Clergy Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church (final)

By Tom Doyle J.C.D., C.A.D.C

While it is true that plenty of lay persons have been complicit in supporting the cover-up, the essential truth is that this is not the “Church’s problem.”  It is the bishops’ problem. They created it and they have intentionally avoided fixing it.

The Hope:  Today and Tomorrow
The hierarchy have turned the “crisis” into an adversarial struggle, a move supported and encouraged by the papacy. Hope that the revelations of sexual molestation of children and minors in 1984 would be recognized by the bishops for their horrific nature quickly dissolved. Rather than respond immediately in a compassionate and open manner they circled the wagons and directed all energies towards self-protection. The fact that the victims and survivors refused to be controlled and silenced resulted in a face-off from the start. Over the years this posture has led survivors and their supporters to the conclusion that the institutional Church is unwilling to comprehend the deep-seated and destructive nature of the problem because it is incapable of doing so.

The clergy abuse saga has had an impact on the whole Church. It has prompted many lay people, formerly docile, quiet and unquestioning, to wake up, look realistically at the Church structure all around them, and challenge what they know to be wrong. This process, the steady maturation of the laity from infancy to Catholic adulthood will not be reversed. The sexual abuse phenomenon is a fundamental dimension of the wider paradigm shift in the Catholic Church. The traditional model of a hierarchical monarchy supported by hordes of silent, obedient and generous lay people is slowly dying. This process has been accelerated by the inability of people to reconcile what they had been taught about the sanctity of the bishops and the hypocrisy of their response to clergy sex abuse.

The Catholic restorationist movement, with its beginnings in the early years of John Paul II’s papacy, provides the illusion of a secure, triumphant ecclesiastical kingdom for those who cannot face the inevitable prospect of the Catholic Church as a community existing in the real world. The myth that the abuse scandal is rooted in the post-Vatican II liberalism and dissent from “authentic Church teachings” has been destroyed by the exposure of widespread sexual abuse during the pre-conciliar period. A number of proponents of the retreat to the golden age have defended the protection of cleric perpetrators drawing into sharp focus the fact that this movement disproves the Thomistic axiom that there cannot be accidents without substance. On the contrary the response to clergy abuse has shown that the gilded hierarchs’ comprehension of compassion and justice is overshadowed by their fascination with the robes, trappings, rituals and attitudes of a Church-kingdom long gone. Beneath the exterior trappings, the accidents, there is little substance of authentic Catholicism.

The survivors and all who join them along the path toward charity and justice are an integral part of this paradigm shift as the Church moves from an irrelevant monarchy to a living Christian community. The survivors of clergy abuse have shown without a doubt that the institutional Church is sorely deficient in its ability to move true charity and justice from words to action. The past twenty-six years have proven without a shadow of a doubt that this institution will not change on its own from the top down. The change is happening in the real Church that exists apart from the clerical enclave. It took the harsh realization that the traditional Church is incapable of responding to the toxic corruption of sexual abuse to shake countless people loose from their fear of challenging the institution and to embracing the risky belief that the true Body of Christ is not imprisoned in the hierarchical monarchy but alive in all believers.

The momentum that was started decades ago may slow down at times but it will not stop. Perhaps the most important lesson learned through it all has been the absolute necessity of personal healing of the deep scars of sexual and emotional abuse inflicted on victims and survivors, and of the equally profound spiritual abuse inflicted on these same victims and on the countless others whose trust and belief has been shaken to the core. The scars and wounds are deep and the healing painful and at times discouraging but it must be done or else the outmoded system so essential to the formation of the abusers and the bishops who protected them will continue to control and spiritually devastate not only the victims but the abusers and bishops as well.

I daresay that none of us who were around and involved twenty-six years ago ever dreamed we would see and experience what has happened over these years. The perseverance of the survivors and their supporters through the tumultuous experiences of the past quarter century has shown those who maintain a belief in the Church as People of God that the spirit of the Lord is alive and active.
For those who have evolved to other expressions of belief, the endurance through this period proclaims the power of the human spirit. Regardless of how one feels about institutionalized Catholicism, the common bond has been a deep longing for justice and the courage to take the risk of standing together to challenge a Goliath that is conquered not by force but by truth.