March 29, 2010

Back in the mid-1970s, when I was growing up Catholic in northern Alabama, there was a replacement priest named Father Jonathan who used to hold services at our church whenever our usual priest was away on vacation. Everybody, especially the kids, loved Father Jonathan. He was a soft-spoken guy who had a sense of humor, and he had worked up a little comedy routine with a fuzzy mutt dog that travelled with him from parish to parish.

He’d put his horn-rimmed glasses on the dog, then talked to her while she sat there, studiously listening to him and licking her lips. It was a riot. The kids would always wait around outside the priest’s house after mass, hoping that Father, a regular Pied Piper, would come out and entertain them with the dog. And he almost always did.

Several years later, when I was a teenager, word came down the pipeline that Father Jonathan had been accused of molesting an altar boy at another church. Soon thereafter, he took off his belt and hung himself.

When my dad, who had been a practicing Catholic since the Depression, heard about this, he said, “I don’t think he did anything.” You know— because innocent true believers in God who are accused of ghastly crimes are bound to commit suicide rather than defend themselves and go on living. It all makes perfect sense.

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Therein lies the central dilemma facing the modern Catholic Church— by which I mean the version of the Church that can no longer hide the fact that it’s been allowing priests to force themselves on children for hundreds of years, with absolutely no legal, and almost always no churchly, ramifications.

It's been piously implied to Catholics for as long as they can remember that any misgivings they might have about the priesthood, or about the Church in general, are too filled with holy mysteries to be fully understood. Priests are pure and blessed, you see, and mere parishioners can only strive to be viewed as sanctified in the eyes of God. So most of those parishioners eventually just don’t want to know, and the Vatican is more than happy to oblige them.

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The American wing of the Church is embroiled, yet again, in a scandal involving the rapes and molestations of scores of innocent children by a member of its priesthood; for purposes of space, I won’t even get into similarly themed scandals currently unfolding in Germany and Ireland.

This time, America's stained glass is cracking in Wisconsin, where it’s been revealed that Father Lawrence Murphy managed to sexually assault as many as 200 deaf children between 1950 and 1974. Murphy worked at the prestigious St. John’s School for the Deaf. Thus, having hit the mother load, he had access to slews of spiritually and physically captive silent victims.

As extra dollops of horror go, you can hardly surpass the deaf angle in this story. But Father Murphy’s case is gaining even more attention than the literally thousands of other sexual assault accusations that have been brought against the Church in the past 20 years because it’s been discovered that, in 1996, the archbishop of Milwaukee finally reported Murphy’s crimes to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a Vatican office that decides, among other things, whether priests who have been accused of sexually assaulting children should be defrocked.

That's right. They have to decide.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, as anyone who’s been keeping up with this sort of thing can well imagine, has been a very busy place for quite some time now, and it was headed from 1981 until 2005 by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. You, however, probably know Ratzinger by his more recent stage name— Benedict the XVI, the Holy Father of the Roman Catholic Church.

Shown here releasing a scented smokescreen, Ratzinger is now the Pope.

So what did the man who Catholics view as a virtual spokesperson for God Almighty do when, as a mere Cardinal, he was alerted to Father Murphy’s ghastly “situation?” Well, documents seem to suggest that he didn’t do anything at all. Not at first, anyway.

According to the “The New York Times,” which uncovered this particular escapade, Ratzinger never responded to two separate letters regarding the case that were sent by the archbishop. After waiting for a response for 8 months, the doctrinal office’s second in command told the bishops to begin a secret canonical trial that might have led to Murphy being booted from the priesthood…with “might” being the key word.

But even this process was stopped, for reasons that aren’t particularly clear right now, when Murphy sent a letter to Ratzinger saying that he didn’t deserve all this attention because he had already repented, was in poor health, and his actions took place beyond the Church’s statute of limitations. The Catholic Church, you see, has a statute of limitations when it comes to priests raping children, regardless of whether or not they’re deaf.

Murphy’s case was dropped soon thereafter, and he was allowed to finish out his life with his dignity intact, in a room that wasn’t a jail cell, as a Roman Catholic priest in good standing. Boy, that was close.

The Church, of course, insists that Ratzinger never saw the documents that would have clued him in to Murphy’s vile indiscretions, and he never read the priest’s letter begging for mercy. He was just in charge of the organization that handled such things, and was the key person who made such decisions. But in this particular instance, the one that everybody suddenly knows about…um…no. Nope, he never heard anything about that one.

Ratzinger was in charge of the office for 20 years, though, and, at this point, it's impossible to verify how many times he didn't see, didn't grasp, or didn't care about such cases. In 2001 - it should be noted often and loudly - he issued a written order that any child rape accusations against priests were to be investigated as secretly as possible, and that investigators should be "restrained by a perpetual silence." This isn't hearsay, or a conspiracy theory. The letter still exists, and has been quoted widely.

But who cares about all that? He's just the Pope.

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I surrendered any remaining vestiges of my imposed “belief” in Catholic doctrine when I was about 21 years-old, at which point I fully recognized that, to say the least, the goods the Church was selling were badly in need of retooling. I started thinking for myself, in other words, and no longer felt compelled to continually wonder, “What if they’re right?” Without that magical notion, without the carefully crafted fear that gets woven into the psychological makeup of all longtime Catholics, I’m convinced the Church would crumble like a stale Communion wafer.

Does that mean I think Catholicism is useless, and that all priests are pedophiles? No and no. If it works for you, and you bring your cognitive abilities into the pew when you sit down for mass, I have no problem with symbolism that helps people focus on matters that are nebulous at best, and a priest who truly believes can be of great help. Not everyone has the ability to visualize our collective spirit, at least not to a degree that enables them to draw strength or inner peace from the concept.

But, like the Sex Pistols said (that’s right, I’m quoting Johnny Rotten), “Blind acceptance is a sign of stupid fools who stand in line.” And the gang out at the Vatican thrives on blind acceptance. Without that, they’re just another corporation— General Electric with gaudier thrones.

Frankly, I think you’re doing God - whoever or whatever God may be, if, in fact, It, Him, She, or Them exists at all - a significant disservice when you allow your life’s journey to be dictated by a money-weighted organization waving an instruction manual. The Golden Rule is enough instruction for me, thank you very much, and I’ll eat an entire steer on Friday if there’s one available and I’m hungry enough to do it.

I also stand proud in my belief that if anything in this world serves at my personal whim, without the need of a self-appointed overlord, it’s my penis. I’ve got mine, and the Pope can worry about his.

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This is St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, and he, more than anyone else, started all this bullshit. Centuries ago, it was Augustine who posited that mankind was born into original sin because, when Adam and Eve first got it on in the Garden of Eden, Adam had been corrupted by the Devil…and that corruption included his semen. So, logically, that means sex is something that needs to be controlled rather than celebrated. Mankind requires guidance from an advisor, then, to properly utilize this most pivotal of all biological functions.

With that certifiably brilliant maneuver, Augustine enabled the Church to forever hang sexuality over the faithful like a blood-engorged sword of Damocles— make a “wrong” move with your genitalia, and welcome to eternal damnation.

Sex, according to the Church, is only for procreation, so birth control is strictly prohibited. And, since you should only have children when you’re married within the Church, that means no pre-marital sex. Tack on that priests aren’t supposed to be sexual beings at all, since God is the real focus of their lives, and you’ve got a big, fat unworkable car wreck that leads to fear, frustration, and shame over something that, in reality, is as natural as eating and breathing.

These utterly unrealistic expectations can also help generate priests who are infantilized adults, grown men who are so mortified by their own natural urges that they have to find release with other sexual innocents. And those innocents are easy enough to find when you’re the most trusted person in your community, and children are taught to view you as a chaste being who's all but touched by God.

Again, not all priests are pedophiles, and, surely, many pedophiles join the priesthood as a way to prey on children. But this is a firestorm that feeds off its own flames, and the Church is solely responsible for having created it and letting it burn virtually unabated.

Don’t kid yourself. All the Popes, for hundreds of years, have known about priests abusing children. They couldn’t, of course, have heard about every instance of one of their shepherds - if I can be as blunt as people apparently need to start being to fully comprehend this ongoing horror - holding a screaming child down and shoving his penis into his rectum, among other choice atrocities. But that’s only because it’s happened so often, in so many places, it would be impossible to keep track of it all.

The Church likes to argue that priests who have sinned in this manner and repented are forgiven in the eyes of God, and don’t require further judgment in a court of law. But that presupposes that their victims have signed on to their twisted logic, and that the rest of the world doesn’t exist.

Imagine if the CEO of K-Mart was allowing his managers to do this, and turned a blind eye to it over and over and over again. Would you keep shopping at K-Mart, or would you retch at the thought? How quickly do you think the blue light special would turn into cop cars in the parking lot? Shouldn’t we apply those same standards to that little shop on the corner known as the Roman Catholic Church?

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I don’t have the paperwork in front of me, because a sinner like myself isn’t close enough to God to have access to it, but you can bet your tainted soul that even John Paul II, who the Church is currently trying to jam through to sainthood, was intimately aware of what was going on.

When I was a naive 14 year-old kid, I had a pretty good sense of it. How could he, or any other Pope, not know? Is the leader of one of the most powerful organizations on the planet really supposed to be consistently too dumb to notice, regardless of who he is, time and time again? If so, that’s a miracle in and of itself, and election to sainthood requires at least one miracle.

Maybe sainthood is in order, then, for all the Popes. Except for Ratzinger, it’s too late now for a prison term.

Paul Tatara