Usa

One Strike and You’re Out

The cases of the American priests accused of sexual abuse. The reports of abuse and millions of dollars in demages. The summit called by John Paul II in the Vatican in March. The power of grace and of Christian conversion, the sources of authentic morality

BY ANDREA TORNIELLI

We should not marvel at sin, because it is grace that arouses wonder. The entire world has “discovered,” suddenly, that priests, too, are men like everyone else, with their weaknesses and their sicknesses, and that they too, even they, can fall into the abyss of the most abject sin, that of abusing little ones and the innocent, scandalizing them. It is a sin that is harshly condemned by Jesus: “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea.”
In the constant barrage of news of the scandal of sexual abuse among the American clergy, the Catholic Church, especially in the United States, is presented as a hotbed of perversion, even though statistics show that the incidence of the phenomenon among priests is not very different from that of other categories of people who are in contact with children and young people. The circumstances are staggering: hundreds of reports of presumed abuse that happened decades ago, lists of “suspect” priests handed over to the police, dioceses on the verge of bankruptcy because of enormous damages paid to the victims of sexual abuse, disturbing percentages of faithful who decided to go on an “offering strike” or demand the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law, Archbishop of Boston, and even former victims who decide to take justice into their own hands, load a Smith & Wesson and, nine years after the incident, shoot the priest who was transferred in the meantime to another parish, as happened in Baltimore.

Zero tolerance
The Holy See, worried about the turn the matter has taken, starting with the Archdiocese of Boston, with the shocking case of Fr John Geoghan, accused of molesting 130 young boys without being stopped in time by his superiors, decided to summon the Cardinals of the United States to Rome. The summit meeting, called by John Paul II, was held in the Vatican at the end of March. The majority of the American prelates, led by the Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, and the President of the Episcopal Conference, Wilton Gregory, tried to put through the principle of “zero tolerance,” which made the former mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, famous: Zero tolerance for pedophile priests, for those accused of sexual abuse. To give an even better example of the concept, an expression–modified in a restrictive sense–was borrowed from baseball: “one strike and you’re out.” The slogan is good for newspaper headlines, but it is perhaps the farthest thing imaginable from the Gospel episode in which Peter asks Jesus, “Lord, how many times should I forgive my brother, if he sins against me? As many as seven times?” The apostle thought he was giving a generous interpretation, and yet he was left light years behind by the Nazarene’s reply: “I do not tell you seven times, but as many as seventy times seven.”

The culture of suspicion
The recommendation of the Americans, alarmed by the media pressure, was not adopted. The culture of suspicion did not prevail. The Holy See did not allow the dioceses to reduce their priests to the lay state in order not to have any responsibility and not to be dragged into court. The problem, made more acute by the particularly aggressive American legal system and especially by the presence of powerful lobbies of lawyers who devote themselves night and day to seeking out similar cases to bring to trial, promising the families large sums in damages and keeping a significant part for themselves, had already been raised about ten years ago. The Vatican, in order to facilitate the needs of the American Church, had granted faster canonical trials, using an expedited procedure that nonetheless guarantees the rights of all parties. It happened, instead, that the legal counsel of the American Episcopal Conference always advised the bishops to pay to keep everything quiet, even when the accused not only declared their innocence but also asked to be judged according to the norms of canon law. It happened that, instead of trusting in the norms of canon law, the prelates put all their confidence in the opinions of psychologists, psychiatrists, sex experts, for the most part imbued with the Freudian doctrine of the naturalness of sexuality and its “liberation,” and oriented seminary and convent life in a permissive direction. Once the scandals burst, they tried to justify and cover the abuse through “damage control,” without taking measures against those who were recognized as guilty. Now, after years in which no processes have been held, the police authorities are being given lists of suspected sex offenders which contain also the names of those who declared themselves innocent and were not given the chance to defend themselves. Now the effort is being made to set up a practically automatic mechanism of expulsion, reducing the priest to the lay state and, among other things, making him and only him responsible for paying damages to his victims.

“Crucify him!”
The Holy See chose a different course. The line of guarantees prevailed, and in his speech to the summit meeting in March, John Paul II himself spoke of the power of grace and Christian conversion. “At a moment when Christian sexual morality and civilian sexual ethics have been relaxed significantly all over the world,” said Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, presenting John Paul II’s Letter to Priests for Holy Thursday, “paradoxically, but also fortunately, a sense of rejection and a conjunctural sensitivity to the question of pedophilia has developed in a number of countries, with penal and economic repercussions because of payments of damages.” Another somewhat bitter consideration could be added: after decades in which many ecclesiastics have dwelled insistently on themes of ethics and morality, with unprecedented frequency, we can well expect that when it is priests, members of the clergy who fall down, there will be a race to shout “crucify him!”

Sixth Commandment
The Church, in any case, has never neglected the problem of sexual abuse on the part of her holy ministers, especially when minors are involved. Canon 2539 of the old Code of Canon Law provided for suspension of the priest who is found guilty and reduction to the lay state in the most serious cases. In the new Code, Canon 1395 reads: “A cleric who has offended in other ways against the sixth commandment of the Decalogue, if the crime was committed… with a minor under the age of sixteen years, is to be punished with just penalties, not excluding dismissal from the clerical state if the case so warrants.” More than a year ago, the Pope assigned this type of crime to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote to the bishops of the whole world, instructing them to avoid any form of neglect in the face of such grave matters. Under the old norms, it was considered pedophilia if a cleric abused a minor under 16 years of age. Now that limit has been raised to 18, and the statute of limitations has been extended to ten years from the victim’s eighteenth birthday, no matter when the abuse took place.

Right to defense
But the ecclesiastical laws, as was reiterated during the Vatican summit, provide also for the accused to have a real, regular canonical trial to ascertain the facts, to confirm the evidence of his guilt. It would truly be absurd for the Church, committed to the defense of human rights all over the world, on the front line by the side of the oppressed and the victims of violence, not to defend also the right to defense of those accused of such a grave crime.
The real problem, which clearly emerged from what is going on in America now, where the traditional doctrine on sin and grace seems to have been forgotten in order to have recourse to catchy slogans imported from baseball, is the lack of vigilance on the part of some bishops, who very often did not intervene to ensure that the accused could not harm anyone again. It is not possible to reassign to pastoral work, in contact with children, a priest who has even once been tainted with the abuse of minors. This is where all the inconsistency of the leadership of some ecclesiastics has been revealed. It is unlikely that personalities like Cardinal Ildefonso Schuster, Archbishop of Milan, or Cardinal Siri, Archbishop of Genoa, would have needed to turn to Rome in similar cases, not knowing how to deal with them.