It is Thursday, July 26, and I’ve been mulling over thoughts for this week’s commentary. There, on today’s Web site for The Patriot Ledger, is an excellent editorial by Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., director of Boston University’s Program in Book and Magazine Publishing at the Center for Professional Education, titled, L.A. sex abuse settlement leaves troubling questions unanswered.

While going about the day’s hum-drum tasks, I had been mulling over some of the same questions, though certainly not with Cravatts’ expertise. My questions were framed from the standpoint of trying to understand what in Cardinal Roger Mahony’s life led him to stand apart from the abused children in his care, and protect their abusers.

Part of the answer I found in the biographical sketch of Mahony in the Internet’s Wikipedia free encyclopedia.

There we are told that Cardinal Mahony was born February 27, 1936, is currently serving as the fourth Archbishop of Los Angeles, and was elevated to the cardinalate in 1991.

With his Hollywood, California birth place, one might assume he had been exposed early on to the glitz of movie land. Such was not the case. His father, Victor Mahony, was a poultry farmer; his mother, Loretta, no doubt was busy caring not only for Roger, but for his twin brother, Louis, and an older brother, Neil.

Roger attended St. Charles Grammar School, north of Hollywood, and entered the minor seminary of Our Lady of Angels, then St. John’s Seminary, and was ordained on May 1, 1962, at the age of 26. The age of his ordination doesn’t disturb me nearly as much as his having entered the minor seminary at the age of 14.

Did not the Church then become the boy’s surrogate parents, the object of his allegiance and love, the protector of his dreams for a relationship with God? When push came to shove, it was the Church he would protect, and his relationship with God that would get lost in the shuffle. What in Mahony’s training could have created such a twisted understanding of his vocation?

The writer questions whether the very process of accepting celibacy and entering the priesthood at an emotionally immature age level predisposes priests to conflicting notions about human sexuality, and quotes Garry Wills’ perspective: “the celibate discipline for a whole class of men (not just for the spiritually gifted individual) is a false, because unrealizable, ideal.” (Papal Sin)

Cravatts goes on to quote the opinion of Donna Markham, Ph.D., president of Southdown Institute in Ontario, a treatment center for church professionals. “For some men, the institutional life in the same-sex environment may have served to further postpone social and sexual development. For these men, at the age of their ordination in their mid-to-late twenties, they were intellectually and physically adults, but emotionally they remained far younger.”

I would add that the deprivation of women priests, married and unmarried, in the Catholic Church, has created a false sense of values in the minds of too many of the hierarchy, whereby power, not service, is the sine qua non of success, replacing humility and compassion with pride and arrogance.

There is something about being responsible for an infant’s life that gentles a man, takes him out of himself, puts him on guard to protect the child from any danger, displaces his ego with genuine love and concern. Cravatts questions the failure of Cardinal Mahony and others to practice such charity.

How could the Church leadership oversee such moral imbecility? Former priest Tom Keneally thinks that the Church’s unswerving belief in its own righteousness, and its self-granted ability to forgive and redeem, gave its leaders, these men of perceived “invincibility, invulneralbility, omnipotence, omniscience,” a false sense of hope in controlling the psychosexual behavior of of some priests.

Jason Barry, author of the first expose of the serial priest sexual abuse in Lafayette, Louisiana in the 1980's, says there is a “fundamental Church failing in its leaders having looked away and exhibiting what he characterizes as an “appalling indifference to children.”

Cravatts goes on to quote him:

Despite a noble history of voluntary celibacy, too many bishops–
shut off from affective bonding, unlettered in the vocabulary of child
raising, swamped in homosexuality and pederasty, hiding behind
lawyers, mired in the muck of the media – were blinded by their flaw
and disgraced the People of God.

Although it has been almost fifteen years since first reading Barry’s book, Lead Us Not Into Temptation, I never think of it without remembering the heart-breaking closing paragraphs.. Throughout the book, Barry had steeled himself to keep to his role of reporter, no matter how horrendous the situations revealed, but in the end, he let down his guard and allowed us to share his unmitigated sorrow.

I began the book by focusing on one community in French Louisiana, with no idea that what happened there was being replicated in so many other regions. In the ensuing years, as I followed the lives of abusers and survivors, my own faith sustained a struggle I have yet to fully comprehend. At this juncture, I feel as if a great weight is lifting. Yet there is a sense of evil I know will haunt me to the grave. When I felt its awful chill I tried to pray, and found my thoughts returning to the Jesuit teachers of my youth. The survival of my religious belief owes much to those men and I can only hope that it endures.

Journalists routinely withhold sensitive information from what they finally publish for backup needs should some findings be questioned. In so doing I have also withheld personal reflections that were too painful to write about. There are angers that rise within a man from a volcano in the soul. Perhaps my reticence comes from a knowledge of those who shouldered greater weights in the uphill struggles of their lives. As a child I was taught that faith is a gift. I know now that faith is an odyssey, and in the darkness of the journey each of us must find a light.

My prayer for each of us is that, as Church, we will find the light out of the present darkness into a new world of freedom, where truth and justice and love are givens for all God’s people, tall and short, which will happen only if we find the courage to keep the plight of the abused children before our eyes, and promise parents and children everywhere, “Never again!” Be with us, Lord. Amen.

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