| A long time ago, when I was a young priest, an old priest told me, 'One-half of the priests are ordained to make up for the failures of the other half.' Until recently, I did not realize the implications of this remark.
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| And later, in a seminary class, another priest told us, 'If you want to be a priest to save your own soul, you are making a big mistake. The life of a priest is not about you or your salvation. The life of the priest is about serving the people.' This was a second piece of wisdom, which I did not fully understand until recently. To be a priest is a risky business, but I never realized how risky until the past couple of months.
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| At the heart of the Gospels is the call to feel with and to care for the victim, for the outcast, for the weak. Whether this is the woman caught in adultery, the Jew left for dead by the robbers on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, the Lost Sheep, or the Prodigal Son, Jesus is calling us to care for those who are downtrodden, neglected and victimized. And at the end of the story is Jesus Crucified. He is the Innocent One, the Lamb of God, the Victim.
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| Learning to be a Christian demands that we attend to those in need. We will be judged by how we cared for 'the least of one's brothers and sisters.' We do this in a thousand ways. We defend the unborn; we educate children; we shelter the homeless; we visit those in jail; we care for the sick; we sit with the dying; we console those who mourn. These Gospels speak to us about the equality of all people before God.
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| But now in 2002, we come face to face with clergy abuse of children. We find that some of us have taken advantage of the young, the innocent. We find some of us have turned our young people into victims. We cannot tolerate the victimization of our young people, nor can we accept the members of the clergy who have done these terrible deeds. But here it is. We are faced with evil deeds in our very midst.
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| The recent reports of sexual abuse of young people by Catholic clergy go against all that we know is good and holy. This sinfulness scars the young person, and as well, it shames and marks the Catholic people and their priests.
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| Are not the rearing and education of our youth the most important tasks we have as parents, relatives, teachers, clergy, and others? Such betrayal deprives the young of hope and innocence. The child is scarred by it. And, as often happens with evil, silence encourages evil to expand.
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| Shame tempts me to withdraw from the congregation of Sacred Heart, as well as from our many friends in Roslindale. I have to fight against withdrawal. As a public person, a priest-dressing in a way that others know who I am and what I do, I and other priests are affected by the misconduct of some priests.
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| Priests experience the looks of people. We sense others thinking, 'What of him?' In addition, priests can become less trusting of one another, protective of themselves.
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| Catholic priests and Catholic people are joined together. When I voiced these fears at a Home and School meeting two weeks ago, a couple of people stopped me. They said: 'Do not talk like that. We know you and the other priests. You have no cause for withdrawing! You have done nothing wrong!' The lessons I have preached about guilt and shame are now being preached back at me! This is a sign of a healthy parish church.
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| We want to act, to do something. First we pray. We pray the psalms of lament (Ps. 22, 31, 38, and 69). We pray for those who are the victims of such abuse. Phrases like, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'; 'Do not ever let me be put to shame.'; and 'I groan because of the tumult in my heart' give some expression to the feelings that surround the abuse. These 'laments' demand that we face the pain and sorrow. Laments are an act of trust in God when we are in the midst of sorrow. We draw upon our prayer as Catholics gathered about the altar of sacrifice.
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| Secondly, silence was used to hurt people. We cannot go there again. We remember what has happened. As difficult as we find it to speak of these matters, the alternative is silence. Remembrance, even of the terrible sins, ensures that we do not fall back into passivity. Rather, we move forward by remembering the past and with the help of God. Our Jewish friends know well the terror of silence and the healing power of remembrance. For Catholics during this season of Lent, these psalms of lament are a fertile place of prayer.
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| Thirdly, we cannot strike out with violent denials, nor can we run away or withdraw by saying, 'It is my Cross to bear.' I suspect that some of the victims spoke this way to themselves. Neither denial nor withdrawal will free any of us from its pain. Rather we live by faith each day, by doing good, fasting, and praying.
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| Along with this refusal to be silent is the fact of the 'whitewashing' of these actions (see Ezek. 13.10). Good and true people sought to do the right thing. They failed. Our young people were not protected, nor were our Catholic families protected. Many parents of Sacred Heart and other parishes are now faced with explaining to their youngsters what words like pedophilia or abuse mean. Nor were the vast numbers of priests protected, since we have a pall of suspicion placed around us.
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| Our failure as Catholics is that we have not acted like a church. We have allowed only a small group of clerics to make these decisions. No laypeople, no religious men or women, and few, if any, parish priests oversaw or decided how to address this clerical issue of pedophilia. I am convinced that if we had only one set of parents reviewing assignments of priests to parishes twenty years ago, none of these pedophile priests would have ever been put back to work in a parish.
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| I do not accept all that the media is saying about the Catholic clergy and pedophilia. Were I to accept it, I would have to assume that every one of us is under suspicion. But, we have no facts. How many Catholic clergy are actually pedophiles? What is the percentage of pedophiles in the total population? Where does most pedophilia take place? In churches? In schools? Or in homes?
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| These reasonable questions are not about to be answered in the current crisis. Still, the institution of the Catholic Church in Boston is in the process of addressing this public and social issue. Our Church is not unlike other institutions. We sought to take care of things 'internally.' This was and is wrong.
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| Institutional silence confused two very different matters: sin and crime. We treated as sin that which was also a crime. A crime is something a democracy handles in the public realm, through the police and the courts. A church has neither the capacity nor the authority to handle the criminal behavior of citizens.
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| So, we move ahead as Catholic people. We move ahead as God's People. We need to change our silent ways. We need to learn how to be a church. We need to lament the terrible sins and crimes which have afflicted our young people. The forty days of Lent provide us with the time to begin this effort.
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| Monsignor Frank Kelley |
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