There is a sad and disturbing theme in the recollections of men who allegedly have been abused by priests, a phrase that emerges as insistently as a musical motif in a symphony: “If you tell, no one will believe you.”
Prosecutors say the boy on whom the state of Massachusetts has built its child rape case against the Rev. Paul Shanley told them that phrase was part of Shanley’s standard admonition to him over the seven years in which he was abused. “If you tell, no one will believe you.”
Other victims in other places discovered that was exactly what happened.
“I must live with the knowledge that I have pledged loyalty to an institution that intentionally placed me in harm’s way, then compounded the injury by dismissing my pain,” said a man quoted by Tribune reporter Bonnie Miller Rubin in a recent story on victims who later became priests.
Until now, it appears, refusing to believe victims and dismissing their pain have been standard operating practice for the American Catholic hierarchy. The result has been to throw the church into a crisis as grave as any it has ever faced.
Last week in Dallas, the nation’s Catholic bishops gathered to hammer out a new approach to priestly sexual abuse, one that ideally will elevate concern for the care of victims above concern for the careers of those who prey on them, one that will give due respect to claims of abuse without inviting witch hunts, one that will begin to dispel the clouds of doubt and suspicion that now hover above the Catholic clergy in this country.
Already shattered–and happily–is the shield that enabled the likes of Paul Shanley or John Geoghan to believe they were bulletproof, that even if one of their young victims should tell what had been done to him, “no one will believe” him.
No one, it seems safe to say, will any longer believe the word of a priest simply because he is a priest. What trust these men enjoy will be because they have earned it. And that is as it should be.
What should not be is that priests should be disbelieved and accusations of abuse credited just because they involve priests. There seems little danger of that happening just now, but as was noted on this page a few days ago, witch hunts are a very real danger in circumstances like this one.
In the last analysis, it was the bishops who, by protecting accused and known abusers, cultivated the atmosphere that said to their victims, “If you tell, no one will believe you.” Only the bishops now can change that atmosphere and earn back for themselves the title of Good Shepherds.
