Having been raised Catholic, I’ve followed the saga of the pedophile scandal in the Boston archdiocese with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I grew up believing priests were as close to God as you could get on this earth – well, except for Sister Angelina but that’s a whole other story. On the other hand, my first boyfriend was a priest. So I feel as though I know both sides of the story.
Fr. Vincent, the parish priest who saw me though my childhood in parochial school, falls into the category of God’s chosen ones. I can honestly say that he was the one priest who retained my affection and respect from my childhood till the day he died. Long after I’d lost all belief in the church, and long after I’d become all too intimately familiar with how flawed and human priests could be, I believed in him.
My affair with a priest brought me down to earth about them and their place in the universe. Once you’ve been romantically involved with a priest, they definitely lose that otherworldly aspect. Especially after the first time you go to confession and say “Bless me father for I have sinned” and he responds with a chuckle, saying “Yeah, I know.”
So my feelings about the priesthood are pretty ambivalent. But my feelings about the church’s response to the Boston scandal aren’t.
I am as horrified as the rest of the world about it. Horrified that it was allowed to continue for so long. Horrified at all the attempts to hush those hurt by it. Horrified that I find myself constantly going back in my mind to all the priests I knew in my childhood and all the young men who served as their altar boys and wondering what terrible secrets they may share. Horrified that I can’t think of those priests now without wondering.
This scandal taints what had been a wonderful time in my life. A time when I believed in the church without question. When I thought that nuns could do no wrong and priests lived in the palm of God’s hand.
But that isn’t what bothers me the most about it. It’s not the lies, not the shuffling of the priests around from parish to parish, not the payoffs to families to keep them quiet – none of that bothers me as much as the deafening silence emanating from Rome.
Where is the pope in all this? Where is the man we were taught is the representative of Christ on earth? Despite my major disagreements with many of his pronouncements, from his stand on birth control to his stand on priests’ marrying, I always felt he was someone who truly wanted to leave the world a better place for his service to it. And children always seemed to hold a special place in his heart.
After all, for Roman Catholics, he represents the man who said, “Suffer little children unto me”. It was a phrase that always stood out in my mind when I was a child because it somehow meant to me that God was giving me special protection. And I always thought the priests and nuns were my special protectors.
So how can he be so silent as child after child speaks out about the abuse they suffered at the hands of his priests? How can he not offer an apology to them, not give them some words of comfort?
The adults throughout this world who believe in him deserve to hear from him. They deserve to hear strong words from him condemning the acts that have led to so much pain, acts committed under the guise and protection of the Roman Catholic Church.
Why is the pope so silent now when his voice is so desperately needed by so many of us who want to be able to cling to something rock solid in a world that seems to be built on shifting sands.
His church in America is in pain. If he doesn’t speak out to help heal it, nothing anyone else does really matters.