Chicago Catholic News
November 30, 2010
http://www.chicagocatholicnews.com/2010/11/new-column-musings-in-ordinary-time-by.html
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Voice of the Faithful (VOTF) is an organization formed in response to the Church’s sexual abuse crisis. On Oct. 11, they released a statistical analysis of abuse in the Chicago archdiocese.
What VOTF claimed was eye-popping: almost 60 percent of parishes had housed a “credibly accused priest” between 1917 and 2009, and there were 97 such priests. They also said that as of 2009, about 20 percent of parishes still had one in residence. To read the stats in depth, including some suggesting that suspicious priests may have been assigned in clusters to certain parishes and zip codes, go here.
The archdiocese adamantly disputes all this. If you go to their records, the number of credibly accused priests drops to a considerably more modest 65, on the grounds that only they lived long enough to respond to the accusations. And, in a column on the right, the archdiocese notes that all these priests are either removed or dead.
Besides, says an archdiocesan statement I found in the Oct. 31 bulletin for St. Peter's in the Loop (page 4), “Initial analysis shows the analysis and conclusions of the [VOTF] report are misleading and erroneous. Data are inaccurate or incomplete for 63 of the 65 Archdiocesan priests mentioned in the report.”
Here, I will dispute nothing the archdiocese says on factual grounds. But even so, they miss the point. They speak the language of damage control and press releases, a language stymied by the nature of sexual abuse.
As a crime, sexual abuse is totally of its own kind. Abusers seize a person’s most sacred space, and colonize it even long after they are gone. The continuing witness of those so violated defies any dry, clipped insistence that Catholic power structures are suddenly trustworthy.
Moreover, priests are unique among perpetrators, since they are officially alteri Christi (“other Christs”). As Catholic commentator Garry Wills put it, writing about abuse scandals in Papal Sin, “It is not an ordinary experience to be betrayed by God.”
That is the real message behind the VOTF report, whatever its accuracy. It speaks for those who are not ordinary, for they have been betrayed by God. They have been betrayed in multitudes. The story is worthy of the Book of Job, and if Job says he has not yet been heard, then he has not yet been heard.
Before they hasten to inform us that the number is 65 and not 97, or that 63 is inaccurate, the hierarchy must risk sitting in total vulnerability and silence, listening to the laments of Job. Otherwise, any attempt to laud their own effectiveness or diligence will sound as blurrily unintelligible as an adult in a Charlie Brown cartoon.
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