A Legacy of Pain

By Frank Bruni
New York Times
March 20, 2012

http://bruni.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/a-legacy-of-pain/

In today’s column I wrote about Rick Santorum and American Catholicism and the church’s child sexual abuse crisis, and I wanted to circle back to that last item in this post, which is also a postscript.

I mentioned a support group for victims that’s under fire from church lawyers. That group is run by a man named David Clohessy, and if you want to understand just how much pain the crisis has caused Catholics, along with some of the ways it has tested families and challenged Catholics’ faith, his story is an instructive, heartbreaking one.

I told it in some detail in The Times’s Sunday magazine a decade ago, and provide the link here. I still vividly remember sitting with him and interviewing him, just as I still vividly remember sitting with and interviewing many people with recollections of sexual abuse by priests. Sexual abuse by any trusted adult is a shattering thing; sexual abuse by a priest or minister or other religious cleric upends a child’s every assumption about who’s safe and who’s not; where moral leadership can be found; what it means for a person to wear a badge of authority or the vestments of holiness. It says that nothing and no one is really safe.

One of the reasons the Catholic church’s child sexual abuse crisis has received so much attention over so many years isn’t, as some Catholic leaders have contended, primarily because there’s an anti-Catholic and anti-religious bias in secular society, and that nonreligious journalists are thrilling to the opportunity to humiliate the church. (Journalists thrill to malfeasance in all walks and corners of life.) It’s because of the magnitude of the violation of trust at work here. Before parents realized they should be as skeptical of a priest’s attention to their child as to anyone else’s, priests had special access to children. And priests certainly had special sway over them.

What’s more, there are indeed questions, appropriate ones, to be raised and to ponder about where the celibate culture of the priesthood fits into all this. A co-author and I thought about this a great deal when, two decades ago, we researched and wrote an early book about the crisis, and we interviewed not only many victims and many church leaders but also many psychiatric experts and several priests who had molested children.

And it struck me, at least back then, that for some men—I repeat, some men—the priesthood with its vow of celibacy was an attractive refuge from sexual discomfort or from sexual impulses that were unwelcome. Celibacy to these men represented an evasion, an answer, a panacea. And all too often it didn’t turn out to be any of those things.

I say “back then” because one of the changes the church has made to respond to the crisis is better screening of applicants to the priesthood. And that’s a blessing not just for parishioners but for the many innocent priests who heed their calling for all the holiest and most altruistic reasons, who pledge celibacy not because they’re trying to escape something but because they’re embracing a kind of service to their god and to their parishioners that they believe is rendered best without other obligations, loyalties, tugs.

These fine men are also among the victims of the child sexual abuse crisis, because they’ve seen their reputations sullied by the crimes of peers. I vividly remember sitting with and interviewing them, too. Like David Clohessy, they’d been deeply wounded, and were in pain.