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Cover
story FALL
FROM GRACE Abuse scandals strain an already crumbling
institution
By EUGENE CULLEN
KENNEDY
One must visit the 19th century to
understand the problems that have been visited on Bostons Cardinal
Bernard Law at the beginning of this one. The great god Brahmin ruled
complacently: No Irish Need Apply signs hung everywhere, and Henry
James, so enamored of the Italians in Florence and Rome, was appalled that they
were moving into Boston.
Catholic priests mediated everything for their immigrant flocks,
from paying the rent to organizing unions and filling out their citizenship
papers. The people paid them back in the small but true coins of trust,
admiration and a protectiveness that gave exempt status to priests in
everything from parking tickets to personal foibles. These immigrants, whose
women waited on the tables of the wealthy as their husbands patrolled their
streets, took great pride in their archbishops living in a mansion as big
as any in Back Bay.
The cold shadow side of that old respect for priests has fallen
now on Law, who is being pilloried for allegedly shifting a known pedophile
priest, John Geoghan, from parish to parish with no warning label attached,
making new and trusting victims available to him in a succession of
communities. The Boston Globe broke this story and, describing
the cardinal on Jan. 29 as, stripped of moral authority, called for
his resignation.
Thou art a priest forever
Law was ordained a priest in 1961, a year before John Geoghan. The
general culture, and that of the clergy within it, seemed intact. Hindsight
allows us to see that both were actually in extremis. Vatican
Council II convened in October 1962, to embark on reforms whose
transformation of the changeless Catholic culture was symbolized by
the end of worship in Latin, the departure of many priests to marry, and a
rapid decline in the number of seminarians. A year later the assassination of a
president in the streets of Dallas set violence and protest loose in assaults
on every symbol and institution of authority. The flag flaked into ashes in the
flames of protest against the Vietnam War, and Americas vision blurred at
the rise of a ragged counterculture ethic, a sexual revolution, generational
estrangement, police called pigs and a president forced out of
office.
John Geoghan was a marginal candidatefor the priesthood whose
intellectual ability was doubted by one rector who also noted his very
pronounced immaturity. His seminary record is moth-eaten with leaves of
absence, illnesses and a two-year interval at Holy Cross College. Described by
a priest uncle at one point as nervous and depressed,
he is remembered by classmates as slight, soft and immature. As with many
similar candidates, he needed the support and control of a stable general
culture, and the Catholic culture within it, to maintain his adjustment. When
these pillars crumbled, his ability to cope vanished in the debris cloud of the
collapsing temple.
The archbishop of Boston in 1962 was the plainspoken populist
Cardinal Richard Cushing who gave up attending Vatican Council II, claiming
that he could not understand the Latin. He may have sensed a threat to the
clerical world in which he had risen to power as he gradually withdrew from his
once dominant role, retiring in 1970, bewildered by the changes symbolized by a
strike of his own seminarians. He was perhaps the last of a generation of
public figures inside and outside the church whose personal problems -- in his
case, a serious, sometimes public, drinking difficulty -- were covered up by a
benign media conspiracy.
Cushing was Geoghans superior during Geoghans first
eight years in the priesthood. In America at large, the Titanic of professional
privilege was on course for the iceberg but, at that time, as with Cushing, its
first-class passengers were treated with a long-since-vanished respect and
courtesy. The prevailing general cultural practice was to allow the alcoholic
or sexually compromised congressman, judge, surgeon or even movie star to get
help, often at a discreet private institution, and be returned to work without
publicity about their failings.
Beneath the wreckage
A counterpoint tragedy of that lost and gone time involved the
victims -- who were left largely voiceless and invisible -- of the sins,
failures or indiscretions of the professional classes. Victims were at times
intimidated, as female rape victims were routinely, by suggestions that they
played a role in the incident in question, and, with the worldly wise
complicity of the culture, they were often urged to keep quiet and go on with
their lives. In a variant of the hoary philosophical question, does the felled
tree make a sound if there is nobody in the forest to hear it, did the victims
exist if nobody listened for their cries? Victims were found huddled where they
had been hidden, in the catacombs beneath the wreckage of the institutional
culture.
Bishops and religious superiors had subscribed to that
cultures ethic of reflexively supporting its privileged and professional
members. They accepted this baptized version of the caste system as in the
nature of things. Church leaders at every level were conditioned to believe
that, by virtue of their office, their own words and actions incarnated the
will of God. Their subjects were trained to hear Gods voice in that of
the bishop or the abbot and to forsake their own feelings and judgment if they
conflicted with those of the superior class. To this day, many bishops firmly
believe that their ordination grants them a share of the infallibility
attributed to the pope.
These conditions meant, in effect, that superiors became, by their
appointment, agents of the divine will who could never make a mistake, and no
layperson or member of the lower clergy could contest their decisions.
Seminarians, in turn, were prepared to serve in this culture by accepting the
seminary rule, a book of regulations, as Gods will for them. The
psychological bonds thus formed strongly reinforced the general Catholic
culture in whose waning days both Bernard Law and John Geoghan were ordained
priests.
This was the Lacordaire era of the priesthood, exalted on
thousands of holy cards in that celebrated 19th-century French preachers
romanticized description of its singular and sacred nature. The calling to the
priesthood separated a young man from his peers and invested him with automatic
respect and honor. Those who left the seminary were considered, along with
those who later left the priesthood, to be failures, deserters, as
the prince of melancholy, Pope Paul VI once put it, spoiled
priests, as women said shaking their heads as they chatted after morning
Mass. Because they wanted to marry, these men were judged to have given in to
the flesh and to be incapable of the self-discipline and virtue of those who
persevered until ordination.
The latter were endowed with a presumed but at times illusory
virtue. All priests were considered chaste, they were celibate, they were
pure and had a higher calling than their departed
brothers who were left with rue in their hearts for leaving the seminary for a
lesser life. Or, as the late Cardinal John Krol, in a phrase that captures the
vulgar triumphalism of the day, described resigned priests when the study of
the priesthood commissioned by the bishops was released in 1971, They
want to change their power over the Body of Christ for power over the body of a
woman.
Beneath this enormous cover and support, many candidates for the
priesthood were quite ordinary persons as they entered time-locked seminaries
or novitiates that froze their immaturity in place. This faux innocence
was curiously rewarded rather than challenged during their years of highly
controlled training. Innocent of knowledge of themselves, none of them
consciously chose the priesthood in order to find trustworthy positions from
which to prey sexually on the young. Significant numbers of them, however,
passed through the seminary in a state of psychological suspended animation
that was sustained by the external supports of the overlapping clerical and
general cultures that invested them with the idealized masculinity of actors,
such as Spencer Tracy and Gregory Peck, who played them in the movies.
Many of the candidates, destined to become and to cause problems
of sexual abuse later, chose celibacy without conflict or hesitation because
their own sexual identities remained undeveloped and whispered inaudibly, if at
all, inside them. They were good boys, the more charming for their untested
innocence, who only began to grow internally after leaving the isolated
seminary for the world of people. Only then did many of them, to their
bewilderment and bedevilment, experience the rushes and longings of
long-stalled erotic needs.
Psychological mirror
Celibacy was not a problem, for neither before or after ordination
were they attracted to an adult relationship with a woman in marriage. Only
gradually did they find themselves seeking unnamed sexual release in
relationships with children. This choice of children reflected their own lack
of maturity, their own groping for something they did not understand, found
difficult to control, and whose significance they could not comprehend. They
found their psychological selves mirrored in these children, so innocent, so
trusting, so unaware of what was happening to them.
Here, in a tragic shadow world of gospel and priesthood, were
found the fields ripe for the harvest by men honored and protected because they
were numbered among the laborers who were said to be few. The victims and their
families, following the prevailing cultural practice, were to put this out of
their minds, never talk of it to anyone. After all, you dont want to hurt
Father, do you? Keep this to yourself, in the mantra of that cultures
ultimate undoing, for the good of the church.
Bishops believed that the good of the church justified denial,
delay and evasion in managing the problems of priests. Bishops are chosen, as
generals are, to maintain the institution against the assaults of history. In
the turmoil of adjustment that followed Vatican II, thousands of priests and
religious nuns and brothers sought dispensations in order to marry. The number
of candidates to replace them dropped sharply, and soon bishops were faced with
managing a church that was growing rapidly with a clergy declining at what
seemed an even faster rate. In the last third of the 20th century, bishops
inherited a greatly changed Catholic and clerical culture. The glory days were
long gone. Keeping even marginally adjusted priests functioning became an
unexpected imperative for them.
Americas bishops, therefore, decided not to follow up on the
multidisciplinary study of the priesthood that they commissioned and whose
reports, in 1971, identified significant weaknesses and emotional problems in
certain groups of priests. Like their counterparts in business and government,
many bishops doubted the usefulness of psychological assessment. To this they
added their own belief, common in the Catholic subculture, that the call to be
a priest was so sacred as to be beyond any measurement or evaluation. Many of
them expected that the old days of plentiful candidates for seminaries would
return, that everything would eventually come back.
Bishops, like other institutional leaders, kept on doing what they
had always done, the best they could with fewer priests and seminarians, and,
confident of divine guidance, were not inclined, despite evidence about
Catholics breaking out of their own culture to become part of the general
culture, to examine subtle questions about the transformations of Catholics or
the priesthood. Make do with the troops at hand was the order of the day and
recruit priests from places as familiar as Ireland and as far away as India.
Keep faltering clergy on life-support, get them help to carry on, and send the
more serious cases for treatment to private, campus-like hospitals such as
Baltimores Seton Psychiatric Institute.
The unquestioned goal was to rehabilitate the priest so that he
could be returned to parish work. The idea that a man should be forced out of
the priesthood was, at that time, even in a changing Catholic culture,
virtually unthinkable. All the difficulties had arisen, some traditionalists
urged, because these priests had not prayed enough. Put aside the psychology,
trust God, and prayer would make all things right again. An ailing culture was
treating itself and inadvertently nursing its worst problem at the same
time.
Going Geoghans way
In this shifting universe, John Geoghan served as other problem
priests had before him, with timeouts for periods of treatment and
rehabilitation when necessary and with kindly support so that they could get
back to their identifying work. Professionals still got a pass in the general
culture and priests certainly got one in the Catholic subculture. Very scanty
records were kept about impaired professionals, and none was kept for the first
18 years of his priesthood. John Geoghans history -- and his official
treatment -- do not seem as singular or unusual when viewed in the context of
this problematic cultural background.
His first dozen years as a priest resemble those of that
substantial minority of priests whose immaturity was not removed by the
imposition of the bishops hands at ordination. His work history sounds
like a railroad timetable out of Our Town as he was moved from
Saugus to Concord to Hingham, Mass., always trailing a cloud of gossip about
boys in his room or fooling around with them in
questionable ways.
As regularly as a whiskey priest being signed periodically into
the sanitarium, Geoghan was sent for treatment, including time at the Seton
Psychiatric Institute. Then, and always with his doctors approval, he was
permitted to go back to work. The doctors, of course, were part of the general
culture of privilege and often part of the Catholic give-Father-a-break
subculture as well.
Cushings successor, Cardinal Humberto Medeiros, followed the
traditional game plan in managing Geoghan and other problem priests, getting
him help and getting him back to work. The timetable adds stops at Jamaica
Plain and Dorchester, Mass. Geoghans story is that of scores of other
priests who were furtively preying on children, almost exclusively boys, but
who, unlike their confreres resigning to marry, were regarded as assets because
these priests were at least staying in the priesthood. There are fewer scenes
sadder than that of men as tortured and inadequate as Geoghan, in and out of
treatment, propped up by medical OKs, the reluctance of people to testify, the
uncertain recollections of brother priests, and their own manipulative
pleading, disappearing and resurfacing, their eyes ever out for available boys,
come to my room, Ive got something I want to show you. ...
By the early 1980s the fault lines in the hierarchical culture of
privilege were clear in every sphere of activity: The country had elected the
fifth president in a bakers dozen of years, the ROTC had been banned from
many campuses, the CIA had been gutted of much of its power, General Motors was
about to invest millions in trying to revamp its tottering hierarchical
structures, and the professional class, led by physicians, was being charged
with malpractice. Victims had found their voices and their attorneys and, in
Louisiana, investigative reporter Jason Berry had begun to look into what he
would soon write -- the first public exposé of the costs, emotional and
financial, of covering up accusations of child sexual abuse against a priest in
the diocese of Lafayette.
Excellent care
After his 1980 removal from St. Andrews in Jamaica Plain,
Geoghan wrote to Medeiros that he had been receiving excellent care
from two wonderful Catholic physicians. Medeiros, again following
accepted practice, approved his return, and urged a woman, Margaret Gallant,
who had written a letter of complaint, to keep silent to protect the
boys, a response that did not satisfy the relatives of the victims.
Two years later, relatives of victims met with Boston Auxiliary
Bishop Thomas Daily to demand that Geoghan be removed from the ministry for
abusing boys where he was then assigned. Geoghan was relieved of his duties
again, remanded for treatment and, in a practice that seems far more
extraordinary now than it was a generation ago, was also sent on a two-month,
expense paid sabbatical to Rome before being returned to work. A bittersweet
bit of clerical philosophy at the time observed that good hardworking priests
were at a disadvantage because the healthy were never rewarded. If, however, a
priest had a serious problem, he was likely to be treated like a top draft
choice, with a trip around the world thrown in for sticking with the team.
Later, Geoghan, tracing the same path as other priests with sexual
conflicts, was treated at the distinguished Institute for the Living in
Hartford, Conn. When a written diagnosis seemed to clash with oral reassurances
that had been given to a Boston archdiocesan official, the evaluation was
altered by a staff member at the institute to argue in favor of Geoghans
return to work as a priest. By then the Willy Loman of problematic clergy,
Geoghan argued his own case with the skills of a beggar on a good street
corner: Its all been bad luck, Im a priest put upon by others, but
Im feeling great now, ready to get back to work, why wont you make
me a pastor?
Geoghan symbolizes the cohort of priests who, in Boston alone, and
to heartbreak all around, survived for a long time in forgiving ecclesiastical
surroundings. On the cusp of old age, he remains the confused boy, the
underdeveloped human being who has little idea of the level at which he
functioned as he repeatedly corrupted the innocent and walked away, corruptly
innocent himself, and still unable to admit or understand it, youve got
me all wrong.
It appears that a clear trail must have been left in crisp snow
but, in the last days of the culture and the first years of Bernard Laws
presence in Boston, the marks would not have been easy to trace had anyone been
determined to do so. In the reconstruction reported in The Boston
Globe, these events are described less in the language of proven fact
than in that of clerical gossip and generalized rumor.
Police found, in some circumstances, that when they investigated
reports of sexual misbehavior, people withdrew their complaints or refused to
testify. Even the pastors under whom these men worked sometimes offer vague or
varied recollections about how much they knew about the history of priests like
Geoghan when they dropped their suitcases in the front hall of their
rectories.
So Msgr. Francis S. Rossiter, Geoghans new pastor at St.
Julias in Weston in 1984, assigned him to oversee the altar boys
and two other youth groups, claiming that he was not informed of his new
curates history. Asked under oath, however, if he knew of Geoghans
problems, he replied, I really cant say, according to the
Jan. 24 Boston Globe. Regarding cases investigated by the Boston police,
police spokesperson Mariellen Burns told the paper that there was no
physical evidence in either case, and in both cases, the victims and their
families refused to cooperate in any prosecution, according to the
Globe. The paper concludes that with just one exception, the
Geoghan records and the transcripts of church officials contain no hint that
anyone around the cardinal urged him to remove children from Geoghans
reach until 1993.
Unsettled questions
Even today, the general American culture is by no means finally
settled or fully sophisticated about sexual behavior. Divided on even defining
the nature of abortion, politicized over reproductive rights, still
reeling from the rationalized hairsplitting of a presidents denying that
oral sex constituted sexual relations, it is stymied about questions of sexual
freedom and responsibility as it struggles to respond to grave problems of
sexually transmitted diseases, impotence and an epidemic of heartbreak in
unhappy marriages and relationships.
While The Boston Globe has demanded
Laws resignation, it did not act so boldly when President Bill Clinton
admitted, in a way as slyly self-serving as the confessions of Geoghan, that he
had taken sexual favors from an intern in the Oval Office. For several
intoxicated months, the media accepted a public relations war
declared by political consultant James Carville on Special Counsel Kenneth
Starr for trying to find the facts and on presidential victims, like Kathleen
Willey, who dared to tell their stories in public. Pundits and columnists then
discounted sexual failings, saying that everybody failed, everybody lied, too,
whats the big deal?
The case may be made, against the grain of current revelations,
that it was Law who finally recognized Geoghans pathology and removed him
from parish work and from the priesthood. In context, Law initially acted in
harmony with both the general and the specialized ecclesiastical culture in
which he had so remarkably succeeded and Geoghan had so conspicuously
failed.
Arriving in Boston in 1984 and, in the one exception
noted by the Globe, Law was alerted by a letter from Bishop John
DArcy pointing to Geoghans questionable fitness for parish work.
Within the week, Law received reassuring comments from two doctors who had
treated the priest, and then approved his new assignment. Only later was it
learned that these doctors were themselves part of the enabling subculture and
that one of them was a general practitioner with no psychiatric training and
the other a psychiatrist with no experience in dealing with pedophiles.
Law acted as dozens of other bishops and religious superiors have
in responding to a cultural crisis whose true dimensions and meaning they did
not understand, acknowledge or attempt to investigate. Feeling responsible for
maintaining the Catholic church as an institution, they drew on reflexes from
the high era of clerical culture, strongly seconded by lawyers and insurance
advisers, by trying to protect their assets and manage their parishes and
schools with declining numbers of available priests.
Americas Catholic bishops have yet to adopt a national
policy on dealing with pedophile priests. They are still trying to manage
clergy who have largely abandoned the clerical culture once filled with wood
paneled rectories, mother substitute housekeepers, hats tipped to Roman
collars, and the blissful dream of a chaste and isolated existence in a
protected universe.
The hardest working American priests, symbolized by those who rose
to the pastoral challenges that erupted when the World Trade Center towers
collapsed, no longer live the way their predecessors did half a century ago and
a world away. They live rather alone, cooking for themselves and cleaning their
own apartments or small houses, and they oversee parishes in which laypersons
carry out most of the ministries of the church. Their closest relationships are
no longer with their brother priests but with the people they serve.
These active priests now question the privileged and vacuum-sealed
worlds in which priests were once prepared and in which they served. That
culture is now comparable to that of the Confederacy in its never-questioned
assumptions about the nature of the universe and the structure of human
personality. A still little-understood aura of sexual mystique surrounded
slaves and priests. Both groups were defined by their being institutionally
subservient to other men, to an indentured impotence that was accepted and
strongly reinforced as Gods will. It is almost cruelly ironic that the
word bishop comes from the Greek for overseer.
Such comparisons are, of course, unacceptable in the controlled
dialogue of the church where investigations of the impact of ecclesiastical
culture on the psychosexual maturity of seminarians and priests are neither
contemplated nor encouraged, despite widespread sexual conflicts among church
personnel. As servitude was rationalized as a happy dependent state in the
Confederacy, so were illusions of problem-free celibacy among apple-cheeked
volunteers in the collapsed universe of clerical life. Unexamined, both kept,
and to some degree, still keep, men from experiencing the full truth about
themselves and the freedom and hazards of living outside an institutions
domination.
The epidemic of sexual abuse by priests and other religious
personnel reveals the long-denied structural faults of that environment. That
leaves bishops resembling Confederate generals who seem not to understand that
the war is over, that further loss of life is sheer folly, and that the way of
life they have been defending has come to an end.
But bishops, too, are men subject to authority and, although many
would wish to, they have been forbidden by the present pope from discussing or
experimenting with new ways to recruit proven and mature Catholics to serve as
priests. No man may be appointed a bishop if he has ever spoken a sympathetic
sentence about ordaining women to the priesthood.
The Beau Geste tactic
Rome expects them to operate as if there were no unmanageable
problems with the clergy, neither a shortage nor a plague of criminal behavior,
and, like corporation heads all around them, they feel compelled to defend
their institution with the organizational solutions provided by lawyers and
insurance advisers: Admit nothing, settle and seal cases, protect assets and
make do with the personnel you have to keep the organization functioning.
Such a strategy means that they must use Beau Geste
tactics. In that story, the beleaguered Foreign Legionnaires prop dead men
up on the battlements of their desert fort to preserve an illusion of strength.
Sworn to obedience themselves, bishops must prop up the dead men walking of
their problem priests while wearing out their best priests. It wears out
bishops, too. Holding out this way, overriding their own opinions, is what they
are expected to do for the good of the church.
A few years ago, Rome made confidential inquiries in every
American diocese about the scope of priest pedophilia but has kept the findings
secret and, despite news from virtually all corners of the globe about the
reality of this problem, has issued no enlightening documents beyond one that
places these cases under the Congregation of The Doctrine of the Faith, once
the Holy Office, where they will be handled sub secreto. The financial
losses to the institutional church, in settlements reached on cases throughout
the world, now reaches into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Geoghan stands for the dozens of priests whose pathetic, furtive
and impoverished searches for intimacy leave them and their families now as
ruined and desolated as the children and families whose trust they abused.
These broken men have been valued for what service could be squeezed out of
them in a priest-poor time. Unfortunately, little attention was paid to the
fact that they were unfit to serve because of their unresolved psychosexual
conflicts.
Many observers feel that these ill-conceived and ill-fated
compromises have been made to maintain what the pope insists on -- despite its
lack of theological or scriptural support -- an exclusively celibate male
clergy. Leaders like Law must often go against their own consciences and
pastoral intuitions in order to carry out what Rome expects of them.
This long-accumulating tragedy cannot be laid solely at Laws
door. It is rather the terrible collapse in our day of a great ecclesiastical
structure whose foundations began to erode generations ago. This is the sad
death of the respect and trust for the clergy that was earned in immigrant days
by predecessor priests. It is a time of grief for the best of priests whose
burdens are increased by the revelations of how widespread, ill-understood, and
impossibly managed have been the numerous priests suffering with problems that
passed suffering on to unnumbered innocents.
Law has for many years been without rival as the most powerful
American bishop, deciding individual careers and diocesan boundary lines, who
shall become a bishop and where they shall serve. When he learned, for example,
in 1995 that Chicagos Cardinal Joseph Bernardin was suffering from
pancreatic cancer, he quickly had the little-known bishop of Yakima, Wash.,
Francis George, named to head the Portland archdiocese. Thus, George became an
archbishop eligible to be moved to Chicago when Bernardin died.
Handsome, white-haired and now 70, Law has been the kingmaker and
keeper of the Catholic church in America for at least 15 years. Now, having
acted by his lights and according to the expectations of the culture to whose
peak he has climbed, he is in danger of becoming the foremost but not the first
victim of its final collapse.
Eugene Cullen Kennedy is emeritus professor of psychology at
Loyola University, Chicago, and author of The Unhealed Wound: The Church
and Human Sexuality, published by St. Martins Press.
National Catholic Reporter, March 8,
2002
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