As an impressionable thirteen-year-old, I had been asked to stand at the driveway entry to a new Catholic high school  with the single task of indicating to the Archbishop where he should park his car. Eventually a large black car, filled with men in black suits and Roman collars came up the road, passed me without pause, swept by the arrayed seats and the waiting crowd and drove to the stage area set out at the front of the school. My role, it turned out, was superfluous, but it hardly mattered for the Archbishop and his monsignors and aides had arrived. In my eighth-grade view of the Church as a staircase to heaven in which the high clergy stood at the top of the stairs, being blessed by their presence was reward enough.

It is very hard, sixty years later, to reconstruct the world of the American Catholic community of 1940s and 1950s. But in terms of belief, it was a tightly-wound world.  Faith in the holiness of the Catholic Church was inextricably linked to the holy nuns who served us in our schools, and the dream of many a Catholic mother was that her son would accede to Holy Orders. It was a closed world where all the pieces cohered, and in which high office and holiness were easily confused. By ordination to Holy Orders the person of the priest was felt to be indelibly reconfigured in Christ. The priest held a high place on the staircase to heaven, and the  notion that a priest could be involved in the sexual abuse of children  was unthinkable.

Within the Catholic community  long-standing social practices were also at play. As Pope Francis recently noted: “In olden times these things were covered up — but they were covered up also in families, when an uncle abused his niece, or a father raped his child; it was covered up because it was a very great shame,” Pope Francis said. “That was how people thought in the last century.”

Nor was such denial  limited to the Catholic Church.  In  the years following World War II in America the topic of child sex abuse was virtually invisible. Medical schools during the 1960s seldom mentioned child sexual abuse, and most often a complaint against an adult sex abuser found police and the courts favoring the accused. In 1970 there was so little professional literature available on people who sexually abuse minors that “you could read it all in one morning,” said a longtime expert on the issue. The practice of remaining silent about such matters was standard practice in public schools, and organizations such as the scouts. There was little understanding of the underlying causes of child sex abuse.

There were other elements in Catholicism also at play, among which was fear that public scandal could have a shattering effect on ordinary parishioners. The handling of such matters within the church was predictably uneven. Priests accused of such acts were the responsibility of local bishops and matters were quietly handled at the local level with little coordination among dioceses and virtually no national or international collaboration.  Only in 1972 was the topic formally discussed by the National Council of Catholic Bishops. With little understanding of the problem of recidivism, bishops continued to believe that the issue could be handled by sending priests to treatment or reassigning them to ministries where there would be reduced contact with children.

Not until the 1980s were there the beginnings of public acknowledgement that the church had a problem in this regard. Another three decades passed until the full scale of the problem begin to be realized. Particularly late in coming was an awareness of the psychological damage, both immediate and long-term, inflicted upon the victims of such crimes.

As painful as is the current situation, the United States, Great Britain and Ireland are ahead of other parts of the world in addressing what has ballooned into a major crisis of church leadership. Meanwhile, Rome, influenced by long-time practices, was also slow to act.

In the sixteenth century it was still not uncommon for priests to be imprisoned, tortured, and even executed for violating children.  From the 1860s onwards, however, as the result of a hostile political environment in Italy and elsewhere, the Vatican suspended earlier practices of  referring priestly sex offenders to civil authorities. Instead, such cases were to be referred to church authorities who were enjoined to maintain them in the strictest secrecy. During the Nazi and Soviet persecutions, beginning in the 1930s, this reluctance to go public with such information was driven by fear that a clergy scandal could lead to imprisonment and even death of the accused and become a pretext for other actions against the Church. This insistence on secrecy persisted, and it was only in 2002 that the Vatican directed that “the acts of any priest or religious violating civil law should be handed over to civil authorities.”

Today, the Catholic Church in the United States is very different from that of the 1950s.  The older notions of church, demanding a level of priestly perfection that never really existed, have been broadened.  As a result of Vatican II’s more inclusive sense of Church, ordinary Catholics no longer view themselves as bystanders to the work of the ordained clergy. Fear of scandal no longer dominates Catholic thinking. The youthful concept of a staircase to heaven has been replaced by the awareness that all the members of the Catholic community have roles to play in the life of the Church and that all have the same call to holiness. We have learned to respect and support our clergy, but not idolize them. The Church is no longer viewed as a domain of priests and bishops but as  a People of God in which all have roles and responsibilities.

None of this mitigates the harm that these shameful acts against children have inflicted on the Body of Christ which is the Church. But its source and head of this body is that same Savior, who stays with his people and though broken upon the cross by our sinful failings, remains our assurance of eventual healing.

Larry Mullaly  September 29, 2018