bellesjoy:
You may offer a fair settlement for counseling, pray for them, offer aid in anyway fesible because you see the injury and as a Catholic want to help them. But you would not ask you children or grandchildren to give up their homes or their futures. That would be irresponsible in your role as parent.
As I understand US law, a victimizer does not get to decide what is fair compensation to the victim. The courts do, in the form of a jury.
The institutional church failed, horribly. In some cases, its bishops knew about evil priests under their supervision and did little or nothing to prevent them from committing further crimes or, even more hideously, to help repair those they knew had been injured already.
That is disgraceful conduct. It is evil.
It is convenient for Catholics to say, “Whoops. Not us. Wasn’t us. It was our bishops, our priests. The abuse occurred in our buildings by men we trusted with authority over our eternal souls. Not our fault. Don’t punish us.”
There’s something to be said for that. We are presented with a heirarchical model. We, as laity, have no authority over what decisions the institutional church makes. We don’t get to pick our bishops. Nobody in the church has to listen to us when we complain, whether our complaints are about the orans posture or sexual molestation of our sons and daughters. They don’t have to, and, guess what?
They don’t. It’s the one thing “liberals” and “conservatives” can agree on.
Let’s face it, folks. Our church failed the victims. They’re injured and angry. Cardinal Law (to use one example) didn’t listen. Eventually they found somebody who would – the secular legal system. The only reason that the American church became responsive to the sexual abuse crisis was because the victims threatened it financially.
That’s disgraceful. So is comparing the rape of innocents to the “rape” of the Church.
Is it fair to the parishoners? Of course not. It’s not fair if I’m counting on an inheritance from my grandfather and he gets sued and financially ruined because he shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die. It’s not fair if my IBM stock (hypothetical, I assure you) drops in value because some dim-bulb manager couldn’t keep his hands off his secretary.
Maybe that’s the way to look at it – we’re voteless stockholders of a corporation run by incompetent and foolish management.
Or maybe we’re sheep who have the misfortune to be led by incompetent shepherds. Sure, the shepherds do bad things to some of us, but the rest of us look the other way until the day the ranch is sold and the new owners come in and ship us all to the slaughterhouse.
Our institution is not innocent. It is not. Who is the institution? Why, despite the fact that we have no say in how it’s run, we are. Because we’re the ones who make up the Church, and children were hideously mistreated by those we allowed to be placed in authority over us.
So we lose a bunch of money and buildings? We’re a long way from Galilee. The apostles had no buildings, no schools, no teachers, no pews, no golden chalices or music ministers. It would be nice to think that the Church is something more than the sum of its possessions.
And it would be nice to think that we, as Catholics, could do for ourselves some of the things we’ve been content to delegate to the institutional church if we had to.
It also would be nice to think that the virtues of charity, compassion contrition, repentance, and restitution apply to the shepherds who preach them, not just the sheep. If some good comes of this evil, perhaps it will be to help all of focus again on what’s really important.
