Peter Novecosky, OSB

Helping the anger go away

The crisis over sexual abuse and its coverup in the church have commentators giving their opinion about its cause and its cure. Everything has been blamed, including celibacy, immaturity, homosexuality, the church’s hierarchical structure, or the culture of secrecy.

While it is admitted that other organizations such as schools, sports teams and scouts face the same issues, church leaders are held to a higher standard because of their moral teaching and symbolic stature within society.

Psychologist Thomas Plante points out that there is a distinctly different level of anger directed toward the Catholic Church over the sexual abuse of minors than toward other organizations whose leaders commit similar crimes.

The professor of psychology and director of the Spirituality and Health Institute at Santa Clara University in Calif., said, “People are enraged by what they see as a coverup, by no high-ranking Catholic clergy being fired.”

“Any violation of children is a terrible thing,” he told Catholic News Service, “but when it comes at the hands of those society puts on the highest pedestal, it’s also a hypocrisy issue.” Shuffling priests to another parish and not laicizing offending priests are other signs of church mismanagement.

According to Plante, the anger directed at the church also has deeper and more diverse roots. “There are a lot of people who are very angry at the Catholic Church about all sorts of things, from the Crusades to how Galileo was treated, to the church’s positions on sexual ethics, divorce and women priests,” he said. “It’s like a fire hose, all that gets funneled into the clergy abuse thing.”

One way to alleviate some of that public anger has been suggested by Jesuit Father James Martin. He suggests the church’s hierarchy, from the pope on down, needs to perform some penance for its role in the sex abuse crisis. The omission of doing penance, he says, is a grave deviation from the church’s own teaching on penitance and restoration, which requires the penitant to make reparation to those harmed and to the larger community.

Writing in the National Catholic Reporter, Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea, a clinical psychologist who addressed the US bishops at their 2002 Dallas meeting, noted that there are two types of shame experiences. One cripples people and stunts growth. Too many sexual abuse victims, she said, labour under this self-destructive and isolating type of shame. “It was never theirs to carry in the first place,” the co-author of Treating the Adult Survivor of Childhood Sexual Abuse wrote.

A second shame experience, she explained, deepens our relationships with self, others and the sacred. “This shame signals that we have transgressed, instructs us to make amends, and warns us to refrain from behaviors that lead to the deepening of shame with its concomitant fragmenting of our psyches, souls and connections to others.”

Instead of blaming the media, attorneys and anti-Catholics, church leaders need to take the shame upon themselves in a creative way, she said.

Firing bishops may be the easy way out, she said. Shame has to be “invited into the parlors of the Vatican and chanceries across the globe.”

Here are some suggestions she makes:

— Bishops worldwide could substitute for their pectoral crosses “millstones fashioned to be just heavy enough to remind these men of the suffering they and their brethren turned blind eyes to.”

— Members of the hierarchy could get out of their chanceries and spend time every month in the kitchens of survivors and their families, “listening abundantly to their stories and apologizing” to them.

— They could visit families of victims who committed suicide or are in jail.

— Bishops could, clad in sackcloth, dedicate every First Friday to leading the Stations of the Cross in honour of victims and invite victims and their families to be present.

It’s strong medicine. Perhaps that’s what is needed to effect a cure.