Conspiracy of Denial

Edward Mechemann, over at the NY Archdiocese web page, makes the same point as I have here about the impossibility of forgiveness without repentance. He quotes this passage from a bishop's letter:

“This is a very difficult time in your life, and I realize how upset you are. I too share your grief.” 

Problem: the letter was to a priest who had raped a girl, then procured an abortion once she became pregnant. 

No hint here of moral responsibility. 

In general, of the official corresponsence in the Pennsylvania report, Mechemann says, 'Terms such as “inappropriate sexual relationship”, “boundary issues”, “this difficult time”, and priests being “reassigned” or “out on sick leave” were used to conceal the true nature of what was happening.'
'All the priests were treated as if they had an illness to be treated quietly, not as if they had committed grievous sins for which they needed to repent and do reparation.' 

This may be the whole story. We have lost our sense of sin.

To begin with, it is human nature to want to deny the existence of evil. The moment we admit that good and evil are a thing, if we are ourselves conscious of doing anything wrong, it feels like an accusation.

It is more comfortable for most of us to just deny that there is any evil, and accept that everyone—certainly all present company—is a decent guy. If there is evil, it is safest to see it only somewhere else, among very different people, or in the less than recent past. The Catholic clergy serve as a useful scapegoat in this regard—they are a distinct and recognizable “other” to most of us, like the Jews. They are not likely to be present company; if they are, they are likely to be noticed, so the subject can be changed. The bottom line here, that everyone ignores: child sex abuse is no more common among the Catholic clergy than the general population.

This does not work for bishops, however; for they are themselves Catholic clergy. For them, too, evil must be elsewhere, outside the circle they see every day. For the rest of us, similarly, to see evil in a typical middle-class family living next door is a great threat toour own conscience, and to social harmony generally.

This is why we use such polite euphemisms as “inappropriate,” “negative,” or “misunderstanding.” We are dodging disturbing terms like “wrong,” “bad,” “immoral,” or “selfish,” stripping out any hint of morals.

An example is the common insistence that Hitler was “insane.” After all, no sane man would have done those things. Right?

The idea is absurd on its face. Nobody at the time believed Hitler was mad, or no one would have obeyed his orders. At the time, instead, everyone insisted on seeing him as perfectly reasonable, and a man you could do business with. Declaring him “mad” is a desperate fallback position. Both seek to avoid the simple reality: not mad, but bad.

We see the same with the standard response to mass killers: that they must be mad. In reality, to be so genuinely mad that they did not understand the moral implications of what they were doing would also, more or less automatically, render them incapable of the advance planning needed to commit a mass shooting.

This tendency to avoid moral issues is aided and abetted by psychiatry, which seems increasingly to medicalize moral issues. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, for example, the “Bible” of North American psychiatrists, lists arson as “pathological fire-setting,” and theft as “pathological stealing.” Then there is the generic “Conduct Disorder.”

The spontaneous social consensus, therefore, tends to be that there is no evil anywhere near us, nor among us, wherever we are, and whoever we are. Even if we are at some conference in Munich. Somewhere, theoretically, there may be dragons, but only in places we do not go, on the unvisited edges of our maps. This keeps everyone feeling safe and secure—from being called to account.