Every year, the end of the college basketball season coincides with the start of the baseball season, and this year, in these parts, where temperatures have been so consistently ten or more Fahrenheit degrees above average that the global-warming skeptics are the only ones not talking about the weather, the confluence of two sporting seasons has been joined by anticipation of the start of the gardening season. It won't be long now till I can stand with the hose in my hand watering flowers while listening to John Gordon call the Twins game on the radio. All would be as it should if you did not have to read in the paper about priests molesting young children and their superiors worrying about the Church, not the kids.
It's gotten so that I am less outraged by the criminal acts performed by disturbed men than I am by the people who go on TV and try to explain it away. My bad, but the crimes were performed out of my sight, sometimes in the confessional booth, a place I will never see, whereas the apologists speak on the screen in my living room. Yes, Michael Tomasky, Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, is despicable. But did you see the Very Reverend David O'Connell, the president of Catholic University, on The News Hour the other day? Answering a question about the pope's role in ignoring crimes and protecting sexual predators in clerical robes--well, that's not quite the way Margaret Warner put it--he said:
I mean, this is all a very, very complicated matter. . . . We have to remember, I think, in all fairness, that we tend to judge situations that happened 20, 30, 40 years ago by our knowledge of today and our standards of today. And I don't know that that's always altogether fair. . . .
You know, you have to understand, when--when--when someone is in charge of a very large diocese, as Archbishop Ratzinger was, Cardinal Ratzinger was, at that time, it's very natural and normal that they would hand off certain matters to personnel directors or vicars or other people. . . .
The Very Reverend O'Connell was wearing his clerical collar, in the way of a crooked cop wearing his dress blues before the grand jury. Oh, it is so very complicated! Presumably, the complicatedness explains why the Catholic Church, which usually puts itself forward as the champion of timeless standards of morality that have been corrupted by the modern world, now suggests that the pope was to some degree corrupted by the lax practices of "twenty, thirty, forty years ago," and should not be judged by more stringent standards that prevail today. It would all seem too convenient even if O'Connell had not hurdled ahead and put it all on unnamed personnel directors, vicars, and "other people."
The only people who never earn a mention are the violated children--the deaf boys, for example, whose repeated complaints about the priest who molested them at their school in Milwaukee were ignored by church officials who no doubt on other occasions loved to yammer about the Church's devotion to "the most powerless members of society." This particular priest worked at the school in Milwaukee from 1950 until 1974, when he was transferred to the Diocese of Superior, Wisconsin. He died in 1998, still a priest. It is not known how many kids he damaged.
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