"Two Key Misconceptions about the Boston Scandal" by Phil Lawler

Philip F. Lawler, editor emeritus of Catholic World Report, reflects on the tenth anniversary of the first reporting of the Boston scandals:

Ten years have passed since the Boston archdiocese was engulfed in scandal, as the result of investigative reporting by the Boston Globe. Today the faithful in Boston are still struggling to shake off the lingering effects of that scandal. But a full recovery is delayed because of two popular misconceptions, which should be corrected.

First, the scandal exposed by the Globe in January 2002 was not the sexual abuse of young people by Catholic priests. That scandal had already been exposed a full decade earlier, as sickening stories of clerical molesters emerged from Louisiana and from nearby Fall River, Massachusetts. By the turn of the century, anyone who followed the story carefully recognized that these cases were not isolated—that the problem was widespread.

The Globe expose added an entirely new dimension to the story, revealing a second scandal. While some priests abused children, the Globe reporting showed, archdiocesan officials had protected the predators, covered up evidence, and lied to parishioners about their priests’ problems. The Globe exposed the corruption within the Boston hierarchy which had allowed the abuse to continue.

Within a few months after the appearance of that shocking investigative coup—during what the late Father Richard Neuhaus called the “long Lent” of 2002—a similar pattern of episcopal corruption was exposed in many other American dioceses. Only a small percentage of the Catholic priests in the US were charged with abusing children, but a very large percentage of the country’s bishops (fully two-thirds, according to an exhaustive search through the available evidence by the Dallas Morning News) had been implicated in the cover-up.

Read the entire piece on the Catholic World Report blog. Phil is the editor of Catholic World News (cwnews.com) and author of The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture, the acclaimed book about the priestly scandals in Boston.

Comments

[LJ]

Indeed in my book The Faithful Departed I argued that the sex-abuse scandal should be understood not as the cause of the troubles that ail the Church in Boston, but as the symptom of a deeper problem.

That, I think, is an important truth routinely missed in our assessments of the state of the Church today, not only with respect to the sex abuse scandals. Which means we need to look further back than the sixties and seventies to find the seeds that were planted that bore the bitter fruit of corruption, dissidence and declining faith during that time, just after the Second Vatican Council.

The evidence keeps returning to the front page; a Canadian Bishop having recently been sentenced to time-served for possession of child porn on his computer has outraged some (for good reason I think, because even though he only possessed the porn, children were abused to produce it) at the lightness of the sentence. It also puzzles a few of us because he was instrumental in rooting out abusers and setting standards for conduct in his own diocese.

National Post article

And it is easy to reverse the cause and effect in the face of such outrage, but if we really want to self examine and hope to see the new springtime of the Church we must trace this whole thing back to the root, wherever that takes us, not for the sake of blame but to learn the lesson.

And then, having learned it, we cannot then dwell on it, but use that to move forward. Phil Lawler is right, we must look deeper.

[Lauri Friesen]

I think, LJ, that the root you seek will be found in fallen human nature and that abusing priests have very personal failings that cannot be easily detected and destroyed. With reference to Mr. Lahey and his sentence, I was far more disappointed by his reliance on "addiction" to explain his corrupt, deeply self-serving and scandalous actions than on the "time served" sentence he received. I grow ever more skeptical and suspicious of the bishops of the Roman rite, especially in North America and Europe, for two principal reasons. First, with respect to Mr. Lahey, I find it impossible to believe that none of his colleagues in the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, never mind in all the years of his priesthood, had no reason to question his character. Second, the recent news about the auxiliary bishop in Los Angeles who is father to two teenagers also makes it impossible for me to believe that his fellow bishops and other clergy had no inkling about his family all those years. Until our bishops deal openly and justly and righteously with both the abusers and those who shield them, I will continue to struggle to respect and obey my bishop with any sincerity. I am grateful to God that, in this internet age, I can gain direction and wisdom in my faith from other leaders of the Church, present and past, near and far. That is a true blessing in these difficult times here in North America.

[LJ]

I think, LJ, that the root you seek will be found in fallen human nature...

Yes, Lauri, I agree. But I think there has been a missing spiritual component in the past and through into the present in the formation of young people, young adults, and in particular, seminarians. In some respects, in certain places, this is changing, but in many cases, the youth or young adult, priest or not, has to find this on their own, with little direction. Spiritual direction must start young and it should not be something hidden away, or only on an individual basis, but an integral part of catechesis at every level.

[Sharon]

I think there has been a missing spiritual component in the past and through into the present in the formation of young people, young adults, and in particular, seminarians.

LJ the book After Asceticism, Sex Prayer and Deviant Priests by the Linacre Institute addresses this issue in relation to seminarians.

http://www.catholicculture.org/news/features/index.cfm?recnum=50434