The Religious Consultation
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National Catholic Reporter Editorial, July 29, 2005 Santorum: preposterous and wrong Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the third-ranking Republican in that august body, has made some preposterous pronouncements during his political career. That’s OK, we have wonderful laws protecting speech, even preposterous speech, even when it comes from a senator. The regret we have is that he often makes much of his Catholicism, is so often touted in some Catholic circles as a model legislator and, understandably, he’s repeatedly identified in news stories as Catholic. All of that gives the impression, at times, that his words are weighted with some sort of official Catholic authority. They aren’t. In fact, most of his more controversial thundering from on high about moral matters has nothing to do with Catholicism, or any expression of Christianity, for that matter. In the past he’s equated homosexuality with sex abuse of children and “man on dog” sex. And earlier this year he compared Democrats opposing Bush judicial nominees to Adolf Hitler. He eventually apologized for that one. More recently, Santorum found himself on the hot seat for comments written in a 2002 column for a conservative Web site, Catholics Online, which surfaced in a Boston Globe column July 11. In the original column, Santorum wrote, “Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.” He was partly correct. There was a cultural influence at work in the sex abuse crisis -- still is -- but it had little to do with Massachusetts liberalism. What’s wrong with his analysis is an apparent ignorance of the fact that the sex abuse crisis was going on for 18 years -- and was being reported on throughout the country -- before it exploded anew in Boston. What made Boston unusual was the release of thousands of pages of documents that contained correspondence among priests and bishops, as well as extensive depositions of church leaders. All of it under the white hot light of East Coast media. For the first time, Catholics and the rest of the world got a comprehensive look at how the church handled the abuse crisis. We were able to read the unedited, unspun language of church leaders. The revelations were shocking. Similar documentation exists, still in secret, in dioceses throughout the country. If Santorum’s claims were true, then he’d have to say the same about the liberalism of Texas and Louisiana, of New Mexico and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and of course of Washington state and Arizona. He would have to explain the abuse that has wreaked havoc on the church in Ireland and England, in Austria, in Australia and elsewhere. He’d have to explain the horrors in Africa, where the sexual abuse by priests occurred not so much against children, but against nuns who were seen as sexual targets that provided safety from the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Santorum’s rant about Boston is a wish, not a defensible argument. What the Boston documents show is that the culture that created the crisis and then allowed it to grow into a billion-dollar problem was that of the Catholic clergy and hierarchy whose first instincts were to protect the institution. In doing so they protected priests who sexually abused children; raided the community’s treasury, without consultation, to pay for victims’ silence; and did serious, long-term damage to the authority and credibility of the institution. The sex abuse crisis is only the most damaging and visible manifestation of a culture that claims privilege and power accountable to no one. If the liberal culture of Boston had anything to do with the crisis it was in prevailing upon the courts to order the documents released. Boston is the only diocese that has begun to face those hidden demons and deal with them. It is the healthy lay Catholic culture of Boston that has demanded a degree of accountability from those who caused the mess. In a healthy church, Boston would now be a model, and bishops and even interested legislators would be asking the laity for advice. |