WASHINGTON (DC)
Go, Rebuild My House - Sacred Heart University [Fairfield CT]
January 10, 2025
By David Gibson
It was probably inevitable that American Catholics would eventually move on from the clergy sexual abuse crisis. But I’m still surprised that when they did, it wasn’t a matter of “scandal fatigue” as much as a conscious decision that sex abuse really wasn’t that big of a deal after all. That’s effectively what happened when a clear majority of Catholic voters—and nearly six in 10 white Catholic voters—went for serial sex pest Donald Trump over Kamala Harris in the presidential election last November. Catholic enthusiasm for Trump makes the Catholic cohort Trump’s most reliable religious voting bloc after white evangelicals and, given the strategic importance of the Catholic vote in swing states, Catholic votes made Trump the next president. The outcome of the presidential balloting also made sexual predation a feature of the nation’s preferred leadership model rather than a disqualification.
How is it that Catholics who professed to being so scarred by the church’s betrayal in covering for abusive clerics that they stopped going to Mass suddenly found themselves ready and willing to flock to the voting booth to pull the lever for someone like Donald Trump? How is it that they could be fine with the incoming president picking men like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth and Elon Musk as top officials and advisers despite the slurry of appalling allegations of sexual misconduct and infidelities, cover-ups and even sex trafficking?
American Catholics who had been furious over the church’s clergy abuse crisis suddenly had no problem supporting a president and nominees for top education and law enforcement positions who would be barred from ever working in a Catholic school or parish. Nor were these Catholic voters too concerned about opening the church up to the kind of jabs they would have once decried as intolerable Catholic baiting: “GOP to quietly move Matt Gaetz to a new parish,” as one social media commenter quipped when Gaetz was finally forced to withdraw as Trump’s nominee for attorney general.
No pushback was possible, and none was forthcoming. To denounce the alleged abusers would have hurt Team Trump. Perhaps this outcome was also foreseeable. Catholics who had for decades seen the church primarily as another useful front in the culture wars naturally saw the abuse scandal as another useful weapon against their foes. The victims were secondary. In 2002, at the height of the abuse crisis, the conservative law professor and future ambassador to the Holy See, Mary Ann Glendon, criticized church reform efforts sparked by the scandal and famously declared that “awarding the Pulitzer Prize to the Boston Globe would be like giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Osama bin Laden.”
In her recent memoir, Glendon did not attempt to revise or even moderate her opinion but instead doubled down on her criticism of the media for its “misleading” coverage and defended John Paul II as the one whose guidance the church should have followed—despite the damning evidence that has continued to emerge of the late pope’s terrible failures to address the abuses. Similarly, conservative culture warriors like the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue have continued to frame the abuse crisis as the fault of gay priests who he regularly defamed as equivalent to pedophiles. Donohue recently went so far as to tar the National Catholic Reporter as “ideologically responsible for the clergy sexual abuse scandal.” That redefines chutzpah given that NCR more than any other outlet was responsible for breaking the clergy abuse scandal.
Last summer, when the Vatican expelled leaders of an elite conservative Peruvian religious community following allegations of physical and sexual abuse, cult-like behavior and “sadism and violence,” among other things, American friends and allies of the disgraced leaders of the society rushed to their defense. “The problem with the Vatican’s latest intervention is the odor of excess, canonical looseness, ecclesial payback, personal vendetta and ideological resentment that clings to it,” Francis X. Maier, a friend and admirer of many of the accused, wrote in one of several articles defending the SCV in the journal First Things.
That First Things hosted such attacks against victims and defenses of abusers is especially resonant given that the journal’s late founder and editor, Richard John Neuhaus, used those same pages to categorically defend Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, and one of the most depraved clerical abusers who benefited from decades of studious incuriosity during the papacy of John Paul II.
The saga of former cardinal Theodore McCarrick is another case in point. In June 2018, Pope Francis removed McCarrick, by then 88 and long retired, from ministry and eventually laicized him following credible accusations of child abuse. But conservatives suddenly found in the McCarrick case a chance to appear as crusaders against abuse by trying to hang the McCarrick case on Francis and on any bishop seen as allied with the pope’s reformist vision for the church. This propagandizing required a prodigious amount of historical rewriting and bottomless credulity, but the partisans would not be deterred. The latest iteration of this dynamic occurred when Francis this month named San Diego’s Cardinal Robert McElroy to Washington. Conservative critics mobilized, bending space and time so as to make McElroy—separated by decades and an entire continent from McCarrick—somehow responsible for the former cardinal’s predatory career. It would be absurd if it weren’t so awful, and ironic.
The consistent through line of the Catholic abuse crisis has always been that the bishops were the bad guys and that lay Catholics would be the ones with the sense of justice and moral outrage to set things right. That narrative doesn’t hold any longer. Combatting sexual abuse was supposed to be a unifying commitment in a polarized church, and an issue that Catholics would be remembered for. The presidential vote and other developments show instead that the sexual abuse scandal was for all too many Catholics just another tool to advance an agenda—diminishing real abuse to protect their allies and generating imagined scenarios to hurt their foes.
It feels like we are back where we started.
David Gibson is a journalist and author and director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University.