Sex Abuse Scandals and Just Scrutiny

By Calah Alexander
Barefoot and Pregnant
February 3, 2015

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/barefootandpregnant/2015/02/sex-abuse-scandals-and-just-scrutiny.html


On Sunday, the prosecutor general of the Holy See announced that two cases of child pornography were discovered in the Vatican last year, along with numerous instances of drug trafficking and money-laundering.

Unveiling the Vatican’s justice report, Milano stopped short of naming those accused of possessing child pornography. Holy See spokesman Federico Lombardi however identified Josef Wesolowski, a disgraced former ambassador, as one of the people facing charges.

(Read the rest here)

This is no longer shocking or even surprising news. Frankly, I’m so weary of hearing about the new and horrible crap some of those in our hierarchy pull that even my knee-jerk attempt to “find the positive” is half-hearted and cynical.

To be fair, the drug-trafficking and money-laundering might be more complex than corrupt clergy. The Vatican, as a small sovereignty, can be used as a center for international crime that might not involve the citizens or clergy of the Vatican state. In the instance of the cocaine-filled condoms, the Vatican was indeed cooperating with civil authorities in an attempt to ensnare the buyer. I have a hard time imagining that the German authorities who handed the package over to the Vatican as bait would have just shrugged and let it go if the buyer had turned out to be a Vatican priest. Nor do I believe that the Vatican would have insisted that a clear instance of international crime be left for them to handle if the perpetrator had been a clergyman.

The child porn case seems different.

For the record, the prosecutor general was not obligated to reveal the details of the investigation, nor was the spokesman obligated to reveal the name of one of the perpetrators.

This is good in the same way that it’s good when one child tells another child that he found his brother lighting kittens on fire, again. Honesty might be a virtue, but the tortured kittens need courage and justice to save them. I doubt they’ll be comforted to know that yeah, the people they trusted with their lives and souls might have tortured and mangled both body and soul, but at least they told the truth.

If this were being handled by the civil authorities, Wesolowski would be awaiting trial in a cozy jail cell. It seems that he is under house arrest rather than in the Vatican jail, since, as my colleague at the atheist channel points out that the Vatican jail has been otherwise, er, “occupied”.

Six people wound up in the Vatican’s prison last year. One of them was a woman who protested without a shirt and tried to get away with a Jesus doll from a manger scene. The PG of the Vatican must have the cushiest job in the history of the world. How, despite the numerous settlements and secular convictions of priests for the rape of children, have we never seen the Vatican put anybody on trial? Hasn’t the Catholic Church been saying they can handle this, so secular authorities need to give them the jurisdiction?

(Read the rest here)

Listen, JT is right. It is an absolute disgrace that many, many priests who abused innocent children for years have been neither tried by the Vatican nor handed over to the civil authorities.

It is worth noting that Wesolowski has been laicized, and that Pope Francis has met with the Chief Prosecutor of the Dominican Republic (where the abuses were allegedly committed) in order to ensure that the institutions of both judicial systems were acting “with complete freedom and within the law“. This suggests that if the Dominican Republic presses charges against Wesolowki, the Vatican will not interfere with the civil judiciary process.

While this is a welcome relief from the general obfuscation that has surrounded many sexual abuse scandals, it’s still absurdly overdue — as overdue as the faithful’s clear condemnation of such lax responses. I am really tired of hearing Catholics’ misguided efforts to defend the Church by pointing out that sexual abuse of children happens everywhere (in the schools! in the Protestant churches!), and that it’s statistically lower among priests. As if that is any kind of defense! There is no excuse for the sexual abuse scandals. None. The number of Catholic priests abusing children should be zero, and until it is, we deserve every bit of the scorn and contempt that is piled upon us.

Why, you say? Because the Catholic Church is the keeper and defender of the fullness of the Truth. As such, we are held at every level to a higher standard than the rest of the world. That applies not only to the virtue of our conduct, but also to the integrity of our response to corruption and scandal. Priests who have participated in the sexual abuse of children ought to be swiftly defrocked, offered the grace of confession, and immediately handed over to the civil authorities.

“From everyone who has been given much, much will be required.” Remember that priests are entrusted with the sacred duty of shepherding souls to Christ. It is terrifying responsibility, accompanied by enormous grace. This does not, and cannot, mean that priests must be perfect and without sin — that’s impossible. There are many priests who have been caught up in “scandals” like drug addiction and alcoholism and even consensual affairs. These aren’t scandals so much as they are heart-breaking reminders that our priests are human, and they need our prayers as much as we need theirs.

But the sexual abuse of children by the men who are charged to be Christ’s face on this earth is unconscionable. It is a direct attack on the body and soul of an innocent child, a desecration of apostolic authority, and an assault on the credibility of the Church.

I converted to Catholicism amidst the explosion of the sexual abuse scandal at the turn of the millennium. I came to believe that the fullness of Truth was revealed in Roman Catholicism largely because of the holiness of the priests at Cistercian Abbey, and the goodness and love that radiates from them to the students and faculty at the University of Dallas. My family is a testimony to the transformative power that the guidance from a good priest can have in people’s lives.

SNAP is a testimony to the destructive power that the abuse from a bad priest can have in people’s lives. That so many of our good priests are lumped together with sexual predators and despised is a testimony to the fact that our culture does indeed hold the Catholic Church to a higher standard of behavior, and rightly so. That the Church has been forced to scrutinize itself more than any other denomination is not an injustice — it is justice. It’s time for us to stop bemoaning that fact and accept it as part of the requirement for the true Church. And it’s past time for the successors of the apostles to hold each other to the civil law at the very least — both in conduct and in reparation.