How Religious Institutions Obtain Silence
I wrote earlier today about the terrible example of Cardinal Angelo Sodano, and how he protected the evil — there is no other word — sex abuser Father Marcial Maciel for decades. Maciel and his fabulously wealthy order, the Legion of Christ, spread money around the Roman curia generously for decades. That cash bought a lot of silence and averted eyes from men in high places. And the Legion required its priests to take a private vow never to speak ill of Maciel and their superiors. Holiness, in this construct, required silence.
To be very clear, none of what she writes about here involves sexual abuse. The comparison is how Jerry Falwell Jr. and the leadership of this Evangelical institution tamps down criticism and dissent. You’ll see the Maciel parallel in two basic ways: it makes open dissent a spiritual issue, and it spreads around cash to buy goodwill, in effect. Here’s how the story begins:
Micah Protzman was a junior at Liberty University the first time he was summoned to David Nasser’s office. Protzman had tweeted a complaint about the speakers at recent Convocation services on campus, a lineup that included conservative firebrand Dinesh D’Souza and Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. Attendance at “Convo” is mandatory, and Protzman was disgusted. Nasser, the school’s senior vice president for spiritual development, retweeted Protzman’s complaint to his followers, and Protzman replied by slamming the school’s “blind ideology.” Within a few hours, Protzman got an invitation from Nasser’s office to talk.
To Protzman’s eye, everything in Nasser’s sprawling office suite was perfect: industrial chic decor, fresh flowers, floor-to-ceiling windows. There was a fridge of custom Coke bottles and stacks of premium candy free for the taking. Nasser offered Protzman a cup of coffee, and he accepted, thinking it would give him something to do with his hands if he got nervous. It turned out to the best cup of coffee he’d ever had.
The conversation was less satisfying. “I felt like I was being sold a car,” Protzman, now a senior graduating this month, recalled in October. He was sitting in a plush chair in the five-year-old Jerry Falwell Library, with sunlight streaming through multistory windows. From his perch in the library, he could see the tinted glass facade of Nasser’s office across a pond where the school performs baptisms. At their meeting, Nasser had quoted a passage in the Gospel of Matthew about how a Christian should confront a community member who has sinned: Don’t air a grievance publicly until you have gone to the person privately. To Protzman, it was clear that the point was to get him to shut up. “I wasn’t asked where I was from, wasn’t asked about my major, wasn’t asked about my work. There was no discipleship,” he said. “It was, ‘Just don’t speak publicly about the university.’ At what point does ‘interaction’ turn into quietism?”
Graham found in her reporting an atmosphere of deep paranoia on Liberty’s campus, where many people are afraid to criticize the administration and its priorities (e.g., support for Donald Trump), even in ways that normally wouldn’t be traceable. That kind of thing is deadly to a university, as we are learning now from testimonies of people on liberal campuses terrified to speak out against gender ideology or progressive identity politics, for fear that somehow, the administration or fellow colleagues will find out, and hound them out of a job. I am not willing to entertain seriously the objections of liberals to the speck in Falwell U.’s eye, when there is a massive log in the collective eye of liberal colleges. That said, it’s a very bad sign.
From my point of view, though, the way that students are taught that dissenting from Falwell Jr. and his views and practices is a sign of spiritual failure is deeply messed up. This is cult-like behavior, and it’s exactly what the Maciel cult (an actual cult back then, not just a cult-like organization) within Catholicism did, at a more intense level. It must be said, though, that this is fairly common within all kinds of churches and religious organizations. Back in 2002, when I was at National Review, I had a series of agonizing conversations with a man whose brother, a Benedictine monk, had uncovered a nest of sexual corruption at his monastery. It turns out that the abbot had spent generously from the monastery’s treasury on boyfriends, and on payouts to abuse victims of monks in his cabal. The man’s brother wanted to go to the police with the information, but the abbot sternly warned him that by doing so, he would be collaborating with the devil against Christ’s church. The would-be whistleblower could not bring himself to speak ill of his brother monks to police, even though it meant covering up for abuse. According to my source, the aggrieved monk even had a heart attack from all the stress. But in the end, that monk never blew the whistle, even though his lay siblings begged him to tell the truth. The poor man was so intimidated spiritually — that is, he genuinely believed that he would betray Christ by ratting out the abusive pervert monks in his monastery — that he kept silence.
He was an older man. I imagine he’s dead now. His was an extreme example of things I encountered in my reporting, but I heard things like this quite a bit. I have no reason to believe it was just a Catholic thing. I can think of stories and examples from non-religious institutions — schools, families, etc. — where omertà was taught as a moral principle. It’s a very common story from families where incest manifested that the young victims were taught that to tell anybody about it would hurt the family, and was therefore immoral.
There may be a fine line between “come to your brother with your grievance before you take it to the public square” and “keep your mouth shut or God will punish you for your disobedience,” but it exists. My view on these matters is strongly to err on the side of exposure. We have so many examples, from churches, government bodies, schools, and other institutions, of corrupt leaders manipulating victims and others — using money, spiritual pressure, or both — to cover up for evil.
Be not deceived: in the Year of Our Lord 2019, if an official of a church, synagogue, mosque, or religious organization tells you to be quiet because God expects that of you, that is almost always a sure sign that you are listening to the voice of the Devil.
