UNITED STATES
Pax Culturati
June 2, 2017 by Kate O’Hare
I’ve finished Netflix’s “The Keepers,” and I have thoughts and questions. Bear with me.
If you haven’t seen the whole series, stop reading now and come back when you have. I’m going to make spoilery comments, and I’m going to reference things I’m not going to explain. You’ve been warned.
Some statements up front:
* I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I don’t deny they sometimes exist.
* Two things can be true at once.
* Neither victims or perpetrators should be taken at their word.
* All human institutions, large and small, suffer from corruption, foolishness, arrogance and cowardice.
* What a storyteller leaves out is as least as important (if not more so) than what’s put in.
* If men are to be held accountable, women must be as well.
* Women make great detectives.
Let’s deal with these one at a time.
Conspiracy Theories
There are cover-ups in the world (just ask Richard Nixon), and they’re usually worse than the crime (again, ask Richard Nixon). In the case of the sexual abuse of children, the crime wins.
Even in the face of something this heinous, though, the human ability to disbelieve the obvious, and an institution’s default response to protect itself, kick into overdrive.
You can explain aspects of the Church’s inability to deal with abusive priests, and you can even understand some of it, but it’s still horrific. Any honest Catholic feels sick to his or her stomach hearing about it. And, no one cares that the Church has largely cleaned up its act and now goes to great lengths to vet priests and protect children, that the accusations are decades old, or that abuse continues rampant in public and private schools, non-Catholic religious institutions, sports teams, the Boy Scouts, Penn State, the Los Angeles Unified School District, and so on. That doesn’t matter, and perhaps it shouldn’t.
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