Beware of Connecticut yankees. When Mark Twain published his book
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court most European Catholic reviewers were not amused, and accused Twain of anti-Catholic bias. Perhaps, after all, Twain’s bias was more generally anti-religious than anti-Catholic. And the book
was funny. Now the humor is gone, and
anti-Catholicism, having adapted for its purpose the anti-cult stereotypes, is no longer funny, just plain ugly. That anti-Catholicism is indeed the last acceptable prejudice, and an effective Catholic Anti-Defamation League is badly needed, would be obvious even to the casual reader of
Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II by Connecticut’s
Hartford Courant reporters Jason Berry and Gerald Renner (New York: Free Press, 2004; in all fairness to Mark Twain and Berry, the latter is really from Louisiana, and its connection with Connecticut is in fact via his co-operation with the
Hartford Courant). Roman Catholics and priests are fair game in the United States media from several years; now it’s open season on the Pope, too.
The book starts with a summary of the pedophile priests scandals in several countries. The authors may be commended for giving equal time to those who believe that the U.S. Bishops’ tolerance of gay clergy was an important factor, and to others who reject any reference to the argument as homophobic. Berry and Renner duly chronicle the rise of a “gay priest culture”, which “gains powers, creates cliques, and uses clericalism to harrass heterosexual seminarians, cover up promiscuity, and extend its patterns of deception to blanket those who have sex with youths” (p. 303). In general, however, the authors only did half of their homework. They did read and interview respected liberal scholars of the scandal such as Father Andrew Greeley, but failed to take into account scholars who have voiced different opinions, such as Philip Jenkins, whose important works on the issue are consistently ignored. Even Andy Shupe is never mentioned: hardly less critical of the Catholic hierarchy than Greeley, he would have provided a much needed comparative perspective, showing that in North America the problem of clergy malfeasance goes beyond the Roman Catholic Church, and involves perpetrators among the (non-celibate) pastors of many denominations. The problem, as Jenkins pointed out, is not the existence of a pedophile priests tragedy, but its prevalence. How many priests really are pedophile is not irrelevant, and only serious statistiscs may sustain serious conclusions.
In its central part, the book tries to resurrect a dead horse. In 1997 the authors reported in the
Hartford Courant about the accusations af a handful of former members of the Catholic religious order of the Legionaires of Christ. They had accused the order’s founder, Father Marcias Maciel (a close friend of John Paul II), of having sexually abused them in the 1950s, when they were seminarians. By the authors’ own admission, national media in the U.S. showed little interest in the story, perhaps because they had been burned before with instances of alleged abuses reported by the so called victims twenty or even forty years after the “facts”. It is also true that the Legionaries’ attorneys at that time provided the mainline media with affidavits by other former seminarians, stating that they had been offered money to confirm false allegations against Maciel. The accusers had been thrown out of Catholic ecclesiastical courts more than once.
The book paradoxically provides the best argument against Maciel’s slanderers. We read that the accusers operate within a large network of angry Catholics and ex-Catholics, including a real legion of lawyers hungry for millionaire settlements. Never, however, did these lawyers move against Maciel and the Legionaries in a secular court of law. The authors are aware of this hole in their net, and counter that the abuses happened in Italy and Spain, where laws and judges operate in a different way. They do indeed: both prime ministers and cardinals have been vigorously prosecuted in Italy and Spain by the like of judges Garzòn of Madrid, Borrelli of Milan, and Caselli of Palermo, both when in office and thereafter. Perhaps these news never reached Hartford, Connecticut.
Not only do the authors rely on clichés on Italian and European judges: they have fancy ideas about non-American cultures in general. They claim that the conservative Legionaries of Christ have more influence in “Latin catholicism” than in the U.S., where “concern for the less privileged” (p. 297) is more prevalent. A study of how much money is allocated to health care for the “less privileged” or the care of the elderly in the U.S. compared to, say, Italy or Spain would sadly disappoint the two Connecticut yankees.
Nor does the duo fare better in its understanding of Catholic canon law. Throughout the book, controversies between the U.S. Bishops and Rome about the annulment of marriages are an important theme, yet the authors truly misunderstand the issue. They claim that “an annulment had stricter standards than a civil divorce; but if aberrations like spousal abandonment or systematic abuse were proven, the tribunal could deem the sacramental bond ‘invalid’, opening the way for a new exchange of vows” (p. 17). This is a confusion between invalidity and nullity, between
ex nunc (as of now) and
ex tunc (since then), quite common among law students in their first years of college. Any basic manual of canon law would have told the authors that a marriage valid when it was celebrated cannot be annulled because of subsequent events. Manuals quote frequent cases where repeated abuse, or even attempts to kill the spouse, were deemed irrelevant for the annulment. The latter, in fact, does not state that the marriage
became invalid but that it never existed in the first place,
ex tunc. If vows were validly exchanged, no subsequent event would make them invalid. It is also ridiculous to claim that in Italy canon lawyers make a lot of money out of “divorces with special property issues, a function usually done by civil attorneys in common-law countries” (p.102). Common law or codes have nothing to do here, and canon lawyers as such do not handle divorces and their consequences, since there is no divorce in Catholic canon law. (Of course, the same individual attorney may be admitted to both Catholic ecclesiastical and Italian bars, and handle divorces in the latter capacity).
In assessing the Legionaries of Christ and other Catholic groups such as the Opus Dei, the authors rely heavily on the anti-cult literature on brainwashing, mind control, and descriptions of movements where only militant ex-members are free from brainwashing and able to tell the truth. Since actual members, and even former members who did not turn into militant critics, are under the effects of brainwashing, we cannot regard them as believable. The fact that some Catholics did buy the stereotype in order to attack, say, the Church of Scientology or the Moonies, is put to good use by the authors. They even repeat from other sources that New York anticult priest Father James J. LeBar is “adviser to the Vatican on sects and cults”, a non-existing position. (In the only consultation that the Vatican sponsored on “sects and cults” in the U.S., organized at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, by the International Federation of Catholic Universities on behalf of four Vatican secretariats – where the undersigned was a featured speaker – LeBar was not even invited, following comments by American scholars that he was persona non grata in the academic community of scholars of new religious movements.) Whole libraries of academic criticism of brainwashing and of “atrocity stories” told by ex members are conveniently ignored.
In the final part, the authors carry their criticism up to John Paul II, a “virgin monarch” whose conservatism and “tragic naïveté about sexual intimacy” (p. 301) resulted in a cover-up of the pedophiles’ scandal. Perhaps the Connecticut duo has never heard of
Love and Responsibility, Karol Wojtyla’s book on love and, well, “sexual intimacy” that largely made his fame as a world class philosopher, although at that time raising some eyebrows in conservative Catholic circles.
The proposed solution for all the Catholic Church’s problems is liberal “renewal”: disband the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, recognize gay rights, introduce married and women priests, tolerate abortion. This “new” stuff is very old. The recipe has been used in liberal protestant denominations, with catastrophic effects, whilst conservative churches strict on moral issues have experienced a sustained growth. Even a casual reading of mainline American sociology of religion would have confirmed to the authors that liberalized churches normally decline. The book ends on a quasi-theological note of appeal to the
sensus fidelium, the consensus of the Catholic “people of God” (allegedly at odds wit the hierarchy). Amen to that: common folks in the pews have already voted with their feet, and the result is the continuing success of groups like Opus Dei or the Legionaries, while liberal groups continue to decline. King Arthur, Father Maciel and John Paul II, rather than Mark Twain and contemporary Connecticut yankees, truly appear to be in a better position for the last laugh.
The Holy See and the Legionaries of Christ: Facts and Fiction, di Massimo Introvigne
