The fall of the Mask

“It Can’t Be True, and If It Is, its Not Our Fault!” This was the standard response to Priestly Paedophilia. With hindsight the expression changed to an excuse, “Well, we guess it’s true, but it’s still not our fault!” There are a number of reasons put forward for the “problem.” The major scapegoat seems to be the sexual revolution and the consumer culture starting from 1950 to 2000 in the West, which is taking place in India now. The usual phrases were “really, there weren’t that many such priests”; in the final analysis, “everybody else is doing it, so why pick on us!” We customarily gave “bad apple” explanation to argue that the abuse incidents were isolated.
The following is part of a response to the 2010 John Jay Report Causes and Context Report: “These causes are in the sacrosanct domain the institutional Church goes to every length to protect but it is the domain where we will begin to find the answers: the clerical subculture and the narcissistic hierarchical elite that has allowed this nightmare to happen and has failed to comprehend the profound depth of the damage done, not to the Church as institution, but to the most important persons among God’s people, the victims.” The history of the Roman Catholic Church contains numerous examples of periods of “grave moral turpitude” that were addressed by the institution.
Three of the most familiar examples are the Gregorian Reformation, the reformation of Innocent III and the Fourth Lateran Council, and the Catholic Reformation inaugurated by the Council of Trent. Still we have to ask why the solutions to moral questions in earlier periods have so obviously failed to address sexual issues.
A religion’s only real commodity is its moral rectitude. There seems to be an understanding, inside and outside the institution, that ending this problem within Catholicism will require a seismic shift – nothing short of a radical and structural institutional reform will suffice. More than twenty years ago an archbishop said: “We are a sinful Church. We are naked. Our anger, our pain, our anguish and our vulnerability are clear to the whole world.” The challenge is facing us, it is true right across the board, we are really faced with the founding, the re-founding of our Church.
Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1846), the great Scandinavian thinker, spoke of “Christendom,” “a Christian world,” “Christian lands,” under “Christian rulers,” having very little of Christianity. Because “people have forgotten the point of Christianity – self-denial.” As an anti-dote to the situation he prescribed, Luther (1483-1546), an Augustinian monk who was the leader of Protestant revolution and married Katharina von Bora, a Benedictine nun, “must return to his convent.” When priesthood or religious life reduce itself to a chess game of power it is “demonically possessed by boredom in an attempt to escape it” into “myths of substitution.” As Kierkegaard notes, “the individual has perfected himself in the art of forgetting and the art of recollecting in this way, he is then able to play shuttlecock with all existence.” As T.S. Eliot clearly defines, the last Temptation is “to do the right thing for the wrong reason.” There is a real motivational crisis in priestly and religious life. The Market has crept into the sanctuary and the holy of holies of the interiority where as Miguel de Cervantes writes “wanton desires diffused into the hearts of man, corrupt, the strictest watches and the closest retreats which though as intricate and unknown as the labyrinth of Crete, are no security for chastity.” Then all tragedies and scandals are possible. No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true. We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin. Kahlil Gibran wrote, “Seven times have I despised my soul: The sixth time when she despised the ugliness of a face, and knew not that it was one of her own masks.” The Catholic Church must become an honestly confessing church – at once sinful and sacred.