Scandal and the culture of silence. (Essay).

Jordan, Mark D.

A dark riddle: What is the "Boston pedophilia scandal" if it's not in Boston, not typically about pedophiles, and more silence than scandal?

WHEN The Boston Globe broke stories in January about Cardinal Law's repeated transfers of John Geoghan, I couldn't see much that was news in them or in the priest's trial. Well-publicized U.S. cases stretch back to 1985, when the national media began reporting on Gilbert Gauthe from Louisiana. Since then there has been a steady flow of reports: Mount Cashel in Newfoundland and Covenant House in New York, diocesan priests in Chicago and the friars of Santa Barbara, James Porter from Fall River and Rudy Kos from Dallas. So where was the news? The number of crimes alleged against Geoghan was high, but about the same as the estimates for Porter. Geoghan had been transferred repeatedly and then (it turned out) recommended to another diocese, but there are transfers and commendations in other cases, too. What, then, was the content of the newest "revelations" from Boston? For that matter, what was "Boston" about them, except perhaps for the local versions of princely arrogance and anti-Catholic rancor?

Indeed, for a reader of the history of the Catholic priesthood and male religious orders, the news from Boston sounded like one more chapter for a chronicle that comes down from the Middle Ages. From court records to popular satires, priests and monks have been accused over the centuries of abusing minors entrusted to them. Sometimes the minors are parishioners; at other times, seminarians or novices. Sometimes the minors haven't yet entered puberty, but most often they are pubescent teenagers or young men. Sometimes those we would label "minors" weren't counted as minors at all, since the age of majority has varied considerably by time and place. The latest news adds one more chapter to a long chronicle, with its brutal facts and banal stereotypes. The chronicle isn't about "pedophilia" in the prevailing clinical sense; it recounts rather how normatively celibate men abuse the young--and often their young. The chronicle's recurring characters are the woeful or comical stratagems that the churches deploy for keeping silence.

The stratagems begin by wanting to deny the abuse, one way or another. Court documents show that Cardinal Law or his deputies transferred Geoghan time after time. Of course they did--and not just because any large organization likes to transfer its bad mistakes. The Boston chancery was following precedents already well-established in the Middle Ages, when sodomitic priests caught with boys or young men were exiled from the city or diocese of their crime. Stricter sentences ordered that they be sent to remote monasteries for a lifetime of fasting and prayer. In the last century, rural American monasteries were still used to house and hide delinquent priests--alcoholics, fathers in the biological sense, "molesters." After a decent interval, most were sent back to some new assignment. With the American church's turn to psychology as management, penitential exile got reconceived as therapy. Penance was supplemented or replaced by twelve-step programs and counseling. Successful therapy led to reassignment. Unsucce ssful therapy led to more counseling.

The important thing was to keep trouble inside the walls. Pious Catholics, like observant Jews, are conscious of living under two jurisdictions: a local secular authority and a universal religious law, which has its own interpreters and enforcers. Catholic religious law prefers to prosecute and punish church officers on its own. So bishops, who once asserted benefit of clergy to keep their priests away from local magistrates, still tend to divert ugly cases from civil authority. Settlements are offered to victims or their families in exchange for a promise to keep things secret. If these inducements don't work, stronger pressure is applied: vigorous rebuttal, charges of disloyalty, counter-accusation, perhaps even exclusion from the parish.

Stratagems for keeping silence have been accompanied all along by loud denunciations of male-male desire, by protestations of priestly purity, and by pulpit thunder against the horror of sexual abuse. This is not simple hypocrisy--if hypocrisy can be simple in religious institutions. Denunciations, protestations, and thunder help to distance "the Church" from internal crimes more effectively than implausible claims that a bishop didn't know what he was reading or writing. Once a case is widely reported, church officers are quick to agree that its perpetrator must be a sort of monster. Such crimes can't possibly come from within "the Church," which hates them. Priests abusing boys--that is utterly alien to Catholic life. So the cause must be some external influence, Satan or the degeneracy of the surrounding culture. For example, clerical pedophilia in contemporary America must originate in our "pansexualism," as Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos suggested at one Vatican press conference. The rhetorical intention is c lear enough. Bishops and cardinals join the chorus of swelling scandal to reinforce silence not just about the frequency of these events, but about their connection with deeper forms of clerical power.

Among many other things, networks of clerical power are systems for keeping silence. They try at first to keep silence in the ordinary ways: they hide acts and offenders; they hush observers; and they deny allegations. If those stratagems fail, then clerical voices begin speaking loudly. They are eager to dissociate themselves from the crime, but they want further to prevent any particular case from becoming the occasion for asking broader questions. Their aim is not just to distance the church from a scandal, but to use scandal to prevent further speech.

Outraged speeches pour from American bishops and Vatican overseers to maintain silence around disruptive topics. They use scandal to police what gets counted as serious speech. Tales linking abuse to power are not serious because they are declared scandalous. People who want to persist with scandalous speech can't be serious. They must have hidden motives--like revenge or greed or anti-Catholic prejudice. Once certain questions are sprayed with scandal, they cannot be discussed seriously in public. So of course church officials join in the chorus of scandal--and not only at press conferences. Most "magisterial" denunciations of homosexuality are chiefly intended to produce silence around the topic of the male homosexuality that exists within the Catholic church.

APOCALYPTIC VISION

The Boston case became national news. It appeared in AP headlines on the AOL welcome screen. Afternoon talk shows invited their audiences to speculate on what the American cardinals would do in Rome. So the defenders of Catholic "orthodoxy" joined the chorus of scandal. Bishops looked for scapegoats, and they turned quickly enough to a familiar group: homosexuals, especially those in the clergy. They blamed the scandalous troubles not just on "pansexualism' but on American gay liberation and its advocates in the libertine media. The Vatican itself rolled out well-worn anti-gay diatribes. But the speeches didn't do what they were supposed to do.

The pope's spokesman wondered aloud--to The New York Times--whether homosexuals could even be validly ordained as priests. After all, he continued, gay men couldn't really enter into a marriage. Joaquin Navarro Valls stopped there, but others mused on. Within classical notions about the sacrament of orders, his statement could not apply just to future ordinations. This invalidity would apply to ordinations in the past as well. And if gay men couldn't really be ordained priests, then they hadn't ever really done the things that only priests can do. And if there were a high number of gay men in the priesthood in any time or place, wouldn't it follow that many and maybe most masses celebrated on any given Sunday were not sacraments? And what about the cascading effects of invalid ordinations by gay bishops? Any number of straight men might not be real priests either.

A curious speech. There were more to come. Wilton Gregory, head of the American Conference of Catholic Bishops, argued that it would be most prudent not to admit gay men to seminaries. The argument begged some obvious questions, since recent procedures for excluding gay candidates from seminaries and religious orders have succeeded chiefly in helping outwardly obedient candidates build more ornate closets. But the bishop kept on talking. It was, he admitted, "an ongoing struggle" to ensure that the Catholic clergy "is not dominated by homosexual men." Dominated, indeed. For the past two decades, worries about the preponderance of gay priests and seminarians have been discussed behind closed doors. Now the head of the bishops' conference rehearses them before the press.

Could it be? Might this finally be the moment for stepping beyond the stratagems of scandal in order to speak seriously about male-male desire and the structures of clerical power? The Roman Catholic church has long been both fiercely homophobic and intensely homoerobtic. Who could say so without being sprayed with scandal and dismissed as less than serious? But now Newsweek devotes a couple of pages to "the gay dilemma" of the Catholic priesthood. Might this be the apocalyptic moment in which the riddles, the paradoxes, the traps of clerical desires could be brought to light?

It hardly looks like a moment of light inside rectories and religious houses. On the contrary, the immediate risks for out gay men in the Catholic clergy are greater than they were before the Boston Globe stories made national news. "Apostolic visitations" have been ordered for American seminaries in order to insure that they are following the rules and inculcating Catholic moral doctrine "in its integrity," that is, with the complete set of sexual prohibitions and gender roles. Bishops, under real threat from outside, will clamp down on dissent inside as best they can. These conditions don't seem likely to encourage serious discussion of priestly sexuality.

Might the apocalyptic openness happen outside church walls? The news coverage has hardly been an unmixed blessing. Gay men are linked, once again, with pedophilia and perversion--for those still listening. Many others are tired of this scandal. Time to move on to the next sensation. If we could stand entirely apart from the bad press and its fatigues, we would find ourselves face-to-face with a persistent challenge: What words are left for pursuing these questions seriously? How can one say anything that hasn't already been swallowed up into scandal and turned back into the service of silence?

LITURGIES

Prayer ought to be privileged speech for Catholics. It is the speech above policies or press conferences, beyond catechism and canon law. Prayer about the present moment in the American Catholic church ought properly to begin as an act of confession.

Some time back, Pope John Paul II was asking God to forgive some of the church's failures towards various groups of people. Lesbians and gays were not included in his petitions--which were, in any case, directed to God and not to the offended human parties. Ten years ago, when I was still teaching at a Catholic university, I imagined a more candid penitential liturgy. It was to be a solemn Lenten service in the campus church presided over by the school's president, a priest. In it, he (still necessarily he!) would ask forgiveness from lesbian and gay students for the dangerous words spoken against them by administrations; from queer alumni who would be honored only if their identities were suppressed; from gay priests and brothers and from lesbian sisters who poisoned themselves with mortification, self-loathing, and breaking labor for the sake of the common good, which was somehow never good for them.

I realized quickly enough that the service couldn't end there. An antiphonal confession had to be made. So I imagined a call to the gay men present, out or closeted, celibate or not, clerical or lay--all would stand. They would then be asked to confess the ways in which they had been complicit in the clerical systems of silence.

As a Catholic layman and public dissenter, I have avoided some sins of complicity. Others I carry in my conscience. Chief among them, the sin of not having escaped the fixed litany of churchly scandal. Antiphon and response: scandalous accusation, scandalized rebuttal. Use the press to dissent, use the press to police. The countless versicles of a litany for avoiding what most needs to be said. Our penance, if we can perform it, is to find unexpected words for unriddling such loud silences.

Mark D. Jordan is professor of religion at Emory and author of Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicsm (Chicago, 2000).