Cultures of Cover-up

The Economist
March 27, 2014

http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2014/03/faith-truth-and-sex-abuse


IN MANY international organisations (including the European Union), there are internal tensions caused by different attitudes towards truth-telling. At the risk of dealing in huge stereotypes, it's a commonplace of social anthropology that there are some cultures and sub-cultures that attach high importance to truth-telling and regard telling direct lies as shameful; and others which foster a keen sense of the importance of "saving face" (one's own, or the family's, or the organisation's) and feel it's okay to tell fibs to keep up appearances. Within both Europe and the United States (again, sorry for the stereotype), the latter mindset seems more prevalent in southern regions than northern ones.

A similar cultural fault-line apparently runs through the global Catholic church, and it has affected the response to child abuse allegations. That at least is the implication of some public testimony that Australia's top Catholic cleric has just given, before heading off to Rome to take on a job that will include responsibility for the Vatican's murky finances.

Cardinal George Pell (pictured) told a Royal Commission on child abuse that despite its failings, the English-speaking Catholic world had been ahead of the Vatican in facing up to the fact that terrible abuses had taken place. When such allegations surfaced in the mid-1990s...

...The attitude of some people at the Vatican was that if accusations were being made against priests, they were being made exclusively or at least predominantly by enemies of the church to make trouble and therefore they should be dealt with sceptically. I think there was more of an inclination to give the benefit of the doubt to the defendant rather than listen seriously to the complaints...I think in many ways, the English-speaking world made a significant contribution to the universal church in this area.

It wasn't this part of Cardinal Pell's testimony that grabbed headlines. People were more interested in what he had to say about a specific matter: a former altar boy and sex abuse victim who lost a battle in Australia's court of appeal after it was decreed that the Catholic church was not an entity that could be sued. In his testimony, Cardinal Pell acknowledged that although the church had fought a hard and technically correct legal battle in the case, John Ellis had been treated unfairly from a Christian perspective. "From my point of view, from a Christian point of view, leaving aside the legal dimension, I don't think we did deal fairly."

So if the English-speaking world has a moral edge, it can only be a very slight one, some might conclude on hearing the Cardinal's testimony. Yet the point about cultural differences is not a trivial one. Thus far, the child abuse scandal has seemed to hit hardest in countries (Anglo-Saxon and otherwise) where there are robust traditions of accountability before the law. In many traditionally Catholic countries, including the Vatican's Italian heart-land, much less has been heard about the subject. But that doesn't mean that child abuse hasn't occurred in those countries; it's more likely that the culture of cover-up and face-saving has persisted for longer. But the chances are that it won't persist indefinitely.