By Gary Topping–
Just when we Catholics were hoping that we might have turned the corner on the gut-wrenching scandal of child abuse among our clergy, along comes the revelation of the worst case yet, the over three hundred Pennsylvania priests who are alleged to have abused more than one thousand children. Once again I feel the poison coursing through my Catholic arteries, tempting me to give up my faith in the Church and the clergy and causing me to ask, silently, when I meet even beloved priests of long acquaintance, “Are you sure I know everything I should about you”?
Once again I find myself having to regroup mentally, reminding myself what the Church is all about and why I cannot and should not, give up on it. And I find myself trying to frame responses, if I ever had the chance, both to the priests (assuming for the moment that they do turn out to be guilty) and to their hapless victims.
As to the priests who are still alive, they need to be prosecuted vigorously and effectively, and from what I’m hearing from the Pennsylvania attorney general, that is going to happen. For those who are dead, I am confident that justice is already being served, at the ultimate bar of judgment, and that that justice is far more just than anything our earthly legal system is capable of attaining.
What to say to the victims and what to do with them are much more complicated questions. Besides the satisfaction of seeing their abusers go to jail, our legal system offers counseling and monetary settlements. Counseling is good and even necessary, but monetary settlements have always struck me as inadequate and even irrelevant. We Americans are capable of monetizing everything, but how does one monetize the loss of a child’s innocence? I guess monetary settlements are better than nothing, and unfortunately neither I nor apparently anyone else has ever come up with a better idea.
Closer to the forefront of my thinking, though, is what I as a Catholic might say to those Catholic kids. What can I say about the transformative power of the sacraments, in the face of three hundred examples of priests who had preached that transformative power without themselves being transformed? One thing I might say is to admit that there have been many more than three hundred Catholics over the millennia who have failed to be touched by that transformative power, but I would balance those over against the many millions whose lives have borne witness to its effectiveness when embraced.
Further, I might point out that the problem of why bad things happen to good people is an unsolvable problem, rendered all the more inexplicable when the inflictor of bad things is someone we trusted to be good. Even the Bible, from cover to cover, is filled with stories of suffering, culminating in God’s only Son suffering on the cross. God does not except even himself from suffering. While God does not promise exemption from suffering, He does promise that nothing can separate us from his love: “I am sure,” writes St. Paul, “that neither death, nor life, nor [many other things—read the list for yourself]. . . will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8: 38-39)
