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words of Bernard Cardinal Law, spoken at his cathedral in Boston,
were, "When there are problems in the family, you don't walk
away. You work them out together with God's help."
The cardinal
doesn't understand that one of the problems in the family is the
derelict father of the family. It is undeniably and painfully the
case that priest after priest who had molested children were called
to the cardinal's attention and he did what amounts to nothing.
To some he advised, or even decreed, psychological counseling. Others
he simply admonished. But the critical concern should have been
to get children out of harm's way. He didn't do that. You don't
pass over his inactivity as simply an act of inordinate compassion.
One can feel with great sorrow and understanding the derangement
of the arsonist, but one does not send him back to into the forest.
Human cordite is otherwise supervised.
The news informs
us that the vote in favor of Cardinal Law staying on in Boston is
about 50-50. Those who are opposed to his resigning are moved by
many motives, one of them, evidently, the sense of it that when
the Church is attacked, one stands by the Church.
The awful error
here is that to stand by the Church precisely means to cause the
defective prince of the Church to stand aside. John O'Sullivan,
the brilliant head of UPI, got it exactly right in his column in
the Chicago Sun-Times in which he said that the right thing
for the Church to do here is to take seriously the word of Christ,
that it were better for him who attacks the innocence of children
if a millstone be tied around his neck and he be cast into the depths
of the sea.
What O'Sullivan
points out is that the public danger, in the complacent handling
of the aberrant priests by so many bishops, is the effect their
documented nonchalance has on the whole structure of the Catholic
mission. The former priest John Geoghan is, finally, in the hands
of civil authorities, on his way to jail. It is humiliating for
Catholics everywhere to ponder that in Boston one needed to wait
around for sheriffs in order to remove him from contact with children.
Because those who first knew of his guilt failed to act decisively
on it. The terrible question creeps into the mind: Was that failure
merely excessive latitudinarianism, a display of an innocent confidence
that, once warned, the transgressor would not sin again?
But Geoghan
and others did sin again, in city after city, parish after
parish. The bishops are discreetly engaged in making civil reparations,
putting out millions of dollars to aggrieved victims and their parents.
What reparations will they make to the great body of priests whose
lives are devoted to the priestly calling and now suffer corporate
disgrace? This disgrace is not generated by the mere existence of
pedophilia among priests. There are homosexual aggressors in all
callings, and perhaps a higher density of them in a celibate culture.
But it is a culture — the ministry — of men whose entire
lives are given to the spiritual services of others. Yet they are
suffering the most.
What they need
now, they and their flock, is a symbolic acceptance of responsibility.
The withdrawal of the failed father.
Bernard Cardinal
Law is a fine human being whose services to the Church were rewarded,
in 1985, with his anointing as a prince of the Church. His instincts
are understandable. There is a mess here, he is saying, I am ever
so disconsolate over the decisions I made that were miscarriages
of my responsibility. But I will reform, believe me.
I believe him.
But that has very little to do with the debt he owes his Church
and his calling. This debt is to affirm the seriousness of his dereliction.
In public life, there is the venerable option available to prime
ministers — to resign. It does not matter whether they were
responsible for bad leadership, or because catastrophic events overtook
them. The closing lines in Mr. O'Sullivan's article can't be gilded.
"Christ himself would have spoken far more harshly to John
Geoghan and the other priests who destroyed the innocence of those
in their care. Yet in speaking harshly, He would have helped them
more. . . . Geoghan himself can only hope to find in prison the
stern but loving Christ whom he evaded all too easily in the Boston
archdiocese."
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