A Catholic reader sent me this tremendous post from Commonweal’s Grant Gallicho, taking stock of the sex abuse/child porn mess in the Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis, which was broken by the reporting of Minnesota Public Radio (MPR). If you haven’t been following the story, Gallicho’s post will bring you up to speed. Gallicho talks in detail about how the previous Archbishop, Harry Flynn, covered up the discovery of a priest’s porn that might involve minors even though he was at the time the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ point man for fixing the abuse scandal. His successor, Abp Nienstedt, was scarcely better. Now Nienstedt has appointed a priest to come up with an “independent lay task force” to investigate what happened and how it could be avoided in the future.

What butt-covering nonsense. Do they really need another panel to find out what the problem is? It’s not the process; it’s the people who run the diocese (and not just the bureaucrats). Gallicho says it well:

[P]erhaps it would be a good idea to stop pretending that these failures had anything to do with policy, and admit that they were entirely the fault of a culture that prized self-protection and secrecy above disclosure and, yes, justice. Is it appalling when an archbishop acknowledges to ecclesiastical authorities that one of his priests is in possession of “borderline illegal” images of children but can’t work up the will to share this information with the civil authorities? Yes. Just as it’s troubling that a bishop who had long won the praise of inaugural members of the USCCB National Review Board apparently promoted a priest who had no business anywhere near children, and then seemingly failed to report a priest who may have downloaded child porn–just two years after he voted to approve the very rules the bishops adopted to address the scandal. But should you be surprised that bishops who fail so miserably have underlings who have trouble reading the reddest of flags?

Of course, it’s not only clerics who help sustain this culture of denial. The maintenance man for the Wehmeyer’s parish told the police that for two years he noticed the same boys going to and from the priest’s camper. “We told [the parish’s business administrator], and she should have done something about it.” Why didn’t he?

That’s right. Passing the buck to avoid having to take responsibility. That man is guilty too. More:

No amount of “safe environment” training can fix this problem. It doesn’t matter how independent a diocesan review board is on paper. Or how many laypeople have been tasked to overhaul a diocese’s abuse policies. Or how sincerely a bishop promises to make room for a review board to do its work. We have seen it time and again. In Philadelphia, where the review board was seeing only the cases the archbishop decided to show them. In Kansas City-St. Joseph, where the review board wasn’t informed of the child pornography on one of their priest’s computers. In Newark, where a priest who admitted to groping a boy sexually was given a hospital assignment and a card proving his good standing. If a bishop decides to keep allegations to himself, he can. If he wants to sabotage strong sexual-abuse policies, he’s free to do so. The only reason you’re reading about any of this is because Jennifer Haselberger went public.

And the only person who can act decisively to change this culture of denial lives in Rome. Do you think he’s listening to MPR?

What he means is that the problem is with the bishops themselves. Until and unless the Pope starts holding bishops accountable, nothing will change. Commonweal, of course, is left of center, and there will be some conservative Catholics who won’t want to listen to them for that reason. That would be a shame, because Gallicho here points to the collapse of moral credibility that bishops like Nienstedt have brought on themselves:

Nienstedt’s service as archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis has been distinguished by an energetic, and expensive, campaign against gay marriage. He recently told a crowd of “influential,” wealthy Catholics that sodomy and pornography were the work of Satan–that they threatened the stability of our civilization. No one could accuse him of failing to take those issues seriously. Except, perhaps, those who take stock of his failures to act in these two cases.

Fight gay marriage for all you’re worth, but turn a blind eye to a gay priest searching out pictures of naked boys, and a gay priest being caught multiple times seeking sex with men? And the archbishop actually thinks people are supposed to take his anti-gay marriage, anti-porn activism seriously? He won’t even police his own priests.

UPDATE: In the comments, a reader (who asked me not to put her remarks in this section) talks about how a family member is living in denial and trying to cover up for two other family members who have been arrested on child porn charges. The reader says her mother is a fundamentalist Protestant, and the reader further suspects that the urge to cover up child abuse like this has little to do with hierarchical churches, and everything to do with human nature.

I think it has to do with people being willing to tell themselves and others any lies they have to for the sake of avoiding facing things they’d rather not face. When it comes to serious sexual transgression — and child sexual abuse (actual or taking pleasure in watching it in porn) is about the worst sexual transgression we can imagine — to acknowledge that it happened is to recognize that nothing can ever be the same again. If Uncle Joe molested children, or Father Bob watches child porn in the rectory, then the system (the family system, the religious system) fails. That’s the fear, anyway. So people deny that it’s really happening, and demand that everybody else accept the Big Lie to keep things from falling apart. What happens is that the thing that might have saved the system — facing the problem openly and honestly, and dealing with it — seems to happen so rarely.