Posted on 06/19/2002 11:45:07 PM PDT by Gophack
The sex-abuse scandal currently rocking the Catholic Church and shaming its bishops to their emergency meeting in Dallas last week has angered, embarrassed, and distressed many Catholics, but I'm not one of them. I'm glad.
Not for the pain that the young victims and their families have had to endure daily. Not for the ruinous financial cost (to be borne by the faithful Mass-goers who keep dutifully dropping their fivers into the collection baskets) — of the countless well-deserved lawsuits against the prelates across the country who covered up the priestly malfeasance for decades. Not for the aid and comfort that those same morons in miters have given to those who hate the Catholic Church and everything it stands for. I'm glad because the pederasty crisis is finally ringing the death knell for the decades-long reign of triumphalist liberalism in American Catholicism: liberal mores (do it if it feels good), liberal crime policies (therapy, not prosecution and punishment), liberal attitudes toward wrongdoing (let's be nice and give Father a second chance). The current scandal has been billed as many things: a celibacy story, an "emotional immaturity" story, a homosexuality story. What it really is is a 1970s story.
Virtually all the sexual wrongs were committed during the 1970s and early 1980s, when liberal Catholicism was at its zenith of cultural power in the U.S. church, sticking its gooey fingers into every corner of American Catholic life, from pulpit "dissent" to music, liturgy styles, and radical church redesign to the private lives of priests — all supposedly prompted by the window-opening Second Vatican Council of the 1960s. The 1970s gave us Catholics "On Eagle's Wings" and the church that looks like the Circle in the Square — and they also gave us the hip Boston "street priest" Paul Shanley, who never seemed to meet an altar boy he could keep his hands off of. It is all of a piece, all part of the tedious middlebrow radicalization fiesta that was 1970s America, and I have zero tolerance for all of it.
For this reason, I whooped and hollered when the arch-prelate of 1970s American Catholicism, Bishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee, had to turn in his crosier prematurely after admitting to a sexual relationship 23 years ago with sometime theologian/sometime florist Paul Marcoux, who, although an adult of age 31 when the malfeasance occurred, claimed that Weakland had "date-raped" him. Do the math on the 23 years. You come up with 1979. Weakland was the very epitome of 1970s liberal Catholicism: signing every "we are Church" petition urging the revamping of the church's sexual restrictions (what else?) that crossed his episcopal desk and, most recently, defying Vatican orders and the pleas of his Milwaukee flock to wreckovate the downtown cathedral into a liturgically correct bare hulk. Then it turned out, of course, that Weakland's diocese had spent $450,000 of that same flock's money — money that could have gone for parochial school salaries and winter coats for the homeless — on a settlement of Marcoux's complaint that looked a lot like a hush payout to many observers. Weakland is 75 years old. I don't think we'll be seeing the likes of his kind again for a while in the American Catholic Church.
It is important to observe the time frame of Weakland's sexual pecadillos in order to put the sex scandal into proper perspective. For many Catholics, the abuse crisis has been sidetracked into a debate about other issues. For liberals such as, say, columnist Andrew Sullivan, the debate is about the Church's celibacy rule for priests, the idea being that bottling up the sex urge makes people do the weirdest things. (This theory entails a rather reductive view of marriage as a kind of legal masturbation outlet.) For conservatives such as, say, Mary Eberstadt in The Weekly Standard, the debate is about homosexuality in the priesthood in general, the idea being that since most of the priestly pederasts have been gay, if we screened out homosexuals from the priesthood, we'd solve the problem. (On this theory, the church of the Middle Ages should have screened heterosexuals out of the priesthood, for the big problem back then was clerical concubines.) Neither of these issues, celibacy or homosexuality, is at stake in the current abuse scandal. What is a stake is how the Catholic Church — read, the bishops — should enforce its own rules of priestly conduct — chastity — and a ban on sex with minors that is enshrined both in the criminal law and in moral precepts that have been held by all Christians everywhere since earliest times.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, those policies of enforcement, which had once been rigidly strict (the cardinal in Los Angeles when I was growing up bought a one-way ticket out of town for any priest associated with the merest whiff of any scandal) became as lax and confused as the rest of American society's. And the Vatican II changes in the church, combined with the prevailing Sixties ethos of self-fulfillment, gave many priests the idea that anything went. Some priests threw off their cassocks and said Mass barefoot. Others left the priesthood to get married, some with the church's permission, others not. Still other priests obviously decided, like today's Judith Levine, that "intergenerational sex" could be good for kids. Look at the ages of the two most notorious of the Boston priests: Shanley is 71 and John Geoghan, recently sentenced to a decade in prison, is 67. Their alleged victims are young men who were brutalized 20 years ago and then grew up and hired lawyers. This pattern prevails across the board among the pederasty cases; there is scarcely a priest under age 40 among the alleged abusers.
The bishops caught the 1970s spirit, too: the idea that the way to deal with criminals, from litterbugs to ax murderers, was to sign the offender up for a lot of counseling sessions, after which he could be pronounced "rehabilitated" and then released. This explains why even respected conservative prelates such as Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law seemed willing to reassign known sex abusers from parish to parish, as long as they said they were sorry and went to group. On the secular side, however, we have known for a long time how flimsy and ridiculous, how little in accord with human nature, is this particular bit of 1970s theorizing. Now we have Megan's Law. We call "intergenerational sex" by its proper name: a felony. Like their former colleague Rembert Weakland, a great many of the U.S. bishops seem for too long not to have caught on to the fact that the 1970s are way over. So I'm glad that this final explosion of the sex scandal is giving them a chance to catch up.
— Charlotte Allen is the author of The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus.
I'm posting for discussion and comments.
I believe it is customary to ring the death knell only after the subject has stopped moving!
Pray to St. Peter Damian for reform.
I'd be pleasantly surprised if this was limited to the 70's. Once homosexual predators find a treasure trove like this, I doubt they give it up so willingly.
In general, I agree with much of what is said in this article. However, the author insists that recalcitrant priests and liberal bishops are the issue. Even Allen will not admit that homosexuality is the problem.
Worth the read.
Virtually all the sexual wrongs were committed during the 1970s and early 1980s, when liberal Catholicism was at its zenith of cultural power in the U.S. church, sticking its gooey fingers into every corner of American Catholic life, from pulpit "dissent" to music, liturgy styles, and radical church redesign to the private lives of priests — all supposedly prompted by the window-opening Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.
ROTFLMAO. She must be listening in at St.Anthonys...(I hear some variation on this theme weekly...)
Dear Lord, save our church. Wake Pope John Paul II up. You have to wonder if this current crisis is the REAL third prophecy of Fatima coming true.
Me too. It ain't dead yet.
The other problem with this article is that she dismisses the homosexual angle.
He has journeyed far and wide to watch naked heathens dance for him in African and Polynesian settings, riding around in a "popemobile" while his true work awaited him in Rome: to restore the Roman Catholic Church to dignity, respect and a haven for worshippers to seek and receive the grace and salvation they all need.
Charlotte Allen seems to get at the crux of the problem.
The bishops also need to enforce the unambiguous 1961 ban on ordaining homosexuals.
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