In the past month, while I was away, the Pope issued a decree. I guess that’s big news. He asserted, I believe for the first time, that pedophilia has no place in the Catholic Church.
Gee, tough call there, John Paul. Makes you wonder: Did pedophilia used to have a place in the Church, but it has now lost that place? Does it now still have a place elsewhere, but just not in the Church? Other churches, maybe? Places that the priests hang out on weekdays or while on vacation?
After this earthshaking pronouncement, the cardinals met with the Pope, reportedly to debate a “zero tolerance” policy for priestly pedophilia. Apparently they didn’t reach agreement, some arguing for zero tolerance and some arguing for...... well, for some tolerance of pedophilia by priests, I guess, though none of them came out and said it quite that way. Fortunately, there is a transcript of part of that momentous discussion, available here for the first time:
POPE JP: Some of our fathers have strayed, what should we do?
CARDINAL LAY: We must remember the principle of forgiveness.
CARDINAL LITTLE: Yes, forgiveness. There but for the Grace of God go I.
CARDINAL BOIES: These are good priests, good men. They have just lost their way.
CARDINAL LAY: We must remember the principle of forgiveness.
CARDINAL COMMON: Wait a minute, here. These sick f*cks were raping little boys, right and left. Their communities are looking to them for spiritual leadership and guidance. Their flocks are meant to look to them for guidance on the most pressing moral issues of the day. Can’t we pray for their forgiveness while they sit in prison, for God’s sake?
CARDINAL CENTS: Do you have any idea what this is doing to our revenues? We used to take in 50K on a good weekend in our largest church. Now, the parishoners tell me that they cannot in good conscience give money when they know in their hearts it will be paid to plaintiffs’ lawyers and victims of priest-rapists who we knew full well had a problem. We may be insolvent in a couple of years if this keeps up. This requires drastic action.
POPE JP: Let us not be too rash in our judgment.
CARDINAL LAY: We must remember the principle of forgiveness.
CARDINAL LITTLE: Yes, forgiveness. There but for the Grace of God go I.
CARDINAL BOIES: These are good priests, good men. They have just lost their way.
CARDINAL COMMON: Are you people out of your friggin’ minds? The public is looking at us like we are some big man/boy love association masquerading as a religion, and you think the next time a priest sodomizes an altar boy we should forgive him and move on? What are you, nuts?
CARDINAL CENTS: We must look at our revenue stream. Perhaps we should upgrade the post-sermon entertainment segment. Perhaps we should reassure the public by allowing priests to marry. Perhaps that would make the priesthood attractive to those without serious deviances.
POPE JP: Change is bad. We cannot change merely because the media or the public demands it. If we change, it will be seen as an admission that we were wrong. Yes, we must be tolerant. Go back, tell your flocks that there is no place for pedophilia in the Church, but we see no reason to change what we are doing.
ANONYMOUS: <muttering under breath> Maybe we can make some money by selling our mailing lists.
<end of transcript>
And so we have it, the first step in the voluntary dissolution of the Catholic Church in America as it has been known up to now. My prediction is that within the decade, priests will be allowed to marry, an entire new and more open leadership will be established, procedures will be put into place so that priests never have access to children without other adult members of the community present, and the Church will have to close at least a third of its least profitable stores (ummm, I mean places of worship with the lowest rates of donation) to service the payments made to the victims and their lawyers.
The lesson? You can never solve a problem in the long run by covering something up. In the long run, all secret information becomes known. You can’t shred it, you can’t hide it. Confidentiality is just a stage that information goes through on its way to eventually becoming known. All decisions made in private may one day become public. So all decisions should be made with an eye toward how they would play on the 11 o’clock news. Would you want your children to see it? Those who respect you? Would you want them to know that you protected a pedophiliac or that you prevented him from continuing on? That you shredded documents when the lawmen were on their way to your door? That you bilked ten thousand widows of their life savings?
The central mistake the Church made was in deluding themselves into believing that the dirty little secret could be kept forever. The dirtier the secret, the more likely it will come out eventually. Enron and Andersen are learning that in courtrooms and Congress right now. The Catholic Church is about to learn it too.
My eight year old asked me a few days ago: “Daddy, is religion a good thing?”
That is supposed to be a yes or no sort of question, but it’s really not, is it? I think my answer was 100 words long and left her more confused than ever. |
