William Donahue is the head of the Catholic League in America. Basically, he’s an apologist for all things Roman Catholic, and he comes across like an old line political boss from Chicago or the Lower East Side. Loud, aggressive, with just enough facts to make him sound like a heavy-weight in more than just bluster.
In the recent revelations about child abuse in European Catholic institutions and some allegations that the current Pope was responsible for some of it because he was in charge of the supervising organization at the time (which seems like a fairly straightforward argument to me), Donahue went on the attack and in one instance from the Fifties he blamed the parents for not going to the police.
Everyone I have ever known who is not a Catholic has the same reaction—why didn’t the parents call the police? Catholic reactions vary depending on age, but by and large this really misses the point. All it says about these people who didn’t call the authorities is that they were truly devout Catholics, which is just what the Church wanted them to be. They believed their priests.
And let’s be honest, it took most of the Seventies for the whole issue of child sexual abuse to emerge from the shadows of “We don’t want to know about this” Ostrich behavior on the part of society in general and most of the Eighties to learn just how not innocent some children can be before this matter drew serious attention. Prior to the Seventies people tended to think kids “made shit up” all the time and couldn’t be trusted to (a) tell the truth or (b) know what the truth is. The myths about who does what and when still pervade the culture and the majority of folks (probably) still think pedophilia is the same as homosexuality. So to assume that way back then people would run to the cops when a little kid said “Father so-and-so played with my wee-wee” is naive and a bit amnesiac.
Add to that the strong hold Catholicism asserts on its adherents…
A reasonable question is, what about non Catholic institutions? A report here discusses the numbers for Protestant churches and the difficulties in collecting and collating the data. The numbers actually place the incidents on par with claims made against the Catholic Church. The numbers aren’t that different.
What is different is the institutional reaction, and that’s where people like Donahue come in. Protestant denominations do not have the same centralized organizational structure that the Catholic Church has. When a local minister gets into trouble, or when a bishop finds himself in legal straits, it’s on him. What makes the Catholic situation odious is the whole attitude the Church takes toward the obligations it expects from its adherents, the responsibilities entailed on the part of the priest, and the level of betrayal which ensues both when abuse is alleged (and demonstrated) and when the Church has moved to cover it up.
Blaming the parents is a cheap shot. They were being good Catholics and trusted their priest. That’s what it meant to be a Catholic then. I recall no such obligation of trust in my days as a Lutheran. Sure, we expected we could trust our pastors, but he didn’t enjoy any special immunity if he did something he shouldn’t have done.
It is not the numbers that are at issue in this. It is the betrayal. The nature of trust involved and the destruction of that trust. Do I think these people were foolish to hold such opinions of their parish priests? Maybe. Do I understand it? Sure. That’s what they were taught. The heinous nature of the betrayal only made the break harder to achieve and more painful to endure.
Do I think institutions ought to expect, command, and hold such trust? No. That’s on the Church, though. For fifteen centuries they’ve rejecting any kind of “eyes open” approach on the part of congregations. Trust has always been expected to be absolute and blind. Now they’re paying for it.
It’s just too bad so many innocent people have to fork over the interest.