Disclosure:
Before I get into the gist of this issue, I must highlight a disclosure. My mother attended daily Mass frequently. My brothers and I attended a Catholic grammar school until grade nine when I, as the youngest, transferred to public schools. My oldest brother, however, attended a Catholic high school. During our grammar school years we had to attend a Roman Catholic religion class every day. I received high grades in my religion classes. My other grades were not that good.
The punch line is that at the age of fifteen I was targeted by one of my confessors, a predator priest, seeking gratification for his sexual preferences. I did not receive professional treatment until 45 years later when I went into crisis concerning my experience of abuse from that priest to whom I confessed my ‘sins’ struggling with puberty issues. Thus, I am not neutral about child sexual abuse.
Gratitude:
I am so pleased to witness persons and institutions not connected to the RCC shedding their fear of the RCC and treating it as any other institution is, or should be, treated. Teachers, psychiatrists, psychologists and other individuals who work confidentially with others are not exempt from reporting their concerns about harm that might be, or has been, perpetrated on others especially when children are involved. These individuals are known as mandatory reporters. They are obligated to report to civil authorities their concerns and/or knowledge of possible criminal activity regarding personal harm. The RCC says that the ‘holiness’, the ‘confidentiality,’ of the confessional is sacred. Wrong. If a religion wrote dogma that under certain circumstances, an individual may kill another person for breach of religious law (say adultery), then would the civil law against murder be overruled by the sanctity of ‘sacred law’? Is God, via the confessional, the protector of criminal activity? The theology of the above stated sanctity of the confessional relegates God as the protective cover for those who prey on children (and others) thereby escaping civil accountability for their deeds.
What is Not Explained to the General Public:
The confessional was never a place to enable the repetition of serious (grievous) sins. Every single time I confessed my sins in the confessional I was given a penance (a chore) that had to be completed in order to demonstrate my sincere regret for my sinning behavior. The priest determined the penance to be done. Almost every time, I was given a set of prayers to complete: five Hail Marys, the rosary, or attend the Stations of the Cross. It could be anything the priest deems appropriate. Upon this point, the RCC can take a critical step in protecting children, preserving the sanctity of the confession and helping the souls of the sinners get to a heavenly reward. The Pope and in turn the RCC can decree that all individuals hearing confessions and providing absolution to those confessing child sexual abuse (or any sexual abuse), regardless of his or her station within the Church, must, as a penance, report their offense to the civil authorities. The person hearing the confession does not break the ‘confidentiality’ of the confession; but, the sinner does not escape true atonement for the sin because he or she must face the civil consequences of the behavior. This would be an appropriate penance for those who commit child sexual abuse or any other serious crime. The RCC agents could then support the ‘sinner’ as he or she endures the path of his or her appropriate atonement via the civil response to the grievous matter of the behavior.
Some church officials and/or theologians may refute this suggestion as inappropriate because others may decide not to confess such a sin for fear of the civil accountability and thus the soul would be lost to Satan. This would be an intellectual illusion. One of the requirements of the individual confessing is to sincerely pledge to never do the sin again. Don’t confess the crime unless you are willing to do the penance. Don’t confess your crime to avoid corporal atonement for your behavior and instead be damned for all eternity because you failed to confess a mortal sin. There is a corollary to this mandatory penance: If the original penance (reporting oneself to the civil authorities) was unfulfilled, then all other subsequent confessions would be suspect. The unrepentant sinner having refused to do the original penance would have demonstrated his or her contempt for the sacrament of penance.
I suspect that those in power within the Roman Catholic Church would not go for such a solution for fear that the Church would lose membership. If the penance required by priests in the confessional fit the actual behavior of the committed sin, instead of some abstract prayer that bears no relationship to the actual offending behavior, then how many individuals would ascribe to such a faith? The confessional would no longer be an abstract cover for sinning behavior, especially for repeating the same sin over and over. Is this not a central point presented in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor“? Is not the true function of the confessional to change one’s behavior, change one’s life to gain entrance into the kingdom of heaven, and not merely the forgiving of sins (and escaping civil accountability for one’s offenses)? Is not heaven earned by one’s behavior and not by someone else’s pronouncements over another? But, here, at this point, with the pronouncement of this last stated rhetorical question, I open the door to religious believers so that they may retreat into their beliefs. Some would refute:
“God’s law is above Man’s law. Peter was given the power of Jesus Christ to lead His Church here on Earth. Jesus said to His apostles, (Matthew 18:18) ‘I assure you, whatever you declare bound on earth shall be held bound in heaven, and whatever you declared loosed on earth shall be loosed in heaven.’ And again in John 20: 22,23, it is written: ‘He [Jesus] breathed on them and said: ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive men’s sins, they are forgiven them; if you hold them bound, they are held bound.’ The power of God is with all priests via Peter and the Apostles as bequeath by Jesus, Himself. If the priest forgives, it is forgiven. End of story.”
I stand corrected. Behavior has nothing to do with getting into heaven. The magical pronouncement of words are all that is needed so long as they are pronounced by the designated individual.
This is a serious trap if not a significant flaw of the ‘religion’ professed by the RCC. If an individual’s sin (criminal behavior) is wiped out by some pronouncement of ‘sacred words’ by appointed (anointed) persons then individuals are freed from all earthly consequences of his or her criminal actions. Theologians could argue that this same procedure occurs every day in our courts. A group of 12 men and women pronounce the guilt or innocence of the individual or individuals being tried. Pronouncements are made. Individuals go free.
Decisions have to be made. Again we arrive at a point that highlights the need for individuals to be educated. To make an informed decision regarding the sanctity of the confessional over the protection of our children requires individuals to be as educated as possible to think through significant, critical issues and to evaluate conclusions made that are pertinent to the issues at hand. At the same time these educated individuals must respect and be open to the wonder and mystery of life’s experience and be open to the fact that we cannot know everything that needs to be known. A strong education is needed to perceive that the pronouncement by 12 jurors after a trial with the public display of evidence and arguments is not the same pronouncement made by a lone priest over an individual confessing alone in secret, in a lightless confessional.
One of the cultural mores that permeates the RCC is that a mortal sin (thus a sin provoking eternal damnation if unconfessed) is committed if an individual ‘brings scandal upon the Church’. This is how this works in the mind of a child: ‘If I accuse a holy person of a very bad act (touching me sexually) I will bring scandal upon the church’. The sinning behavior is transferred from the predator to the victim. To compound this problem, the parent, who is informed by the child of the abusive action, is faced with the same dilemma: ‘Do I report this accusation and bring scandal upon the church?’ Or, does this parent simply respond to the child: ‘No priest would ever do such a thing. He is a man of God.’ Remember also that this parent has received the same training from his or her earliest years and so the training is well engrained in the psychological profile of the parent. This mandate to “not bring scandal upon the church” is hugely beneficial for maintaining secrecy from secular eyes.
There exists another element that fostered the years (decades) of child sexual abuse and coverup. The infallibility of the Church is intimately entangled with the fact that the Church is made up of humans and humans are not infallible. This dilemma allows for an interesting side-stepping dance. The Church doesn’t make mistakes; the humans in the Church make the mistakes because after all God is perfect and God in His Three Persons (the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit) is perfect, infallible. If the body of the Church is infused with the Holy Spirit; how could that body (the collective body of the Church officials) allow and participate in the perpetuation of the vast violation and tragedy of pervasive child sexual abuse for decades on an immense scale by the very body that is infused with the Holy Spirit? Answer: It wasn’t the Holy Spirit; it was the individual church official who made the mistakes. It was each individual who perpetrated the sexual abuse; it was each individual who was bringing scandal upon the Church and it was each individual who decided to protect the Church from such scandal by covering it up and shipping the abuser to another community of children, and it was the individual who decided not to tell the receiving parishioners that a child sexual abuser was entering service to their community. All these individuals acted as individuals who, unfortunately, sinned and didn’t feel the presence of God.
While I understand this position in human terms, I also understand this response as a pat answer of a human attempting to avoid or minimize responsibility, accountability and the admission of a grievous ‘mistake’. I also recognize that if it was truly a mistake, then the error occurred by some accident or lapse of understanding. Such a response seems to imply that these actions by the Church were not deliberate and consciously undertaken. The longevity, the global scale, and the vast number of the known victims of these protected perpetrators of abuse belies any statement or implication that this was done unconsciously or without deliberation. The vast amounts of money spent on lawyers, the public relations spinning of responses, and the maligning of outspoken victims, etcetera over decades, all speak to the conscious, deliberate attempt to avoid responsibility, the covering up of behavior, and the silencing of any attempt to discover the truth of the matter. The RCC, the Pope and all others who ascribe to the pat answer described above are trying to have it both ways — the infallibly Perfect, and fallible humankind (capable of great evil).
As a corollary to this terrible tragedy perpetrated within (if not by) the Roman Catholic Church (RCC), there is a book, Fallen Order, by Karen Liebreich (copyright of 2004 and first printed in Great Britain by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Groove Atlantic Ltd). On the inside of the jacket for this book, the reader is given a synopsis of the text:
“For hundreds of years the Piarist Order of priests has been known for its history of important contributions to eduction, science, and culture. Throughout Italy, Spain, and central Europe, the order’s schools evolved from shelters created to educate poor children into exclusive private academies. Thousands of children were educated at Piarist schools, including Mozart, Goya, Schubert, Victor Hugo, Johann Mendel, and a host of astronomers, kings, emperors, presidents, even a pope. Yet in 1646, the Piarist Order was abruptly abolished by Pope Innocent X, an unprecedented step not seen since the Knights Templar were suppressed for heresy in the fourteenth century.
Fallen Order is the stunning story of how the sexual abuse of children, practiced by some of the leading priests in the order, led to The Piarists’ collapse.”
This corollary is important because Fallen Order demonstrates that the contemporary tragedy of child sexual abuse within the RCC that first exploded publicly with the Boston Globe’s exposé regarding the Boston Massachusetts Archdiocese in 2002 was not the first time such an organized sexual abuse tragedy occurred inside the RCC. The journalism efforts by the Boston Globe research team of journalists was made into the movie, Spotlight, (2015). After viewing the movie, muster up all the remaining fortitude that you have left and sit through the scrolling of the list of the global extent to which this terrible tragedy metastasized in your life time.
Remember that all of what you viewed in that movie is what is known. This represents the victims that are known. I, being a survivor who has shared with other survivors, know of others who have not come forward. There are many that are unknown. If the RCC had its way, we would all be unknown. Finally, a significant accounting that has never been reported for whatever reasons (difficult to research, no one cared to document, and so forth) is the number of suicides related to this tragedy. I know of at least one. Other survivors have conveyed to me that they know of others. The number of those exposed to this tragic occurrence is huge. Take just one individual survivor and seek to understand the depth of the black hole into which the soul plummeted in order to grasp the damage done to the individual and you begin to grasp the magnitude of the destructive power of this tragedy. Quantitatively, the said total magnitude of this horrific tragedy would be the number of individuals times the depth of each dark hole.
Given this understanding I want to return to the reflection that decisions have to be made in spite of our inability to know all that is pertinent to the significant and critical issues at hand. The decision that has to be made regarding governance is whether ‘sacred’ law should rule over ‘civil’ or ‘secular’ law or vice versa. Is this decision to be made based on pure emotion? Is it to be decided upon one’s pure intellect?
I contend that neither pure intellect nor pure emotion should rule any decision. I stand squarely, confidently and steadfastly upon all that Joe’s Honor Coin encompasses. We must see a thing (an issue, a person, a reality) for what it is; nothing more; nothing less, knowing that there is much we do not know or have only a fleeting vague perception of its being. We must incorporate our suspicions — whether they have validity or whether they are our biases or prejudices trying to sway us from the truth we do not want to see or whether they are our intuition recognizing subtleties of understanding triggered by something mysteriously perceived by something in us that is unknown to us consciously. We must nurture ourselves and others in the virtues of Truth, Honesty, Honor, Respect and Reciprocity. A critical component for achieving a high standard regarding this aspiration is acquiring as much true education (as opposed to ‘training’) as possible.
Human history must be considered when deciding which has dominion — civil or church law? History has recorded religious practices that appease or gain favor of the gods through human sacrifice. Should a religion ordaining such a practice in our country be allowed the freedom to practice such a tradition or should civil law prosecute to the fullest of the civil statute against murder? On the other hand can the lawmakers of civil laws pass legislation that confiscates, imprisons or deports members of a religion because the religious beliefs and practices are offensive to the ruling culture? It has happened before. German civil law killed thousands upon thousands of Jewish members because they were Jews. Native Americans were forbidden to practice Sun Dancing. Civil laws have been written by human communities to harass and otherwise make life miserable for individuals who practice a religion considered to be unacceptable to the ruling culture.
When considering the question of the governance regarding sacred law and civil law, we are ultimately struggling with the nature of the reality we designate with the term “community”. What makes a community a community? The heart of the community is the value system around which the community is built. While many small communities may be formed within a much larger community, those smaller communities cannot deviate with extreme significance from the core principles of the value system around which the larger community is built. In a larger community which has religious tolerance as a core value, the tension between sacred law and civil law is resolved via the civil court system which interprets the community’s legislated decrees.
Regardless of the decision regarding the dominance of civil law or sacred law, the common element which determines prejudice, double standards, injustices, and atrocities etcetera is the human character. At the core of all communities, religious or secular is the human individual acting collectively. Prejudice, double standards, injustices, atrocities, exploitation and bullying et cetera are human motivations precipitating the actions of human creatures regardless of the robes that they wear.