Sunday Sermonette: Higher Authority
Earlier this week, I read of the arrest of a priest in the city I grew up in. He was charged with one count of assault with intent to rape a child and three counts of indecent assault and battery on a child. The alleged assaults took place over a ten-year period, ending when the boy was a teenager.
Last Thursday, the Roman Catholic bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph was convicted of failing to tell police about a priest suspected of sexually exploiting children. One of the priests who reported to him had taken hundreds of pornographic pictures of children in Catholic schools and parishes in the diocese.
On July 24th, Catholic Monsignor William Lynn of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia was sentenced to three to six years in prison for child endangerment. He did not abuse children himself, but he protected pedophile priests by transferring them to other parishes, knowing they were abusers. Judge M. Theresa Sarmina said that Lynn had shielded, protected and aided "monsters in clerical garb" while he "refused to hear and refused to see" their young victims.
It's been over ten years since the Boston Globe first broke the stories of sexual abuse of children by priests. Rather than wait to be forced to testify, Cardinal Bernard Law resigned as Archbishop and made haste to take up residence in Vatican City, where he has lived ever since. It should not escape your attention that the United States does not have an extradition agreement with Vatican City. In 2003, the Globe won a Pulitzer for their reports. But it didn't end in Boston. The scandal turned out to be world-wide.
What is it about priests and sex with kids?
Strictly speaking, nothing.
Studies show that priests are not any more likely to abuse children than other clergy or school teachers or adult males in general. The priest arrested last week wasn't Catholic.
Celibacy does not lead to child abuse. You may argue that celibacy is itself a sexual perversion, and there's some evidence that a higher percentage of young men who choose the celibate life that ordination requires have other issues they're not dealing with, mostly homosexuality. But not having sex doesn't automatically turn children into objects of sexual desire.
Likewise, a same-sex orientation does not make one any more likely to offend against children. It does make it more likely that the priest might be nipping off to a gay bar in a nearby city, but that's about it.
Clergy apologists also like to point out that most of the victims were not pre-pubescent children, but that's a pretty feeble justification for the inexcusable.
Here's the thing: when a schoolteacher is exposed for having groped a boy, the school district calls the police and suspends him pending investigation, no exceptions.
The problem is that the Roman Catholic Church saw things differently. For all practical purposes, a priest doesn't answer to local law enforcement, he answers to the the Church hierarchy. The laws of God outrank the laws of man.
Besides, exposing a predatory priest would harm the Church's reputation, and when you're the chosen instrument of God, that's almost unthinkable. The offending priest has sinned, and must confess and do penance, and perhaps engage in a course of counseling with a friendly Franciscan friar. The grace of God will ensure that he won't sin again.
It isn't just the Roman Catholic Church who have this problem of covering up the unspeakable. The problem exists in the ultra-Orthodox enclaves of Hasidim in New York, and even in the football program at Penn State. It happens anywhere the wealth and reputations of the most powerful members of a group become more important than the welfare of the least.
The Church has issued a number of sincere apologies over the past decade, and paid out millions of dollars in compensation. They promise that things are different now. Meanwhile, Church officials have been quietly working in state legislatures around the country to keep statutes of limitations from being loosened. These statutes set a time limit after which victims cannot bring civil suits and prosecutors cannot press criminal charges. For example, if I run you down in my car and flee the scene, leaving you with a broken pelvis, you have three years from learning my identity to file suit against me in this state. After that, you're too late.
Changing the statute of limitations “has turned out to be the primary front for child sex abuse victims,” said Marci A. Hamilton, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. “Even when you have an institution admitting they knew about the abuse, the perpetrator admitting that he did it, and corroborating evidence, if the statute of limitations has expired, there won’t be any justice,” she said.
Sexual abuse is different from a hit-and-run. Many victims are unable to talk about the abuse or face the perpetrators until they are in their thirties or even later. According to a recent New York Times report, the statute of limitations for most sexual assaults against children extends only to the victim's 23rd birthday.
The Church claims they are merely trying to protect themselves against ambulance-chasing attorneys filing frivolous suits on behalf of profiteering perjurers. But every now and then, a clergyman lets something slip. In late August, the National Catholic Register published an interview with Fr. Benedict Groeschel who had counseled priests involved in abuse. The interview did not stay up online long before being pulled, but the Internet never forgets.
“Suppose you have a man having a nervous breakdown, and a youngster comes after him. A lot of the cases, the youngster - 14, 16, 18 - is the seducer.”
"Well, you know, until recent years, people did not register in their minds that it was a crime. It was a moral failure, scandalous; but they didn’t think of it in terms of legal things.”
“And I’m inclined to think, on their first offense, they should not go to jail because their intention was not committing a crime,” he added.
Still above the petty little laws of man. Still believing that they answer only to a Higher Authority. Who, conveniently, does not exist.
Last Thursday, the Roman Catholic bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph was convicted of failing to tell police about a priest suspected of sexually exploiting children. One of the priests who reported to him had taken hundreds of pornographic pictures of children in Catholic schools and parishes in the diocese.
On July 24th, Catholic Monsignor William Lynn of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia was sentenced to three to six years in prison for child endangerment. He did not abuse children himself, but he protected pedophile priests by transferring them to other parishes, knowing they were abusers. Judge M. Theresa Sarmina said that Lynn had shielded, protected and aided "monsters in clerical garb" while he "refused to hear and refused to see" their young victims.
It's been over ten years since the Boston Globe first broke the stories of sexual abuse of children by priests. Rather than wait to be forced to testify, Cardinal Bernard Law resigned as Archbishop and made haste to take up residence in Vatican City, where he has lived ever since. It should not escape your attention that the United States does not have an extradition agreement with Vatican City. In 2003, the Globe won a Pulitzer for their reports. But it didn't end in Boston. The scandal turned out to be world-wide.
What is it about priests and sex with kids?
Strictly speaking, nothing.
Studies show that priests are not any more likely to abuse children than other clergy or school teachers or adult males in general. The priest arrested last week wasn't Catholic.
Celibacy does not lead to child abuse. You may argue that celibacy is itself a sexual perversion, and there's some evidence that a higher percentage of young men who choose the celibate life that ordination requires have other issues they're not dealing with, mostly homosexuality. But not having sex doesn't automatically turn children into objects of sexual desire.
Likewise, a same-sex orientation does not make one any more likely to offend against children. It does make it more likely that the priest might be nipping off to a gay bar in a nearby city, but that's about it.
Clergy apologists also like to point out that most of the victims were not pre-pubescent children, but that's a pretty feeble justification for the inexcusable.
Here's the thing: when a schoolteacher is exposed for having groped a boy, the school district calls the police and suspends him pending investigation, no exceptions.
The problem is that the Roman Catholic Church saw things differently. For all practical purposes, a priest doesn't answer to local law enforcement, he answers to the the Church hierarchy. The laws of God outrank the laws of man.
Besides, exposing a predatory priest would harm the Church's reputation, and when you're the chosen instrument of God, that's almost unthinkable. The offending priest has sinned, and must confess and do penance, and perhaps engage in a course of counseling with a friendly Franciscan friar. The grace of God will ensure that he won't sin again.
It isn't just the Roman Catholic Church who have this problem of covering up the unspeakable. The problem exists in the ultra-Orthodox enclaves of Hasidim in New York, and even in the football program at Penn State. It happens anywhere the wealth and reputations of the most powerful members of a group become more important than the welfare of the least.
The Church has issued a number of sincere apologies over the past decade, and paid out millions of dollars in compensation. They promise that things are different now. Meanwhile, Church officials have been quietly working in state legislatures around the country to keep statutes of limitations from being loosened. These statutes set a time limit after which victims cannot bring civil suits and prosecutors cannot press criminal charges. For example, if I run you down in my car and flee the scene, leaving you with a broken pelvis, you have three years from learning my identity to file suit against me in this state. After that, you're too late.
Changing the statute of limitations “has turned out to be the primary front for child sex abuse victims,” said Marci A. Hamilton, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. “Even when you have an institution admitting they knew about the abuse, the perpetrator admitting that he did it, and corroborating evidence, if the statute of limitations has expired, there won’t be any justice,” she said.
Sexual abuse is different from a hit-and-run. Many victims are unable to talk about the abuse or face the perpetrators until they are in their thirties or even later. According to a recent New York Times report, the statute of limitations for most sexual assaults against children extends only to the victim's 23rd birthday.
The Church claims they are merely trying to protect themselves against ambulance-chasing attorneys filing frivolous suits on behalf of profiteering perjurers. But every now and then, a clergyman lets something slip. In late August, the National Catholic Register published an interview with Fr. Benedict Groeschel who had counseled priests involved in abuse. The interview did not stay up online long before being pulled, but the Internet never forgets.
“Suppose you have a man having a nervous breakdown, and a youngster comes after him. A lot of the cases, the youngster - 14, 16, 18 - is the seducer.”
"Well, you know, until recent years, people did not register in their minds that it was a crime. It was a moral failure, scandalous; but they didn’t think of it in terms of legal things.”
“And I’m inclined to think, on their first offense, they should not go to jail because their intention was not committing a crime,” he added.
Still above the petty little laws of man. Still believing that they answer only to a Higher Authority. Who, conveniently, does not exist.