Jim Taylor’s Weblog

Sunday October 4, 2009

Another scandal for the Catholic church

By Jim Taylor

A long list
        He becomes the latest in a line of scandals plaguing the Roman Catholic Church.
        In Newfoundland, the Christian Brothers paid $16 to victims of abuse at their Mount Cashel orphanage. A priest, Des McGrath, committed suicide after he was charged with sexually abusing a boy in western Newfoundland decades ago.
        Nova Scotia made a similar settlement of $15 million to victims of abuse by diocesan priests dating back nearly 60 years – a settlement, ironically, that Bishop Lahey helped negotiate.
        “I want to formally apologize to every victim and to their families for the sexual abuse that was inflicted upon those who were entitled instead to the trust and protection of priests of the Church,” Lahey stated. “Sexual abuse, indeed any abuse, is wrong. It is a crime, and it is a serious sin in the eyes of God.”
        Unfortunately, committing a “serious sin” did not deter Father Charles Sylvestre. He pled guilty to 47 charges of sexual misconduct with young girls in his parishes of the Diocese of London, in Ontario, from the 1950s into the 1980s. Sylvestre died in prison after serving three months of his sentence.
        Sylvestre’s case was unusual – compared to, say, the misdemeanours alleged in the Boston Archdiocese – because the victims were exclusively girls.

Not an isolated issue
        These abuses are not limited to North America. New Zealand reeled over revelations about the Marylands School in Christchurch. Author Pete McCarthy wrote with venom, in his book McCarthy’s Bar, about being disciplined by Christian Brothers in Ireland.
        Nor is the Roman Catholic Church the only offender. Canada’s Anglican and United Church have also paid heavily for abuses committed under their jurisdiction in residential schools.
        And I’ve lost track of the number of school teachers convicted of sexual offences, but two stand out. In Toronto, David Elliot McClure went to jail for six counts of indecent assault, two counts of buggery, and three counts of gross indecency involving male students. In Vancouver, Tom Ellison was convicted of sex, drug, and alcohol abuses, when he took teenagers on wilderness experiences.
        Typically, it seems, such perpetrators befriended the parents of many of their victims, developing a trust that made it more difficult for the students to tell their parents what happened.

Sense of betrayal
        These cases generate shock and revulsion. “I was shocked. I was saddened. I was angered,” admitted Martin Currie, the Archbishop of St. John’s in Newfoundland, Lahey’s birth province.
        Lahey’s superior, Archbishop Anthony Mancini expressed similar feelings in Halifax: “…sadness and shock … devastating to be faced with this kind of revelation.”
        Unfortunately, their concern is often for the institution rather than the victims.
        This “will stir up again all of the history that has gone on in the past, of the abuse,” Currie commented in St. John’s. “I think people become disillusioned… If you can’t trust the chief shepherd, who can you trust?”
        Exactly — the common factor is breach of trust. All these abusers were trusted – by their parishioners, by the parents of the children, and initially by the children themselves. Also by their superiors, who refused to believe allegations of abuse, and who were unwilling to discipline abusers even when the evidence piled up.

The unforgivable sin?
        I have seen people forgiven for assault, infidelity, lying, cheating, stealing… Wartime combatants have later become friends. I’ve even heard of – though I have never met – people forgiving the man who murdered their children.
        But I have yet to hear of anyone who forgave a pedophile priest or church representative for betraying the trust placed in them.
        Betrayal may be the unforgivable sin.
        In the Christian gospels, Judas, a member of Jesus’ inner circle, betrayed his leader to Temple authorities in Jerusalem. Although Jesus himself instructed his followers to forgive “not just seven times, but seventy times seven,” nothing in the New Testament suggests that the new church founded in Christ’s name ever forgave Judas for his act of betrayal.
        The sense of betrayal is particularly keen when it comes from one who supposedly represents the highest standards. A police officer or a government official represents the nation. A doctor, a teacher, represents a profession. But a priest or minister is the human representative of God, and God is supposed to be perfect.
        To paraphrase Archbishop Currie, if you can’t trust God’s representative, can you trust God? That’s why these betrayals hurt so deeply.
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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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Your Turn



Not many letters about last week’s column, in which I wondered who’s handicapped and who’s normal, using percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie as a case study. But the letters that came were thoughtful and illuminating.

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About My Paraphrases

Occasionally, I get frustrated by the Bible. Not usually by the message, which is timeless, but by the language and metaphor. Contemporary translations update the language, but not the metaphor, so the text still expects us to respond to images of deserts and tents, camels and droughts, kings and concubines. What we’ve learned since the Bible was written — about psychology and evolution, about quantum physics and astronomy, computers and fossil fuels – is simply left out.
        At such times, I start paraphrasing. I don’t pretend that these paraphrases rely on new translations of original texts. They are, rather, my way of writing what I think the original writers might have said IF they lived today. Sometimes I stick close to the traditional versification; sometimes I take liberties.
        My paraphrase of Paul’s letter to the Romans attempts to put Paul’s sometimes convoluted words — and argument — into a contemporary setting. If Paul were writing today, to the Christian church, I’m not sure he’d worry as much about the failure of the Jews to follow Christ as about the failure of Christians to follow Christ, so I have rephrased in those terms. I suspect he would also make use of quotations from the Gospels — which of course didn’t exist when he wrote his letters — rather than using quotations from the only scriptures he had available, which we call the Old Testament.
        About 200 people have requested the paraphrase of Romans, as an electronic file.
        I now have two new paraphrases available, for Ecclesiastes and Job. Ecclesiastes sticks pretty much to the biblical flow of verses – though with, I hope, some sense of humour. Job cuts 42 chapters down to about three pages. I found the speeches in Job interminable; the only way I could make sense of the various characters’ verbal meanderings was to turn them into television sound-bites.
        I’m making these available the same way as Romans – on the honor system. You send me an e-mail and request the file you want. I’ll send it. If you like it, and want to keep it, you send me a cheque for $5 by snail mail. If you don’t like it, simply erase it from your hard disk and send nothing.

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