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When you are dealing with an international organization that has a proven track record of top-to-bottom corruption that has been going on for decades in all organizational sites around the world, you are not dealing with a organization with some corrupt. people. You are dealing with a corrupt organization. Rebecca Hamilton
The “organization” I’m talking about is the Catholic Church, and the corruption is the generational, endemic, worldwide scandal, systematically supported, aided, abetted, and defended of clergy sexual abuse.
The first reaction of Church leaders when, in 2002, the Boston Globe began reporting what amounted to institutional sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests in Massachusetts Catholicism, was outraged outrage. As the scandal began to spread, the bishops reacted with the puffy emphasis of an embarrassed cat. Then as it got bigger, they started talking about how they had made a “mistake”, an “error in judgment”. Since this “mistake” has involved thousands of abused children, years of relationships with lawyers, complicated confidential cash settlements, and decades of transferring priests from one parish to another so they can continue. to abuse, rape, assault and destroy children. at leisure, it did not hold too well.
Then they started saying silly things like they didn’t know what celibacy meant. There was also a lot of talk about how we were supposed to forgive the child molester, which, of course, begged the whole question of putting the abuser back to where he could abuse again, and doing that. Many times.
The scandal has now moved to the point that the bishops admit their predecessors botched things up, but they follow up with the claim that things are better now. Lay members go through extensive background checks before they can work with children, and the Pope has started to kick out an occasional child molester, including a few bishops. In Chile, all the bishops nationwide had to be dismantled because of their broad support for child abuse.
Of course, the bishops also call on those of us in the pews to engage in fasting and penance for… what? Be so stupid that we believed them?
Frankly, I see the bishops’ call to the laity to engage in fasting and penance for the fact that their bishops and priests have preyed on the children of the laity as yet another manifestation of the sexual predator’s habitual defense against the victim. .
This case of blaming victims of sexual predation for the predator’s crimes is commonplace in Catholic education and practice with respect to women. I will write a lot about this in the future. But for now, I will simply say that I consider the call of the bishops to the laity to engage in fasting and penance because the laity have been victims of these same bishops who reek of priestly arrogance and the blame of the victims. It is also more than a little stupid that so many lay Catholics accept this false reasoning of their bishops without a doubt.
I think there is something close to consensus in the pews that bishops have been wrong to support child sexual abuse and rape in their churches. I also think there is almost the same consensus that bishops who engage in this kind of behavior themselves should be tried and sent to jail like any other sexual predator.
Where the consensus crumbles is how Catholics can deal with this monstrosity of sin and failure, this clear and undeniable proof that it is not just a few bad apples, that whether in the priesthood or the episcopate. The sexual predators who rape, assault, abuse, and prey on the honeycomb lay people of our Church, and they have been encouraged, protected, and permitted to continue to destroy people by the Church as an institution as far back as we went in our search for records. This corruption extends throughout the Church, from top to bottom, from pope to priest, and all over the world.
How do we deal with the fact – and at this point it certainly seems to be a fact and not a conjecture – that while the sacraments are conduits of grace that we have all experienced, the priesthood that brings us these sacraments is, on some fundamental and essential level, corrupted to the core?
I will postulate that this corruption is not a sealed thing, that it permeates the Church’s teaching on sexuality, especially its teachings on women, and that it clearly affects the way the Church treats powerful men in the worlds of politics and commerce who are themselves predators.
I believe the Church’s amoral and corrupt practice of pampering sexual predation within its ranks extends beyond the borders of the Church and into the way it interacts with men of power in our larger society. . More than that, it affects what the Church teaches us – in fact, what she demands of us about what she tells us is the peril of our souls – about how we respond to tyrants and predators in top of our company.
Corruption as widespread and pervasive as sexual corruption within the Catholic Church cannot be confined to one sphere of activity. It will inevitably permeate his thinking in all areas.
The Catholic Church is corrupt. And this corruption affects her relationships with people and what she teaches us about politics, power, and other corrupt areas of power in our wider society.
If you want to understand why the Church rejects the sexual predation of power politicians with a clerical gesture, why it has no shame in telling people that they will go to hell if they don’t vote to empower hateful women. , racists, corrupt monsters, all you have to do is watch the way the Church has treated its own children. Consider the depth and breadth of corruption it takes for an institution the size and scope of the Catholic Church to engage in sexual predation against trusting and innocent laymen all over the world for decades and decades, then stop being surprised that it is so easily corrupted by the money and the power of power politics.
It is not necessary to think very hard to understand why the bishops were not disturbed by the sexual predations of a Roy Moore or of a Donald Trump; why the lie, cheating, theft, insurgency and death brought by Trump didn’t bother them.
Bishops have systematically covered and empowered men wearing collars like Trump for as far as we can get. It turns out that many of the bishops and leaders are men like Trump themselves.
The question that torments me is not whether my church is corrupt or not. The facts that say so are piling up to the heavens.
Nor am I tormented by the temptation to allow these corrupt men to push me into supporting a sexual predator for high office. The bishops do not vote me. I vote me.
But this other question, this misery half taken from loving the Church for her good and knowing that the sacraments are real, that God still consents to come to us through these fallen men; that’s what beats to me.
I can’t figure out how to stay and leave, both at the same time. I am a whole person.
I tried, as hard as anyone could try, to get over it. I wanted to do the Catholic thing and put on my Catholic blinders and just slip through the eye of the needle la-la-la-my way past the lies. But it ended in Kavanaugh.
I cannot put on the Catholic mantle of passivity in the face of abuse by the clergy, and I am absolutely and without a doubt convinced that the behavior of bishops regarding sexual predation, both inside and outside the Church. Church, is abusive in the extreme. I am also convinced that the brutal politicization of the Gospels and the Eucharist to bring political water to an increasingly violent fascist American political right is both abusive and anti-Christ.
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