Can anything good come out of Los Angeles? Or, for that matter, out of any Roman Catholic diocese dealing with revelations of priests sexually abusing children?
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles has just released the personnel files of 126 priests accused of sexual misconduct dating back to the 1920s. They provide, according to The New York Times, a “numbing chronicle of 75 years of the church’s shame, revealing case after case in which the church was warned of abuse but failed to protect its parishioners.” In a narrative similar to that of Cardinal Bernard Law’s dealings with Boston priests, we are told that Cardinal Roger Mahony “and his predecessors quietly shuffled the priests off to counseling and then to new assignments.” Parents of victims were “offered counseling for their children and were urged to remain silent,” according to the Times.
We have sat stunned through these acts of an American tragedy many times. In the first act, people who are supposed to be heroic commit a terrible crime and hatch a cover-up during the intermission that ends up being exposed in the second act.
It may be as dangerous to try to put the reactions of Roman Catholic bishops into this context. Nonetheless, and despite its random obtuseness and insensitivity, the church responded to the sex-abuse crisis in the same way that other great institutions handled such problems during that long period before the country paid much attention to the victims.
Our consciousness of the impact of traumas on those who suffer from being sexually abused is relatively recent. Only as the Space and Information Age destroyed the foundations of a hierarchical system that immunized the powerful on top of its pyramids did we even examine the rights, much less the human suffering, endured by the powerless at its lowest level.
In classic institutions, from government to the courts to the universities, and in less classic settings such as business and sports, the same reflexes were not only used but were culturally accepted.
If a judge, a university dean, a company president or a Hollywood star drank too much, made a pass at a waitress or a caddy at the golf club, or smashed his car through a bakery window, the accepted response was to protect the professional, to get him some psychological help, perhaps in a hospital or clinic, to keep the incident out of the papers, and to ignore, threaten or cajole the victims into silence by paying for any damages. It was the American way. A preferential option for the professional permeated American culture. The silent majority’s lot in life was to buck up, keep its head down, and not disturb its betters with its weeping.
This professional paradigm fits into the Golden Age of Therapy in which high-class or famous offenders were thought to have rights to our attention and respect. What we now call cover-ups were then thought humane and high-minded because they preserved or restored the good order of American life. Get the sobered-up judge back on the bench, the dean back behind his desk, the rock star back on the concert stage and life could resume for everybody in the three-quarter rhythm of an era as falsely innocent as the waltz-time of pre-World War I Vienna.
The Therapeutic Era of “I’m OK, You’re OK” was also the no-fault period in which we wanted everything settled, from car crashes to divorces, without anybody being blamed for anything. Many in the therapeutic class claimed that divorce did not harm children. Only a generation later did other researchers acknowledge that divorce had its victims, usually children who bore their wounds, it was learned, into their own adult years.
We live now in the Class-action Lawsuit Age in which we want to place blame on somebody, anybody, usually members of that once privileged professional class, large institutions, or such industries as drug manufacturers who are presumed to be out to get rather than serve us.
The Roman Catholic bishops acted just like many chief executive officers who bought into the mores of a lost-and-gone time where rehabilitation and return to work were the objectives after a fall from grace. In short, the bishops acted humanly, fallibly, like men trapped on the highest level of a building that was collapsing. They suffered from the misapprehensions of all hierarchs that their first duty was to save the structure and its owners rather than the people living in it. But they did not set out as hard-hearted men who wanted to harm others or cover up crimes. They thought, God help them, that they were doing the right thing.
No wonder they seem defensive, unsure of themselves and still unable to comprehend the human tragedy whose real meaning they have not yet fully appreciated. They will only regain the trust of their people and rehabilitate the church in the public eye when they shed their hierarchical worldview and stand on the same level with the suffering to whom neither they nor we paid enough attention for so long a time.
