The Silence We Keep: A Nun's View of the Catholic Priest Scandal (9 page)

It’s as though it’s in fulfillment of Scripture, and clearly by the power of a very Holy Spirit, that the silence kept for centuries is destined to be spoken now, bringing all the dark deeds and deadly sins of the fathers into the light of day. “Nothing is concealed that is not being revealed, and nothing hidden that will not become known” (Matt. 10:26). We were warned by Jesus more than two thousand years ago that this would happen. And even though it did take that long for us to see, we’re beginning to.

I believe what we see in the Catholic priesthood is the beginning of the end. We see that the Church Fathers don’t practice what they preach when it comes to celibacy, homosexuality, birth control, abortion, and all sexual activity outside marriage. Sex scandals and criminal activity continue to spin out of control, as does public ridicule of clerical crimes, now topping the monologues of nearly every talk show host. That’s part of what we have to look forward to in the months and years to come. This priesthood has made of itself a laughingstock, and we are just beginning to see the heights and depths of the hypocrisy, scandal, and betrayal. And what’s to come is likely to get far worse before it gets better, especially given what feels like the divine forces of Fate at work in the unfolding of events.

Every time I get news of another soul-stunning scandal, as happens almost daily, I can’t help but feel that we are being touched once again by a hidden God. Some huge truth gets set free and some enormous evil once again becomes its own undoing. Everything that’s been concealed is being revealed. So out of control is criminal sexual activity in the priesthood that they cannot help but end up in the daily news, not even while attending the pope’s 2002 Summer Youth Rally in Toronto. The news from the end of the rally revealed two priests in their sixties from New Jersey were arrested downtown by police one night as part of a pimping and prostitution sting. According to church authorities, neither priest had a previous record. As one critic said, “I bet all the pedophile priests attended the pope’s Youth Rally.” I bet the same. If this is not the beginning of the end of this “laughable” priesthood, then what in God’s name is it? When all the Church Fathers inspire today is anger, division, disgust, and ridicule, we can be absolutely sure that these are not “men of God” and clearly not the priesthood of Jesus Christ. The deadly sins of Church Fathers are being heaped upon all of us whether we like
it or not, coming to us with the divine forces of Fate and all the signs of the hidden presence of God—and an angry God at that.

We are now all forced to see that sexual permissiveness and deviance has an old, unreformed soul in the Catholic priesthood. An April 2002 article by Maureen Orth in
Vanity Fair
on the indicted pedophile priest Paul Shanley quotes Richard Cardinal Cushing, who was at the time the archbishop of Boston and was leading a retreat for seminarians, that the theologian Fr. Richard McBrien (two years behind Shanley in the seminary) never forgot:

Men, if you’re going to do it, do it with a woman—don’t do it with another man. And if you get her pregnant, come to me—I’ll take care of it.

It appears as though the Catholic Church has a long Vatican-approved tradition of encouraging responsible sex in the priesthood. And it sends chills up my spine thinking of all the women who were “taken care of” in that way by the Catholic Church, whether by financial settlements, adoption, or priestly pressure to abort. It’s a heart stopper and an eye opener for me, not to mention the women tormented by the church’s teachings against them on birth control and abortion—mortal sins for women, not men, and clearly not for the “men of God” in the priesthood. I imagine Cardinal Cushing’s fatherly advice is just a tiny glimpse of the teachings that created this priesthood, as we’re beginning to see its criminally deviant results. With every new revelation of scandal, it appears as though karmic laws of Fate are indeed at work, some divine force beyond the church’s control that’s breaking the silence, some hidden God revealing painful truths that serve to set us free from the erroneous teachings of misguided Church Fathers.

For all who believe blindly that this whole mess is the result of the anti-Catholic media seeing things that aren’t there and making up scandals, there’s a growing mound of research that demonstrates this is no illusion. A vast majority of Catholic priests worldwide are living openly or secretly uncelibate lives. Data on sexual activity in the priesthood demonstrate what everyone seems to know and accept, but no one, especially the Vatican, admits as really happening. The Catholic priesthood is nowhere near as celibate as the Catholic Church still wants us to believe. It reminds me of the wisdom of
The X-Files:
Nothing is as it appears. But here we have statistics to prove it.

In 1990, a former monk and current psychotherapist, Richard Sipe, conducted a study of clerical sexual habits.
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Believing the results to be conservative given what he knew, he reported approximately 20 percent of priests were sexually active with women, with another 10 percent thinking about it seriously. He also found 20 percent were homosexual, 10 percent of whom were sexually active, 4 percent of those with children. Some critics and seminarians, and most sisters I asked, felt the numbers should be doubled. Sex researchers also talk about the likelihood of an underreporting bias in sex research. So if you double the numbers, and add a little more for priestly bias, that’s an overwhelming majority. Nearly every priest was sexually active or thinking about it. And that was more than ten years ago.

All over the world, research demonstrates that celibacy among priests is practiced mainly in the breach. In Brazil and Indonesia, where there is little cultural value to celibacy, it is more common than not for priests (60 to 70 percent) to have wives, lovers, and affairs. And in parts of Africa where polygamy is common, the burning question among priests is not celibacy, but limiting themselves to one wife. In Latin America, it’s reported that approximately 80 percent of Peruvian priests
marry or live with women. A Peruvian sister explained that many of those priests are missionaries who live alone in isolated areas and in another culture where celibacy is neither valued nor expected of priests by the people. The whole world sees that Catholicism no longer has (and probably never had) a celibate priesthood. All evidence points to the contrary. We can all see now that the mandatory celibate part of the Catholic priesthood has already changed, and without a Vatican Council.

Even more disturbing than what we know about the Catholic priesthood is what we don’t know about the criminal and immoral activity going on. And the worst revelations are yet to come. If this is what we’ve been forced to know after decades, if not centuries of hidden criminal activity, can you imagine what we don’t see and what we’ll never know? If this is what court-ordered documents reveal, imagine what must have been shredded and destroyed. Out of everything we see in the priesthood, the silence priests are bound to keep is the deepest kiss of death, full of the unwillingness to change anything, especially their minds and their privileged unpriestly lives. At a time when the whole world looks at the Catholic priesthood with outrage, Church Fathers appear to wrap themselves in the silence of the brotherhood, offering heartfelt apologies void of the whole truth and pastoral advice to “weather the storm” and “move on.” The silence demanded by the Church Fathers in the face of their crimes and misdemeanors is the most disturbing silence of all. If we decide to keep it.

Garry Wills writes in depth about the institutionalized “conspiracy of silence” that exists from pope to priest, and most likely as well to bankers, lawyers, judges, law enforcement, and media. Aiders and abettors galore swirl around this scandal, and more
silence than we’ll ever know is being kept criminally safe by them, too. It looks as if a very highly organized system of protection and silence has been smoothly operating in the Catholic Church for a very long time. Wills calls them structures of deceit, building blocks of the priesthood. That’s not being sarcastic. That’s the only way any of this could possibly happen and stay so hidden for so long—plenty of high-powered help, both in and out of the Catholic Church, from the very start. “Keeping the silence” has all the markings of the Inquisition of the twenty-first century. In the name of God (and not spreading the scandal) the Church Fathers demand blind obedience to everything they ask, and forbid its priests from breaking the silence of the brotherhood. The unbroken tradition of keeping priestly silence rules: No dissent allowed.

One deadly sound of silence so striking in the priesthood is that of its priests, good ones included, who aren’t telling everything they know. It feels criminal to see how claims of abuse remain the burden of the victims and their families. I’ve yet to hear more than a handful of reports by brother priests, superiors, or communities coming forward first to spare victims further anguish. Certainly, priests must know who their pedophile brothers are. Everyone else seems to. The
Boston Globe
knows. The
New York Times
knows. And the
National Catholic Reporter
makes sure Catholics know. All over the world reports of abuse continue to be made public, but not yet from within the priesthood or the Catholic Church. Clerical lips remain sealed regardless of new zero-tolerance policies, and the unwillingness to be absolutely truthful only intensifies. Minds that haven’t changed for thousands of years are not likely to be moved by new rules and guidelines.

In the silence kept by the priesthood, what we see is an inability to change its ways of thinking, its criminal and immoral ways of acting, its refusal to change in any way at all. We see a refusal
even to admit that we are now a house so corrupt within that the Catholic Church cannot exist as it is much longer. The People of God cannot stand it as it is much longer. We are seeing that happen in Boston, in New York, and in Los Angeles. If it’s not happening in your home town, do not for one second believe that it’s not a problem. In a survey conducted by the
New York Times
, reporter Laurie Goodstein writes of how the “Trail of Pain in Church Crisis Leads to Nearly Every Diocese.”
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Every region of the country was seriously affected, “with 206 accused priests in the West, 246 in the South, 325 in the Midwest and 434 in the Northeast.” This is the Body of Christ we are talking about, and if one of its vital organs is terminally diseased, then the whole body is dying, whether the pain has hit or not. It’s just a matter of time.

It does not appear as though the priesthood can reform itself today any more than it did in the Middle Ages. The church leaders have yet to see the problem. What we’re likely to see instead of real progress is what we’ve known all along: denial, denial, denial—possibly with better behavior, though that remains to be seen. The most blatant cases of abuse are still being fought in court and resisted by the church. (When it comes to the sexual abuse of children, there is no such thing as statutes of limitations.) Evidence is hidden and suppressed, if not destroyed, and justice is being obstructed by those who are quickest to condemn injustice in everyone else. Acting as a law unto itself, the Catholic Church’s defiance of the civil laws of the land continues as though there is no problem at all, certainly not as big as the one I see.

The inability to change is the clearest sign we know of predictable corruption and death. Whatever doesn’t grow and change dies naturally. Natural death by corruption and decadence appears to be part of the transformation at work in the priesthood today. By forces clearly beyond anyone’s control, the
conspiracy of silence that binds the priesthood has finally become its own soulful undoing. With divine forces of Fate coming to meet them, the silence that so many victims swore to God to keep is being moved fearlessly to speak, moved to tell the horror of what their kept silence concealed, moved to speak the unspeakable. In one way or another, the truth is being set free.