As it happens, I caught Amy Berg's fantastic documentary Deliver Us From Evil last week. While focusing on one particularly heinous perpetrator in the California diocese system named Oliver O'Grady, who molested as many as 50 children before being sent back to Ireland, where he now walks the streets as a free man without the local police even knowing about his prior crimes, the movie does detail the centuries-old struggle in the Catholic church with sex abuse cases, and the deep-seated corruption inside the system, which seeks to minimize these cases by ignoring the victims and making every attempt to shield the guilty from prosecution and publicity.
Indeed, sex abuse has been an issue in the Catholic Church for centuries. It can be argued that this stems from the practice of clerical celibacy, and the arrested state of sexual development which priests are subjected to by sublimating their physical desires from right around adolescence. Are you aware why the Roman Catholic church instituted the concept of celibacy, around the 4th century AD? For the first several hundred years, priests, bishops, and even popes were married men. Even today the practice of celibacy is not considered dogma or doctrine but a discipline, that could be changed by the Pope at any time. While many after-the-fact rationales were given for forcing celibacy on the laity, the real reason was simple: money.
When Paul dealt with qualifications for bishops, elders and deacons, his restriction was only that they be “the husband of one wife.” By the third century, bishops were being denied the right to a second marriage.
The problem for Christianity was it started to become financially prosperous.
The rich, the thoughtful ones who understood that their earthly goods were barriers to heaven, were delighted to hand over chunks of wealth to the priests and bishops as a down payment on easier transmission from one place to the next. (The soul’s equivalent, the wealthy presumed, of time-sharing a jet instead of having to stand in line at a purgatorial Southwest counter.)
Not only were priests and bishops becoming wealthier, they were becoming worldier. Many were married, others just had “open marriages” -- concubines. Worse than that -- in the church’s eyes -- the priests and bishops begetting sons regarded the endowments being made to the church as personal property. So the same rollicking clerics were setting themselves up as landed gentry and passing the fortunes along to their primogenitor sons and heirs.
In the 11th century, five popes in a row said: “Enough already.” Then came tough Gregory VII. He overreacted. He told married priests they couldn’t say Mass, and ordered the laity not to attend Masses said by married priests and naughty priests. The obvious happened. Members of the laity soon were complaining they had nowhere to go to Mass.
The edict was softened a bit to allow Mass-going. As usual, the women were blamed. Concubines were ordered scourged. Effectively though, the idea of priestly celibacy was in -- though not universally welcomed among the clerics themselves. And handing over church money to sons of priests and bishops was out.
They simply refit Catholic teaching to promote the idea that celibacy was always part of the system, changing history to fit the economic needs of the church. This was a power play, and denying the rampant scandal right at their feet is part of preserving that power. A rich and entrenched church was willing to break any law and subvert any investigation in order to maintain that lofty perch. And while they unintentionally created the circumstances which potentially led to many of these abuse cases, they weren't about to admit any wrongdoing.
Indeed, there should be absolutely no surprise that this was happening under the nose of Pope Benedict XVI. The entire scandal in the United States did as well.
In May 2001, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and later elected Pope Benedict XVI on the death of his predecessor, sent a letter to all Catholic Bishops declaring that the Church's investigations into claims of child sex abuse were subject to the pontifical secret and were not to be reported to law enforcement until investigations were completed, on pain of excommunication. The secrecy related only to the internal investigation, and the letter did not attempt to discourage victims from reporting abuse to the police.
It didn't attempt to discourage victims because it wasn't written to victims; it was an internal memo giving the bishops their marching orders. And over the years, those bishops denied any wrongdoing, shuttled molesters off from one parish to the next without informing the authorities, and basically tried to keep a lid on the scandals until they eventually exploded.
This is not good for Christianity as a whole; new studies have revealed that believers and non-believers have an increasingly negative view of the religion. This is because those at the highest levels have, through dishonesty and cover-up, betrayed the ideals of their faith. The church is a slow-moving organ that extends opposition to reform as far as possible. This has damaged their trust between them and their parishioners, and has left those of us on the outside shocked at the level of corruption.
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