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	Hall Triplett: Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church San Angelo Standard-Times May 31, 2010 http://www.gosanangelo.com/news/2010/may/31/sexual-abuse-and-the-catholic-church/ SAN ANGELO, Texas — I have never understood the logic of those who profess that everything is forgivable. If every atrocity were forgivable, what need would we have for a sense of judgment? What need would judges have for a sense of justice? I am reminded of these thoughts, seasoned over seven decades now, by Garry Wills' stunning essay, "Forgive Not: A Catholic's Struggle with the Sins of his Church," in the May 27 issue of The New Republic. Everyone who is identified even remotely as a Christian should read this essay. Not to be confused with George Will, Garry Wills is one of the most exhaustively informed, perceptive and powerfully articulate intellectuals in American history. The vast scope of his learning is awesome, from a Ph.D. in the classics and translations of ancient Latin to brilliant studies of George Washington, Jefferson's Declaration at Philadelphia, Lincoln's classic words at Gettysburg, Reagan, Nixon and Kennedy, the effect of nuclear weapons, plus detailed studies of Christian origins and papal history. Like the 19th century Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, Wills takes the proverbial leap of faith and defends his personal identity as a Christian while confronting his church with centuries of its own nonsense, up to the present. This recent essay confirms again his understanding that the scriptural injunction to know truth as a liberating force is fundamentally different from securing one's "faith" in dogma. And no one demonstrates so meticulously as Wills that truth lies in the details. One of my learning experiences as a lawyer was in training young lawyers in the Abuse and Neglect Division of the guardian ad litem office in the juvenile court of Cook County, Ill. We represented children rather than prosecuting crime. Yet the heinous fact of child abuse in all its forms was a constant companion of our professional consciences. That any human thinker could argue with a straight face that abusing a child is not a secular crime — especially in a setting where a Catholic priest oversees his juvenile flock — appears so absurd to me that I must question whether that so-called "God-given intelligence" that all of us reportedly possess was in fact given. And yet the argument for making exceptions within that holy family of the priesthood is a defense by which Catholic hierarchy have protected pedophilic priests from the reach of law. A Catholic spokesman has even argued on national television that the most recently exposed priests were not pedophiles since, by dictionary definition, pedophilia does not apply to the adolescent boys they assaulted. A recurring theme of Wills' essay is power, something that is hard to see for good little churchgoing girls and boys. I was old enough to buy beer before I learned the historical significance of the Roman emperor Constantine. I was older still when I learned to separate the Constantine of "church history" from the Constantine of history. It was reportedly the freak accident of a dream that led Constantine to endow the Catholic bishops of the fourth century with the power of a militarily dominant empire and to use them in his own power struggles. At the behest of Constantine's convocation, funded by the empire, they traveled to Nicaea in 325, room and board provided, and haggled over doctrine — all under the brilliantly power-minded presence of Constantine. And so the Nicene Creed, as Michael Grant puts it, came into being "less for theological reasons than because hardly anyone had the nerve to contradict him" — the emperor, that is. The requirement of reciting that creed, or one of its minor Protestant variations, is still in force 17 centuries later, as though the pervasive illiteracy of the Dark Ages still identified the mass of humanity and Johann Gutenberg had not devised the use of movable type in printing books, through which human minds might conduct their own search for truth. Ever since the gathering at Nicaea, the history of institutionalized Christianity, reformed or otherwise, whatever the articles of faith, has been a study of power, of presumptively divine might defining, dictating and enforcing right. And so it goes into the 21st century, as Wills details in the hierarchical cover-ups of priestly crime. He writes, "Since the papacy has been frozen in a defensive crouch, defying historical fact and free inquiry, it has been opposed to anything that might diminish the power of the church to define reality. ... Thus, the covering-up of sacerdotal sins and errors was a given in the Church." This process, conducted of course in pursuit of a "higher" purpose, was once called acting as an accessory to a crime "after the fact," and several aides to President Richard Nixon went to prison in the 1970s on that very count. The deterrent fear of prison may or may not have kept a priest out of the pants of his juvenile congregants. But as long as the church succeeds in keeping its own sexual predators out of prison, everyone who is doing hard time for burglary must be wondering what happened to justice. San Angeloan Hall Triplett is a retired lawyer.
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