INQUISITION NEWS: The sacrificial lambs

The sacrificial lambs

By Janice Kennedy, The Ottawa Citizen

This week alone: a Kansas City Catholic bishop got his knuckles rapped for shielding a priest accused of taking hundreds of pornographic pictures of children, some as late as last year; a Chilean priest, protected by his bishop, was connected with sexual misconduct stretching back more than 40 years; residents of northeast Pennsylvania learned that a former parish priest, who'd also worked at a high school, is accused of sexual misconduct - like his brother, defrocked two years ago.

Sexual abuse, cover up, restitution: just another week in the life of the Roman Catholic Church, right?

More or less. But while the abuses, revelations and payouts continue to dominate the routine of the world's largest Christian church, its apologists have adopted a new defensive angle.

Those Catholics who remain in denial about the corrosive rot at the institutional core of their church have always had an impressive arsenal of cynical excuses to trot out with each new public shaming.

The abuse, they like to say, is the work of a tiny minority, a few bad apples, but the media blow it out of all proportion. Such coverage is an anti-Catholic attempt to blacken the church's eye.

Besides, the apologists continue, abuse happens everywhere, not just in the church. And when it has happened in the church, you can understand why: priests of recent decades have been so infected by the disease of postmodern liberalism you can hardly blame them.

In any case, the Pope has apologized, and things have changed with the Vatican's new guidelines. Most of the abuse talk is irrelevant ancient history.

Right. All this has constituted the official line for years. But now there's another weapon in the excuse arsenal.

The latest medium of exculpation for Catholic diehards? Institutional self-preservation - as a good thing.

In the wake of the Penn State scandal, observers everywhere have been condemning institutions that turn a blind eye to criminal exploitation so they can preserve reputation and safeguard revenues.

Church defenders, however, have taken this self-preservation line and run with it in a different direction. Now, when an institution like the Church protects itself by hiding the sins of its ministers - shuffling creeps from one parish to another, shielding criminals from civil authorities - it is justifiable. As columnist David Warren put it last Sunday, their actions and inaction are not even "necessarily morally contemptible. For they are in a position to see that more harm than good could come of it" - "it" being admission of guilt.

In short, some twisted form of logic dictates that the victimization of children is the lesser evil, while the preservation of this mighty fortress dedicated to God's work - or the illusion thereof - is the greater good.

They don't get it. They don't get that their particular institution is not just a school, benevolent organization or community group that can shrug sadly about a few inevitable bad apples.

They don't get that it's not (supposed to be) a mere shrine to Latinate ritual, an empty historical and artistic shell. They don't get that their church, notwithstanding its history, is supposed to be above corruption, representing the good and the Godness in people.

Destroying the lives of children and shattering the trust of untold others is not merely a regrettable and costly indiscretion, one that repeated anguished apologies might eventually erase. In an institution ostensibly devoted to the precise opposite, it is an evil so monstrous it threatens - as it should - the church's very future.

For God's sake, how many times does it have to be said? There is no greater evil than sinning against children.

Do they think their founder was kidding when he said (according to Matthew) that those who corrupt children would be better off drowned in the sea, millstones around their necks?

They must, if they see child sexual exploitation as a lesser evil, to be brushed off with a glib "No, it's not nice, but it happens." Or "Seriously, it's not the end of the world." Or "Nice payout, though, huh?"

Which is stunning, given the mountains of accumulated evidence, the tragic stats, reports, stories and obituaries that testify to the destruction of countless - well, sacrificial lambs, apparently. When a priest, revered and representing The Good, sexually abuses a child (or adolescent, a mixed-up and stillevolving kid in an adult body), he creates enduring disillusionment, loss of faith, mistrust of authority, self-doubt, psychological and sexual confusion and, of course, trauma. He contributes to the creation of an adult who is often angry, unshakably vulnerable, incapable of trusting relationships and prone to whatever dulls the pain, whether booze, drugs or suicide.