Cardinals Law and Egan are in very deep, very serious trouble.
From the Vast Understatement File: Cardinals Law and Egan are in very deep, very serious trouble, and if something toward the end of decency and logic isn’t done soon, the closest things to justice the Catholic Church can deliver will be forever denied.
As this column is being written, New York is drafting legislation that would call for the arrest of anyone who has knowledge of an active pedophile and doesn’t inform proper authorities. One’s first thought is, Why wasn’t there already such a law? No matter how widely sweeping and unnecessary law becomes, you’d have thought such an idea would have appealed to men of decent standard decades before now. One’s second thought is, In absence of law, men in positions of power must be morally compelled to take forceful action against the guilty in the name of the innocent. Here the innocent are so many young boys who have been molested by priests, a death of trust only made worse in those instances where the offending priests were shipped from one parish to another, so more victims could be born.
Consider now the Candyman Internet bust, where dozens of people were arrested for downloading, trading and possessing child pornography, including some parents who were exploiting their own children, bus drives, teachers and priests. The stomach turns at the details, both explicitly mentioned and implied. At least two dozen of those arrested openly admitted to molesting children; not known at this time, whether or not any of them were priests. What we do know is this: the problem of pedophilia in the priesthood is far too wide spread to be a series of unique coincidences, and has been handled so badly you cannot help but wonder if anyone in the Church ever took the matter seriously.
The first reasonable question is, What is it about the Catholic Church that attracts this sort of man? One must recognize, this is not a problem limited to Catholicism but it’s a more popular target of investigation, as the Church tends to openly defy Leftism in the most direct terms. Every organized religion – and most of the unorganized religions, when you think about it – has pedophiles lurking in the midst. Careful research uncovers this datum: the percentage of pedophiles in America’s general population is, as a percentage, roughly the same as it is among priests, six; and six percent of America’s total population – we’ll say, excluding priests – is a much larger number than six percent of the priesthood. And while it’s popular – and altogether modern – to say priests should be allowed to get married and / or generally push aside the 900 year old rule of celibacy, the idea this will take away from priestly pedophilia is a false one. Married men can (and do) molest children, their own as well as those belonging to others, just as often and as easily as single men.
No one knows the answer to why the Church attracts pedophiles. The Church doesn’t openly court them; my basic contention is, there lies within certain percentages of gay youths and grown men a wish to shake their desires for boys, and they join the Church in hopes of having their desires curbed by God. When and if this fails, and when and if the resolve of any priest abandons him, children are often molested. Whether or not a particular pedophile goes through the Church’s hierarchy seems immaterial.
All right then; let’s say this is, for the most part, unavoidable and molestations are going to happen. Now what? This is where Cardinals Law and Egan and brought to task, and rightfully so. Evil ends in a man’s quarters when he forces it to end. Insofar as the buck must stop somewhere and didn’t, the Cardinals shouldn’t have been around long enough to refuse to step down before being removed by the Old Wise Man. Make no mistake on the position taken here: there is nothing – and in this, I mean nothing – more sacrosanct than the safety and innocence of a child, and until such time as he is old enough and prepared to remove all precautions toward the ends of safety and innocence, he should not be robbed of either.
No one could rightfully suggest the Cardinals have wrought physical or emotional harm to any child, but they may as well have, as inaction breeds and suggests acceptance. The end has arrived; Cardinals Law and Egan didn’t create the problem, but they inherited it and effectively made it worse. This may not have been a legal crime, but it was a Biblical one; and neither is excusable.
