All the Pope's Men (36 page)

Other cultural differences also came into play, such as differing conceptions of what constitutes “sexual abuse." In Italy, which is the cultural matrix for many Vatican policy-makers, the age of consent for sexual relations is fourteen. In Spain, where Herranz is from, it’s thirteen; in Honduras, where Rodriguez is from, it’s fourteen; and in Mexico, where Rivera Carrera and Sandoval are from, the age of consent in some states is twelve. Canon law sets the age of consent for marriage at sixteen for a man and fourteen for a woman. Many Vatican officials and Catholic prelates in other parts of the world are thus culturally inclined to believe that adolescents are capable of adult decisions about sex. Since so many cases in the American crisis involved a priest and an adolescent male— this tempted many Vatican officials to construe the crisis as one of homosexuality, not abuse. They saw it through the lens of a supposed homosexual subculture in the United States and among American clergy, and in that sense saw an “American problem."

It’s also true that over the past twenty years, Americans have developed a heightened awareness of the prevalence of child sexual abuse within society and a deeper appreciation of the long-term consequences for the victim, especially if there is no therapeutic intervention. Public anger was exacerbated in the United States by a greater understanding of the trauma experienced by victims. This is a cultural development that many officials in the Holy See have not experienced, and it too tended to distance the “gut reactions" in the Vatican from those on the American street.

All that can be granted, and yet few officials in the Holy See are under the illusion that sexual abuse by clergy is a uniquely American phenomenon. The evidence that it is a problem affecting the universal Church, as discussed above, is simply too obvious. Nor did the conviction that some aspects of the problem are uniquely American lead anyone in the Vatican to believe it is therefore unimportant. For better or worse, everyone in the Vatican realizes that if America sneezes, the rest of the Catholic Church will eventually catch a cold. In fact, the concern that the U.S. bishops were setting a precedent that would be widely studied and imitated around the world is one of the reasons the Holy See took such an interest in the American norms. Once again, it is ironic that the same people who derided the Vatican for regarding sex abuse by priests as an American problem also got upset when the Holy See took an interest in the American norms.

The bottom line is that the accusations reviewed here were for the most part false, unfair, and unhelpful. Taking such a polemical stance as the premise for conversation led nowhere. This is not to defend the Vatican’s stance on any particular dimension of the crisis. It may well be that the Pope should have spoken out sooner, that he should have moved against Law and other bishops more forcefully, and so on down the list of complaints. The point, however, is that American Catholicism and the American press can never have a serious discussion with the Holy See about these issues so long as they rely on a set of assumptions about Vatican thinking that in effect renders dialogue impossible. A much more effective strategy would be to grasp which values are really motivating the Holy See’s response and attempt to show how proposed American solutions in the long run will better satisfy those concerns. That’s the stuff of conversation.

How Rome Misunderstood America

Conversation is of course a two-way street. It is equally true that when the Holy See gazes across the Atlantic Ocean, its analysis is often impaired by a bundle of stereotypes about the United States and the American Church. Four are most relevant to the sexual abuse crisis.

1. Sexual Hysteria.
Recall what we said in chapter 4 about the European sociology of the Holy See. Many Vatican officials tend to carry around a rather typical set of European prejudices about the United States, including a kind of live-and-let-live sophistication when it comes to sexual misconduct, as opposed to what is often construed as America’s puritanical hysteria. The Clinton/Lewinsky scandal was cited repeatedly by Vatican officials in background interviews in explaining why they found the overwhelmingly negative coverage of the sexual abuse crisis by the American press exaggerated. In the end, they said, it is obviously repugnant that a small number of Catholic priests engaged in the sexual abuse of minors. But being human, some priests will fail, even in these terrible ways. It has always been thus. Are Americans just discovering original sin?

The Vatican’s mistake in this regard was interpreting the American reaction as having to do primarily with sex. In fact, it was not really the sexual misconduct by priests that fueled the explosion in January 2002, but the managerial misconduct by bishops. It was not John Geoghan who ignited the blaze, since his story was already well known in the Boston press. It was Cardinal Bernard Law, and the pattern that began to emerge of his failure to intervene against Geoghan and others when the evidence gave him a clear basis to do so. To the extent Vatican officials construed the crisis as driven by shock over the moral failings of priests, they were bound to misdiagnose the situation. Certainly, many Americans have high expectations of priests, and when priests fall from their pedestals, it generates more trauma than it probably should. Still, most American Catholics were primarily concerned with the bishops and what they perceived as a collective failure by the Church to protect its children, to admit the truth, and to take the proper steps to restore confidence.

2. Anti-Catholicism.
Some officials in the Holy See were predisposed by their cultural background and experience to interpret the hostile reaction of the American press and of elite segments of American culture through the lens of anti-Catholicism. Not only did Vatican officials and sympathetic prelates around the world sound the alarm about anti-Catholicism, but they did so in language that could not help but fuel the sense among many Americans that they were out of touch. Rodriguez compared what he saw as the American press’s “persecution" of Catholics with Hitler, Stalin, Nero, and Diocletian. Obando Bravo called it a kind of bloodless martyrdom. Americans took this as an example of Church leaders wanting to “blame the messenger" rather than confront their own responsibility for the crisis.

Yet it must be understood by American readers how difficult it is to explain to non-Americans how the sexual abuse story in the United States became a story about the Catholic Church. Since most sexual abuse of minors happens in the family, since priests are no more likely to abuse than other clergy or professional groups, and since the vast majority of priests are innocent, how did the Catholic Church become the primary focus for this story? This is a reasonable question, and Americans must be prepared to give a response. Perhaps there is some truth to the suspicion that anti-Catholicism played a role. Philip Jenkins in
The
New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice
(Oxford University Press, 2003) argues that whereas conservative nativist sentiment was the carrier for anti-Catholicism in America in the nineteenth century, secular political liberalism has become its incubator today, and it had a field day with the sex abuse crisis.

In the end, however, Vatican officials misplaced the emphasis in construing the American reaction primarily in terms of anti-Catholicism. Some of the reporters who led the charge on the sex abuse story were in fact practicing Catholics, shocked and pained by what they learned about their Church. Most reporters, however, are not so much hostile to organized religion as indifferent to it. If there was a bias at work, it was not against the Catholic Church, or even religion, but institutions generally. This reflects the culture of American journalism, which holds up the investigative reporter as the highest realization of the profession’s ideals. European journalism idolizes the essayist who pens pithy philosophical essays; American journalism lionizes the gritty street reporter who meets sources in parking garages at 3:00 A.M. to get the dirt. The working assumption is that institutions tend to corruption, and the less accountable an institution perceives itself to be, the more ripe it is for an exposé. Once the Catholic Church began to appear an institution under siege, attempting to suppress the release of documents, ducking the press, using hardball legal tactics to try to discourage claims, reporters smelled blood. The article of faith underlying such coverage is that exposure brings reform. For the most part the American reaction was thus not about anti-Catholicism, and interpreting it in that light missed the passion for bringing injustice to light that actually drove most of the public discussion.

As a footnote, it may be that Boston was a special case. It may be that the long history of antagonism between Cardinal Bernard Law and the press, especially the
Boston Globe
but by no means limited just to the
Globe
, generated a particularly adversarial climate. This in turn helped shape a regional difference in the way American Catholics experienced the scandals, since the media coverage at several critical moments was far more intense on the East Coast than in other parts of the country. Midwestern Catholics, for example, may not have had the same experience as Catholics in the epicenter on the Eastern seaboard.

A variant of the anti-Catholicism thesis, as the chronology above notes, is that Jewish hostility to the Catholic Church, perhaps in combination with Masons and others, helps account for the persecution related to the sex abuse scandals. Is it true that in the United States, Jews are overrepresented in the media? Perhaps. In his book
Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment
, J. J. Goldberg found that while Jews are 5 percent of the working press nationwide, they represent one fourth or more of the writers, editors, and producers in America’s “elite media." This includes network news divisions, the top newsweeklies, and the four leading daily papers (the
New York Times, Los Angeles
Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal). Yet even if this reality biases the American media against the Catholic Church, a debatable proposition in itself, it would be a serious distortion to imagine that American Jewish reporters went after the sexual scandals on this basis. I can offer personal testimony. I worked extensively with American broadcast and print reporters throughout the most intense periods of the crisis, sometimes as an interview subject, sometimes as a journalistic colleague. Not once did I ever have the impression that Jewish animus for the Church had anything to do with their coverage. Most of the reporters associated with this story, as a point of fact, are not Jewish. Moreover, it’s unlikely that most American Jews are even aware of the Vatican’s position on the Middle East conflict, let alone that they would desire to exact revenge for it.

3. Greed.
Some Vatican officials have suggested that the desire to cash in at the expense of the Catholic Church was at the root of the American crisis, especially since in many cases the lawsuits being filed today brought against the Church are decades old. Bertone, for example, hinted at this in his
30 Giorni
interview of February 2002, saying there is a “well-founded suspicion" that the scandals are all about money. This is largely a misperception, although one not without its grain of truth.

In accounting for why the Catholic sexual abuse crisis has been so much deeper in the Anglo-Saxon world, probably the single most important factor is the unique nature of Anglo-Saxon, and especially American, tort law. To put it simply—no lawsuits, no crisis. Tort law in the United States makes it possible to sue the Catholic Church as a legal person and force it to pay up for the acts of abuse committed by individual priests. In most other parts of the world, this is much more difficult, if not impossible. Without the lawsuits and the inherent drama they created, it’s difficult to imagine that the sex abuse story would have generated the same media interest, or attracted the same corps of legal specialists dedicated to uncovering what had been concealed.

The concept of corporate liability began to develop in earnest in the United States in the 1950s, when companies began to be sued for faulty products or the incompetence of their employees. Ralph Nader’s famous 1965 book
Unsafe at Any Speed
, about his successful lawsuit against General Motors over the dangers of the Chevrolet Corvair, made corporate liability seem a noble area of the law, a way for the little guy to even the score with vast corporate conglomerations. Since the late 1950s, the annual cost of settling tort lawsuits in the United States has outstripped the gross domestic product every year. This trend was accelerated in the 1970s, with development of class action lawsuits, growing reliance on expert testimony, and procedural reforms regarding evidence that combined to make it much easier to sue corporations and obtain large settlements. Today the average American company spends between three and eight times more defending itself from tort actions than comparable firms in other parts of the world. Beginning in the 1980s, these concepts of legal personality, corporate liability, and negligent hiring and retention began to be extended by courts to church groups, and the Catholic Church is easily the most lucrative target for such litigation.

In Europe, accusations of sexual abuse against Catholic priests tend to be one-day stories, except in the rare instances where the law permits a criminal trial. Generally speaking, there is no one to sue. In the United States and other parts of the Anglo-Saxon world, however, lawsuits keep the story alive for months, if not years. Legal recourse also gives victims, lawyers, and journalists procedural tools to extract information from the institution, such as the right to depose Church officials and to subpoena records. In many cases, it has been the public unsealing of Church records under court order that has fueled the most significant and explosive media attention. The potential for large financial settlements or jury verdicts sustains public interest and gives journalists some quantitative way to measure the impact of the scandals. That potential also, obviously, attracts lawyers.