McCarrick Report

[Anastasia]

Writing the above seem to trigger me to think more about the Church and child sexual abuse (although again, it is a mistake to concentrate only on child sexual abuse, there is an emotional abuse and adult abused as well). I was telling myself that there is another Church, normal – normal people, saints etc. And then I got it. “The great silence” or covering up is like a blanket of pathology (an abnormal reaction) which is being spread over the whole Church. Via implementing “the great silence” the Church says: “the Church is not a safe place, to cover the abusers is our norm”. The safety in the Church is not created by various policies but via a healthy reaction of its members to a pathology.  

[chrysostom]

If I'm not mistaken, the specific crime Mr. McCarrick was laicised for was way outside of his modus operandi and thus he never really was "officially" done in by his beach house stuff.

[CatherineM]

I remember when the abuse crisis first got public in the late 80’s, early 90’s where I was. I was having tea with our Archbishop, and when he talked about the topic, he’d get such a pained expression on his face. He said he couldn’t conceptualize it. It wasn’t that he disapproved, which he obviously did, he literally couldn’t understand how someone could act that way. 

In the beginning, he was so out of his depth that he asked experts to advise him. Those psychiatrists said it was cureable. He believed them and acted on their advice which turned out to be wrong. Once he realized they were wrong, he got different experts and went a different direction. The pain on his face when he was remembering was palpable. 

I truly believe that to holy, devout priests and bishops, this stuff doesn’t compute. They do the best they can, but stumble in the dark. 

[Anastasia]

There are different situations and different people. Our notorious pedophile (and psychopath) was, for instance, tossed all over the area, from one parish to another. Interestingly, when he was a seminarian, the committee there advised his Bishop not to ordain him, on the grounds of psychopathology but the Bishop did because he reportedly “did not want to upset his mother, a very pious woman”.

Decades later the new Bishop repeated the action of his predecessor ordaining a seminarian whose own Bishop was adamant that he must never serve as a priest. A seminarian proved to be a malignant narcissist and an emotional abuser. Eventually the Bishop tossed him to another city.

As I wrote before, if there was abuse but if it was adequately dealt with it would be one thing; any mature person would understand that evil is everywhere. What blows a mind off is the undisputable fact of continual covering of the abuse at the expense of the victims’ healing, sometimes at the expense of their lives. The worst in that saga is that it is clear that the way of dealing with abuse and other unsightly things within the Church remains the same – all the Church’s spiritual riches are somehow contained in some sick net of abnormal relationships with the values upside down. Every time a Bishop (including the Pope or any member of the Church) says something slippery he contributes to that shadowy system because the slippery words/lies/deception belong to that very system, they perpetuate it. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to have a real spiritual life in that frame of untruth. Clearly that frame is totally alien to the Christ’s Church.

An alcoholic/lustful/angry etc priest cannot ruin someone’s faith. A lying priest – absolutely. And, the more glorious the spiritual riches of the Church the more destructive effect on a soul they make when put together with a pathology of dealing with pathology. So the riches, in a sense, are turned via a crime into their opposite. An analogy: to be abused by a stranger is mot as awful than  by own mother.

[Aloysius]

@CatherineM that is of course another part of it when we're dealing with bishops' failures in general, and one that I think applies, in the context of the McCarrick report, mostly just to JPII if at all.

It no longer really applies for Benedict or Francis because by the time they were dealing with McCarrick the idea of psychological cures and such was already thoroughly discredited and really would've had to have gotten used to it by now.  I understand it still not computing--it doesn't compute to me either, so far outside of what i could imagine any human being being capable of--but by now it's a known quantity, no bishop can claim they're just stumbling in the dark doing the best they can anymore--their responsibility to their flock demands that they should've figured out how to harshly deal with this by yesterday.

but it is definitely one of the things to keep in mind as part of interpreting all the past negligence of bishops, not to fully excuse them,but as one of the ways we understand what was going on at the time when priests were moved around even that were known to have been guilty--the belief in psychology's ability to cure them was an incredibly damaging thing.  it combined with problematic church politics as I mentioned in past posts and with problematic self-serving face-saving (even when well intentioned with the fear of making the church look bad) and was a perfect storm--one that we can never allow to happen again, so we demand sunlight and ANSWERS from our bishops and popes.

[Guest]

On 11/16/2020 at 12:49 PM, Anastasia said:

, there is an emotional abuse and adult abused as well)

Good point.  To be frank, no way would I complain to The Church even today.  I would be fearful that the treatment received would only make worse any resulting emotional problems. We have a new Archbishop and I don't know a thing about him really. Not only that, even though today far more is known about mental illness and all the right words are said quite loudly in high places in The Church, walking the talk is remiss at parish level and often.  A MI sufferer is most always fearful that they will not be believed.   I would be and know I am not alone, far from it, in the community of mental illness sufferers.   Of course, there are sufferers who have a different story, a positive story.  Laudate Dominum.

1 hour ago, Aloysius said:

-the belief in psychology's ability to cure them was an incredibly damaging thing

8 hours ago, CatherineM said:

I truly believe that to holy, devout priests and bishops, this stuff doesn’t compute. They do the best they can, but stumble in the dark. 

Aloysius:  Not only that, but I think that some bishop's believed an abuser when he said he was sorry and would never do it again i.e. he just got shifted elsewhere.  It is the theology of forgiveness and the failure to recognise something as a crime demanding in justice a report to police.  Nowadays it is known that peodaphilia is a compulsive pathology; that it is a crime and justice demands it be reported.  An abuser has a personality disorder, known to be difficult to impossible to cure.

CatherineM: Another really good point.

Edited November 17, 2020 by BarbaraTherese

[fides' Jack]

On 11/12/2020 at 12:59 PM, Peace said:

There are plenty of folks ( @KnightofChrist @fides' Jack ) around here who flat out reject both the JP2 version and the PF version).

I don't reject the JP2 version of the moral teaching of the Church on the death penalty.  I embrace it.  The JP2 version clearly states there is room for differing opinions on the matter.