The ripe tones of Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles filled my
house Tuesday morning, courtesy of NPR. Mahoney spoke of his horror, his
shame at the stories of priest abuse. He apologized to the victims. The
mellifluous sanctimony of his penitence filled the room with such solemn
anguish that I burst out laughing. What a surprise it all is! Priests
hitting on altar boys! Priests molesting children. We're shocked, shocked!
When Winston Churchill was in charge of the British navy early
in the last century, he proposed some reform, and an elderly admiral
protested that this was "against all the traditions of the Navy." "And what
are the traditions of the Navy?" Churchill smartly replied, "Rum, sodomy and
the lash." With the Church we can maybe exclude the rum, and, for the lash,
substitute contrition and forgiveness.
When Oscar Wilde was packed off to Reading Jail in 1895 for
sodomy, the railway trains to Brighton and Dover were soon replete with
panicked gays fleeing England to Paris. Hundreds of Catholic priests here,
many of them in retirement, must be asking themselves whether it might be
prudent to remove themselves from the jurisdiction until the heat dies down.
It was bound to happen. Five years ago, a senior dignitary in
the Roman Catholic hierarchy confided to a friend of mine that the Church
had paid out over a billion in out-of-court settlements as well as court
fights on priest abuse cases.
On the old way of doing business, someone molested by a priest
20 years earlier would read of a big settlement and contact an attorney with
experience in the field. In the Bay Area, it's been Michael Meadows. Then,
if the case looked as though it had merit, Meadows would push forward, and
sooner or later, be in communication with the Church's lawyers, who would
either settle out of court for some hefty sum in the high hundreds of
thousands or low millions. Or the Church would fight it, and often go down
in court. The Church would pay the legal bills, and the Church would keep
the priests on the payroll.
So now the Church is cutting the priests loose, because it can't
afford the money drain. Of course the Church will still face suits from
people molested by priests, but they won't fight the cases, and they won't
keep them on the payroll. Big savings right there.
Anyone with any knowledge of these cases knows perfectly well
that this is no matter of a few rotten apples in the barrel. Sometimes,
hearing about one priestly molester after another, I've had the no doubt
exaggerated impression that not only has the Catholic church been the prime
sanctuary for repressed gays for the past several hundred years, but that
there isn't a priest alive that hasn't at some point made advances to an
altar boy or boy scout. At least in the Middles Ages they got off with the
nuns, or in the nineteenth century, when they could afford domestics, the
maid.
And certainly the Church has protected these priests, moved them
around the country, away from an area where their activities had become
known. The Church has some very dingy closets to clean out.
That being said, the witchhunt atmosphere is very disagreeable.
The same NPR program featuring Mahoney had the story of two priests in
northern Maine, driven from their parishes by the diocese, against the
desires of the congregation, who knew their pasts and felt comfortable with
them. But on some sexual matters we are unforgiving, demanding that people
convicted of violent sexual crimes stay behind bars not just for 10 or 15 or
20 years, but forever.
The same society sends young non-violent offenders off to prison
where the near-to-absolute certainty is that they will be raped, and many of
them rendered psychopathic timebombs. The church protected its priests. The
state of California, the governor, the prison union and we the people in the
form of the jury, stood by the prison staff at Corcoran responsible for
conditions under which a man was put in a cell with a violent convict who
raped him repeatedly over a period of two days. The society that has
designed our gulag rape factories shouldn't get on too much of a moral high
horse about the Catholic Church's moral delinquencies.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander
Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2002 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
