[Vision2020] The Church’s Errant Shepherds

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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July 6, 2013
The Church’s Errant Shepherds By FRANK
BRUNI<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/frank_bruni/index.html>

BOSTON, Philadelphia, Los Angeles. The archdioceses change but the
overarching story line doesn’t, and last week Milwaukee had a turn in the
spotlight, with the release of roughly 6,000 pages of records detailing
decades of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests there, a sweeping,
searing encyclopedia of crime and insufficient punishment.

But the words I keep marveling at aren’t from that wretched trove. They’re
from an open letter that Jerome Listecki, the archbishop of Milwaukee,
wrote to Catholics just before the documents came out.

“Prepare to be shocked,” he said.

What a quaint warning, and what a clueless one.

Quaint because at this grim point in 2013, a quarter-century since child
sexual abuse in the Catholic Church first captured serious public
attention, few if any Catholics are still surprised by a priest’s
predations.

Clueless because Listecki was referring to the rapes and molestations
themselves, not to what has ultimately eroded many Catholics’ faith and
what continues to be even more galling than the evil that a man — any man,
including one in a cassock or collar — can do. I mean the evil that an
entire institution can do, though it supposedly dedicates itself to good.

I mean the way that a religious organization can behave almost precisely as
a corporation does, with fudged words, twisted logic and a transcendent
instinct for self-protection that frequently trump the principled handling
of a specific grievance or a particular victim.

The Milwaukee documents underscore this, especially in the person of
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, now the archbishop of New York, previously the
archbishop of Milwaukee from 2002 to 2009 and thus one of the characters in the
story that the documents
tell<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/02/us/dolan-sought-vatican-permission-to-shield-assets.html?pagewanted=all>.
Last week’s headlines rightly focused on his part, because he typifies the
slippery ways of too many Catholic leaders.

The documents show that in 2007, as the Milwaukee archdiocese grappled with
sex-abuse lawsuits and seemingly pondered bankruptcy, Dolan sought and got
permission from the Vatican to transfer $57 million into a trust for
Catholic cemetery maintenance, where it might be better protected, as he
wrote, “from any legal claim and liability.”

Several church officials have said that the money had been previously
flagged for cemetery care, and that Dolan was merely formalizing that.

But even if that’s so, his letter contradicts his strenuous insistence
before its emergence that he never sought to shield church funds. He did
precisely that, no matter the nuances of the motivation.

He’s expert at drafting and dwelling in gray areas. Back in Milwaukee he
selectively released the names of sexually abusive priests in the
archdiocese, declining to identify those affiliated with, and answerable
to, particular religious orders — Jesuits, say, or Franciscans. He said
that he was bound by canon law to take that exact approach.

But bishops elsewhere took a different one, identifying priests from
orders, and in a 2010 article on Dolan in The Times, Serge F. Kovaleski
wrote that a half-dozen experts on canon law
said<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/nyregion/17dolan.html?pagewanted=all>that
it did not specifically address the situation that Dolan claimed it
did.

Dolan has quibbled disingenuously over whether the $20,000
given<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/31/us/cardinal-authorized-payments-to-abusers.html>to
each abusive priest in Milwaukee who agreed to be defrocked can be
characterized as a payoff, and he has blasted the main national group
representing victims of priests as having “no credibility
whatsoever.”<http://www.wnyc.org/blogs/wnyc-news-blog/2012/jun/03/dolan-rips-groundless-reports-he-authorized-payments-abusive-priests/>Some
of the group’s members have surely engaged in crude, provocative
tactics, but let’s have a reality check: the group exists because of
widespread crimes and a persistent cover-up in the church, because child
after child was raped and priest after priest evaded accountability. I’m
not sure there’s any ceiling on the patience that Dolan and other church
leaders should be expected to muster, especially because they hold
themselves up as models and messengers of love, charity and integrity.

That’s the thing. That’s what church leaders and church defenders who
routinely question the amount of attention lavished on the church’s child
sexual abuse crisis still don’t fully get.

Yes, as they point out, there are molesters in all walks of life. Yes, we
can’t say with certainty that the priesthood harbors a disproportionate
number of them.

But over the last few decades we’ve watched an organization that claims a
special moral authority in the world pursue many of the same legal and
public-relations strategies — shuttling around money, looking for
loopholes, tarring accusers, massaging the truth — that are employed by
organizations devoted to nothing more than the bottom line.

In San Diego, diocesan leaders who filed for bankruptcy were rebuked by a
judge for misrepresenting the local church’s financial situation to
parishioners being asked to help pay for sex-abuse settlements.

In St. Louis church leaders claimed not to be liable for an abusive priest
because while he had gotten to know a victim on church property, the abuse
itself happened elsewhere.

In Kansas City, Mo., Rebecca Randles, a lawyer who has represented abuse
victims, says that the church floods the courtroom with attorneys who in
turn drown her in paperwork. In one case, she recently told me, “the
motion-to-dismiss pile is higher than my head — I’m 5-foot-4.”

Also in Kansas City, Bishop Robert Finn still inhabits his post as the head
of the diocese despite his conviction last September for failing to report
a priest suspected of child sexual
abuse<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/07/us/kansas-city-bishop-convicted-of-shielding-pedophile-priest.html>to
the police. This is how the church is in fact unlike a corporation. It
coddles its own at the expense of its image.

As for Dolan, he is by many accounts and appearances one of the good guys,
or at least one of the better ones. He has often demonstrated a necessary
vigor in ridding the priesthood of abusers. He has given many victims a
voice.

But look at the language in this 2005 letter he wrote to the Vatican, which
was among the documents released last
week<http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-07-01/national/40292386_1_archbishop-jerome-listecki-archbishop-timothy-dolan-jerry-topczewski>.
Arguing for the speedier dismissal of an abusive priest, he noted, in cool
legalese, “The liability for the archdiocese is great as is the potential
for scandal if it appears that no definitive action has been taken.”

His attention to appearances, his focus on liability: he could be steering
an oil company through a spill, a pharmaceutical giant through a drug
recall.

As for “the potential for scandal,” that’s as poignantly optimistic a line
as Listecki’s assumption that the newly released Milwaukee documents would
shock Catholics. By 2005 the scandal that Dolan mentions wasn’t looming but
already full blown, and by last week the only shocker left was that some
Catholic leaders don’t grasp its greatest component: their evasions and
machinations.

•

I invite you to visit my blog <http://bruni.blogs.nytimes.com/>, follow me
on Twitter at twitter.com/frankbruni and join me on
Facebook<https://www.facebook.com/frankbruninyt>
.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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