What planet...?

I was glancing through this New York Times review of Losing My Religion, a book by William Lobdell, a former religion writer for The Los Angeles Times, and came across this astounding paragraph:

To Lobdell, it began to seem not just that religious institutions were no better than secular ones, but that sometimes they were much worse. After all, school systems and Little Leagues don’t defend molesters as tenaciously as the Catholic Church did, and parents aren’t as reluctant to believe the worst about teachers and coaches. It was precisely the cultivation of religious awe — with its traditions, rituals and ceremonies — that made priests seem holy, and thus allowed so much evil to go unreported or disbelieved.

Un. Be. Liev. A. Ble. Seriously?

It has become commonplace to stereotype Catholic priests as actual, possible, or potential pedophiles, perverts, and generally creepy guys. But you rarely hear anything about the sexual abuse of children that takes place in public schools, even when a 2007 AP piece reported, "One report mandated by Congress estimated that as many as 4.5 million students, out of roughly 50 million in American schools, are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12^th grade. That figure includes verbal harassment that’s sexual in nature." Why, who could ever imagine a public school being a likely haunt for pedophiles and perverts? Stunning. (For example, I attended a small high school—200 students and 18 teachers—and I know that at least three teachers carried on sexually with one or more girls during my time there. I'm not good at math, but that's about 16.66%.)

No, I'd bet my public education and a half-caf latte that the vast majority of parents today would believe the worst about a priest before believing the same about a teacher or coach. This despite increasing evidence that public schools are far, far worse places to be than churches when it comes to sexual, verbal, and emotional abuse. Go figure; of course, it makes sense, because while kids spend some 30 hours a week in schools that often disparage or misrepresent Christianity, they spend an hour or less a week in churches learning anything remotely resembling the "religious awe" described above.

And, of course, a big part of the problem is that for every AP story about abuse in public schools, there are numerous stories ignored, passed over, or treated lightly by the media, which generally worships at the high altar of public education. Strangely enough, Lobdell's former employer, The Los Angeles Times, appears to be on the forefront of this imbalanced situation.

Comments

[Daisy]

It would seem, if it is news about a public school it is 'misconduct' but if it is news about a Catholic priest or school teacher it is 'sexual abuse.'

Why is it that people who are abused by public school teachers get $20k or $30k but people who are abused by priests or Catholic school teachers get millions?

[Dan Deeny]

Carl, both you and Mr. Lobdell are right. People expect more of priests and nuns than they do of laymen and women. Mr. Lobdell should not have left the Church; he should have tried to make the Church better.
I am a former public school teacher and your comments remind me of times when I have come very close to verbally abusing students. And this in a good, rural school. Imagine the pressure in a large-school environment. At times I may have crossed the line; I'm sure some parents think I did. Urban and suburban schools are much too big. Children live in busy, even chaotic, homes where both parents work or where there is only one parent. Numerous think tanks produce studies that badger teachers, parents, and students.
One solution is to make the schools smaller: fewer students and smaller class sizes.
Pattern all schools after St. Benedict's Prep in Newark, NJ and Delbarton School in Morristown, NJ.

[Robert Miller]

I believe (and have believed from the beginning of the affair) that the "clerical sexual abuse" scandal is a gigantic red herring ginned up by an unholy alliance of anticlericals, homosexual activists (tu quoque, perhaps!?), Modernist "Catholics" and media voyeurs.
The US bishops have not helped matters by their tendency to try to respond with "restoring trust" garbage (corporate-style bureaucratic spin and damage control).
Most Catholics have known for decades that the rot of secularism has been eating away at the priesthood and religious life. In fact, most of the "revelations" of the "abuse scandal" were well-known, but widely acquiesced in because there was broader "understanding" that the Church in the US was committed to engagement with the secular culture.
Recently, thank God, some of the US bishops have begun to set up no-go zones between faith and "engagement", but all US bishops have a huge challenge before them of facing down the large secularist bureaucracies of laity who run the day-to-day business of the Church -- bureaucracies that have been strengthened immeasurably by the bishops' supine response to the sexual abuse trial lawyers.

Jesus always put casting out demons at the top of his agenda. I think the US bishops ought to take that message to heart before they begin to look for ways they can engage with US culture. "Faithful citizenship" and "stewardship" are euphemisms for surrender of the core meaning of "Render unto Caesar..." and "apostolate".

[Dan Deeny]

Today's New York Post has an article on a teacher, Francisco Garabitos, who has often been accused of abusing students.
I don't know him, of course, but I imagine that he is a decent person and a decent teacher who has been trying to function in a dysfunctional environment. He finally broke. Theodore Dalrymple has written about this sort of environment. Teachers' unions, better salaries, and performance criteria are not the answer. Small schools and smaller class sizes will help.
The biggest help would be a disciplined effort on the part of the Catholic Church to change the culture by constructing and staffing schools. We've had enough pamphlets and position papers. Good jobs will also help. By good jobs I mean making shoes, clothes, nuts, bolts, lock washers, machinge tools, etc.

[Jan Baker]

Please come to my blog and read about two priest-characters and see if the message about them doesn't work to counteract the slander reported in this post. One is a young priest who is claustrophobic and who is the likely candidate, as the twin brother of a famous astronaut already on Earth's first space colony, to be the first Bishop of the Universe. I have two sections from the science fiction novel I'm writing now up on my blog. I also have a separate short story called Another Eve whose priest, also young, is quite different. Come visit and see how, and please comment to let me know if you think my work is good both priest-wise and fiction-wise. There is non-fiction on the blog, too, and I need a mouthpiece for the Holy Spirit to tell me which I should give my time to, fiction or non-fiction. It's the White Lily Blog at wordpress.

[Robert Miller]

Do non-fiction. It's stranger than fiction.

[Jan Baker]

Robert, did you go look? Or are you making a joke! You do know fiction has a different effect on human beings than non-fiction. If something can move you to cry, it can move you to pray maybe faster than something that moves you to think can move you to pray.

If you can get a person to pray, they're half way there, or half way back, from paganism. Maybe a soul saved.

See my drift, Rob?

Go read Confession 1 and Confession 2, pretty please? And pick any one of the non-fiction pieces there--like Please Send Catholics to Outer Space or Please Don't Ask, people like that one--and tell me which seems more powerful.

[Achilles]

The real concern seems to be the incredibly corrupted thinking behind such extreme misstatements. They are unboubtedly a reslut of several generations of "values free" education. Our educational system has been leached of meaning by the politcs of recognition and the narcissism of our era. It boggles my mind that people can write grammitically correct sentences so bereft of meaning beyond the nose of the pedant trained in public schools.