UNITED STATES
A Sound of Sheer Silence
Michael Boyle
In the previous post, I framed question #2 of “how did this sex abuse crisis happen?” as “how did it come to pass that the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church covered up the fact that some number of Roman Catholic priests had and were sexually abusing children, either actively or passively, thus facilitating the abuse?” The answer to that question, in my view can be answered in a one sentence response–“because the culture of the Roman Catholic priesthood is sick and broken, and the sex abuse crisis is the most visible manifestation of that pathology.”
It is extremely important here to emphasize the word “culture.” While people contribute to cultures in which they are a part, a culture is a conceptually distinct entity from any particular member of that culture. There are deeply decent and honorable men who are Roman Catholic priests. But the culture in which they swim is not decent and not honorable in the main. And, in what is perhaps the greater tragedy, fundamentally decent and honorable men can become compromised by that culture to do things they would never otherwise do.
Let’s talk about the big picture elements of that culture, and then drill down to the specifics. If you look at the history of the Roman Catholic Church, probably the single most consistent thread post-Constantine is the absolute and uncompromising insistence by the Church that clerics are not, and should never be, subject to the authority of non-clerics. Thomas Becket died, and was named a saint, for standing up for that principle–that he and his clerics could not be tried by the king’s courts in the manner of every other person in England. Gregory VII is acclaimed as a great pope for asserting the same privileges for clerics in the Holy Roman Empire. These fights are often framed as being about protecting the Church from domination by power-hungry kings, and there is truth to that, but the core principle is clerics are to be judged by other clerics, and never by non-clerics.
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