The cost of the Catholic scandal

Patricia Snow -- Ross Douthat's mother -- has a moving, thought-provoking essay up on the First Things site counting the costs to the laity of the sex abuse scandal. She asks: Has the Church, in the aftermath of the crisis, veered from denial and disbelief to the dangerous countermeasure of habitually imagining the worst and constraining community in order to avoid it?

The story starts with her teenage daughter's parish girl group losing permission to meet in the church hall:

Summer came, and the club didn’t meet. In August, referred by our pastor to a lay brother I’ll call Giles, I asked if the same arrangement would obtain in the fall. Not meeting my eyes, he said briefly that the girls could continue to meet but not on the stage. They could meet in the library next door, a dark masculine room whose dimensions are almost entirely taken up by a table.

A day later, gathering my courage, I telephoned Brother Giles, explained my concerns, and asked why the girls couldn’t meet on the stage. An abstract, evasive explanation followed, tinged with bitterness, in which the word “bifurcation” figured prominently. No two groups could meet in the same space at the same time, he said. An adult male organization, for example, couldn’t meet in the hall at the same time as the catechesis.

I was still confused, so finally he said what he meant: Our girls couldn’t meet on the stage on Wednesday afternoons because of the possibility that they might molest the younger children.

I was too stunned to make the obvious objections—the physical distance between the two groups; their entirely separate facilities; the intermediary presence of watchful adults. I simply blurted, “But Brother, some of those children are our girls’ younger brothers and sisters!”

“Oh,” he said grimly, “that’s no objection unfortunately.”

Then the author sits with other adult parishioners through a required sex abuse training seminar, which involves the Virtus films, shown in many US Catholic parishes. This video's content appalls her:

As for the abusers—actual child molesters whose rehabilitation was made contingent upon their cooperation—one is a family man who abused his sons’ friends, and the other is a roller-skating instructor who preyed on little girls. The particular problem of sexual abuse in the Church, in other words, with its special feature of clerical homosexuality, is generalized in the video into an overwhelming, generic problem, and the message communicated is: anyone, anywhere.

Indeed, these are the opening words of the film, that zoom toward us against a black background. The video is a melodrama, in short, straining for an effect. And the effect is fear and loathing.

If the guidelines from Hartford encouraged me by their balance, this video depressed me. After the first segment, when the husband facilitator was disabusing us of the myth that child abusers are primarily homosexual, I raised my hand and said that that might be true generally, but, in fact, in the crisis in the Church, the acts of abuse were primarily homosexual acts, which was why Rome was taking a fresh look at the seminaries.

The man stared at me. He seemed confused and uncomfortable, so I mentioned the John Jay report and Fr. Richard John Neuhaus’ columns in First Things, at which point he brushed me aside, saying quickly, “Well, this isn’t about the Church. The Church is taking care of itself.” Not about the Church? Perhaps he meant to say, “This isn’t about the priesthood” but was embarrassed by the presence of the seminarians.

There's lots that could be said about this, but what seems to have struck the author is that the reaction by the Church now seems not really to be about protecting children, but about something else. She concludes:

In parish after parish, programs have been curtailed or eliminated. When the bishops in Dallas went too far, essentially stripping priests of due process with their policy of zero tolerance, Rome eventually stepped in, restoring balance and justice. Who will step in on behalf of the laity, whose innocence in so many cases is being impugned? Who, in effect, will speak for our girls? “You can’t have community without trust,” I murmured at the workshop, but by that point the momentum was all the other way.

You can’t have community without trust; you can’t have life without risk. When did the Church begin to forget this?

I hope you'll read the entire piece. I don't think it suggests any easy answers; in fact, it anticipates that any answer at all will of necessity be hard. It's too simple to blame insurance companies, or plaintiff's lawyers, for this state of affairs. Mostly, I think, it's the bishops of the past (and some -- hello, Roger Dodger out there in El Lay! -- of the present) who went to such extreme lengths to deny the problem that when it exploded, a massive overreaction was all but guaranteed. And as many priests and Catholic commentators pointed out in the wake of the 2002 Dallas charter, the bishops exempted themselves from the same standards they applied to the lower clergy. If you want to put the blame for the deadening effect on parish life of the scandal's fallout on someone, don't attack victims, and don't exonerate the prelates who got the Church into this mess by not following the kinds of common-sense policies that ordinary Catholics -- like Boston's Margaret Gallant -- understood as the right thing to do regarding molester priests.

That said, what are lay Catholics to do under the new regime? And priests too -- a friend of mine who's a parish priest has confided his deep and abiding fear of false accusation in this environment, and how one lying child could destroy his name and his vocation, with no hope of repair. Can you imagine what that does to the relationship between a pastor and his flock?

Does anybody have any constructive thoughts toward a restoration of the kind of trust, the loss of which Patricia Snow mourns? Or is it just something that's going to have to be muddled through?