The Church and its villains are not so unlike the rest of us
With the giant orange liar-baby refusing to concede the White House and coronavirus deaths continuing to spike, the US has scandal aplenty to be going on with as 2020 limps to a close. Easy then, to miss other ‘‘wait, what?’’ moments that might dominate the news in any normal year.
In a normal year, a 400-page report direct from the Vatican into sexual abuse of parishioners by a Cardinal of the Catholic Church – a report that has the potential to sully the saintly image of Pope John Paul II no less – would be right up there at the top of the list.
The report was released on Tuesday and there has been some coverage of course – coverage that bears a closer look for the things it tells us about abuse and the Church’s response. Namely, priests and their leaders are not so much different from the rest of us.
Robes, incense and incantations make little difference to the way an abuser or his enablers behave when the abuse threatens to come to light. It’s close to 20 years since The Boston Globe published the stories of survivors – including 130 parishioners preyed on by a single priest (remember the Oscar-winning movie Spotlight?) – and some progress has been made.
A Vatican City conference on the protection of minors in the Catholic Church in early 2019 might never have taken place, had it not been for those parishioners, and those journalists.
But the case at the heart of this week’s report shows the Church is like many (most?) modern day institutions. It will not address the systemic issues it faces unless forced to, and like common or garden organisations big and small, it will drop the ball given the slightest hurdle placed in the way.
This time it’s the behaviour of just one senior church official – not dozens of priests – at issue. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, formerly archbishop of Washington, is already long gone, defrocked and booted from the Church just days before that conference in 2019. He was judged as having had sex with minors and adults ‘‘with the aggravating factor of the abuse of power’’, and having solicited sex during confessions.
He got away with it for decades, despite the best efforts of church officials who repeatedly tried to raise the alarm, for reasons both banal and evil.
The denial:
The evil was done by McCarrick himself (on top of the obvious evil of the abuse, of course). In 1999, when McCarrick was in line to become archbishop of New York, the incumbent, a cardinal called John O’Connor, wrote a letter of protest to the Vatican laying out what he knew and begging it to stop the promotion. The Pope read the letter and considered an investigation but a few months later O’Connor, rather unhelpfully, died of a brain tumour.
That gave McCarrick the opportunity to write directly to the Pope and deny everything. John Paul II believed him.
This is where survivors of sexual harassment and abuse out here in the real world might feel a prickle of recognition. It can take weeks, months, or even years to get someone, anyone, to believe you just enough to agree to look into your allegations.
One emphatic denial from the alleged perpetrator, even where the details don’t match up, is often enough to knock all that on the head. Sometimes it’s lack of training, sometimes laziness, but a denial is often seen as a full-stop, as if the process can’t possibly proceed unless everyone’s in perfect agreement. It’s easier to accept a hotly worded denial than to think ‘‘what if it’s true?’’ and proceed, if carefully, with a proper investigation.
The accomplices:
In McCarrick’s case, the sinner Cardinal was helped along by three New Jersey Bishops who gave ‘‘misleading and incomplete’’ information to the Vatican. The Pope dropped the investigation and although McCarrick did not get the New York job he desired, he stayed on as archbishop of Washington unscathed.
Once again, this is a scenario survivors will be familiar with; the mates or staff of the accused who’ll bend the truth out of loyalty, or just refuse to get involved even if they know something’s not OK just because, well, it’s just easier, right? This reluctance to step in is one reason bystander training, which gives ordinary people the skills to intervene when they see wrongdoing, is becoming the gold standard for organisations trying to tackle harassment.
And finally, the banal:
You’d be shocked how many lives are ruined, how much hope is lost, as a result of simple errors or quibbles over tiny details, clerical or otherwise. I’ve commiserated with dozens of people whose files have been misplaced or lost completely by police or professional disciplinary bodies, or even their own employers.
In the Church’s case, McCarrick’s denouement was delayed another three years because the assistant to Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley never handed over a letter to his boss.
The 2015 letter contained detailed accusations of McCarrick’s abuse. O’Malley said the letter was withheld from him because its author (the delightfully-named Father Boniface Ramsay) was in charge of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors – and Ramsay’s accusations were about abuse of adult men, not minors.
After that, in another breathtakingly bungled set of assumptions, Pope Francis did nothing to address the mounting evidence against McCarrick until 2017 because he assumed both his predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict, had already looked into it.
Out here where we wear ordinary clothes and not embroidered vestments, people who’ve gathered the courage to complain wait months or years for word of progress, and find out that something as simple as an assumption, or a single unsent email is the reason for their spiral into despair and depression. I wager it’s often only when their manager, or the HR professional, or the CEO, has someone in their own family facing bullying or harassment in the workplace that their eyes are truly opened to how destructive those ‘‘little errors’’ can be.
You’d be shocked how many lives are ruined, how much hope is lost, as a result of simple errors or quibbles over tiny details, clerical or otherwise.
Credit where credit’s due:
The 461 pages of the Report on The Holy See’s Institutional Knowledge and Decision-Making Related To Former Cardinal Theodore Edgar McGarrick (1930-2017) might not be your cup of holy wine, but at least it shows the Church is willing to delve into the past and acknowledge the litany of mistakes made along the way. It should be commended for that, at least.