Father Moran

Here's a story to knock you back: The Rev. James Moran, a Catholic priest in DC, has resigned (and been removed from) active ministry to protest the U.S. Catholic bishops' disgraceful handling of the priest sex-abuse scandal. Here is his resignation letter (PDF).

Father Moran says he was raped as a seminarian in 1970, and nobody in the hierarchy cared to do anything about it; his rapist went on to abuse minors. Read the WaPo account; Father Moran is clearly a broken man. He wrote in a letter to his parishioners that the US bishops "are more concerned with the things of this world than they are in simply Christian justice. … I have loved serving the Church, but I cannot go against my conscience in standing up to the bishops in calling for them to take responsibility."

Someone in the comment boxes below wanted to know how I could make the comment that I did about seeing the damaging effect of centralized power on ordinary people and still affirm the Catholic hierarchy. The answer is that the abuse of power doesn't invalidate the structure that bad men used to abuse the powerless. Nevertheless, the scandal itself has precipitated a crisis of faith in me. In 2002, when a prominent archbishop was trying to get me to quit writing so critically about our scandal-ridden church, I told him that I believed Catholic laypeople had a duty to speak out, because I no longer trusted the bishops to take care of the problem. He responded by saying that if I didn't trust the bishops, how could I still be Catholic? Well, I told him, my faith depends not on the competence or goodness of bishops, but on the teachings of the church.

Four years on, I admit that I struggle mightily with this. I still believe it's true, but the faith we hold, if it is to have meaning, must be incarnate. It can't be merely an abstract thing, merely a pleasant ideal. The moral malfeasance of the American bishops do not invalidate the faith by any stretch, but for some people--like Father Moran, apparently--it can be such a scandal that they find it impossible to continue in their relationship with the church.

I can't get out of my mind the stories I've been told by victims and their families, nor the stories I've been told by priests of what they've seen, but won't talk about because they are afraid of being punished by their bishops. It wears me down, I confess. The trust left long ago, as did the expectation that any of these bishops will be held to justice by the Vatican or the criminal courts, but it's the loss of the joy that I find so difficult to deal with.

I look at my two little boys and worry about the lousy icon of Christ that I, their father, am presenting to them. It used to not be this way, but Father Tom Doyle warned me five years ago that if I kept digging into the scandal, I would have to confront a kind of darkness that I would not be prepared for. I believed him, but having gotten into the story by investigating how the Archdiocese of New York had covered up for three priests who had taken sexual advantage of a fatherless immigrant teenage boy, I figured I couldn't look away.

That boy's father was in Nicaragua when his mother took him to the priests looking for a father figure until her husband could get to New York. And when the father arrived, and discovered what had happened, he went straight to the Archdiocese, which offered to cut him a check in exchange for his signing over the right to his legal counsel to the Archdiocese's lawyers. The father might have been a simple immigrant laborer, but he had enough sense to see what was happening, and to walk out, get him a non-Catholic lawyer, and take the Archdiocese to court. At the time, I thought: of course I'm going to keep looking; I have a Catholic son of my own, and I want to do this for the sake of that immigrant father and his son, and all those like him.

That was 2001, before the Boston blow-up and everything after. Five years later, I look at my two little boys and am as certain as I am of anything else that if either of them had been raped by a Catholic priest, that they and their mother and me would have been treated like dirt by the bishop and his representatives. And that is a thought that sits in my heart and mind like a radioactive rock that I cannot manage to dislodge.