Witness and Belief

By Kevin O'Brien
Waiting for Godot to Leave
October 6, 2013

http://thwordinc.blogspot.com/2013/10/witness-and-belief.html

Rod Dreher  brings up some current sex scandals in the Church, some of which I've written about recently on this blog.

One involves Fr. Riedlinger in New Jersey.  Riedlinger was a favorite of Msgr. Rossi, who is the rector of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC - enough of a favorite that Riedlinger claimed he would "vacation" with Rossi (who is a much older man).  Riedlinger would be introduced by Rossi to young seminarians, and Riedlinger would then proceed to hit on these guys and turn the talk around to gay sex.  Some of the young seminarians would complain about this, and their complaints would go unheeded.

Eventually, two of them instituted a "sting" operation against Riedlinger.  Timothy Schmalz and his roommate Ryan posed as a 16-year-old boy on Facebook, and "friended" Fr. Riedlinger, who soon turned the conversation toward sex.

The messages show Riedlinger needed little or no invitation to steer the conversation to sex. He spoke of past encounters and the size of his penis, encouraged Josh to enjoy sex with his boyfriend and repeatedly told him how alike they were in their thirst for pornography and sex.

“I love u dude. Ur a sick (expletive) like me,” Riedlinger wrote.

Riedlinger occasionally sent a message saying he was near Newton, suggesting a get-together. On those occasions, Schmalz declined to respond and made up an excuse later.

The conversations culminated in a graphic, six-hour texting session in the early morning hours of Aug. 3, 2012. The next day, Riedlinger asked to do it again.

Schmalz and his roommate cut off contact two days later and forwarded the transcript and other materials to [Trenton Bishop David] O’Connell [Riedlinger's ordinary].

On Aug. 7, the bishop wrote back, thanking them for the documents and saying he had personally escorted Riedlinger to a hospital for in-patient treatment. The diocese, citing federal health law, declined to say where Riedlinger was treated or how long he remained in the facility.

Schmalz and Ryan said they continued to press the diocese to notify parishioners at St. Aloysius [the parish where Riedlinger had been assigned], saying they worried Riedlinger might have spoken to other teens the way he spoke to them.

Two months ago, the diocese’s victim assistance coordinator, Maureen Fitzsimmons, flatly told Ryan in an e-mail that O’Connell would not do so, according to a copy of the correspondence.

***

Dear readers, I can understand sexual crimes and perversions.  I really can.  Many abusers were abused themselves as children, and if there's anything all of us should be humble about, it's the trouble our gonads can get us into.  Few of us can throw stones at someone who behaves in a sick or reckless way sexually. Yes, child abuse is over the line, and horrific.  But there is something worse.

And that is not the sin of the flesh - awful as it is; but the sin of pride, the spiritual sin of those who cover up this stuff, who place kids in harm's way, and who smugly defend their own actions by attacking not only whistle blowers, but also normal people who want this nonsense to end.

Case in point: the way the pastor at Fr. Riedlinger's church handled the situation.  Instead of telling the parishioners that Fr. Riedlinger was trying to have sexual contact with someone he thought was a 16-year-old boy, and letting his flock know that the middle school sex ed students might have been victimized by a priest who liked to talk to 16-year-olds about the size of his penis and who brags about being a "sick (expletive)", Pastor Kevin Keelan ...

chastised parishioners for asking questions about Riedlinger’s removal, saying in the church bulletin that "blabbing" was a sin and that they were not entitled to more information.

That kind of moral bullying (used more typically by female Catholic parochial school principals than by pastors) is so completely characteristic of what happens in the day-to-day operations of the Catholic Church that it confirms the whole scenario.  This is exactly how authority figures act in the Catholic Church and this is exactly why so many people are losing their faith.

Rod Dreher writes (my emphasis) ...

The knowledge that he has been sexting with what he thought was a teenage boy about his penis and such does not render the ordination of Fr. Riedlinger invalid, nor the sacraments he confects. This is true, and an extremely important truth to hold onto, because it protects the integrity of the holy sacraments. But honestly, in terms of spiritual authority, who wants to take anything a cretin like that says about Jesus seriously? In terms of authority, every word coming out of his mouth is suspect. Similarly, when Archbishop Nienstedt troubles to teach his flock about holiness, what kind of credibility will he have, if it is established that he buried the evidence of a child-porn priest, and misled police investigators? And: Bishop Finn.

In the future, the kind of bishops and priests who rebuild confidence in the Church’s spiritual authority — and I’m not just talking about the Catholic Church, but all churches — will be the kinds of bishops and priests who testify to the truth of Christianity by the integrity of their lives. 

And so, fellow sinners, we can't change our bishops or our priests.

But we can change ourselves.

We can make reparations for the sins of these men - and we can "testify to the truth of Christianity by the integrity" of our OWN lives.

I, for one, have not been very good at that.  I suspect that neither have you.

Let us pray for one another, and let us realize that even though personal sanctity is hard to achieve, one thing is within our grasp.

Basic human decency.

Let's begin with that.  And let's pray our priests and our bishops do, too.