fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Catholic Stockholm Syndrome

On sex abuse, when the faithful are part of the problem
shutterstock_252469630

It’s easy to overlook, or to forget, that the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church was not and is not only one of abusive priests and prelates who covered up for them. If you talk to victims, or read their stories, you will discover in many cases that the people in their parishes — and even family members — did not want to know about these things.

Recently, the Baton Rouge diocese released the names from its files of priests it believed had been credibly accused of sexually abusing minors. One of the worst abusers had been in the parish where an elderly person of my acquaintance lived, though he had moved on before she moved there. Her response? “Oh, that poor priest’s family. He’s been dead all these years, and now they have to read that about him in the paper.”

The children he abused were invisible to her. What she saw as a priest — a figure of respect — held up to contempt in the newspaper, long after he died. Whether she realized it or not, what this old woman was saying, in effect, was: “How sad for us all that we have to know such things about our priests.” Once I calmed down, I tried to think about the issue from her point of view — and that helped me understand better why the crisis festered for so long.

When your worldview depends on believing certain things, you have a powerful disincentive to recognize facts that contradict the narrative. This is human nature. We all do it, though part of doing this is disguising from ourselves what we are doing. I recall getting into arguments about the Iraq War with the war’s supporters, who fell reflexively back on, “We have to support our troops!” — this, as a way to avoid having to reckon with what America was actually doing in Iraq, and why we were doing it. The thing is, in 2003-04, I would have taken refuge in the same kind of argument, though it would have been a more intellectually sophisticated form of self-deception.

Like I said, we all do this from time to time. T.S. Eliot:

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

I admit that I struggle with laypeople who want to dump all this on the bishops and clergy. Yes, it is mostly their fault — no argument there. But can we really say that the laity wanted to know what was happening? To know is to be responsible. I think of the victim I met several times in New York, who had been raped repeatedly by the monsignor who was principal of his Catholic elementary school. When as a child he told his working-class Irish Catholic mother in Queens what monsignor had done to him, she slapped him hard, and told him never, ever to speak ill of a priest. In so doing, she consigned him to be that monsignor’s sex toy. His was an adult life of gay promiscuity (mostly with priests, by his account) and alcoholism before he got sober late in life. His mother bears a lot of responsibility for what happened to him — not as much as the priest who raped him, but her responsibility isn’t nothing, either.

As my own Catholic faith was disintegrating back in 2004 and 2005, I recall once standing in my full parish in Dallas, struggling hard, as I did every Sunday back then, to contain my anger and my emotion. Every other day, it seemed, the newspaper where I worked, The Dallas Morning News, was reporting horrifying news about our own diocese, and the sex abuse cover ups. It had been doing so for years. The Dallas diocese had already paid (in 1997) a massive settlement in the Rudy Kos case, so it’s not like any of this was news to Dallas Catholics. The bishop, Charles Grahmann, had admitted that he never read Kos’s file, and gave him continued access to children. Grahmann was still bishop in 2004 and ’05. The news kept coming. And most people just stood there, placid and uncomplaining, as if this crisis was something happening to Other People Elsewhere.

Thing is, if not for my job, and the fact that I had been writing about the crisis for the prior two or three years, I might have been one of them. It was terrible to know these things, especially if the integrity of the Church and the priesthood was one of the pillars that held up your view of an ordered, just, good world. Nobody wants to know that Father was a pedophile any more than they want to know that Presidents lie. It’s the commonest thing in the world, scapegoating those who bring us bad news.

I say all that as a prelude to an infuriating story in the Wall Street Journal, out of Poland. The Journal reports that quite a few Polish Catholics are standing by their priests even as they acknowledge those priests to have been sex abusers. Excerpts:

There are deep splits in the world-wide Catholic Church over how to handle cases of sexual abuse involving priests, with some clergy and laity arguing that any member of the clergy who sexually abuses a minor should be removed from ministry. Others call for a more flexible, lenient response.

In the U.S., the church has adopted a zero-tolerance approach. Church leaders in Australia, Canada, Ireland and elsewhere also have moved aggressively against clergy who transgress.

But in many other places, including Poland, a less-strict standard prevails. The faithful often defend accused priests. And church leaders can be reluctant to punish abusers.

“You have to exonerate the human being,” said the Rev. Bogdan Jaworowski, a priest in southeastern Poland whose congregation rallied behind a colleague convicted of distributing child pornography.

A priest guilty of distributing child porn — but the congregation is rallying behind him! I wonder what the parents of those children in the videos think.

Here’s what happened to Father Jacek Wentczuk, convicted in 2012 of molesting Ernesta Milkowska, a 15 year old girl whose parents were divorcing, and whom he recruited to act in a play about St. John Paul II. After his conviction in court:

The church defrocked him, but he appealed and the Vatican reversed the ruling. “Because of this, the bishop of the diocese was free to appoint the priest to new assignments,” the Wegrow diocese said in statement to the Journal.

Classmates stopped talking to Ms. Milkowska, other priests blamed her, and neighbors grew cold, her mother said. “We were excluded from the society,” her mother recalls. “We could have escaped, but I wanted to prove to those wool hat ladies at the church that it is not we who are guilty.”

When Father Wentczuk arrived in Wegrow, some locals complained to the bishop. “He shouldn’t be a priest, and he definitely shouldn’t be around children,” said Ewa Swiniarska, a church member. “Older people are more supportive…they grew up in a different world.”

Father Wentczuk was distraught when his bishop told him he was considering transferring him, according to Dr. [Monika] Landzberg, in whom the doctor said the priest confided. The doctor, who describes herself as an atheist, defended the priest to the bishop. “It’s typical man behavior. And this is just a man in a cassock,” she said.

After Father Wentczuk told parishioners he might be moved, dozens of churchgoers stormed the bishop’s office carrying a roll of wallpaper signed by most of the church’s several hundred regulars. People deserve a second chance, one said. Fifteen-year-old girls dress like women, another protested. A week later, the bishop decided to allow him to stay.

Read the whole thing.  These people are guilty of Stockholm Syndrome: identifying with the people who are abusing them.

For all the problems we have in America, at least we are dealing with this evil — imperfectly, God knows, but we’re trying to face it, after all this time. One difficult thing for a religious conservative like me to accept is that the more religious a society is, the less likely it is to identify this cancer within the body of the faithful, and excise it.

But then, people are always religious about something, if not God. Somebody once said that if you want to know who holds power in a society, think of who you cannot criticize. A variation on that: who in this society would you be condemned for reporting as a sex abuser? I don’t have anybody in mind, in case you were wondering, and I think the #MeToo movement is breaking down those barriers. Still, everybody in Hollywood knew about Harvey Weinstein for years … but kept the secret. Movie stars who may wonder why on earth so many Catholic priests and seminarians observed the code of silence about Archbishop McCarrick for all those years should reflect on why so many of them observed the code of silence about Archbishop Weinstein.

That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.

Advertisement

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now