What's in a Scandal? Let's Not Lose the Face of the Victim

While this thing was always scandalous, we cannot continue to call it a scandal, though we will forever be scandalized. We really must call it what it is: systematic, institutional criminality. The victims of rape and other sexual abuses by the hierarchs of the Church dissipate under the cloak of the merely scandalous. The face of the victim recedes behind the veil of scandal. Survivors must be seen so that evil comes to light. Scandal. The only scandal here is that anyone refers to the irrevocably diabolical as a scandal. Enough.

That evil can rock the Church is one thing, but that it can destroy it is another. Christ himself indemnified the Church, stating definitively that the gates of hell will not prevail against it; but that of course assumes that good people will not simply stand by and be amazed, disgusted, violated, appalled, etc. Catholic action must now accuse the shepherds, and rid the Church of all the agencies of violence, sin, crime and other movements of evil in the flesh. It's really not a matter of not 'going to church', or withholding donations or other kinds of giving. Catholics must give the Church its blood back, its spine and its conviction, all of which has been lost. We have all, clergy and laity alike,  known too long about this cancer within the body of Christ, and we have let it metastasize. 

It's all well and good that the civil authorities now move legally to identify and prosecute criminals masquerading as leaders of the church and shepherds of the faithful, finally lifting the corporate veil covering up the most egregious sinfulness and criminality; but only lay Catholics have the moral authority to accuse systematic evil and wrest the Church from its clutches and exorcise the malignancy that threatens to undo the people of God.

No adequate sacramental theology can retain holy orders in the pedophile or ephebophile; God does not bless the devil. The Church does not breed pedophiles and ephebophiles, but it apparently attracts them, harbors them, protects them, and enables them to infiltrate the trust of the faithful, and then destroy that trust. This horrific and obvious impediment to reception of orders renders the sacrament automatically annulled, in a way analogous to the impediments that might make the reception of matrimony automatically annulled. An indelible mark cannot be etched into the soul of the violent, criminal sexual predator; and what makes matters worse is that he knows it, and pretends to that which is unattainable to him: holiness, service, love. There is simply no role for the niceties of the work worked (ex opere operato), or the work of the worker (ex opere operantis) here. We simply no longer know who or what is working what and why. To give sanctuary to sin and erase the face of the victims is to nourish the virulence of the malignancy.

From time to time, some people suggest that celibacy, with or without the complexities of a single sex environment, leads men to transform from normal and healthy sexual beings into predatory monsters. Celibacy arguably pertains only to those of superlative ascetic being, but does a choice for celibacy as part of an authentic sexuality committed to service to the other unencumbered by commitments to family necessarily lead to sexually poor health? Too many good and loving celibate clergy witness against that conclusion. Perhaps, then, an authentic celibacy might be part of the solution to part of the problem. Nonetheless, celibacy cannot be visited upon those who vicious predations have brought the rectory to its knees. The voraciousness of the predator laughs at the prospect of an authentic commitment to the other, whose sole purpose is to slake its thirst for violence. Nonetheless, and irrespective of the sexual orientation of one whose vocation to the priesthood is from the Spirit,  an authentic celibacy remains at least a possibility. Of course, the possibility that a true vocation moves a married man to the service of sacerdotal priesthood cannot be excluded, and the Church, in its reception of married clergy from other Christian traditions as Catholic priests, attests to this admission.

 The delusions of sacramentality must dissolve under the work of the Spirit. And the Spirit beckons all Catholics (indeed all Christians, if not all people of good will) to act in service to the victims of the hierarchs' horrors. What is Canon Law to the face of the human other? Canon Law wilts in the face of the other, for within the face is the trace of God. The Spirit calls us to absolute solidarity with the victims of the hierarchical church.