Pope Emeritus Benedict has emerged from self-imposed seclusion to speak out on the Catholic Church’s clergy sex abuse scandal.
Sadly, the nearly 6,000-word letter he addressed to bishops and cardinals on the great evil that plagues the church is not so forceful or incisive as one would hope.
In fact, as noted earlier by National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty and the New York Post’s Sohrab Ahmari, Benedict’s essay on the matter dedicates a significant amount of energy to employing the worn-out argument that says the cultural shifts of the 1960s are largely responsible for the clergy scandal.
The revolutionaries of the mid-20th century, Benedict writes, fought for “all-out sexual freedom, one which no longer conceded any norms,” adding that part of the “physiognomy of the Revolution of 1968 was that pedophilia was now also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate.”
“I have always wondered how young people in this situation could approach the priesthood and accept it, with all its ramifications,” the former pope writes. “The extensive collapse of the next generation of priests in those years and the very high number of laicizations were consequence of all these processes.”
After Vatican II and 1968, he adds, “there could no longer be anything that constituted an absolute good, any more than anything fundamentally evil; there could only be relative moral judgments.”
The problem here is that Benedict’s focus on the 1960s ignores that there is a great deal of evidence showing the cancer of clerical abuse long predates that decade. True, the 1960s likely hastened the church’s descent into moral decrepitude, but to blame the problem on the spirit of the “Summer of Love” is a dodge and a tired one at that.
In the years following the Boston Globe’s 2002 reporting on the clergy scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston, Catholics were told repeatedly that the abuse and its coinciding culture of cover-up could be traced directly to the 1960s, back when traditional standards regarding sexual ethics were loosened to the point of being non-existent. For those of us who were not even aware of the abuse scandal until after the 2002 Spotlight report, this explanation not only made sense, but it was also the only one we had.
But then a Pennsylvania grand jury report published on Aug. 14, 2018, shattered the flimsy illusion that the problem could be traced to a recent moment in history. The Pennsylvania investigation of the grisly and haunting history of child sexual abuse and cover-ups in the state’s eight dioceses found numerous examples that long predate 1968.
If former Pope Benedict wants to lay the lion’s share of the blame on the 1960s, he will have to explain, for example, Reverend Francis T. Gillespie, who groomed, drugged, and then raped young boys when he served as a priest at St. Joseph’s in Girardville, Pa. Gillespie was ordained on May 7, 1959. He served at St. Joseph’s between 1959 and 1963.
There’s Monsignor William E. Jones, V. F., ordained in 1960, who not only enabled known abusers but also shared victims with fellow priests. There’s Reverend William J. Shields, ordained in 1958, who fondled and abused at least two boys when they were roughly 12 and 13 years old. There’s Reverend J. Pascal Sabas, ordained in 1954, who purchased his victim a slot car race set so as to have an excuse to be alone with him in his basement, where he regularly violated him. The abuse also occurred in school and in the church rectory after the victim served Mass as an altar boy.
There’s Reverend Gerald Royer, ordained in 1947, who repeatedly abused a fatherless 12-year-old boy over the course of several years. There’s Reverend Henry Paul, ordained in 1941, who taught several children under the age of 12 how to French kiss. There is Reverend Charles J. Ruffenach, ordained in 1930, who regularly beat and sexually abused a child in a boiler room in 1945.
I can keep going.
Reverend Robert F. Bower, ordained in 1959; Father Robert E. Hannon, ordained in 1954; Father Donald C. Bolton, ordained in 1952; Reverend Joseph W. Jerge, ordained in 1951; Father Herbert G. Gloekler, ordained in 1949; and Reverend Joseph A. Zmijewski, ordained in 1936. The grand jury report goes to great lengths recounting the enormously tragic and horrific details of the sexual abuse these men, each of who came into the church long before the cultural revolution of the 1960s, heaped upon the unwitting and innocent parishioners of Pennsylvania’s eight dioceses.
Of these examples, only one resigned and only one was laicized. The rest remained in the good graces of the church, profiting from its generous retirement benefits and facilities. None of them have faced legal consequences for what they did.
And these are just a handful of examples drawn from a much lengthier, exhaustive investigation into a single U.S. state. This is to say nothing of the abuse that has occurred elsewhere in America and the world. And it says nothing about the lack of moral substance that allowed church leaders to cover up the abuse and reassign the abusers from parish to parish to parish.
Benedict is not wrong to suggest the social upheavals of the 1960s likely made matters worse for the church, but that is like saying the gasoline is the real problem and not the existing fire upon which it is being poured.
“Yes, there is sin in the church and evil,” Benedict concedes at the conclusion of his essay. “But even today there is the holy church, which is indestructible.”
Indeed, but not for a lack of the church leadership’s trying.
