When Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George met in January with 200 parishioners from St. Agatha Parish about his assignment there of a known priest sexual predator, the overseer of an afterschool program at the parish said she saw children knocking on the rectory’s back door last fall and then going in.
“I am hurting,” she is quoted as saying in press reports. “I pray God will forgive me for not speaking out earlier.”
Many others could repeat her words. Rectories are public venues frequented by volunteers, vendors and business people. Parishioners arrive for counseling, to arrange weddings or baptisms, or request copies of records. Volunteers, the lifeblood of both school and parish, drop off papers or attend meetings. Staff are not often alone. If one employee saw children visit, others saw the same thing.
Yet we don’t hear other admission. Where are other witnesses?
Sexual abuse by priests could not continue for decades without the active complicity of not only priests, bishops and cardinals but lay witnesses in schools and rectories where priests work and live.
She goes on to recount two incidents: a conference for those ministering to AIDS/HIV victims that became a cruising ground for priests and then her own experience of overhearing three teen boys ask a priest with whom they were going to spend the weekend if they could watch the Playboy channel again:
I sat in a campus chaplaincy commons, waiting for a friend. Three young boys bounded joyfully in, storming into the pastor’s open office, announcing that they were spending the weekend with Father. From inside his office, before the door closed, I heard excited voices loudly asking, “Please. Please. Can we watch the Playboy channel again?”
Laughter stopped. The door closed. Silence. My friend arrived. We left. At dinner, I recounted the occurrence, still hearing the boys’ words. A trusted priest said he could do nothing, telling me to report it to the bishop. I had, anonymously. Fr. Friend said that anonymous reports are automatically destroyed.
She rightly asks…why the silence? She has no firm answers. I’d say there are a number of factors: fear of authority and its power, a sense of hopelessness that anything could actually be done, a cognitive dissonance that refuses to believe that a priest could do this – particularly a priest one likes or admires (which is more often than not, the M.O. of the perp, currying favor and popularity so that no one could ever ever believe that he could do such a thing…and one could guess that a perp priest would take special care to manufacture this image with his staff and volunteers, yes? )
There is also the simple fact that anyone who knows anything about how these things work knows that those who reveal these unpleasant truths are not exactly celebrated. Because diocesan structures are so tight, and so essentially centered on the maintenance of clerical culture, and because most bishops are not boat-rockers (which is why they are selected to be bishops in the first place), people who come forward – lay or ordained – usually end up getting punished, somehow, in some way.
It all works to nurture cowardice.
Laity also tend to give priests a massive benefit of the doubt. We are coming from an era in which a priest who had a special connection with youth was a prize rather than an object of suspicion. People, we have heard over and over again from parents of victims, were grateful that Father took an interest in their son.
Many laity also have a subtle condescending sense of pity for priests, seeing them as overgrown children, of a sort – the good sons they never had, the almost-pathetic bachelor and so on. Priests don’t like it, but it’s there, and it’s one more factor in keeping priests up on a perverse kind of pedestal, a combination of clericalism and infantilization that prevents the laity from seeing their priests clearly, in their goodness…and in their faults.
But even then – and this could have been part 2 of her column – and perhaps it will be – we have seen, so many times, parishes rising in "support" and applauding their priest who has been guilty of something like this.
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