Comment: sins.(The Talk of the Town)(priests, celibacy and sexual exploitation)

When a man (always a man) becomes a priest in the Roman Catholic Church, he takes vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. All three -- and their opposites, and their corruptions -- have been sometimes ironic themes of the internal crisis that currently afflicts the American branch of the Church and seems to be the leading edge of a crisis within the entire worldwide institution. The priestly vows correspond, roughly, to the id, the ego, and the superego, into which a less venerable orthodoxy divided the human psyche; and these three, too, have been playing their roles, in mostly unbalanced and distorting ways. The precipitating factor is a cascading series of disclosures detailing the sexual exploitation of children and, more commonly, adolescent boys by a large number (though a small minority) of priests, in many dioceses throughout the country. The wave began in January, in Boston, where a dogged investigation by the Globe established that a priest named John J. Geoghan had been shuttled from parish to unsuspecting parish for thirty years, even though his superiors, including Bernard Cardinal Law, the Archbishop of Boston, knew with increasing certainty that he was a serial and, finally, incorrigible sexual molester. It quickly emerged that some eighty priests had been similarly (and credibly) accused, and similarly protected, in Boston alone. There have been secondary explosions from coast to coast; in all, some two thousand priests have been accused. And, while the United States is the epicenter, scandals of the same type have erupted abroad; in Ireland, in January, the Church agreed to pay a hundred and ten million dollars to compensate some three thousand victims of child abuse. One might say that Boston was merely the tip of the iceberg, except that what is happening feels more like last week's sudden, unsettling melting of a country-sized part of the Antarctic ice shelf.

The big shocker, for Catholics and non-Catholics alike, has been not so much the abuse itself -- awful and heartbreaking though it is -- as the coldly bureaucratic "handling" of it by hierarchs like Law and the current Archbishop of New York, Edward Cardinal Egan, who faced yet another such scandal for several years when he was Bishop of Bridgeport, Connecticut. The anger of Catholic commentators has been astonishing. One of many who have weighed in wrote, "The resignation-in-disgrace of Cardinal Law would be meaningful only in the context of an equivalent resignation by Pope John Paul II, of whose antireform policies -- closed, secretive, dishonest, totalitarian -- Cardinal Law is a mere functionary." And another: "The crisis in the Catholic Church lies not with the fraction of priests who molest youngsters but in an ecclesiastical power structure that harbors pedophiles, conceals other sexual behavior patterns among its clerics, and uses strategies of duplicity and counterattack against the victims." That first snippet is from a recent article by James Carroll, a distinguished author and a former priest. The second is from "Lead Us Not Into Temptation" (1992), by Jason Berry, a journalist who, in 1985, in articles for the Times of Acadiana, a small Cajun-country weekly, broke the first of several seemingly isolated stories of abusive priests that foreshadowed the present mess. After another such ...