Ignoramus or liar ?
 

st-louis-archbishop-didnt-know-sex-children-was-crime-n127291

Well, the link worked at the BB I discovered this at.

The article is about a St. Louis archbishop who claims that he didn't know that having sex with children was a crime.

My vote is for liar. No way a grown man can be so ignorant. But that's beside the point. Even if it were not illegal for a grown man to have sex with a child, common sense and simple common decency would inform anyone that sticking your schwanz in a child requires a heart with no moral compass and a mind with no high degree of intelligence whatsoever.

I don't think you provided the entire link. This one seems to work.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/religion...-crime-n127291

Thanks, Michael.

I've written several angry poetic screeds on this subject.

Sadly, I find it entirely plausible that this bishop didn't know or care that the sexual abuse of minors was a crime. Crimes are determined by civil authorities, and what is earthly authority next to religious authority, if you're a true believer?

To someone in the repentance business, it was a sin. Its status as a crime was irrelevant.

TRIGGER WARNING if you haven't already figured it out yet. Discussion of rape follows.

I also strongly suspect that the harm done to the victims wasn't taken seriously because this particular offense was sexual, and sexual victimization is traditionally thought of as somehow invited or deserved by the victims. Yes, I know, it's not official Church policy or anything, but culturally look at all the saints given the honorific "virgin and martyr"; the message is that God protects truly good people from that foul indignity, even if He lets their living eyes be gouged out (St. Lucy, virgin and martyr), or their breasts severed (St. Agatha, virgin and martyr), or various other sadistic tortures to be visited upon their nude bodies (my namesake, St. Juliana, virgin and martyr). I think it's very telling that the patron saint of rape victims, St. Maria Goretti, was the victim of an attempted rape, and bears the title "virgin and martyr" because her frustrated attacker killed her. If he'd succeeded in raping her, I imagine that that would have been regarded as evidence that she was no saint. And for such things to happen to a boy, well, surely he'll bounce back, because it's not as if he's lost his hymen the way a girl would have. And if he doesn't bounce back, or shows homosexual tendencies, well, there must have been something rotten about him anyway, because rape isn't something that happens to good people, right?

But I digress.

There is a long history of religious authority trumping civil authority. If a person confesses to murder or theft or other sins that are also civil crimes, the seal of the confessional prevents the priest from reporting those to anyone. A priest may assign penitents to turn themselves in to the police as their penance--and if penances aren't completed, the absolution is void--but the priest can't report anything, even anonymously, without incurring automatic excommunication. It's a big, big deal. That's the most obvious example of Church trumping State.

And at the time, religious authority had said, via the Crimen sollicitationis document, that anyone who went public with accusations of sexual predation by a priest--be it the victim, the victim's family, other witnesses, or Church staff appointed to investigate--would automatically be excommunicated. Automatically. I.e., regardless of whether or not anyone in the Church heirarchy ever identified the leak. Tell, go to hell. You were supposed to suffer in silence, and expect others to suffer in silence, rather than commit the sin of scandal.

Regardless of whether or not a bishop was aware of the existence of statutory rape laws, he should have been able to figure out that lasting harm was being done to children. Instead, the Church hierarchy as a whole seemed entirely focused on protecting the Church's reputation, and on salvaging priests who were useful to them. (One predatory priest who got moved around from parish to parish in San Diego was a talented fundraiser. What price a bunch of kids' physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing?)

The arrogance that comes with great power makes it difficult for some bishops to recognize and admit when they're in over their heads in a sticky situation, until their incompetence just can't be hidden anymore. See former Archbishop of Los Angeles Roger Mahoney, among others.

I think that all levels of the Church hierarchy--including, ahem, two recently-canonized Popes, who were perhaps intentionally kept in a bubble about it--should have known and cared about the lasting harm being done to kids, and to the Church itself. It beggars belief that even those two could have had no inkling that the Crimen sollicitationis document had been created to address a real problem. (Even then, the problem it was addressing was the possibility of scandal, NOT the possibility of more harm being done to more kids. But could anyone be aware of the first problem without being somehow aware of the second?)

If certain people didn't know things, it was because they didn't want to know them.

While this is all no doubt true, I have to respectfully disagree that the bishop didn't know that having sex with children was a crime. If this was the middle ages, your argument would be iron clad, but as this is the modern day, and priests aren't shut up the way they were in centuries past, I have to conclude that there is simply no way the man could not have known what the civil law was, regardless of whatever he may have thought about how much of a truer or more legitimate authority he believed the church held over him.

He's a liar, and perhaps a bit of an ignoramus to boot, but not that ignorant. It's apparent to me that someone higher up caused him to play the idiot in these interviews, in the time-honored tradition of saving face for a corrupt church riddled with perverts and criminals.

I was baptised Catholic but at this point I'm glad I never became an active member of the church. If things get worse, I would recommend the church be treated as a giant criminal organization which ought to be legally dismantled, or at least publicly shamed by as many people as possible, until they begin to clean up their act with genuine contrition and not just a lot of empty words and idiotic priests doing interviews.

I'm also glad I never sent any of my poems to First Things, which a Spherian once suggested to me. I would be embarrassed to have any of my work printed there.

Here's an even better way for the church to clean up their act and behave like Christians: give all of their wealth away, and live in poverty, according to their vows. WWJD?

Anyone see the film Shoes of the Fisherman? Now that was an awe-inspiring flick.

Not qualified really to expound on this but I am sure it would be no consolation to any child or family that the archbishop didn't realize sex with children is a crime. Did it occur to him that it was heinous?

It's disgusting. But, I don't believe that the Catholic Church should be dismantled. I have seen so many good works and good people there. Not perfect people, but good, kind and generous people (including priests and nuns.) They do charitable work all over the globe. The abusive members should be imprisoned and excommunicated, they bring a stigma to the rest.

Yes, I was being extreme, no doubt. How would such a giant entity be dismantled, anyway?

Naturally, there are far more good Catholics (including priests) than lying, hypocritical ones.

You're right Bill. It's true.

I respect your opinion, and the reasoning behind it, based on your experience.

However, based on my experience, I still think it's entirely plausible for an asexual man of a certain age to have spent his upbringing in the protective bubble of Catholic schools and seminary, never dating and never engaging in crude discussions in which terms like "jailbait" for underage girls might have been bandied about, and never having paid much attention to certain sordid aspects of the local news. And thus I also think it's plausible for an asexual man--with nary a firsthand sexual thought or urge ever, and thus without even the slightest personal interest in sexual activity--to never have paid any attention to the civil laws relating to such activity. The Church teachings on sexual sins, yes. Civil laws, no.

I don't know that this particular bishop is asexual; but one would expect a fair percentage of men attracted to the celibate priesthood to be asexual, no? Of course, in the Church's view, innate sexual orientations--including asexuality--don't exist; same-sex attraction is a disorder; and lack of sexual attraction is simply self-control, virtue, purity, etc., and attainable by all if you pray hard enough.

I have tremendous respect for the priests affiliated with my current parish, who are smart and good-hearted and down-to-earth and have a good grounding in modern psychology and are actually interested in helping real people with real problems. But I've been a choir member, cantor, and catechist for three decades, and have had the displeasure of dealing with a number of shockingly--even appallingly--unworldly and naive and ivory-towerish priests. So I know that priests with this kind of cluelessness do exist, and are sometimes promoted.

Not that I'm in any way excusing this guy, or buying into the idea that ignorance is equivalent to innocence. Far from it.

Sorry, Julie, I had no idea of your involvement with the church. I suppose I could be wrong. But this kind of thing tends to make me more emotional than reasonable.

I should also remember that these kind of stories surface in the news all the time, and that this tends to make the issue of sexually deviant priests seem far more common than it is in reality. After all, there are how many thousands, or tens of thousands, of Catholic priests, and you only hear bad news about a handful of them.

One must maintain proper perspective.

Nonetheless, I strongly believe that priests found to be guilty of sexual misconduct with children (nevermind their behavior with one another - who cares -) ought to be charged and imprisoned, not protected. That's something I don't think any rational person should be willing to bend on. Forgiveness is a wonderful thing, but do we extend it to grown men who abuse children? My own Christian desire to forgive and forget is not that strong. I'll have to leave that measure of forgiveness to God and Christ. And even then I wouldn't dare claim to be happy about it, because They'd know I was lying anyway.

No need to apologize. You could be quite right. And I have no problem with people getting emotional about this. WWJD? Maybe flip a few tables. (For starters.)

We cross-posted.

The number of predators was, percentage-wise, very small; the number of people shushing and/or blaming the victims was HUGE. When the first stories of abuse started getting media attention in the mid-'80s, the victim-blaming directly or indirectly included almost everyone in the Church, including me. We laypeople have to accept responsibility for our role in perpetuating the climate in which the abuse flourished. Our ignorance doesn't entirely excuse us, any more than it excuses the guys in charge.

And the victim-blaming goes on. Even nowadays I hear grumbling that people's favorite charities have had funding slashed, to pay victims' settlements, and how those greedy, vengeful victims are stealing from the poor. I don't hear it often anymore, because I get in people's faces about it, but I do occasionally hear it.

Of course a grown man of over twenty having sexual intercourse with a baby of a child of nine is wrong. I don't know whether desiring such things is wrong in itself. I think according to the church is is a sin.Isn't that so?

But... do you think the chap who sang 'great balls of fire' (Sorry, senior moment) was a rapist? I don't though lots of English people thought and said that he was. Was the English teacher who had sex with a pupil aged fifteen a rapist? Well, he was in the UK, but when he fled to France he wasn't, since the age of consent there is fifteen. In the USA the age of consent in some States is eighteen. Is that true? I thought it was but I could be wrong. Wasn't the World Heavyweight Champion Jack Jones done for something like that with a girl (girls?) of sixteen. or am I wrong.

What about pederastically inclined men kissing boys of (say) twelve. How bad is that?

What about muslims who marry girls of nine, including (is it not so?) the prophet himself?

I don't mean to logic-chop but the whole thing is a minefield. And I do think Catholic priests have had a bad press. In the C of E we have vicars who do much the same thing. Marriage doesn't seem to have the effect it is supposed to. But there hasn't been the outrage. English people make jokes about it. Probably they shouldn't, but they do.

What would I have done if the teenage guy who stalked my seven-year-old daughter all over Dreamland (A Margate Funfare) had had his wicked way? I would probably have killed him or at least beaten him to a pulp. I was more able to do such a thing in those days. Doreen (my wife) would certainly have done it.

John,

No, I certainly don't think the balls of fire guy, Edgar A. Poe, Elvis the Pelvis, or any of those guys who married very young women, sometimes their cousins, were rapists, pedophiles, or any of that.

I had an acquaintance once who was accused of statutory rape by the father of his girlfriend, who was seventeen. He was nineteen or twenty, can't remember. I don't recall how the case went, or if it even went to court, but everyone knew that this was an instance of an irate father who didn't like that someone was diddling his daughter.

Certainly, the age of consent is largely arbitrary, and the best we can do. It's not like someone is an ignorant dewy-eyed kid one day and a responsible adult the following day, when they turn that magical 18, or 16, where ever one happens to be.

I felt guilty complimenting a 20 year old young lady I worked with, even after she had showed me a list of the twenty or so people she had had 'relations' with. Yes, she kept a list. Another co-worker jokingly, but bitterly, called me a 'cradle-robber' and yes, a 'pedo', because I had had the unmitigated audacity to find a 20 year old woman attractive, and the intolerable indecency to tell her so. Of course, I had it coming because I told this young lady how adorable she was a lot, and this habit of mine was quite bothersome to the other ladies.

Nevermind the fact that I never asked her out, never saw her outside of work (except for one occasion when the entire department went bowling), and never made a suggestive or off-color remark to her. I no longer work with her but we remain good friends to this day, if only through Facebook.

Lest we forget:

The ones to remember and bear in mind are the victimized boys who are truly victims: the ones who are not romantically interested in these nasty priests, NOT consenting, and who are forced to do things and made to suffer physical and mental trauma.

When I finger point, I'm pointing at rapists and/or molestors - and the ones who play hush hush about them, not all those who happen to fall into the gray areas.

John, to address various points you made:

Temptation is not sin.

Very few of us on the planet have never had a politically incorrect sexual fantasy. Very few of us have never thought, "Sheesh, what is wrong with me, that I find this sick stuff exciting, and can't seem to get it out of my head?" Very few of us would not be mortified if an uncensored version of the stuff in our heads were accessible to those whose opinions of us we care about.

Temptations are involuntary thoughts.

Sins are voluntary actions.

Big difference.

Of course, deliberately feeding a temptation (with porn or stalking or whatever) is a voluntary action, so that would cross the line into sin. But per se, just feeling a sexual attraction to something inappropriate? Not sinful.

Granted, a lot of the squeamish language used by religious instructors is so euphemistic that the distinction between involuntary thoughts and voluntary actions gets muddied. For example, it took me years to figure out that all those forbidding lectures I was subjected to about "entertaining impure thoughts" were probably intended to say "masturbating is bad"...but the latter concept was so indelicate that adults never dared mention it in language comprehensible to any kid in the room. (And also, of course, if any of us kids had managed to figure out what these adults were actually talking about, one of us would surely have asked them to explain what masturbation was, and why it was bad, and we can't have that, can we?) Anyway, if the object of the lectures was simply to make yet another generation neurotic about anything having to do with sex, they succeeded. Yay, tradition.

It's no secret that many adults find the firm young bodies of young people sexually attractive. That's not the problem. The problem is that some of these older, wilier adults exploit the young owners of those firm young bodies, to the great harm of those young people. And for what? A little temporary pleasure for the exploiter.

A few years ago I was looking into teen pregnancy statistics and stumbled across this: in 75% of that year's unwed births to California mothers under the age of 15, the fathers were over the age of 25 years. Seventy-five percent. And that was just the births--of course no figures were available for the men who took their teenaged girlfriends to get abortions, to make the evidence of statutory rape just quietly go away. (And, you know, sometimes birth control works, so the data wouldn't reflect those cases, either.) In short, there are an awful lot of creepy Californian over-25-year-olds determined to get their jollies, regardless of the destructive impact those jollies may have on young girls' lives. [Edited to say: I will try to come back and provide a more responsible citation for this than just "I remember".]

Those are the kinds of situations the "age-of-consent" laws are trying (unsuccessfully) to prevent. Not the kinds of December-May romances ending in marriage (i.e., longterm financial and [presumably] emotional support of the girl) that you mentioned.

I don't paint all of these relationships with the same brush, and I don't understand why you do.

In California, the penalties for statutory rape become less serious [Edited to say: misdemeanor as opposed to felony, and varying terms of prison time], the smaller the age difference between the parties. Two minors engaging in (still illegal) sexual activity are not treated the same as, say, a 19-year-old and a 17-year-old, who are also not treated the same as a 27-year-old having sex with a 17-year-old. [Edit: I changed the preceding sentences to make them gender-neutral.] There is also consideration given to the fact that not all 17-year-olds have the same mental and emotional maturity. There's a lot of wiggle room, and the courts use it to try to be reasonable and compassionate and fair to all parties. Again, the courts don't consider every underage relationship to be the same, and I don't know why you do.

Most US states allow the marriage of an underage girl to an adult man, if it has been determined (often, but not always, with parental input) that she is mentally and emotionally mature enough to consent to this, and that he is mentally and emotionally stable enough for this to be in the girl's best interest. If she is pregnant with the prospective groom's child, he may or may not be prosecuted for statutory rape. Usually not, if they are relatively close in age, and it seems that his motive for marrying her isn't just to escape prosecution. [Edited to say: I believe that if the adult is over 21 it's automatically a felony, but there is some leniency in sentencing depending on the circumstances.]

Generally, the practice of marrying off young girls occurs today in cultures in which fertility and domestic labor are seen as the only reason for a woman's existence. If a girl is raised to believe that her family and society value her only for her ability to crank out as many babies as possible and raise as many of them as possible to adulthood, she might very well want to get started on fulfilling her life's mission as soon as possible. [Edited to say: Or she might be terrified, but have no way out of the business contract between her father and husband-to-be.] Marriage does at least provide her with the compensation of financial stability (in addition to social status, and the inherent joys of being a wife and mother). The honor of being chosen for an early start on married life may well meet the only definition of success and happiness she's ever imagined for herself. [Edited to say: If the only other choices are getting thrown out (or murdered, see recent news from Pakistan) by your father for disobeying his wishes, or marriage to a wife-beater, or death, then marriage to some one who at least doesn't beat you is the best you can hope for, and you might consider yourself fortunate.] If she's fortunate enough not to be shackled to an abusive husband, or not to spend much time at the bottom of the pecking order of women in the household (mother-in-law, previous wives), she might even be happier in her arranged marriage than many women in the West who have chosen their own partners. [Edited to say: I expect to get slammed for this statement, so perhaps I should clarify that I'm not saying denying women any say-so over their lives makes them happier. I'm saying that it's possible to be in an oppressive situation and simply be content that it isn't much worse.]

Contrast her fate with that of a girl (or boy) who is sold into sex slavery. The pimp gets almost everything, and the poor kid just gets a subsistence diet, disease, and an early death. Even if that kid willingly consents to becoming a prostitute, is it really consent, when he or she has no other realistic options for survival?

And then, of course, there's just grooming a child for abuse, having one's fun, and shaming the kid into silence, as these priests tried to do. No concern for consequences to the child.

You really don't see a difference between those three scenarios, John? I don't find them at all equivalent, except for the fact that an adult gets to enjoy having sex with a child's young body in all three of them. The degrees of exploitation and damage to a young person's life are quite different, though.

In short, the priests who used their authority to sexually prey on young men and women really can't be compared to men wanting to marry teenaged girls, or to men simply fantasizing about sex with young people. Apples and oranges and bananas.

But I'm glad to discuss these distinctions. They're something that should be discussed.

The document that gave the 75% figure has been removed, but here is a pretty good summary of the problem of adults preying on young women in California.

And here is a teen-oriented document emphasizing that not all cases of statutory rape are prosecuted, clarifying the differences in penalties depending on the age difference, and encouraging pregnant teens not to avoid getting health care for fear of getting their partners in trouble.

[I realize that these points are somewhat off-topic, since the vast majority of the victims of clergy sex abuse were boys, and I certainly don't want to minimize what happened to them just because boys can't get pregnant. But I did want to address some of John's statements.]

Before it slides, a good and pertinent sonnet
 

Quite Apart From The Holy Ghost

I remember God as an eccentric millionaire,
Locked in his workshop, beard a cloud of foggy-coloured hair,
Making the stones all different, each flower and disease,
Putting the Laps in Lapland, making China for the Chinese,
Laying down the Lake of Lucerne as smooth as blue-grey lino,
Wearily inventing the appendix and the rhino,
Making the fine fur for the mink, fine women for the fur,
Man’s brain a gun, his heart a bomb, his conscience – a blur.

Christ I can see much better from here,
And Christ upon the Cross is clear.
Jesus is stretched like the skin of a kite
Over the cross, he seems in flight
Sometimes. At times it seems more true
That he is meat nailed up alive and pain all through.
But it’s hard to see Christ for priests. That happens when
A poet engenders generations of advertising men.

— Adrian Mitchell

*


By the by, I actually spotted this poem while going through a print anthology I picked up cheap some years ago called Unrespectable Verse, edited by Geoffrey Grigson. Put out in 1971, it's quite good and contains lots of formal verse by Mitchell, Stevie Smith, Phyllis McGinley, George Starbuck, and a host of other Pierian celebrities olde and gnu. I'll bet dollars to scones that John Whitworth would love it, and probably already owns it or knows of it.

Bill, the Mitchell poem reminded me another biting one he wrote, semi-famous as far as poems go, I think, To Whom It May Concern, which begins with these lines, if I remember right

I was run over by the truth one day.
Ever since the accident I've walked this way ...

each stanza ending with the refrain: Tell me lies about Vietnam.

"Thou shalt not covet" but I do covet that book. There are three of my favorite writers named in a single line: Mitchell, Stevie Smith, Phyllis McGinley, George Starbuck.

Coveting a neighbor's book surely isn't as bad as coveting his or her ass.

Dean, yup, that's the name of the poem, and it's in the book I mentioned. I don't know what the form is called, but Elizabeth Bishop uses it to great effect in a poem with 'Bedlam' in it, I believe. Will Gooooogle when I get back from work later on. I'm on break right now and far too tired.

Janice, thanks for making me LOL**, I needed it after my stressful day thus far. I'll bet you can find a used copy of the anthology at Amazon or some other bookseller online. I'll check into it later if you haven't already.

Or:

I'd hate to part with it, but I can scan it for you, page for page, if you're willing to wait about ten years for me to have time to do it! : p < tongue-sticking out smilie.

**Sure, it's a very sensitive topic, but one does need some levity once in a while.

Oh, I forgot:

Adrian Mitchell was voted in some poll or other as the poet whose work people would most prefer to be sent out into space to represent humanity. I believe I read that in one of the obits somewhere.

I love that sonnet of Mitchell's because it's oh so poignant without being overtly blasphemous or disrespectful of the person of Jesus. I essentially tried to do much the same thing in a villanelle I posted here about Christ's crucifixion, which Don Jones and others ably realized.

Yo Don, where are ya!

You're thinking of Bishop's great "Visits to St. Elizabeths" I think, which is kind of a cumulative form, which I think was modeled after a Mother Goose rhyme that I can't think of right now. (I keep thinking Jack & The Beanstalk, but that isn't right).

As for the form, I don't know the name of either (Bishop or Mitchell) but they do seem a little bit similar.

eta: The House That Jack Built (google is my friend).