The Laity’s Role In The Sex Abuse Scandals

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK

I have yet to come across a member of the Catholic laity who is not deeply disappointed and angered by the cases of sexual abuse in the Church. Even if in percentage terms it was a small number of priests who were guilty, and even if the percentages were no higher than among Protestant ministers, rabbis, and public school teachers, we were saddened. We expected more of our priests.
That is why Frank Bruni was off the mark when he argued in early November in The New York Times, in an article entitled “The Catholic Church’s Sins are Ours,” that ordinary Catholics were guilty of “complicity” in the scandals; that they ignored “an epidemic right before their eyes” because of an ill-advised deference to the Church and the clergy.
He writes that we “genuflect too readily,” in expressions of faith that were “truly blind.” Catholic “journalists, parents, police officers, and lawyers” did not “want to think ill of the cloth” and fooled themselves into concluding that the stories of sexual crimes by “priests were exaggerated by spiteful secularists.”
Mr. Bruni, that is not what happened. Ordinary Catholics were reluctant to believe the stories of sex abuse not because we were “blinded” or naive or excessively deferential to leaders of the Church. We didn’t believe them because we didn’t believe them; the stories did not fit into our experience of Catholic life in the United States.
I know. I was there. I was taught by Dominican nuns in elementary school — eight of them, not a single layperson — in the early 1950s. Well over half my teachers in high school, in the late 1950s, were Marist Brothers. I went to Fordham University in the early 1960s, where half my teachers were Jesuit priests. I taught religion and history at a Catholic high school from 1965 to 1969, the same high school from which I graduated. Half of my colleagues were Marist Brothers.
I’ll list for you every single incident — even rumor — of sexual abuse by a priest or brother that I came across all during that time. In grammar school, not one. In high school, not one. In college, not one. During the years that I taught in a Catholic high school, not one, except for a story one of my colleagues told about a sexual advance by a parish priest that he experienced when he was an altar boy. It never went beyond an advance.
And my colleague never experienced anything like it again, through high school or college. He would have told me if he did. At the time he told me the story, in the late 1960s, he was in sympathy with the liberalizing element in the Church that was eager to cast doubts upon clerical authority. But he did not do that. He treated the priest’s sexual advance as a shocking and atypical betrayal of his trust.
I can picture some readers of this column objecting at this point, thinking that perhaps I was a naive young man and unlikely to be aware of what was going on around me. There is no way for me to prove that is not the case. But, for the record, I grew up in the playgrounds of New York City, where you learned early not to be a “chump,” to look out for people who were “feeding you a line.” I was a bartender from my late teens through my mid-20s. I cast a jaundiced eye upon most of the stories I heard from the back-slappers who bellied up to the bar. The bottom line: It wasn’t as if I had never been around the block.
But the case I am making does not depend only on my personal recollections. I have corroborating witnesses. During the years I was a bartender, many of my co-workers were New York City cops and firemen, working part-time. Their conversations were filled with derisive comments about the overly gullible “suckers,” “jerks,” and “goobers.” My fellow parishioners for over 30 years in a suburb of New York City were men cut from the same cloth.
None of these men suffered fools gladly. They were more than willing to criticize the priests they knew for perceived personal failings, for close-mindedness, arrogance, self-centeredness, naiveté, stupidity, you name it. The sexual abuse of boys was not on the list. Never.
I am not making light of those who suffered sexual abuse by priests. What they experienced was horrific, indefensible, a crime. No doubt, my feelings about life as a Catholic would be starkly different if I or a member of my family had been a victim of clerical sexual abuse. But I would wager serious money that my experience of life as a Catholic was more typical than that of those who suffered sexual abuse. Incidents of sexual abuse — even whispers of sexual abuse — were not routine in the Church during the years I was a young and a middle-aged man.
Frank Bruni has it wrong: Catholics who love the Church do not love it “in spite of” the clerical abuse that was taking place; they love it because they were genuinely unaware of it. We did not look the other way. We looked at the Church and its role in our lives and did not see these betrayals taking place. We saw the Church as a healthy presence in our lives, an oasis where good things — everything from youth groups to parish dances to the Holy Name Society and Altar and Rosary Society — thrived in contrast to the less wholesome secular world around us.
We did not see the priests and teaching brothers as abusers, but as sacrificing men who worked long hours to give us, at a very low cost, educations comparable to that in expensive prep schools, in a safe and happy environment that led us to stay after school to participate in athletic teams, debate and science clubs, theater groups, and choral societies.
No one pulled the wool over our eyes to make us think that way about what it was like to be around the priests and brothers in our past. We know what we saw and liked it. So did our parents. They would not have sent us to those schools if they harbored predatory sex abusers. That is why so many older Catholics will speak fondly at parish social gatherings these days of how we wish that schools like those of our youths had been available for our own children and grandchildren.
There was no cover-up, no rationalizing, no ignoring of the facts, no blind deference to authority.
I’ll close with an example of what I am talking about. A colleague of mine at the public school where I used to work was an ex-priest. He left the priesthood without permission from Church authorities. He did not care about what the hierarchy had to say about his decision. He didn’t respect them. He harbored a mild contempt for the Church. He did not practice his faith. He would welcome opportunities to jab and criticize Catholic institutions. What I am saying is that the last thing he would do was cover up for the Church.
This led me one afternoon to ask him if he had heard of many examples of priests abusing boys when he was a priest. His answer: Never.