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This week saw the demise of ACORN followed by its most solid vindication from the California Attorney General's office, juxtaposed with the Catholic Church's spiraling descent into incoherent babbling as more than half a century of criminal conspiracy in hiding and protecting child molesters finally threatens to demand a full accounting.
The fact that ACORN could be destroyed by lies despite no criminal activity, while the Catholic Church has avoided any criminal penalties for engaging in conduct that the Mafia wouldn't forgive speaks volumes about the state of hegemonic struggle in America and the world today.
This is not about Catholic-bashing. The countless victims of these unspeakable crimes were all Catholics. It's about the patriarchal hierarchy, which has long outlived not only its usefulness, but its moral credibility as well. Sinead O'Connor--herself a victim of (non-sexual) child abuse by the church--in an eloquent Op-Ed put it squarely when she called the Pope and his co-conspirators the churches "alleged leaders", after explaining:
To Irish Catholics, Benedict's implication -- Irish sexual abuse is an Irish problem -- is both arrogant and blasphemous. The Vatican is acting as though it doesn't believe in a God who watches. The very people who say they are the keepers of the Holy Spirit are stamping all over everything the Holy Spirit truly is. Benedict criminally misrepresents the God we adore. We all know in our bones that the Holy Spirit is truth. That's how we can tell that Christ is not with these people who so frequently invoke Him.
On Monday, Democracy Now discussed the Church's pedophilia coverup crisis with Bridget Mary Meehan, a dissident female bishop, who is part of a growing movement to reform and transform the Church from below, along transparent, egalitarian, non-sexist lines. (Her blog is here.) In the interview, she said:
This is very, very serious, because standards of accountability must apply from the top down. There needs to be an entire shake-up of the whole Catholic system. And we need to begin by truth-telling. Roman Catholic Womenpriests are calling for a truth commission, made up of the non-ordained, the victims, and people of integrity, to examine the crisis in its implications for Church structure, for renewal, for reform. And we believe that any structural change must include the end of mandatory celibacy, married priest, and women priest. We must really change the way the Church does business and become a more accountable, open, transparent and just Church.
Hopefully, this extremely painful episode (an "episode" only in millenia-long history of the church sense) will eventuate in a radical transformation of the Church that will leave it much closer to the original communal and collegial form it had when it was the church of the Roman Empire's multi-cultural, multi-racial underclass--not the church of the Empire.
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As just one part of the multi-faceted story now exploding world-wide, this past Wednesday, SNAP (The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) released a dozen pages of once secret church records in Los Angeles--documents proving that the Pope and other top Catholic officials - in Rome and America - knew a good deal about pedophile priests decades ago. In an advance press release SNAP said:
Newly released records, including letters to the Vatican in the 1960s, show a Catholic official admitting a "tremendous problem" of predator priests. The documents prove that almost 50 years ago, top church staff knew how widespread and incorrigible pedophiles are. They severely undercut recent claims by the Pope's defenders that he and others in the church hierarchy mishandled cases because they were "on a learning curve."
Some of the records are written by the head of the Paracletes, a religious order that tries to rehabilitate predator priests. Decades ago, he admitted that "There are now in many parts of the world (facilities) "where 'Christ's wounded priests' may be cared for." In another shocking acknowledgement, he said that 30% of all priesthood candidates who are first rebuffed because of "question(able) qualifications" are later ordained because "someone in authority overruled" the initial rejection. He also urged the Vatican to adopt a "heavy penalty" for those "tampering with the innocence of the young," including "retirement . . .within a monastery" or "complete (defrocking)," in part because "Many experienced priests agree (we) not turning out men as dedicated to their priesthood as we did in former days."
The cleric had a private audience with then-Pope Paul VI and later wrote that he opposed "the return of priests to active duty that have been addicted to abnormal practices, especially sins with the young."
These records, and thousands of other similar pages, were to be made public as part of the $660 million Los Angeles Archdiocese settlement in 2007. Church defense lawyers are still fighting to keep those records hidden.
Several times during his papacy, Benedict has urged bishop to be "transparent" with child sex cases. In light of his advice, and recent disclosures of abuse and cover up in the Pope's home diocese in Germany, SNAP wants the pontiff to publicly disclosed how he handled hundreds of cases from across the globe from 2001-2005 as head of CDF (the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), the Vatican office where all such cases are sent.
The Church has told so many lies it's virtually impossible to keep track of them all. But here is perhaps one of the most central and damning of them: the revelation of just how far back knowledge of a systemic, widespread evil goes--without doing anything remotely effective or responsible to stop it. According to a story in the New York Times this week:
The founder of a Roman Catholic religious order that ran retreat centers for troubledpriests warned American bishops in forceful letters dating back to 1952 that pedophiles should be removed from the priesthood because they could not be cured.
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From the 1940's through the 1960's, bishops and superiors of religious orders sent their problem priests to Father Fitzgerald to be healed. He founded the Servants of the Paraclete in 1947 ("paraclete" means "Holy Spirit"), and set up a retreat house in Jemez Springs, N.M.
He took in priests who were struggling with alcoholism, drug abuse or pedophilia, or who had broken their vows of celibacy, whether with men or women. He called them "guests." His prescription was prayer and spiritual devotion to the sacraments, which experts say was the church's prevailing approach at that time.
At one point, he resolved not to accept pedophiles at his center, saying in a letter to the archbishop of New Mexico in 1957, "These men, Your Excellency, are devils, and the wrath of God is upon them, and if I were a bishop I would tremble when I failed to report them to Rome for involuntary layization."
Laicization - or removing a priest from the priesthood - was what Father Fitzgerald recommended for many abusive priests to bishops and Pope Paul VI.
But that step was rarely taken, said the Rev. Thomas Doyle, a whistle-blower who often serves as an expert witness in cases against the church, "because the priesthood was considered to be so sacred that taking it away from a man was something you simply did not do."
Thus, the perverted rightwing attempt to blame priestly pedophilia on secular post-60s influences of the left must needs also involve time-travel as well. I'm thinking particularly of the NY Times' Ross Douthat writing this:
This hasn't prevented both sides in the Catholic culture war from claiming that the scandal vindicates their respective vision of the church. Liberal Catholics, echoed by the secular press, insist that the whole problem can be traced to clerical celibacy. Conservatives blame the moral relativism that swept the church in the upheavals of the 1970s, when the worst abuses and cover-ups took place.
In reality, the scandal implicates left and right alike. The permissive sexual culture that prevailed everywhere, seminaries included, during the silly season of the '70s deserves a share of the blame, as does that era's overemphasis on therapy. (Again and again, bishops relied on psychiatrists rather than common sense in deciding how to handle abusive clerics.) But it was the church's conservative instincts - the insistence on institutional loyalty, obedience and the absolute authority of clerics - that allowed the abuse to spread unpunished.
(Douthat is, of course, completely silent about the utter failure of prayer, fasting, pastoral counseling and--presumably--exorcism to cure pedophiles, because that's exactly the wrong sort of balance, as all good citizens of Versailles rightly know.)
There is, quite simply, no end to the lies the Church hierarchy and it's rightwing defenders will tell. Truth is something entirely foreign to them.
p.s. I happened to see an old episode of Law & Order this week, based on an early real-life case in which a priest was convicted of molesting 28 children. The Church itself was kept entirely off-screen, giving its blessing to the investigation. There were some critical comments from the detectives, and at one point the ADA talked about naming the Church as an unindicted co-conspirator--but only to allow prosecution beyond the normal statute of limitations. The episode was "Bad Faith", and it was from 1995, featuring a pre-Sex in the City Chris Noth and pre-Crossing Jordan Jill Hennesy.
The case it was based on was from 1993. It's been that long since we've had indisputable, well-publicized evidence (there were earlier cases in the mid-80s) that the Church has been hiding and protecting pedophiles, foisting them off on one parish after another, giving them new flocks to prey on, once they are exposed in the old ones--in effect, functioning as procurers, far and away the largest pedophile procurement operation in the world.
ACORN
On the other hand, we find the exact opposite situation with ACORN. Although the California Attorney General's report finds evidence of managerial sloppiness resulting in potential civil liability, mirroring earlier findings, this is the first investigation to finally get its hands on the unedited tapes, and thus to confirm what ACORN itself and all other evidence previously pointed to: a well-crafted con-job by the purported "conservative media activist." From the AG's press release:
Last September, Gov. Schwarzenegger asked Brown to investigate the activities of ACORN in California. His request was triggered by tapes made by undercover videographer James O'Keefe III that purported to show ACORN employees providing advice on how to conduct a prostitution ring and commit other serious crimes.
But new, unedited videotapes discovered through Brown's investigation, as well as other evidence, shed clearer light on interactions between O'Keefe and the now-defunct ACORN.
Videotapes secretly recorded last summer and severely edited by O'Keefe seemed to show ACORN employees encouraging a "pimp" (O'Keefe) and his "prostitute," actually a Florida college student named Hannah Giles, in conversations involving prostitution by underage girls, human trafficking and cheating on taxes. Those videos created a media sensation.
Evidence obtained by Brown tells a somewhat different story, however, as reflected in three videotapes made at ACORN locations in California. One ACORN worker in San Diego called the cops. Another ACORN worker in San Bernardino caught on to the scheme and played along with it, claiming among other things that she had murdered her abusive husband. Her two former husbands are alive and well, the Attorney General's report noted. At the beginning and end of the Internet videos, O'Keefe was dressed as a 1970s Superfly pimp, but in his actual taped sessions with ACORN workers, he was dressed in a shirt and tie, presented himself as a law student, and said he planned to use the prostitution proceeds to run for Congress. He never claimed he was a pimp.
"The evidence illustrates," Brown said, "that things are not always as partisan zealots portray them through highly selective editing of reality. Sometimes a fuller truth is found on the cutting room floor."
The original storm of publicity created by O'Keefe's videotapes was instrumental in ACORN's subsequent denunciation in Congress, a sudden tourniquet on its funding, and the organization's eventual collapse.
In short, while ACORN itself was guilty of sloppy management, its failures pale in comparison to the failures of all those who took the sting videos at face value, never bothering to discover for themselves if what they purported to show was actually true. Thus Congress not only acted recklessly and unconstitutionally (anyone remember the invasion of Iraq?), but utterly foolishly as well. (Anyone?)
The same is also true of all the foundations that withdrew support for ACORN as well. While conservatives have closed ranks in support of child molesters central, liberal powers that be fled in horror from an organization with an unmatched record of work registering low-income & minority voters, and providing them with a wide range of services as well as organizing assistance--based solely on the un-investigated public impressions created by an avowed conservative activist.
As far as hegemonic warfare goes, this isn't a case of bringing a knife to gunfight. It isn't even a case of bringing a yogurt spoon to a nuclear war, as I sometimes say. It's a case of bringing a wakizashi (Samurai short sword) to a seppuku (ritual suicide).
But if anyone should be committing seppuku, it's the liberal foundation establishment. They have behaved abominably. They have behaved like traitors. And that's exactly what they are. |
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