Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Amen to McConnell Philadelphia, Pa. To the Editors: I don't know when an article has delighted me as much as did Frank McConnell's "Soothing Music" [May 6]. Someone surely has...
...I don't agree that all this has been forgotten...
...Where corporate liability has been found in lawsuits against the church, the findings were facilitated by evidence from canon law of a theology of the clerical state that justifies not just exclusive teaching and sacramental roles for the bishop but, more importantly, absolute jurisdiction over the administration of church properties...
...With Father Dreese, we are all appalled by the vast loss of money and resources...
...To the Editors: I hasten to applaud Sidney Callahan l"Why I Changed My Mind," April 22] and to say how much I appreciate her carefully chosen words...
...The deep psychic destruction is not a forgettable life experience, a transitioning incident prematurely ending puberty...
...so the challenge of gay couples to be included in the institution of marriage promises a new look at what marriage means...
...Juries decide what they perceive to be true about the seriousness of the injury caused, who caused it, who knew of it and allowed it to continue...
...so also theories of corporate, vicarious liability, damages for emotional and psychic injury...
...The Catholic church was never traditionally on the side of nationalism in Ireland...
...as a rule both would be judgment-proof (i.e., unable to pay substantial judgments...
...With people like Ms...
...This has been the cornerstone position of most Catholic commentators, but the argument ignores the reality that the insurance premiums of millions of Catholics are being used right now to fund abortions...
...Throughout the nineteenth century the church forbade its members to join any of the nationalist movements, including the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Fenians...
...that is what respondeat superior is all about...
...Solitary leaders still seek affirmation along ascending lines and need not, really, listen to the laity at all, not on matters of personal morality, not even in the agony of sexual victimhood...
...A larger question has to do with his sensing softness in this rule-bending...
...As for the same priest's hoping to last until pension-vesting age, I like that one too...
...The remedy, however, is not a new immunity...
...One may hope that the genesis of the new policies was not in the cautionary advice of lawyers employed to avoid corporate liability but rather in a really new sensitivity to the evil of the sin or the false accusation of it...
...O'Halloran observes in the Irish press and elsewhere in Irish society stems in part from the years of censorship instigated by the church, starting with the censorship bill of 1928 and leading to the banning of books by Faulkner, Hemingway, Somerset Maugham, Sigmund Freud, among other foreign authors, and of practically every native Irish writer of renown...
...If Catholics could use this provision as a reason for setting up health-care plans that would not fund abortions, they would have a real choice...
...Third, as to the "priests manipulate symbols" remark...
...I see them as practitioners who care about theory...
...Look at the case records: letters sent to parents, police admonished to retain confidence, priests called in, chewed out—and reassigned...
...Those who are most vulnerable and those who care the most will have to be heard before the church can be healed...
...Whatever happened to ascetic struggle...
...Had the parents of the raped children of North Attleboro twenty years ago sought immediate prosecution of the marauding cleric, had they been able to join the bishop to the case on grounds of negligent supervision, and had they won widely publicized and very expensive lawsuits, you can be assured that the hierarchy would have found a way to rid the church of the miscreants immediately...
...Now, there's a thought...
...One was the power of sacerdotal bonding, rather stronger than the clubby mentality of the United States Senate...
...Administrators whose attention was focused upon burgeoning institutions could fail to grasp the seriousness of all this, a failure that would lead to skewed priorities...
...the evidence is not of peccadillos but of dreadful crimes...
...He was addressing the racism issue and urging equal time forcontraceptionists...
...To sin...
...RAY E. INGRAM We fund abortions now Fremont, Mich...
...O'Halloran herself has little recollection...
...Just what I've always wanted, an informed heart...
...Such uses of the law masked a desire to save the cleric that superseded the will to save his victim...
...The bishops saw greater opportunities for themselves within the United Kingdom, so that today in Ireland many historians view the church as just a second colonial power...
...we had backyard picnics, friends whose doors were never locked...
...Very interesting, that...
...The laws fostered legalism and worry-wartism, especially among us naive literalists of the AngloSaxon tradition...
...In addition to what has been said above, a significant lesson from these sad episodes is that the laity in most church jurisdictions still have no significant decision-making role in personnel management...
...Unfortunately the term "false consciousness," little understood in America, is applicable to Ms...
...Churches have been stripped of their civil immunities...
...If it is God's will that women be priests, in the fullness of God's time, they will be, and they will be ordained under the aegis of the Roman hierarchy...
...To the Editors: Liz McCloskey's column, "Neighbors Need Neighbors" [April 22] brought me a happy recall of days long gone "in the old neighborhood...
...No bishop in this country has yet been found guilty of aiding and abetting or criminal shielding of a child molester...
...FRANCIS L. GROSS, JR...
...Burkhart got il wrong Astoria, N.Y...
...The manipulation business is a good approach, if a bit matter-of-fact for some tastes...
...First, the list of threats to modern Christian marriage is so long that gay marriage should rank about twentyfourth, even for those who take it seriously...
...in the case of priests who marry, the laws are used in some dioceses to justify depriving them not only of ministry but also of long years of accrued pension and healthcare benefits...
...it had to come from the Spirit...
...As for the bishop and "foolish" fasting laws, I hope the context makes it clear that the emphasis is on laws and in this case their application (enforcement...
...And why not...
...Church costs incurred in these criminal cases, mostly involving fees for professional advice, have been modest— though, of course, scandal to the faithful has been felt in lowered church contributions...
...Another had to do with civil law...
...To the Editors: In response to John Garvey's thoughtful May 20 column, "Breaking the Rules and Starving the Spirit" (ouch...
...Oak Park, 111...
...Part of the problem was that he would not speak despite many requests...
...She says that a new generation has grown up which "has no recollection of colonial status...
...Interesting questions, maybe for another book...
...PAUL LEE Learning from gays Brooklyn, N.Y...
...Under the original Clinton health-care plan, as I understand it, every person was to be offered a choice among several health-care plans...
...To conclude: Father Dreese has indeed been hurt and betrayed...
...Settlements are approved by bishops who have been apprised of the evidence...
...To the Editors: I read Father John J. Dreese' s article on "The Other Victims of Priest Pedophilia" [April 22] with the deepest sympathy, for I share the shame and anger he expressed so well...
...After affirming once more that I do genuinely share Father Dreese's sense of having been hurt and betrayed by the pedophiles, I must add that I see the focus of his article still upon the pedophile and his bishop, and not upon the victims, or upon the mothers and fathers in the church who live with the agony of their spiritually devastated children...
...There are thousands of priests like him, and like me, and millions of lay men and women who share his dismay...
...Why was the revulsion of parents against pedophiles not shared by the hierarchy and translated into canonical impediments to exclude these persons from continuing ministry in the church...
...Meantime, my Episcopal church announces that it is about to take Matthew Fox into the fold...
...I must, however, ask a clearer focus upon the cause...
...Misuse of current canons is ironic...
...O'Halloran to say that Bishop Eamonn Casey was given no opportunity to tell his side of the story [about his relationship with Annie Murphy...
...I gather that Dr...
...Such ubiquitous and constant empowerment allows the case law to see in the perpetration of crimes by clerics a representation of authority...
...There would be little or no civil litigation if molester and bishop could be reached only in their personal capacities...
...As for Cunningham's remark that my "odd ruminations act like jelly over a lens," I must confess that odd ruminations are the kind of thinking I have thirsted after for most of my life...
...they had a great talent for switching principles at a moment's notice...
...Or does this book at least imply or assume people struggling to do the right thing...
...about my book, Bending the Rules: What American Priests Tell American Catholics, first, thanks for the careful reading...
...Aquinas recognized their peculiar reality (spiritual vs...
...Growing up in a multi-ethnic neighborhood in Stamford, Connecticut—where all the ladies met at the clothesline and chatted over a real backyard fence, where all the kids played kick-the-can in the street, and where Morris Plotnick, our fruit-andvegetable man, drove through in his converted bus three times a week—was probably the best of times...
...The cost of criminal prosecutions of pedophiles has been borne by the taxpayers...
...There is a heaven...
...To the Editors: I knew that David R. Carlin, Jr., is quite often mean-spirited about those with whom he disagrees, but his column "Paying for Abortions" [May 6] was pure ditto-head propaganda...
...Case law reveals that juries have so found...
...Hey, we're talking about ecclesiastical descendants of the old-time pastors in the baronial mode, "Dollar Dan" and his like...
...In any event, that pension won't buy much...
...Parents are summoned to the bishop's office, interrogated there by the diocesan authorities, urged not to contact lawyers or the courts...
...This immunity was guaranteed both by the courts and, tacitly, by the legal profession, the police, and the press...
...The problem was that church leaders a generation ago did not have the will to do it, because they did not fully realize why the crime was so terrible, either for its victims or for the church...
...Pope Leo XIII in 1888 ordered the Irish bishops to keep their people out of the Home Rule movement and the boycotting campaign organized by Charles Stewart Parnell, the great Protestant nationalist statesman whom the church helped pull down...
...She makes no demand for full discussion, currently resisted and feared by the hierarchy...
...Starving the spirit...
...But these men are Christians who in the light of the Holy Ghost meditate upon Mary and read Galatians...
...To the Editors: Reading Ruth O'Halloran's article l"How Catholic Are the Irish...
...To be grouped with other authors of "wrongheaded books of this kind (e.g., Erikson's Young Man Luther)" is pleasure indeed...
...which led common folk to sometimes ridiculous lengths...
...My educated guess is that Limbaugh knows better, and is just rewriting history to bolster his right-wing agenda...
...Perhaps most importantly, in reading the record of facts in these cases we need to shift our attention to a scarcely mentioned realization that the stories of the child victims and their parents often fell upon almost totally insensitive ears...
...Continued on page 27) 2 CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 2) Dear me, I wondered at first why he was bringing Ronald Reagan and Oliver North into the abortion debate, and then it dawned on me that he was only dittoing Rush Limbaugh's "femi-Nazi" argument by referring to Hitler and Goebbels...
...Not because the 27 hierarchy is made up of patriarchs, for patriarchs qua patriarchs are no more likely to rethink customs that put them in the catbird seat than are—well—matriarchs...
...To the Editors: Lawrence Cunningham's review of my book The Making of a Mystic: Seasons in the Life of Teresa of Avila ["Religious Booknotes," April 22] has made me happy...
...Father Dreese's lament against the press has been widely articulated...
...As I see it, the best risk management for the church is an administration that is open, more fully participatory, even-handed, and sensitive to the needs and expectations of all the persons we touch (with due regard for confidentiality...
...And I suspect that such marriages could teach us a lot in terms of realizing the ideal of true friendship...
...In none of the cases in which corporate civil liability has been found did the bishop rush to the aid of the child and the family, secure medical and psychological help, immediately report the crime to the police, and then take decisive action to dismiss the priest...
...Finally, it is unfair of Ms...
...Thus, personnel decisions within the church could be made almost entirely in confidence and without civil consequence...
...Who now reads Claudel, Mauriac, Bernanos...
...There would have been no stalling, no stonewalling of discovery, no exercises in ambiguity and evasion—tactics that wound up costing the church in America nearly half a billion dollars...
...I find myself thinking that a little jelly over a lens might provide a wonderful new way of looking at life...
...It seems Ms...
...What is in question is not malfeasance but nonfeasance: failure 29 of an administrator to do what common sense and minimal ethical standards require...
...Voices that can be heard only in court or in exit polls from a thoroughly autocratic church may one day demand discovery of decisional evidence of why parishioners were never consulted on the appointment of pastors, donors on the closing of churches, the faithful on the choice of civil corporate structures of centralized, unaccountable control, men and women on the natural understanding and delicate individuality of their sexuality...
...Where would sacramentalism (even theology) be without them...
...Sexuality seems to be a good clue in the search for our real selves...
...It is noteworthy that to date appellate review has not produced significant reversals...
...yet what Ms...
...I don't think they are soft on sin, except maybe hypocrisy...
...To ordain women or not: a labyrinthine question tormenting so many—but not Ms...
...No doubt our bishops had much to learn about sexual aberrations and sexual crimes, as did we all...
...JIM BOWMAN Carlin echoes Limbaugh Baton Rouge, La...
...Apart from the rank hatred exhibited, a problem with that argument is that when Hitler came to power one of the first acts of the new government was to outlaw abortions in the Third Reich...
...they were masters of propaganda...
...physical...
...When this suffering is given priority, our heaviest emphasis should be given to the question of accountability...
...These cases are not frivolous...
...It can be argued that these are not tax dollars but, on a moral level, I would argue that this is a distinction without a difference...
...REV...
...I suggest that there were other factors that tended to keep church administrators (the bishops) from looking squarely at the problem...
...Pious exaggeration, I know...
...Had the bishops known some decades ago that their decisions in these matters would one day be made public, they would have proved better shepherds...
...To the Editors: On reading Marian Burkhart's article "In the Paraclete I Trust" [May 6], I knew she could not have written so magnificently without help...
...There were sanctions and there were procedures for imposing them...
...It's a promise that draws, from me, at least, respect and awe...
...So it was that events that we now know were taking their toll in human lives were kept secret...
...Hey, thanks...
...she'll leave it to the Paraclete...
...Today all this has changed...
...I admire the courage of the homosexual person giving him/her self to one person, one body, one heart and to a lifelong struggle to understand and support that other...
...Burkhart writing, there's still hope for us...
...and they practiced the fine art of mass homicide...
...He simply left the country under cover before the scandal broke...
...MICHAEL R. BECKER From the editors: That's what you get for sending us all those Anglicans opposed to women's ordination...
...Help...
...The anger Ms...
...I'll give Mr...
...He writes, for example: "[E]arlier in the twentieth century there were one or two parties that exhibited the following characteristics: they were totally devoid of intellectual integrity...
...Many, if not most, of the existing private health insurance plans offered today include abortion in their coverage...
...It is simply not true that the bishops were powerless to rid the church of a cleric who could destroy a child's faith or personal integrity...
...It's a phenomenological view, spoken by a truly objective observer...
...GINO DALPIAZ, C.S...
...It is in civil litigation, where litigants themselves must bear the costs, that significant awards against the church have been obtained...
...Garvey takes it all as seriously as I do...
...Suits seek damages from corporations for what has been done in representative roles...
...RAYMOND H. HOFFMAN Neighborhood memories Waterford, Conn...
...We, too, could observe all the activity from our front porches (stoops...
...in the words of James Joyce, "we have served two foreign masters, an Englishman and a Roman...
...The priests impressed Garvey (and me) as dedicated, hard-working, and devoted...
...Second, it seems to me, as wife and mother, that it may be the most committed of hearts that would enter and stay in a marriage as a one-to-one relationship...
...It's interesting that the challenge of women on ordination has brought forth a fresh new look at what priesthood means...
...It is out of these perspectives that I respond...
...She spoke not as a woman but as a Christian and a human being when she refused to engage in the politically correct castigating of the patriarchal church and its male leaders: "The hierarchy may be made up of patriarchs, but they are Christian patriarchs, and Christianity modifies patriarchy...
...Parents and their spiritually ruined children fall away from the church...
...It may be that the committees and guidelines that have been created to address the problem as it recurs in the future will prevent similar harm...
...Please note also that in all these successful civil actions, cases were won not by the first victim but by subsequent victims who could prove that superiors knew of the pattern of crime against others and did not take reasonable steps to protect them...
...did not approve of the invitation, any more than Horace approved when Homer nodded...
...Those are items in rebuttal of Garvey's well-chosen details...
...But my thoughts come from a life spent almost equally on both sides of the clerical chasm in the church, from my experience as the father of two sons and a daughter, and from my familiarity with both canon law and civil law...
...Symbolic gestures make up much of a priest's service...
...In the church as elsewhere, publicity and massive money losses provide powerful incentives toward making proper management decisions...
...Her column led to thoughts about the argument that gay marriage would endanger the institution of heterosexual marriage...
...Before blaming the men and women who sit on juries for overcompensation of victims, Father Dreese should sit through a criminal or civil trial of a child abuser, or carefully read the transcript of such a trial...
...Had these things been done, the image of the priesthood and the reputations of good and innocent priests could have been saved...
...As an Irish citizen and teacher of Irish history, let me recall some facts...
...under pain of what...
...It's an old question: Why so adamant (and repetitive) on the second and not the first...
...I believe in it...
...Her passive faith in a happy ending recalls the comment by Karl Marx, so often quoted in incomplete form: "Religion is the opium of the people...
...Burkhart's maxim: "Wait and see...
...Then comes the record of silence as the pastors hope the problem goes away...
...Why, when sent to the Servants of the Paraclete in New Mexico for psychological treatment, were known sex offenders given faculties for weekend work...
...Someone surely has to let the hot air out of the New Age balloon...
...Still, it's not the case that the gravity of sexual abuse of children was unknown until our own enlightened times: In criminal law, it has always ranked as a serious felony...
...Cunningham regards Robert Coles as somewhat less "wrongheaded" in his biographical efforts than Erikson, but I am equally glad to be somehow in Coles's league as well...
...I was deeply touched by her conclusionary words: "Oh Christ, if we could only take your words to heart and learn what defiles a person and what doesn't...
...if the prophetic voice is suppressed...
...Burkhart wrote rang evangelically true...
...HELEN KANE Burkhart got it right Stone Park, 111...
...To the Editors: David R. Carlin, Jr., decries the injustice of making Catholics help pay for abortions through the use of their tax dollars...
...In cases where bishops were found not to have been negligent, defense costs have been relatively small...
...carmel Me caffrey Pedophilia's victims San Francisco, Calif...
...To repentance...
...In the 1960s the church shared with nonprofit public benefit organizations generally the shield of charitable immunity...
...March 11 ], I was more than a little surprised by her obvious lack of knowledge of Irish history...
...This is my thirty-fifth year of ordination, so we are nearly contemporaries...
...Carlin the benefit of the doubt, and assume his excuse could be ignorance...
...Today the "warm glow" she mentions is only a sweet memory for so many of us, living as we do in neighborhoods where a distant wave from a passing car once or twice a year is worth mentioning at the dinner table—"I think the guy next door waved at me today...
...william w. bassett The writer, a professor at the school of law, University of San Francisco, taught canon law at the Catholic University for eight years...
...Burkhart...
...First, it is not true that under the 1917 Code of Canon Law bishops or religious superiors could do nothing to rid the church of clerical child molesters...
...at the same time the laws are interpreted to "require" bishops to 28 provide lifetime sustenance to known criminals totally unfit for the ministry...
...The most serious ecclesiastical penalties, all involving excommunication and privatio officii et beneficii, were available to exclude from the faithful the perpetrators of grave sexual crimes...
...I like that...
...Please, editors, let not the prophetic voice be mute...
...I'm glad Garvey picked up on it...
...JOAN sexton Ireland & the church Mount Airy, Md...
...Kalamazoo, Mich...
...Awards of punitive damages against religious organizations were virtually unknown...
...The difference between 1964 and 1994 is less in the perceived organic chemistry of sexual abusers, given much stress by Father Dreese, than it is in today's general awareness that the child victim may be almost totally destroyed as a human being by the traumas inflicted upon him by the trusted, sacred marauder...
...Second, the priest who said we invite hate-filled people to Communion (so why not birth-controllers...
...To the Editors: Regarding women's ordination, a complex issue, Marian Burkhart is unrealistically trusting in the capacity of religious "gatekeepers" to do justice...
Vol. 121 • June 1994 • No. 12
