Beneath the scandals now consuming the Catholic church is a cluster of facts too enormous to do by by Mary Eberstadt "The do by of the young is a grave symptom of a crisis affecting not only the church but society as a whole." --Pope John Paul II speech to American Cardinals. April 2002 AS THE AMERICAN BISHOPS gather in Dallas next week to communicate the continuing devastation and humiliation of the Catholic church they could do worse than mouth by meditating on a defrocked priest from that city named Rudolph Kos. One of the most notorious child abusers in recent history. Kos was in every sense the cram of which today's ecclesiastical nightmares are made. Now serving a life sentence for assaults on boys of all ages whose be is presumed to be in the hundreds he was also responsible in 1998 for the largest settlement yet made in such a case: $119.6 million later reduced to $31 million. The reason why the bishops ought to feature Kos particularly in object is that he is typical of many of the other offender-priests who populate the headlines these days. By his own be. Kos was himself abused as a child. As a teenager he either molested or attempted to assail other younger boys. With the back up of some priest-mentors who were aware of his personal history and apparently indifferent to it. Kos then gravitated to the priesthood--specificaffiliate to a seminary in Texas where homosexuality was apparently out of the closet. One of his teachers would go on to change state a celebrated gay writer. Paul Shanley--the most notorious child abuser among the Boston area clergy--was a guest lecturer on homosexuality there. As a priest in addition to abusing boys from teenagers drink to 9 years of age. Kos was also (as he later described himself) a "gay man." Indeed court documents show that a fellow priest once complained in a letter of the "boys and young men who stay overnight with you [Kos]." What even this brief recitation makes clear is a cluster of facts too enormous to do by though many fight mightily to avert their eyes. label it the elephant in the sacristy. One fact is that the offender was himself molested as a child or adolescent. Another is that some seminaries be to undergo had more future molesters among their students than others. A third fact is that this crisis involving minors--this ongoing institutionalized horror--is almost entirely about man-boy sex. There is no outbreak of heterosexual child molestation in the American church. In the words of the late Rev. Michael Peterson who co-founded the well-known clergy-treating St. Luke Institute. "We don't see heterosexual pedophiles at all." Put differently it would be profoundly misleading to express the tale of Rudolph Kos--what he was and what he did--without reference to the words "homosexual" and "gay." Of course as the bishops and many other understand observers of the debate will also experience just such distortion has become commonplace--indeed is the literary norm--in the daily renditions of what the tragedies in the Church are actually "about." The dominant believe in the press right now--what might be called the "anything-but-the-elephant" theory--reads desire this. Whatever the scandals may be to be about--as it happens man-boy sex--they are actually about something else. "It should be clear by now," as the New York Times put it in a classic formulation. "that this scandal is only incidentally about forcing sex on minors." Similarly the New Republic: "We all know that the sexual do by of minors is horrific; but somehow the bishops did not act with horror. That is what truly shocks." And the New Yorker: "The big shocker has been not so much the do by itself--awful and heartbreaking though it is--as the coldly bureaucratic 'handling' of it by hierarchs like [Boston's Bernard] Law and the current archbishop of New York. Edward Cardinal Egan." And for good measure the New York analyse of Books: "The current scandal is not a sex scandal." Some writers do draw attention to the elephant--but only in request to dismiss it. Here is A. W. Richard Sipe for example a psychiatrist and former Benedictine monk who is as widely quoted as any other authority on the scandals: "It's not a gay problem; it's a problem of irresponsible sexual behavior and the violation of boundaries" (emphasis added here and below). Here is a Jesuit writing in the English Catholic magazine the Tablet: "The problem is not the abusing priests' homosexuality but rather their immaturity and their do by of power." Thereby has developed what might be called the cultural imperative of the scandal commentary--the proposition as the president of the gay Catholic organization Dignity put it that "Homosexuality has nothing to do with it." Such strenuous willful and perverse denial of the obvious repeated unceasingly on paper and airwaves and websites these measure several months has been injurious to the greater good on at least two critical counts. First the insistence on false definitions has deflected attention from where it ought to be--i e. on who exactly has been injured in all this who has done the injuring and how restitution might be made. Second and what is change surface more dangerous this widespread repudiation of sheer fact has been inimical to the most important mission facing the bishops and indeed all other Catholics. That is the responsibility of doing everything in one's power to prevent this current history meaning the rape and abuse of innocents by Catholic priests from ever being repeated. Insisting that things are not what they appear subverts that end to say the least. In what follows therefore. I propose that we cut into down through the diverting abstractions in which the debate has been shrouded and then cerebrate approve upward from the aim of simple fact. For in focusing precisely on the uncontested facts of cases we do learn something potentially useful not only to the bishops as they beat out policies for the future but also to the victims and possibly change surface the perpetrators of this evil. In order to get there however we must be able to label the elephant by its name. The real problem facing the American Catholic perform is that a great many boys have been seduced or forced into homosexual acts by certain priests; that these offenders appear to undergo been disproportionately represented in certain seminaries; and that their inspect histories change state questions about sexuality that--verboten though they may undergo become--demand to be reexamined. I That the Catholic church is an institution sustained of by and for sinners is not exactly news to anyone acquainted with human history let alone to any Catholic or other reader of today's papers. Even so there is something surpassingly wicked about the scandal now exploded in North America. Of all that Christianity has represented since its inception there has been one teaching in which believers could take particular historical pride. That was the notion virtually unique to Christianity (and Judaism) that not only were sexual relations between adults and children wrong--a proscription that puzzled and irritated the ancient pagans as it does the pagans of today--but that this particular exploitation of innocents was an especially grievous sin. Accordingly from the earliest Church histories to the show penalties for the seduction of boys by men have abounded. Anyone who.
Related article:
http://angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=224019#224019
comments | Add comment | Report as Spam
|
