And here was a name, a priest’s name, in a public forum. And there were allegations of sexual advances on a young boy. The young boy was one who was in the charge of this priest, a troubled boy who needed help and direction.

 After 30 years of reading newspapers, this was now, ironically, nothing unusual. But of course one could say that sooner or later, whenever grown men have close contact with young boys, something might happen among some of them. We all know that. Or do we?

I remember 30 years ago. It was a great time to be a Catholic. I was wildly Catholic. My church was Our Lady Help of Christians in Newton, Massachusetts. I went to the Our Lady Help of Christian’s school right through high school. And Vatican II had left all of us at the Catholic high school with a sense of purpose. Vatican II, we believed, had brought our religion, our faith, into the modern era. We could, for example, walk into a non-Catholic church without being condemned to Hell. Instead, we could talk with Protestants, and get to know them, without fear of condemnation. It was a wonderful opportunity. 

I was in the middle of all this. In grammar school, I became a choir singer, after which I became an altar boy. I became part of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. In earlier years, this would have been an unthinkable privilege for anyone who had not been formally ordained by the church. And here I was, a Catholic boy, directly participating in that most holy aspect of the ceremony, the Sacrifice of the Mass. 

Later, I became one of three who started a folk Mass in the upstairs of the church, strumming a guitar and singing Jesus’ name; it was an ecstatic experience. It was the beginning of that time of openness that coincided with the sense of questioning that had taken hold of America in the Johnson years of the 1960s. 

I joined my parish’s Confraternity of Christian Doctrine as a high school student and I taught junior high kids from public school about Catholicism and all the mysteries of the faith. 

In my Catholic junior high and high school I was first elected junior high president, then I became senior high president, and at the same time, president of the Student Council. When I became a senior in high school, I ran for and was elected by the parish to be the youngest person on the Parish Executive Committee. Most of this I did at the same time. 

The most thrilling part of all of this was that a dozen or so laymen like me – well, they weren’t just like me, they were all much older, but we were all laymen at least – were going to be asked to guide the church. Somehow, we were going to do this. I was not quite sure of how we would do this, nor were the others, as it turned out, and not even the priest assigned to educate the Parish Executive Committee was sure how everything would go, but we were all thrilled by the possibilities. 

What we discussed, in that context, I no longer remember. What I do remember is the feeling of empowerment; that we would be able to illustrate to the parish authorities what was felt to be important by the parishioners. 

But while I do not remember the particulars of discussions that grew out of the belief we would be able to reflect the hopes and desires of our Catholic peers, including our families and friends, what I do remember was how I quit the Parish Executive Committee and eventually quit the church itself within a few months. 

The reason was a single sentence. 

That sentence said: “All decisions will be made in the rectory.” That was the final dictum that came back to the layman’s group after a few meetings: everything would be decided at the rectory. So we were not at all going to be involved in helping to guide parish policies. At most, we were to give the rectory a few useful ideas from which to choose. 

But it was more than a blow to my confidence in my church’s sincerity; to me, it was a religious knockout punch. How could the parish officials, and the Catholic Church hierarchy above them, lead people to believe they would now participate more fully in the processes and functions of the church, and yet know themselves that no power or influence would ever be actually relinquished? This was a sham that seemed to reveal a house of shams. 

I had been considering the priesthood for some years. The prelates at the parish knew this and tried to gently support the idea, without ever saying anything directly. I had spent weekends with four or five other

young men at a house that one of the priests had permission to use. He would talk with use, ask us about matters of faith, and talk about his life. They were nice weekends, and No – there were no improper acts, words, deeds or any indication of anything improper. We all had a good time, and we all felt we had been given a sliver, a sense of the life within the priesthood. 

But beyond all else, that blind sentence – “All decisions will be made in the rectory” – changed everything, utterly, for me. The absolutism of it undermined all of the vibrant concepts we had embraced; it was as if after sensing and embracing the possible we were told that all of those concepts were pragmatic window-dressing, created to engage the potentially disaffected during turbulent times. The concepts of change and openness were, therefore, empty; all power emanated from the rectory, and in direct line upward through the hierarchy to the Vatican. In short, nothing had changed but a convenient local image. 

Now, 30 disaffected years later, I suppose my only religion is Tao. I read from one of the Tao books every day. I suppose that is a tribute to my early upbringing, which has enabled me to continue to believe. And in that light, I can say that my daily reading does somewhat remind me of the priest who brought those five high school boys to that house on certain weekends. He was a good man, and a religious man. 

Sometimes, increasingly rarely, I will go into a Catholic church to participate in the honor due a relative or friend at a funeral, or to attend the christening of a child or a wedding of someone close to me, and always it is awesome to me. The beauty of the church, its service, is majestic. 

And sometimes when I think about giving the Catholic church another chance, I think about going back, and that emotion exists until in my memory and in my consciousness I hear that phrase again – ‘Everything will be decided in the rectory.’ 

That is where the current problem has its origins. It is no longer a question of what hue the vestments of the priest will be, or what will be the selection of music by the choir director. Such were the minor issues that would have seemed revolutionary to us, as we sought to have input into the church system. Certainly, of course, if those prerogatives had materialized it is reasonable and natural to assume that other steps would have followed. Lay people might have actually had some input into the serious issues of religious life, and perhaps have become involved in policy decisions regarding church positions. That potential reality, of course, may explain why we received the quiet but absolute dictum, ‘Everything will be decided in the rectory.’ 

But the current moral dilemma is as serious as religion itself. It is more serious than the ephemeral discussion of how many angels may meet on a pin-tip, or whether mortal sinners are damned. This is an issue where children are at stake.  

To everyone of honest heart on this earth, whether he or she lives in a dirt-floored hut or a marble-floored mansion, or anything habitable in between, the inclusion of a sentient child into one’s life is a miracle that knows no boundaries and challenges all understanding. Here, if one believes, is God’s gift! Here is life renewed and proven. Here is every blessing that can be bestowed.  

It is not surprising that parents are often more religious after the birth of a child than they were before the advent of an offspring. To see and feel a living, sentient being that came through you and yet is different from you but is totally reliant upon you is profound beyond anything that can be easily explained, no matter how candid the dialogue.  

To parents, of any age, the blessing of a child changes them. It uncaps a well of love that they did not know existed, yet it’s as natural as the drawing of breath. But it seems equally clear that in its handling of children, this same phenomena has exposed the weakest aspect of the Catholic Church. There is no apparent understanding of the beauty, the grace, and the potential magnificence of the newborn among the celibate clergy of the Catholic Church. 

No priest – from the newest local prelate to the Pope – has any idea whatsoever what it is like to be a parent!  

And yet the Catholic Church steps forward in every way, asserting a paternalism, a false or fake parenthood, over the children of the faithful, whereby priests regularly advise parents regarding the raising of their children. But there is no way for any priest to guess, imagine or compassionately consider kids or their needs, other than to recall his own childhood.  

This is a failing based on knowledge. The priest cannot know parenthood, and his knowledge of women is laughable. And yet this same individual, who probably has entered training for the priesthood before turning 20, is the one that the Catholic Church will designate as the individual who will give guidance to troubled couples. If the priest is indeed celibate and adheres to all of his vows, and additionally is learned in his understanding of written scripture and Canon law, he is still handicapped when trying to deal with the immediacy of sexual problems among his married and unmarried penitents. 

Even a priest who has broken his vow of chastity and has had orgies of physical pleasure through the years is unlikely to know what women want, need or hope for in life, and he can only guess at what the married man or the devoted lover may feel in a given relationship.  

But the priest who breaks his vows and is intimate with a willing woman, or even a willing man, has sinned with another adult, and the interaction can be potentially covered up forever. The fact that the authoritative dictums of men who are sworn to celibacy are routinely accepted as the final word in disputes between men and women who have known intimacy, whether sanctioned by marriage or not, is perhaps the best example of why the current pedophilia scandals are so unremittingly evil. The actions of the church hierarchy in hiding such violations is more understandable when it is considered that to have punished the offenders directly might have opened the eyes of faithful to the fact priests are not infallible, nor are their superiors. 

That the Catholic church has avoided this issue for centuries is common knowledge, and the fact such circumstances have caused untold and irreparable harm can hardly be disputed, but change is hard to accomplish when power and authority are based on past precedents rather than what might be best for God’s children in the modern world.  

But such pragmatism takes on a new and unholy caste when children are involved. We now know that there are priests who have committed horrible acts upon children in their care, and these same religious authority figures have often if not usually told their victims they might go to Hell if they reveal what took place; it has been shown that such priests have often used their training and education to manipulate the child who has been victimized into believing he (or she) is at fault. This is both a physical and intellectual evil. It is an attempt to manipulate a child into believing that he or she is the guilty one and must therefore expunge the experiences from the vault of memory, or lock it away in a manner that will prevent it ever being brought forward, for to do otherwise would be to lose all the societal anchors of love, affection and respect. 

This is the ultimate crime. It is a crime of the psyche that vastly outweighs the crime of physical violation, though both crimes are intertwined. But it is the twisting of the victim’s innocent mental concepts that creates the deepest and most long-standing damage. The child is made to feel he or she is at fault, and then is forced to accept and live a fiction that nothing happened, and that the greatest possible fear is the revelation that such a thing could have happened. 

Such abused kids have no normalizing rudders to guide their lives. They can’t brush such horrors away, but they can and do sublimate them, and almost invariably they develop further, more serious emotional and interactive problems. 

To whom should these children go for advice?  

Imagine the difficulty in approaching a religious parent, or any adult, for that matter, to explain how a priest groped you, or forced you into a sex act. Imagine how this difficulty is geometrically enhanced if the priest was successful in making the child take a direct action, through copulation or providing masturbation or oral sex to the priest?  

The very description is repulsive. It is only useful in illustrating the trauma such victims feel. How can a child so violated ever hope to enjoy a normal, heterosexual life? Isn’t it likely that children so violated will grow up believing that what they experienced is in fact what sex is all about? Children are easily caught in their own ignorance and the fear of asking anyone to help resolve their doubts and their questions.  

But what about the church itself and its internal structures. Couldn’t it move to solve such dilemmas for the victims of such twisted priests, especially given that such priests may well be a minority? 

One would think so, but we now know that such an assumption would be unrealistic. As Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law said in times past, ‘All such decisions will be handled in the rectory,’ or they will be pushed forward to a higher order, perhaps all the way up to the Holy See. But that doesn’t work any longer. We now know that Cardinal Law was a part of an internal judicial process that ultimately forgave priests who were accused of pedophilia, even after legal judgments were on the horizon and settlements were required. And while the forgiveness of sins is divine, it is not divine to facilitate temptation for a proven sinner. Moving a known pedophile from a parish where such sins were committed to a new parish, with no restrictions or direct supervision based on the acknowledged history, is more than irresponsible. It is a defacto means of condoning the behavior.  

No matter what the rationale, whether it is an optimistic assumption that counseling has rehabilitated an errant priest, or a cynical interest in serving the bureaucracy of the church before and above all else, such an approach within a religious setting is evil. 

Thankfully, and to his credit, once the revelations of repeated pedophilia began to become public Cardinal Law started turning names over to the authorities. The Cardinal, in other words, fingered the suspected pedophiles in the Archdiocese. Bravo. He took the decision out of the rectory. 

Cardinal Law has apologized for using the old ‘keep your mouth-shut, we’ll take care of it’ approach to the issue. But this apology and public directness has only been 40 years in coming. That’s 40 years of children having their lives compromised.   

That’s 40 years of telling abused kids and families to keep quiet, often while the priest moved on to another parish and new potential victims. It is not realistic to assume that the hierarchy of the priesthood didn’t understand the dynamics involved. Sending a priest accused of pedophilia to a rehabilitation site for a few months and then returning him to a local parish cannot be passed off as ingenuousness. We are, after all, talking about a religious community that prides itself on its education. This approach was more than self-deceptive; it was self-serving.  

It was a question of who will be protected? Who will be saved? And invariably the effort was expended on behalf of the violator, the priest. By attempting to save the priests, the church hierarchy sacrificed the victims, the children whose lives would never be the same. And all of this required secrecy. Everything had to point to an anomaly; that is, the victims must be led to believe that this ‘unfortunate’ incident was out of the norm, and that it is in everyone’s best interests to resolve it quietly and keep it quiet. Such subterfuge kept the problem quiet for decades, and the effort served to save the priests. But of course in the end it also worked to condemn them. 

In fact, all priests are hurt by this catastrophe. And most of all, and perhaps appropriately, Cardinal Law is visibly shaken in his authority and his stature. He has been the manager of the Archdiocese of Boston for 18 years, so the problem obviously pre-dates him, but it’s his now, and that’s appropriate since there are indications he participated in a long-standing policy of wrist-slapping obvious offenders in his cadre of priests. 

Now there are suggestions that he should resign because of decisions made by him and those under him that allowed priests who were sued and their cases settled to be moved to new parishes. In earlier times, when a Cardinal found himself in such trouble he might seek a seat in the Vatican as an honorable way out. But it isn’t that easy now.

That would be just another case of the higher rank pulling the troubled prelate out of a thicket and placing him in an easier and more protected location. That won’t happen this time, thanks to the public spotlight that is finally illuminating this disgusting problem. Cardinal Bernard Law is not yet, by any stretch of the imagination, overwhelmed by this problem, and he can fight those who are challenging him far better than most might expect. But if he tries to stand on the past, and in a sophisticated and convoluted manner tries to justify the attempts to protect and reemploy priests who are proven pedophiles, he must go! The long established dictum has now come home to roost; the buck does stop in the rectory.

There are still defensive approaches Cardinal Law can take that will justify his remaining in office, and they include creating systems for more intensive screening and testing of would-be priests for any indication of pedophilia. He might consider realistically broadening the role of laymen and women for various parish positions, which would be a departure from the lip service of the past.

 But above all, Cardinal Law and all of the Catholic Church hierarchy must make it clear that protecting children comes first. It is clearly time to move absolute decision making out of the rectory. If Cardinal Law cannot do this, if he cannot prove this is his policy, he must step down immediately. Protecting children comes first; everything else is second, including Cardinal Law. This time, the buck does stop in the rectory.