First Sunday of Lent C

The Problem of the Priest Scandals

            For my first year of seminary, I studied at a place here in the USA.  I’ll never forget the impression I first received when I saw in front of the chapel the beautiful statue of Our Lady holding the Christ Child.  It was exquisite.  The Blessed Virgin was crowned as Queen and was standing, looking down tenderly at the child she was rocking to sleep on her breast.  I asked one of the older faculty members about the possibility of procuring a small replica of it, and he responded that there used to be one in every seminarian’s room.  “Where are they now?” I asked.  He nonchalantly replied, “Oh, they were used as bowling pins in the hallways back in the Sixties.”  I looked back at the statue:  there, visible in marble, was the womanly tenderness of Mary, the absolute purity of the Immaculate Conception, the aura of the royalty of this daughter of David, a mother caring so gently for her Son.  Anger like I have rarely felt before welled up within me, much like the anger I have at the hideous priest scandals that have come to light.

            I cannot imagine – it just will not fit into my head – the idea of taking one of those statues of the Mother of God and the Christ Child and using it, smashing it, as a bowling pin.  But then I cannot imagine, either, someone – especially a priest – abusing a child or minor.  But these two things are connected, intimately connected. 

            After the Second Vatican Council, instead of getting the promised “great renewal,” we went through, rather, the great chaos.  Blessed Pope John XXIII upon calling for the Council exclaimed that he was opening up the Church’s windows to get some fresh air.  Just a few years later, Pope Paul VI would say that through those windows had come the very smoke of Satan.  Perhaps nowhere was that more evident than in the seminary.

            Now, as soon as the scandals hit the front page of the newspapers, the old guard Catholic journalists and other members of the aging, chattering class, the rectors and faculties at many Catholic seminaries and others still enamored of their ideas of Sigmund Freud, began to level the blame:  “Yes siree, if we had just not had all that repression going on before the Council, there would never have been this blow-up.”  But those of us who have bothered to explore this issue know better, and what we know is being verified by the release of the John Jay Study.

            In the Sixties, during the American Church’s mindless and reckless efforts to be like the world, the seminaries became a place of a near total breakdown of discipline.  The things that began to go on there cannot be described here from a pulpit in the presence of the Most Blessed Sacrament; however, for the sake of one example, suffice it to say that in the discussion of such Catholic doctrines as the Virgin Birth, the most vulgar, obscene, and adolescent, locker-room joking became the oh so daring, courageous and “cutting-edge” norm.  The seminaries, that is, became, beginning in the Sixties, places of such an atmosphere that unstable, disturbed men of disordered appetites were attracted to them in record numbers.  The John Jay Study informs us that 10% of the class of 1970 ended up being abusers; that 1970 was the peak year for abuse allegations; that the decade of the 1970s is when by far the greatest amount of abuse occurred; that after 1979 the rate of allegations began to drop and has drastically done so in the 1990s. 

            At present – and here I let you in on a secret many are too afraid to talk about openly – at present there is a pitched battle going on in many seminaries, and the battle lines break down pretty much along the line of generations.  Many of the old guard – incredibly – still tout the truisms of the post Vatican II heyday of “liberation” and what is euphemistically called “openness.”  The younger men just roll their eyes, plead for the return to Tradition (and some sanity), academic seriousness, and spiritual rigor, and emphasize that if they want to go bowling, they’ll drive over to the bowling alley. 

In other words, the main cause of this horrific nonsense that’s been going on is a rejection of Catholic truth and life.  The Catholic faith did not produce these scandals; rather, it was the embrace of the sexual revolution that was occurring at the time of the Council, with its dubious call for “an openness to the world,” when the Church, at that time, should have been all the more on guard against the infection of worldly stupidity.  In those years, the Catholic Faith was rejected in the seminaries, and so they became incubators of dissent and perversion.  

            Things fell to pieces in the 1960s and 70s.  While the disorder spread, the Pope in Rome wrung his hands, and many bishops stood around grinning embarrassedly and talking about the great renewal that never happened, while regular Mass attendance by the laity dropped from 75% to less than 25%.  We sowed to the wind, and now we are reaping the whirlwind. 

            But the worst is over… as far as the scandals go.  The John Jay Study’s statistics bear this out.  Still this is painful.  But when you are hurting and when you are angry, try to put yourself in the shoes of one of the great majority of priests who have been true to their promises and whose horror at these crimes against the young is multiplied many times by our deep and personal familiarity with what the priesthood is really all about. 

            Let us remind ourselves that these scandals do not flow from Catholic faith and life, but from a rebellious rejection of it.  It’s time to stop talking about how wonderful things have been since 1965, for they have not been wonderful.  It is time, though, to delve back into the great and mighty Tradition of the Catholic Church, a tradition that did not begin with Vatican II but which was born out of Christ’s own life and teaching that He left His apostles, teaching handed down through the generations and reiterated at Vatican II.  Our great need is to return to the perennial teaching of the Church and to the disciplines that would help set us free to really live out that teaching.  Beginning in the priesthood, this true renewal must come; we must hope for it, long for it, pray for it; and meanwhile, work toward a restoration of things:  a return to the Church’s ever glorious Tradition, so beautifully displayed through that statue of the Christ Child and our Lady.