{"id":6352,"date":"2006-08-23T11:05:28","date_gmt":"2006-08-23T11:05:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/what-absolutely-needs-to-be-said.html"},"modified":"2006-08-23T11:05:28","modified_gmt":"2006-08-23T11:05:28","slug":"what-absolutely-needs-to-be-said","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/what-absolutely-needs-to-be-said.html","title":{"rendered":"What absolutely needs to be said"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Scandal of Silence: Diane Pawlowski in NCR(eporter) – on what has been seen and what has been kept secret.<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

W<\/strong>hen Chicago\u2019s Cardinal Francis George met in January with 200 parishioners from St. Agatha Parish about his assignment there of a known priest sexual predator, the overseer of an afterschool program at the parish said she saw children knocking on the rectory\u2019s back door last fall and then going in.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am hurting,\u201d she is quoted as saying in press reports. \u201cI pray God will forgive me for not speaking out earlier.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n
\n

Many others could repeat her words. Rectories are public venues frequented by volunteers, vendors and business people. Parishioners arrive for counseling, to arrange weddings or baptisms, or request copies of records. Volunteers, the lifeblood of both school and parish, drop off papers or attend meetings. Staff are not often alone. If one employee saw children visit, others saw the same thing.<\/p>\n

Yet we don\u2019t hear other admission. Where are other witnesses?<\/p>\n

Sexual abuse by priests could not continue for decades without the active complicity of not only priests, bishops and cardinals but lay witnesses in schools and rectories where priests work and live.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

She goes on to recount two incidents: a conference for those ministering to AIDS\/HIV victims that became a cruising ground for priests and then her own experience of overhearing three teen boys ask a priest with whom they were going to spend the weekend if they could watch the Playboy channel again:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

I sat in a campus chaplaincy commons, waiting for a friend. Three young boys bounded joyfully in, storming into the pastor\u2019s open office, announcing that they were spending the weekend with Father. From inside his office, before the door closed, I heard excited voices loudly asking, \u201cPlease. Please. Can we watch the Playboy channel again?\u201d<\/p>\n

Laughter stopped. The door closed. Silence. My friend arrived. We left. At dinner, I recounted the occurrence, still hearing the boys\u2019 words. A trusted priest said he could do nothing, telling me to report it to the bishop. I had, anonymously. Fr. Friend said that anonymous reports are automatically destroyed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

She rightly asks…why the silence? She has no firm answers. I’d say there are a number of factors: fear of authority and its power, a sense of hopelessness that anything could actually be done, a cognitive dissonance that refuses to believe that a priest could do this – particularly a priest one likes or admires (which is more often than not, the M.O. of the perp, currying favor and popularity so that no one could ever ever <\/em>believe that he could do such a thing…and one could guess that a perp priest would take special care to manufacture this image with his staff and volunteers, yes? )<\/p>\n

There is also the simple fact that anyone who knows anything about how these things work knows that those who reveal these unpleasant truths are not exactly celebrated. Because diocesan structures are so tight, and so essentially centered on the maintenance of clerical culture, and because most bishops are not boat-rockers (which is why they are selected to be bishops in the first place), people who come forward – lay or ordained – usually end up getting punished, somehow, in some way. <\/p>\n

It all works to nurture cowardice. <\/p>\n

Laity also tend to give priests a massive benefit of the doubt. We are coming from an era in which a priest who had a special connection with youth was a prize rather than an object of suspicion. People, we have heard over and over again from parents of victims, were grateful<\/em> that Father took an interest in their son. <\/p>\n

Many laity also have a subtle condescending sense of pity for priests, seeing them as overgrown children, of a sort – the good sons they never had, the almost-pathetic bachelor and so on. Priests don’t like it, but it’s there, and it’s one more factor in keeping priests up on a perverse kind of pedestal, a combination of clericalism and infantilization that prevents the laity from seeing their priests clearly, in their goodness…and in their faults.<\/p>\n

But even then – and this could have been part 2 of her column – and perhaps it will be – we have seen, so many times, parishes rising in "support" and applauding their priest who has been guilty of something like this. <\/p>\n

(Comments on this will open later)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Scandal of Silence: Diane Pawlowski in NCR(eporter) – on what has been seen and what has been kept secret. When Chicago\u2019s Cardinal Francis George met in January with 200 parishioners from St. Agatha Parish about his assignment there of a known priest sexual predator, the overseer of an afterschool program at the parish said…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat absolutely needs to be said - Via Media<\/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\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/what-absolutely-needs-to-be-said.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What absolutely needs to be said - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Scandal of Silence: Diane Pawlowski in NCR(eporter) – on what has been seen and what has been kept secret. When Chicago\u2019s Cardinal Francis George met in January with 200 parishioners from St. Agatha Parish about his assignment there of a known priest sexual predator, the overseer of an afterschool program at the parish said…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/what-absolutely-needs-to-be-said.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2006-08-23T11:05:28+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"What absolutely needs to be said - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/what-absolutely-needs-to-be-said.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"What absolutely needs to be said - Via Media","og_description":"The Scandal of Silence: Diane Pawlowski in NCR(eporter) – on what has been seen and what has been kept secret. When Chicago\u2019s Cardinal Francis George met in January with 200 parishioners from St. Agatha Parish about his assignment there of a known priest sexual predator, the overseer of an afterschool program at the parish said…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/what-absolutely-needs-to-be-said.html","og_site_name":"Via Media","article_published_time":"2006-08-23T11:05:28+00:00","author":"awelborn","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/what-absolutely-needs-to-be-said.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/what-absolutely-needs-to-be-said.html","name":"What absolutely needs to be said - Via Media","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website"},"datePublished":"2006-08-23T11:05:28+00:00","dateModified":"2006-08-23T11:05:28+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/what-absolutely-needs-to-be-said.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/what-absolutely-needs-to-be-said.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/what-absolutely-needs-to-be-said.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"What absolutely needs to be said"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/","name":"Via Media","description":"Amy Welborn","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a","name":"awelborn","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","caption":"awelborn"},"description":"Amy Welborn was born in 1960, the only child of a now-retired professor of political science, a teacher-librarian-artist mother,deceased since 2001, was a teacher, librarian and artist. The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6352\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}