The scandal of silence

Saturday September 9, 2006

This ‘viewpoint’ was published in the August 25th edition of NCR – National Catholic Reporter. ‘Harvey’ has asked me to post this as a lead to his own reflections on and ‘learnings’ from the ‘Harvey Interviews’ posted on this website over the past ten months. It is posted not to surface guilt or create turmoil in the soul but to heighten the awareness that the ‘cover-up’ of abuse continues and is symptomatic of the lack of episcopal and pastoral accountability that continues in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. Catholics in the pew must share some responsibility.

Ordinary Catholics looked the other way when priests abused children

By DIANE R. PAWLOWSKI

When Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George met in January with 200 parishioners from St. Agatha Parish about his assignment there of a known priest sexual predator, the overseer of an after school program at the parish said she saw children knocking on the rectory’s back door last fall and then going in.

“I am hurting,” she is quoted as saying in press reports. “I pray God will forgive me for not speaking out earlier.”

Many others could repeat her words. Rectories are public venues frequented by volunteers, vendors and business people. Parishioners arrive for counseling, to arrange weddings or baptisms, or request copies of records. Volunteers, the lifeblood of both school and parish, drop off papers or attend meetings. Staff are [sic] not often alone. If one employee saw children visit, others saw the same thing.

Yet we don’t hear other admission. Where are other witnesses?

Sexual abuse by priests could not continue for decades without the active complicity of not only priests, bishops and cardinals but lay witnesses in schools and rectories where priests work and live.

Repeated abuse continues because good people ignore things they would otherwise report to police. Also, a recurring phenomenon follows priests’ dismissal for sex abuse: Anguished cries of disbelief and loyalty to Fr. Perpetrator and against victims ring out. DignityUSA ruled that no priest convicted of sex abuse may celebrate a chapter’s Mass. Members griped because a friend, a celebrant, was lost.

Reading the parish employee’s pained remark, I recalled two incidents I witnessed. In 1993, I attended a national conference for AIDS/ HIV ministers held at a Catholic university. Inspiring talks filled a week illuminated by liturgies sparkling with bright banners, music and a bishop’s homilies. Attendees broke bread together in the cafeteria.

An unusual mealtime ritual slowly emerged. Lay attendees ate quietly, with heads down as if avoiding someone, because some priests used mealtime to flirt and cruise.

Messages for meetings of non-celibate priests blossomed. The final plenary featured an open mike session for attendees to share impressions and reactions. Conferees recalled inspirational moments, lessons learned. Then one earnest, unsmiling man in his early 20s stood up and apologetically announced that he needed to say something upsetting.

“John” identified himself as a person with AIDS, saying that in gay groups and in bars, he never experienced as many sexual overtures as during this conference.

“I’ve never been hit on so much in my life,” John said. “This is one place I thought I would not have to experience this sort of behavior.”

He sat down to stunned silence, averted eyes. Open mike closed. Attendees caught cabs, planes or trains home. I left, recalling meals with laywomen looking down, avoiding what they did not want to see: priests behaving badly toward young, vulnerable persons with AIDS.

The article about the cardinal’s meeting echoed an incident three years before Canadian revelations of sex abuse surfaced. I sat in a campus chaplaincy commons, waiting for a friend. Three young boys bounded joyfully in, storming into the pastor’s open office, announcing that they were spending the weekend with Father. From inside his office, before the door closed, I heard excited voices loudly asking, “Please. Please. Can we watch the Playboy channel again?”

Laughter stopped. The door closed. Silence. My friend arrived. We left. At dinner, I recounted the occurrence, still hearing the boys’ words. A trusted priest said he could do nothing, telling me to report it to the bishop. I had, anonymously. Fr. Friend said that anonymous reports are automatically destroyed.

How did sex abuse proliferate? It’s convenient to blame hierarchy, absolving the rest of us who are church. Blaming hierarchy absolves Catholics active in parish life. Priests and nuns played and still play silent roles, as do staff or visitors in rectories or schools.

An excuse for silence is that good laity want to see good in others, especially shepherds from whom we receive absolution and eucharistic grace. Why do priests and religious who live and work with abusing colleagues remain silent?

Priests abused innocent little kids. Hold superiors responsible. But who else saw? Whose voices—still able to halt abuse—are silent? What does silence earn? False peace and security? Insured social status in parishes resembling the whitened tombs Christ condemned? Where are righteous parishioners, Catholic secular press reporters and editors who claim to do just work and fail to hear witnesses’ voices?

This silence costs a church claiming justice and truth. Popes and theologians preach Gospels that sex abusers and their friends violate. Look at the sad eyes of those leaving the church to seek truthful answers for the injustice of abuse-empowering silence.

_Diane R. Pawlowski, a research anthropologist at Wayne State University in Detroit, has done research on the anthropology of religion and on the Dignity organization while in a graduate program at the University of Windsor in Canada.

National Catholic Reporter, August 25, 2006
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And ‘Harvey’ adds:

Based on the information that has been shared over the past ten months vis-à-vis the ‘Harvey Interviews,’ it is now clear to me that there is a cancer in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States in general and in the Diocese of Paterson in particular that no legal spin or shallow apology can eradicate. The bare truth is that truth has been honored only in the breach.

Although the jury is still out on the determination of guilt with regard to congregational silence about sexual abuse, the verdict on institutional cover-up by bishops and their officers is clear. What is difficult to appreciate much less to understand is the silence among priests and people in the pew. None save the lonely voices of reform groups have had the courage to speak but they have been dismissed at worst as rabble rousers and malcontents or bleeding hearts at best.

Over and above the abuse of minors what troubles me most is the absence of disquiet about the misconduct priests—past and present—who have ‘hit up’ on young men and women eighteen and older. Where is the outrage? Surely you are not going to tell me that Catholics are unaware of clergy ‘affairs’ and ‘partnerships,’ same sex and otherwise, to say nothing of the crossing of proprietary boundaries and unwelcome provocations. Surely the data is not known only to Father Lasch who has claimed all along that this same data is only a door opener.

It is clear that media have vaults of information that remains unpublished. It is also clear that civil officials and corrections officers know more than they are telling. It is also clear that church employees are aware of the hidden agenda of some clergy including bishops but are unwilling or unable to speak due to fear of the loss of their jobs.

It this sounds bizarre, it is only because it is bizarre.

I stated earlier that the cover-up of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church is only symptomatic of the abuse of authority and the absence of accountability on the part of bishops and other members of the clergy.

Catholic parishes continue to be decimated by authoritarian and autocratic pastors who use Church law wrongly to curtail dialogue with and collaboration among parishioners in the development ministries and programs that foster greater participation in the life of the parish.

“Liturgies that do not foster and inspire faith destroy faith.” [Vatican II] This is not only true of worship but also of pastoral leadership. How many Catholics will it take to abandon their ‘home’ parish and even to abandon the Church before the bishop will listen to the faithful?

Do I have hope? Yes, as Father Lasch has stated so often, hope is the deep conviction that God will not only not abandon us, but will continue to intervene in the life of the Church. Am I optimistic? That depends. I continue to be inspired by lay people who struggle with their faith and who are not afraid to ask questions and challenge Church leaders to integrity. That makes me optimistic. However, I am not optimistic about the present ‘assembly’ of bishops the majority of which seem unwilling or incapable of not only opening their ears but their hearts to the people of God.

Having stated that, I take heart from an editorial authored by Fr. Gene Lauer, head of the National Pastoral Life Center, which was published in the latest edition of ‘Church’ magazine. Here are some relevant excerpts:

“From the unfolding history of the church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we see again and again how the Spirit always leads us to new life, even in times that seem quite hopeless. John Henry Newman pointed out in his ground-breaking nineteenth-century treatise, On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, that in the famous fourth century Arian controversy, in which a majority of bishops were moving in the direction of denying the divinity of Christ, the real solution came from the faithful as a whole, who continue to pray to Christ as God. From them came the impetus for resolving the controversy.”

“We need to look more and more to the general consciousness of ‘the people of God.’ We believe that the Holy Spirit is in every believing person. The Second Vatican Council took Newsman’s observation to its logical conclusion, a conclusion that may seem startling to one who has never read the Council document, Lumen Gentium. The Council Fathers wrote: ‘The body of the faithful as a whole, anointed as they are by the Holy One, cannot err n matters of belief’ (no. 12). Quite an affirmation of the wisdom of the body of the faithful.”

The age in which we are living is, in the words of Emanuel Kant, “in essential degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit. Religion Through its majesty, may seek to exempt themselves from it, but they then awaken just suspicion, and cannot claim the sincere respect which reason accords only to that which has been able to sustain the test of real and open examination.” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason)

Bishops who remain intransigent in their stubborn authoritarianism and doctrinaire in their unyielding attitude toward the faithful hinder the work of the Spirit. On the other hand, Catholics in the pew who keep silent or simply walk away from the table are no less culpable for denial of the presence of the Holy Spirit even in the fermentation and the distillation of revelation that will continue until the end of time.

So let’s get on with it.

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