But with secrets communicated sacramentally, there is no balancing. The priest's obligation of secrecy is absolute.
The scandalous sins, however, were not revealed in confession. They were revealed by victims who demanded that something be done to stop the evil conduct. The absolute obligation of confessional secrecy did not apply.
The obligation of professional and confessional secrecy, however, is an important background consideration for understanding the whole pedophile priest scandal. Within the Catholic Church, confessional secrecy, over the years, created a culture of secrecy. This culture influenced the attitudes and dispositions of all church officials. In addition, there were instances of priests, bishops and cardinals being falsely accused.
The first and almost automatic reaction of church officials to being informed of scandal was to take steps to keep the scandal secret. They pleaded with victims for silence and sometimes offered financial compensation for doing so. Their automatic reactions turned out to be wrong -- actually deepening the scandal.
Some bishops sent the sinful priests for therapy, but this was mainly unhelpful. Pedophilia was not well understood even in psychiatry, and the talk therapies claiming to treat this personality disorder were ineffective. Other bishops sent the pedophile priests to make retreats, which were even more ineffective. Pedophilia is a serious psychiatric pathology.
Recently a few bishops have come forward and revealed church secrets. They provided church documents and information about the names of the priests and how the pedophile priests were shuffled around.
What seems to be required now is a public expression of regret and a public plea for forgiveness. This will have to come from the very top of the church hierarchy.
If and when the public apologies and admissions of guilt are made by church authorities, some people will still not be able to forgive.
Those who can forgive might think about returning to church and helping to heal the community. Changes will have to be made and maybe people who initially were most hurt or disgusted by the failures would be the best ones to help straighten things out.
JAMES F. DRANE is the retired Russell B. Roth professor of bioethics at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania (jdrane@edinboro.edu).
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