The massive, 1,300-page report on child-sexual abuse in the Catholic Church issued by a Pennsylvania grand jury this month makes for horrific, soul-numbing reading. In plain language, it tells the story of more than 300 predatory priests operating in six Pennsylvania dioceses over decades, preying upon more than 1,000 identifiable child victims as well as thousands more whose stories will probably never come to light.
One priest abused five sisters in a single family, and “collected samples of the girls' urine, pubic hair, and menstrual blood” later found in his home. Another raped and impregnated a girl, then arranged an abortion. In another case, “the boy ... drank some juice at his priest's house, and woke up the next morning bleeding from his rectum, unable to remember anything from the night before.”
The stories go and on, and as heart-breaking as they are, in some ways the larger horror is how the church itself responded. “Priests were raping little boys and girls,” the report tells us, “and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all. For decades.”
In case after case after case, the grand jury found, credible allegations and evidence of abuse “were brushed aside, in every part of the state, by church leaders who preferred to protect the abusers and their institution above all.” They hid the truth, they evaded accountability, they launched “investigations” meant not to uncover the truth but to conceal it. Those within the church, including those at its highest levels, chose to protect themselves, each other, and reputation of the institution even if doing so meant the betrayal of all that holy institution was meant to champion.
Confronted by such behavior, the question that we instinctively ask is how? How could such a thing could happen? And the unfortunate truth is that it reveals a weakness in human character and institutions that is more prevalent than we like to admit, and that it occurs often, if on a lesser scale, in institutions of all kinds.
It happened at Penn State, my alma mater, where protecting the vaunted football program required looking the other way in the Sandusky scandal. It happened with The Weinstein Company, an avowedly progressive workplace where employees both male and female enabled, assisted and protected Harvey Weinstein in the alleged rape of his targets. It happened at Wells Fargo, where a corporate culture evolved to not just allow but require fraudulent behavior, and it happened with the U.S. Olympic gymnastics team. In Germany, the world's most renowned researcher and advocate of the healing power of empathy has finally been exposed as a cruel tyrant who has brutalized those who worked for her, a discovery that came only after years of institutional denial and coverup.
In every case, people found a way to avoid doing the obviously right thing, an excuse to deny to themselves and others what was really going on. The immediate costs of challenging wrong -- costs to their institution and its reputation, to themselves and their careers, to their relationships with colleagues -- were perceived to be lower than the immediate cost of staying silent, of doing nothing, even if conscience quietly gnawed at them.
In recent days, we’ve seen another poignant case in the headlines, this one involving Omarosa Manigault-Newman. In a taped conversation released by Omarosa, she and two other Trump aides, Katrina Pierson and Lynne Patton, are strategizing how to handle the release of what they believe to be a tape in which their boss, Donald Trump, uses the hateful N-word. They discuss how to minimize it, how to spin it, how to make it seem OK, and what makes it so poignant is that all three participants in that effort to make the indefensible seem defensible are themselves African-American.
There’s a lot of that kind of thing going on these days within conservative circles, among the free-traders, the deficit hawks, the NATO supporters, the evangelicals, the family-values traditionalists. The principles that once animated the Republican Party, that gave it a purpose and mission, are being set aside in the pragmatic if desperate circling of the wagons. The resulting moral, ethical and factual contradictions have become so profound that in many cases they can be resolved only by retreat into conspiracy theories. As with the Catholic Church, all within have agreed not to admit or even notice the price that is being exacted.
It is a rot from within, and a time will come, as it always does, when reckoning is required.
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