Perhaps the most stunning thing about the current roman catholic clergy child abuse scandal is the silence of the priests.
Think of it: 1000 diocesan priests in the Archdiocese of Boston. In the last ten years alone, the Archdiocese has settled 70 different child abuse cases. Consider how many people worked with those 70. Consider how many hands any piece of official paperwork moves through. Consider the normal human tendency to hang from the gossip vine. From these numbers alone, it is clear that most diocesan priests knew or had to work hard not to know of Bernard Law's child abuse policies. Yet did any of those who knew or ought to have known go to the Globe or the Herald? No. Did any protest to Bernard Law that his policies were unwise, offensive, sinful, un-Christian? I have found one who did: Bishop John D'Arcy.
The breadth of the scandal is important. In Timothy Noah's version of Bernard Law's "management tips," Law "doesn't sweep the mess under the rug. He has people to sweep messes under the rug for him." Calls for the resignation and defrocking of Bernard Law seem grossly inadequate, almost beside the point--even if he is telling the truth about how quickly and completely he forgot what his child abuse policies were. Law did not do it alone. There are his peers--Egan, Mahony, and others. There are the implementers of Law's policies--Thomas Daily (now bishop of Brooklyn), Gilbert Phinn (sometime director of clery personnel) who told pedophiles shifted to new parishes *not* to tell the pastors of their new churches about their crimes, John McCormack (now bishop of Manchester), Robert Banks (bishop of Green Bay), Alfred Hughes, William Murphy, and how many others? There are those who worked for the implementers. And then there are the 500 who knew, or ought to have known, almost all of whom seem to have been too cowardly to consider the well-being of their parishioners, or the honor of their God.
At the level of institutions, this says shocking things about the processes by which diocesan priests are chosen and trained: you have to work very hard to get such a large proportion of cowardly yes-men who will not think or act for themselves.
Posted by DeLong at May 9, 2002 03:06 PM | TrackBack