{"id":186,"date":"2011-03-07T08:38:51","date_gmt":"2011-03-07T08:38:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/03\/the-scandal-of-scandal.html"},"modified":"2011-03-07T08:38:51","modified_gmt":"2011-03-07T08:38:51","slug":"the-scandal-of-scandal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/03\/the-scandal-of-scandal.html","title":{"rendered":"The Scandal of Scandal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, Jeff Anderson, the preeminent plaintiffs lawyer in Catholic sex abuse cases, released a lette<\/a>r
\nfrom then Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan to then Cardinal Joseph
\nRatzinger asking that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
\n(CDF) do everything necessary to laicize an incorrigible pedophile
\npriest named Franklyn W. Becker. In the letter, Dolan writes:<\/p>\n

The public display that will now take place in the criminal
\ntrial in California, to say nothing of the civil suits that could arise
\nthere, makes the potential for true scandal very real. The media reports
\non this case have already begun.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Calling the statement “a smoking gun,” Anderson declared<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

What this
\nunderscores is Dolan’s desire in concert with the Vatican to think about
\none thing: secrecy and preservation of their own reputation. There’s nothing in that or the actions they seem to have taken
\nconcerning Becker that are dedicated to anything but that.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

To Dolan’s defense leaped<\/a>
\nthe Catholic League’s Bill Donohue, denouncing Anderson as a “liar,”
\nattacking the news media for giving him a free ride, and explaining what
\nDolan really meant in referring to the danger of “true scandal.”<\/p>\n

The term “scandal” in the Catholic lexicon is very specific: it is
\ndefined as “a word or action evil in itself, which occasions another
\nspiritual ruin.” In other words, once the public finds out more about
\nBecker, his misconduct will give scandal to the Church by causing the
\nfaithful to question their faith. For that reason, and for his past
\nrecord, Dolan said he wanted him out of the priesthood. Anderson knows his way around Catholic circles and knows full well what
\nDolan meant, yet he chose the more conventional understanding of the
\nword “scandal” to condemn him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Donohue is right about the doctrine of scandal. And as the AP story (not
\ngiving Anderson a free ride) pointed out, Dolan wanted Becker gone
\n“[i]n order that justice may be made manifest and healing of the victims
\nand the Church may proceed.” But he was making the best case he could
\nto the CDF. And scandal, in the doctrinal sense, is itself highly
\nproblematic.<\/p>\n

In case after case, the shielding of priests accused
\nof abuse has been justified on the grounds that this would scandalize
\nthe laity (thereby leading to their spiritual ruin). So bishops in
\nDolan’s position have been forced to argue that not acting publicly
\nagainst a pedophile would cause greater scandal than keeping the lid on.
\nIn the Kiesle case<\/a>
\nfrom the early 1980s, the CDF actually asked the bishop of Oakland for
\nassurances that that there would be no scandal if laicization took
\nplace.<\/p>\n

If anything has become clear over the past quarter century, it is that
\nthe doctrine of scandal has been the occasion of greater scandal in the
\nCatholic Church than the sexual abuse itself. Nothing has done more to
\ndrag the Church into disrepute–and to alienate the laity–than the
\nrevelations of cover-up. It’s time for the doctrine to go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, Jeff Anderson, the preeminent plaintiffs lawyer in Catholic sex abuse cases, released a letter from then Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan to then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger asking that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) do everything necessary to laicize an incorrigible pedophile priest named Franklyn W. Becker. In the letter, Dolan…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Scandal of Scandal - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/03\/the-scandal-of-scandal.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Scandal of Scandal - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Last week, Jeff Anderson, the preeminent plaintiffs lawyer in Catholic sex abuse cases, released a letter from then Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan to then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger asking that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) do everything necessary to laicize an incorrigible pedophile priest named Franklyn W. Becker. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}