BishopAccountability.org
	2 Men in 2 Different Moral Universes By Alan Cowell New York Times July 16, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/world/europe/17iht-letter.html As far as is known, or even likely, there is no formal link between Roman Polanski and the bishop of Bruges beyond the coincidence that both men, now in their 70s, were embroiled long ago in sexual abuse yet enjoy a measure of freedom. But, in recent weeks, the juxtaposition of their unrelated cases has offered a starting point to ruminate on such questions as conflicting standards of moral judgment in Europe and the United States and whether celebrity, art, money or power might offer exemption from ordinary justice. Last Monday, after restricting Mr. Polanski’s movements in various ways for nine months, the Swiss authorities rejected a U.S. request for his extradition on charges related to his flight from sentencing in 1978. Bernard Kouchner, the foreign minister of France, where Mr. Polanski, 76, is a citizen, said he was “delighted” at the ruling. On that same day, Bishop Roger Vangheluwe of Bruges, Belgium, was reported in the International Herald Tribune to be in seclusion at a Trappist monastery in Belgium after resigning last April when he admitted molesting a minor decades earlier, later identified as his nephew. There is no record of any European politician expressing delight at even an appearance of sympathy for an abusive cleric: this, after all, is an old and world-weary continent, given to compromise, seeing shadings of gray where Americans prefer stark monochrome. The cases, of course, are different. Mr. Polanski fled the United States after pleading guilty to unlawful sex with a 13-year-old, Samantha Geimer. He had spent 42 days in psychiatric evaluation at Chino State Prison but, he said, feared that a judge, now deceased, would impose a harsher sentence. In any event, Mr. Polanski’s supporters argue, Ms. Geimer has emerged publicly to urge closure. There is an argument, too, that Mr. Polanski’s behavior was a product of a wild era and of his own narrative — a child survivor of Nazism and the Holocaust in Poland, who later escaped Communism to reach the West only to see his own wife, Sharon Tate, murdered by the Manson Family in 1969. Could it be that his actions were tinged with the torment, and hubris, of an extraordinary life and times? In the bishop’s case, the trauma is less known. The nephew he abused has not permitted himself to be publicly identified. Nor has the victim, now in his early 40s, offered forgiveness. And, just as Mr. Polanski’s crime was set in a particular era, so too the bishop’s hidden life was lodged in a secretive Vatican culture built over centuries. But there are common conclusions and questions: does the status of an Oscar-winning moviemaker like Mr. Polanski soften the focus of opprobrium reserved for priestly abusers like Bishop Vangheluwe? If this is in part a morality tale — permissiveness corrodes virtue, illicit urges undermine restraint — is morality itself a relative concept? That question seemed likely to be asked more searchingly this week after the Vatican issued new rules about the handling of priestly abuse, listing pedophilia in a catalog of other supposed grave crimes including “the attempted ordination of women.” “What I did, supporting the ordination of women, they saw as a serious crime,” said the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, an American priest excommunicated less than two months after he participated in a ceremony ordaining women. “But priests who were abusing children, they did not see as a crime. What does that say?” Irrespective of the answer, it has become clear that societies once condemned to collective silence over priestly abuse, such as Belgium or Ireland or Austria, are no longer prepared to remain mute, or to offer a tacit statute of limitations. The world has moved on. The church is on the defensive. Sexual abuse is widely understood to be an enduring burden for the victims, whose forgiveness may send the wrong signal. It is society’s task — through its courts, not through closed ecclesiastical conclaves or individual acts of grace — to determine redemption and punishment. Time does not alter that message. Neither does geography. What was punishable more than three decades ago in the United States remains so elsewhere: under an international warrant issued in the United States, Mr. Polanski could still risk arrest outside Switzerland, France or Poland, where he also holds citizenship. Is that destiny too harsh? Society had different levels of tolerance in the 1970s. Mr. Polanski has been punished enough, his supporters say, effectively exiled from the Hollywood mainstream, held in the 1970s for a period agreed by due process, detained last September in Switzerland then ordered into house arrest at his chalet in the ski resort of Gstaad. And, surely, his canon of work should be weighed alongside the legalities? Maybe not. “The many artists and intellectuals who haughtily dismissed what Polanski had done on the basis of his talent and achievement” were thinking of his films, Richard Cohen wrote for The Washington Post. “They should have thought of their own daughters.” By contrast, Bishop Vangheluwe, 73, has not been tried or punished. A Trappist monastery is no Swiss chalet, but neither is it a prison or a psychiatric ward. It is place of peace, contemplation, prayer. His nameless nephew is “scared” to talk. “And the church has a lot of power,” the man told Doreen Carvajal and Stephen Castle of the International Herald Tribune. That power is built in part on secrecy, in part on the once-unchallenged mystique of its clerics and to a large extent on its frayed claim to offer moral certainty and rectitude. Those values might not always extend to Hollywood, yet, in significant ways, Mr. Polanski’s actions have had far more of a public airing than those of the clergy. The intellectualized debate should not, of course, camouflage the reality. Abuse is about the betrayal of trust, the violation of fragile bodies and souls, the imposition of adult cravings on young people unable to discern or refuse the manipulation of their abusers until it is too late. It is no more than an aside, but Mr. Polanski’s latest movie, “The Ghost Writer,” is based on a novel by Robert Harris published initially in 2007 as “The Ghost.” If victims’ advocates have their way, the haunting will not end as definitively as the movie does.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.