Sin City
Harboring sinners-and criminals.

Januray 31, 2002 2:10 p.m.

hose who think of Christ as "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild" have read the New Testament very selectively. Christ had many words of comfort for the afflicted; but He also uttered harsh words of condemnation to the impenitent. And there is no judgment more terrifying than His warning to anyone who attacked the innocence of children that "it were better for him, if a millstone be tied around his neck and he be cast into the depths of the sea."

But there was apparently a shortage of millstones in Boston over the last three decades. In that time, the Catholic Church harbored several priests who repeatedly molested young boys. One priest, now defrocked, John Geoghan, has been convicted of serious assaults in that period and awaits sentencing. Other names are surfacing now that the courts have ordered the Boston archdiocese to disclose its internal documents on Geoghan. And newspapers speculate that as many as fifty priests may eventually be accused. That is almost certainly a large exaggeration. But suppose that the true figure is five. Would that not be shocking enough?

As the church documents have already shown, however, priestly sexual abuse is the lesser scandal. What has shocked Catholic Boston still more has been the apparent willingness of church officials, including two cardinals and five bishops, to allow priests whom they knew to have abused children to return to their parishes, or to be assigned to new ones, after the most cursory period of psychological "treatment" and without informing either the police or, on one occasion at least, the parish priest who would be supervising their pastoral work. And in Geoghan's case, the bishops committed this extraordinary blunder — one might call it by harsher names — on repeated occasions, never apparently deterred by their past disappointments or by his almost flamboyant recidivism.

One reason for this, given by the current Bishop of Brooklyn, was fear of "scandal." But that defense surely falls on both moral and prudential grounds. It was imprudent to conceal priestly child abuse at the risk, now realized, of provoking the far greater scandal of an ecclesiastical cover-up. And, morally, it set Father Geoghan free to corrupt more innocent children.

No worldly cynic would have behaved as stupidly as the elders of the Church did. He would have handed Geoghan over to the cops and sought the moral credit of dealing honestly with the Church's most embarrassing problems. And everyone, including Geoghan, would have been better off.

So weak is the argument of avoiding "scandal" in this case that one is inclined to treat it as the rationalization of a deeper failing. And that failing is a bishops' lack of faith in their own religious mission and message.

What, after all, did they think pedophilia was? Was it a sin, a crime or a medical condition? Child sex abuse certainly is a crime — and a very serious one at that. Handing its perpetrators over to the authorities therefore falls under the injunction: "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's." Yet the Church bureaucracy did not treat it as a crime. At no point did the various bishops and monsignors seriously seem to think of calling in the police even though they knew Geoghan was committing a series of felonies that carry heavy prison sentences. If you or I sought absolution for murder in confession, it would be granted only on condition that we admitted our crime to the authorities. For a priest, child sex abuse is an act of similar magnitude. Faced with a crime in its own house, however, the Church acted to a lower standard than those it imposes on the faithful.

Nor, however, did they treat what Geoghan did as a sin. To be sure, the bishops occasionally used the language of sin, repentance and renewal in their correspondence with him about his new postings or brief hospitalizations. But there is little sign of the stern moral condemnation that a serious sin invites; nor of any demanding inquiry for evidence of Geoghan's "firm purpose of amendment." On the contrary: after one sordid episode, he was given $2,000 and a trip to Rome. All in all, he was treated more tenderly than the parents of the children he abused.

What emerges from the internal documents is that the Church truly believes in psychiatry. Its belief in psychiatry, indeed, is as the belief of little children or of primitive tribes or of early twentieth century intellectuals. It regarded Geoghan's pedophilia almost blithely as a medical condition which a good psychiatrist might cure. Admittedly it did not employ good psychiatrists to do so, merely those it could trust to be discreet. (One of them, as luck would have it, has been accused by a woman patient of sexual abuse. It's been a bad week at the Bishopric.)

But even a good psychiatrist would have made little headway with Geoghan because, as good psychiatrists know, pedophilia is one of those conditions that can be "cured" only if the patient desperately wishes to recover from it (and perhaps not even then.) Psychiatry can cure those mental and emotional illnesses that are the result of physical causes such as a chemical imbalance in the system. But it can only assist the patient to overcome those conditions such as alcoholism and pedophilia which, even if they arise from genetic predispositions or early childhood experiences, are nonetheless embedded in the mind and will. And there was little clear evidence that Geoghan ever really wanted to be "cured" and was prepared to embark on the hard business of disciplining his own will. His illness was more a moral failing — that is, a sin — than a medical fact. It was therefore in the Church's own territory of sin, repentance and reform. But the Bishops lacked the faith to see that or to propose their own hard spiritual remedies.

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 loved them more. For He might have turned them away from the sins that corrupted their souls and attacked the bodies of children in their charge. Geoghan himself can only hope to find in prison the stern but loving Christ whom he evaded all too easily in the Boston Archdiocese.