Sin and Innocence, Peter Craven, ABC News, April 12, 2010

Sin and Innocence

By Peter Craven
ABC News
April 12, 2010

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2870363.htm

It's a strange sad business, the current outcry against the Catholic Church and the sexual abuse of kids by priests. The outrage has been so great that the cries have actually penetrated as far as the inner sanctum of Pope Benedict himself, Joseph Ratzinger that was, that donnish man who, when he was elected pontiff, said to his fellow cardinals that they had taken him where he did not want to go.

Well, the finger is now pointed that under his watch as Archbishop of Munich, Ratzinger - through the agency of one of his underlings - allowed a priest who'd been guilty of paedophile offences to continue with his ministry.

There's a grave irony in all this because this very scholarly and attentive Pope - Ratzinger in religion, at least as much as Kevin Rudd in politics, is the supreme bureaucratic mandarin of the church - has being vigilant to the point of severity in dealing with the problem. Far more so than the burly Pole who preceded him, John Paul II, who was never personally tainted by the scandal that has been rocking away at the church for ages now.

Why? It can't be quite as simple, even in our image raddled world, as the fact that John Paul looked like a prize fighter, skied like an obsessive for as long as his health lasted, threw back the wine and food and smoked - an awe-inspiring detail - just one cigarette after dinner. Whereas Benedict loves cats and relaxes playing Mozart.

No, it can't just be the muscular Christianity of the one and the theology-inflected thoughtfulness of the other that can be so easily made to look furtive. But images and mythologies come at us from every side with this issue.

To begin with, we live in a world that wears as the badge of its secularism an obsession with sexuality so marked and so self defining that we think the Catholic ideal of a celibate clergy (and, all the more so, as celibate and exclusively male clergy) as downright sick. If we cut some slack to other religions, to Hindus or Buddhists or Muslims in this respect, we think that in the western dispensation this is a denial of nature and we're at least half inclined - when we're being psychologically deterministic rather than judgemental - to think that the crisis in the church is the consequence of this aberration.

Well, you certainly sometimes hear from Catholic insiders that some religious are driven by the loneliness of their calling to behaviour that they would never have conceived of.

Obviously that may well be the case just as single sex worlds - boarding schools, prisons, the Navy- may encourage an artificial homosexuality. As a previous generation, boisterously represented by Jeff Kennett, used to say, "If you can't get a girl get a Melbourne Grammar boy."

Well, yes, but boys being boys together is no real reason for thinking that men (however much they may be overgrown boys, as some offending clerics no doubt were) should prey on boys or girls. Nor should it tarnish a time-honoured ideal or - if you want to talk turkey - should the lapse from that ideal necessarily or in calamitous numbers take the form of child abuse.

But does it, though? The numbers do not bear out the notion of priests and brothers as some race of pariahs peculiarly given to the rape - whether it's literally coercive or persuasive it's liable to be technical rape when someone is underage - of the kids in their charge.

The figures don't bear it out in terms of percentages that any young person is more likely to be interfered with by a man of the cloth than he or she is by a social worker or a scoutmaster or the babysitter down the road. It simply that the duty of care in the case of the Catholic Church is statistically immense. It was the church who ran the orphanages and the schools and who ministered to the poor and down and out long before governments knew the name of mercy. And the priests and co. continue to do so on a massive scale so that of course they will appear to be numerically greater - as well as much more visible because of the catholicity of their calling - than any other grouping.

The church can also be sued and the clergy can be execrated as a race of child molesters who at some level were bound to be because they deny sex so that it comes and gets them (and everyone else) in the darkest and nastiest way.

The secular world, of course, pretends it is sitting pretty with sex. Sex is what sells hamburgers and glossy magazines, it governs our choice of newsreaders, it's something we want as an extra diversion in our films, and it's something we entertain ourselves with privately on the Internet (except for the pervs who get off on kids who should be sent to jail for the stuff they look at).

That last caveat is part of a giveaway. Everyone's teenager is, at least on the discernible surface, far more knowing about sex than people even in their 30s now were 20 years ago. And it's a fact of life that just as films are increasingly marketed for mid teens, so ideals of beauty have been getting younger and younger for decades. (Leonardo DiCaprio is now a pudgy thirtysomething. It's 15 years or so since Germaine Greer denounced magazines for tweens which were all about getting it.)

And yet in the midst of this proliferating eroticisation we hold to the ideal of the innocence of the child like a last stronghold of sexual purity.

It makes sense, in its way, that mythologies have their own coherence, that a world which defines itself as primarily sexual should define priests as sexually aberrant (therefore predatory) and kids as the potential objects of absolute violation in a world that admits of no other form of purity.

One of the things which gets lost in the midst of all this is the fundamental Christian (and definitionally Catholic) belief that sin can be forgiven - murder and rape and child molestation along with highway robbery and defrauding widows - and that it is the duty of people who sign up to the system to hate the sin, not the sinner. And along with this too goes the strong belief in the freedom of the individual will.

One of the things we've inherited from the Christian tradition is the belief in mercy. If you believe that we are, in the words of Mr Casey in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, "all sinners and black sinners" then you will throw yourself on the mercy of whatever spirit there is and resolve to sin no more.

It should not be beyond all powers of understanding to think that some priests who had offended could reform themselves. No doubt they sometimes did. Christ's injunction to "render unto Caesar" cuts both ways. Most people faced with the wrongdoing of their own intimates, their family, would hope and pray for reformation. Not every lawyer or businessman who's ever done a shoddy deal has a permanent commitment to iniquity.

And sexual behaviour of one kind or another is a one-to-one map of the world. Isn't everyone guilty of it one way or another?

No one wants to see kids interfered with and every sane thing should be done to prevent it. But when we sit in judgement on these churchmen of a few decades ago we should remember that the bishops believed in mercy, they believed people who stuffed up could come good and they believed that what the Church could do for the world was a wonderful thing, whatever the sometimes failings of its ministers.

One of the strangest things about the current witchhunt is that it treats secular justice as a kind of religious absolute. The only thing that can ever be done with the malefactor in this area is to throw him to the hounds of secular justice. Never mind that at least some misbehaviour in this area seems to be a consequence of chain reactions (i.e. suffering the same thing as a child), let alone in the treatment of sexual offenders in prison.

Again we're dealing with unexamined mythologies. But we should not be too quick to decry mercy. It is very odd that bishops who have tried to practice mercy tend, in a context of hysteria, to be tarred with the branch of the whole horror. Because they are deemed not to have attacked with maximum stringency, they are treated as if they had been complicit in the sexual offence. It also brought down Peter Hollingworth when he was Governor General. Because he had not acted harshly to a particular priest he was execrated as if he was responsible for the primary offence. It is crazy that the same kind of mythological thinking could be applied to the Pope.