NEW YORK (NY)
Commonweal
May 8, 2019
By Paul Elie & Paul Baumann
It’s good to have a response from Paul Baumann to my article in the New Yorker (titled “Acts of Penance” in the April 15 print issue, and “What Do the Church’s Victims Deserve?” online).
Paul is one of the hundred or so people I spoke with while reporting the article. Having served as editor of Commonweal across several recent decades, he is capable of engaging with the conviction about history that I brought to it: namely, that for American Catholics of our era, priestly sexual abuse (and the Church’s efforts to address it) is something other than a crisis—it is an everyday reality that has shaped the life of the church for a third of a century, affecting Catholics as a people and individually, touching on matters of truth that are the basis of the church’s existence.
There’s a personal dimension, too. When Paul was the editor of Commonweal, I told him that I had been violated by a Jesuit priest while I was a student at Fordham. He was the first person I told who was in a public Catholic role. “A priest you probably know,” I told him. At the time, Paul lived during the week in one of the group of apartments on West 98th Street known as the West Side Jesuit Community. That is, he lived in the apartment building where I had been violated, under the auspices of a community whose members included Edward Zogby, SJ, the priest who violated me. That’s one reason I told him. As I recall, Paul’s response wasn’t to ask what had happened or who the priest in question was. He simply said, “Well, if you’re ever interested in writing about it, let me know.”
Paul could have brought a great deal of shared history and common travail to his response. Instead, he took the position, well established at Commonweal, of aggrieved media scrutineer—finding disagreements where there are none, passing over careful distinctions and efforts of balance, and casting aspersions on the New Yorker and its supposedly “jeering readers.”
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