By Robin Darling Young professor of theology,
University of Notre Dame
A recent catch-phrase among anti-abortion Catholics goes: "What will you say
to the babies?" It refers to the ancient belief that aborted infants will see
harsh justice done to their selfish parents on Judgment Day- already in the
second century, the Apocalypse of Paul pictured parents in hell judged by the
souls of their babies. Updated for the abortion polemic, this question asks not
only parents, but all voters, how they would justify their vote for a
"pro-abortion" politician such as Barack Obama.
This Holy Week the question has an unintended association. What will the
Roman Catholic Church say to the "little ones" about whom Jesus is reported to
have told his disciples "If any of you scandalize one of these little ones who
believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened
around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea." (Matthew
18:6)
Its defenders, Pope Benedict XVI among them, claim that the Church is judged
unfairly; that the problem is widespread; that the New York Times and other
publications are part of a conspiracy to destroy the Church. These noisemakers
hope, perhaps, to change the subject.
Charges and counter-charges about who knew what and when, whether or not
bishops or even the pope should resign, bitter controversy among lay Catholics,
and Church defensiveness are shaping much public discourse on this matter.
Throughout all this, Catholics are ignoring the core of the problem: that
children were raped.
As anyone raped as a child can attest, there are three chief elements in the
event. The first is the relationship between the rapist and the child. This is
often one of trust, or at least gullibility, with respect to the person who
desires sex with the child. Often manipulation occurs, if the action is not an
act of brute force. The child is coaxed, played with, fondled and finally
penetrated - often literally, and always psychologically.
The second element is the sexual act itself. Adult rapists want to achieve
coitus with the small bodies of children. Often since they know this is wrong,
they can also enjoy the thrill that they might now, or one day, be discovered.
They can enjoy the thrill of domination, and the temporary bliss of coupling.
They can enjoy their betrayal of the Church in which they are themselves often
prisoners, and they can enjoy the art of hiding and dissimulation. The Church,
being a very old institution, has long suffered the "imperfections" of illicit
sexual partnerships among its clergy and, to be fair, among religious sisters.
The predictable results of such dishonesty has been lying and turning a blind
eye - "a scandal is not a scandal," a prominent Midwestern archbishop told me
once, "until it is public."
The third element is the lasting state of mind of those who have been raped.
The children who were fondled, penetrated - often painfully - and then abandoned
are forced into a different game. They have had to protect their abusers through
enforced silence. They may have developed a love for their abusers that will
haunt them for the rest of their lives. Because they have been forced into
sexual activity before they are ready for it, they will come to expect this kind
of treatment - and they will reproduce it. It is well known now that pedophiles
cannot be cured - the state of mind that causes their actions has also caused
them to objectify other human beings, and to use them as an accompaniment to
their own internal, and impotent, fantasies. But rape victims cannot really be
cured, either - the act continues, and they continue to be penetrated and hurt,
and they continue to seek someone resembling their rapists, in order to rectify,
or to repeat and understand, their original violation.
It is monstrous to obscure the pain of these human beings damaged by agents
of a Church that claims to represent Jesus and his teachings. For these damaged
children the offending priests, bishops, and now the pope himself are
responsible. The deaf boys of Wisconsin, and all the children ruined and
silenced by the Church are, unlike aborted babies, still alive, are still being
raped by Fr. Murphy and all the other abusers, and they are now asking the Roman
Catholic hierarchy what they will say to these young children whose parents
placed them in their care.
In Holy Week it is only just that the Church should be compelled to have
something to say to them.
Robin Darling Young is Associate Professor of Theology at the University
of Notre Dame.
I agree with Peggy Noonan that the Church should be thankful for the media coverage that provided the motivation to take the priest sexual abuse crisis seriously -- indeed, perhaps even to begin viewing it as a "crisis" in the first place. I also agree with observers who point out that at least some of the media coverage is shaped by a not-too-subtle desire to discredit the Church. Witness, for example, Get Religion's helpful comparison of the AP report of an Indian priest's alleged sexual abuse in Minnesota with the New York Times' coverage of the same allegations. It has been troubling, though, that at least some Church leaders seem to be focusing their concern on the unfair media coverage, rather than on the events that put the Church in the position of having to deal with unfair media coverage. It gives support to critics who say that the primary objective of Church leaders has always been defending the public perception of the Church, and that this mindset, as seen in the "blame the media" strategy, also contributed to the scandal itself.
Now to jump into some murky ecclesiological waters that are undoubtedly over my head, one of my concerns when I became Catholic was the extent to which my Catholic friends sometimes struggled to talk about their relationship with God, rather than their relationship with the institutional Church. There are different dynamics going on here, I know, but I wonder if they stem from a common tendency to view the Church as the ultimate end of the Christian life, rather than as a body that "places herself concretely at the service of the Kingdom of God." (Compendium para. 50) If Church leaders began with the questions, "What is the mission of the Church, and how have the Church's failings compromised that mission?," I wonder if the conversation would be any different than it is today.
As Finnis, Boyle, and Grisez make clear, their critique of the morality of forming even a conditional intention to kill non-combatants (whether the weapons one is contemplating using are nuclear or conventional) depends entirely on the rejection of the putative principle of moral judgment that directs the choosing subject to select that option which overall and in the long run promises to yield the net best proportion of benefit to harm. This is the master principle of "proportionalist" ethics of the sort famously championed by liberal Catholic moral theologians such as Bernard Haring, Joseph Fuchs, Charles Curran, and Richard McCormick. They and other liberal Catholic theologians who adopted the proportionalist method invoked this principle in defending contraception, homosexual conduct, direct abortion in some cases, and certain other practices that Catholic moral teaching condemns as intrinsically immoral. Proportionalism seems incompatible with the belief that any specific moral norm can be an "absolute," that is, a norm that rules out certain forms of conduct always and everywhere, irrespective of the consequences of honoring it. On a proportionalist understanding, there is no reason in principle to rule out in advance the possibility that forming a conditional intention to kill noncombatants in a retaliatory attack would, all things considered, probably produce the net best proportion of benefit to harm overall and in the long run. Of course, for their own reasons, liberal Catholics might like Obama's policy of "narrow[ing] the conditions under which the United States would use nuclear weapons." But, to the extent that they embrace a proportionalist understanding of fundamental ethics and moral theology, they are in no posistion to draw support from the work of Finnis, Boyle, and Grisez on direct killing and conditional intentions, or to claim that definitive Catholic teaching absolutely rules out the direct killing of noncombatants and the forming of even conditional intentions to kill innocent human beings. They are scarcely in a posistion to criticize "Republicans" or others who oppose Obama's nuclear weapons policies on the ground that sound policy treats non-combatant immunity as a moral absolute. No one will be surprised that my advice to them is to abandon proportionalism. Then they could, with integrity, condemn the killing of noncombatants as a matter of strict principle, and call out Republicans and others (including most Democrats) who favor a policy that depends on the formation of conditional intentions to kill noncombatants all they want. Of course, I would then invite them to rethink their views on sexual ethics, abortion, and some other important moral issues on which some liberal Catholics tend to be closer to the views of the New York Times editorial board than to the firm and constant teaching of the Catholic Church.
[Cross posted at dotCommonweal]
I heard this segment of This American Life on my way home today. It
was a powerful story that, in my view, captures what is wrong (but at
the same time almost inevitable) about how the hierarchy has responded
to the (now global) abuse problem. Here's the summary:
Patrick
Wall was a special kind of monk. He was a fixer. The Catholic church
sent him to problem parishes where priests had been removed because of
scandal. His job was to come in, keep events from going public and
smooth things over until a permanent replacement priest was found. But
after four different churches in four years, after covering up for
pedophiles and adulterers and liars and embezzlers he decided to make a
change. Carl Marziali tells his story. (21 minutes)
You
can stream the entire episode here.
The Wall segment is the first segment of the show. As a lawyer, I was
particularly intrigued when Wall said he thought his work with
plaintiffs' lawyers was in many ways more pastoral than the work he was
asked to do as a "fixer." The 20 minutes or so is well worth your time.
UPDATE: Grant Gallicho tells me that Patrick Wall -- who now works for a
plaintiffs' firm -- has quite a history of making questionable claims
about the abuse issue. I'm not sure how much of that bleeds into this
particular interview, which I found interesting precisely because of the
way it illuminates the ambiguous role litigation in both of Wall's
incarnations (as a "fixer" and as a consultant for plaintiffs'
lawyers). On the one hand, it has helped bring to light lots of
documents that we surely never would have seen about the extent of the
problem and the flawed responses to it by the relevant authorities (both
within and outside the Church). On the other hand, as Wall concedes,
the threat of litigation pushed him into a corner in his role as
"fixer," causing him (along with other things, no doubt) to approach
victims in a less than pastoral manner. But, as with everything, please
take the story with the appropriate grains of salt.
In a series of posts on MoJ, our brother Greg Sisk has offered powerful criticisms of the Democrats approach to health care insurance reform. In the cover story of the new issue of the Weekly Standard, Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs magazine and one of Washington's most brilliant policy analysts, offers a comprehensive analysis that is very much in line with Greg's critique. Here is a taste:
Conservative and liberal experts generally agree on the nature of the problem with American halth care financing: There is a shortage of incentives for efficiency in our methods of paying for coverage and care, and therefore costs are rising much too quickly, leaving too many people unable to afford insurance. We have neither a fully public nor quite a private system of insurance, and three key federal policies—the fee-for-service structure of Medicare, the disjointed financing of Medicaid, and the open-ended tax exclusion for employer-provided insurance—drive spending and costs ever upward.
The disagreement about just how to fix that problem has tended to break down along a familiar dispute between left and right: whether economic efficiency is best achieved by the rational control of expert management or by the lawful chaos of open competition.
Liberals argue that the efficiency we lack would be achieved by putting as much as possible of the health care sector into one big “system” in which the various irregularities could be evened and managed out of existence by the orderly arrangement of rules and incentives. The problem now, they say, is that health care is too chaotic and answers only to the needs of the insurance companies. If it were made more orderly, and answered to the needs of the public as a whole, costs could be controlled more effectively.
Conservatives argue that the efficiency we lack would be achieved by allowing price signals to shape the behavior of both providers and consumers, creating more savings than we could hope to produce on purpose, and allowing competition and informed consumer choices to exercise a downward pressure on prices. The problem now, they say, is that third-party insurance (in which employers buy coverage or the government provides it, and consumers almost never pay doctors directly) makes health care too opaque, hiding the cost of everything from everyone and so making real pricing and therefore real economic efficiency impossible. If it were made more transparent and answered to the wishes of consumers, prices could be controlled more effectively.
That means that liberals and conservatives want to pursue health care reform in roughly opposite directions. Conservatives propose ways of introducing genuine market forces into the insurance system—to remove obstacles to choice and competition, pool risk more effectively, and reduce the inefficiency in government health care entitlements while helping those for whom entry to the market is too expensive (like Americans with preexisting conditions) gain access to the same high quality care. Such targeted efforts would build on what is best about the system we have in order to address what needs fixing.
Liberals, meanwhile, propose ways of moving Americans to a more fully public system, by arranging conditions in the health care sector (through a mix of mandates, regulations, taxes, and subsidies) to nudge people toward public coverage, which could be more effectively managed. This is the approach the Democrats originally proposed last year. The idea was to end risk-based insurance by making it essentially illegal for insurers to charge people different prices based on their health, age, or other factors; to force everyone to participate in the system so that the healthy do not wait until they’re sick to buy insurance; to align various insurance reforms in a way that would raise premium costs in the private market; and then to introduce a government-run insurer that, whether through Medicare’s negotiating leverage or through various exemptions from market pressures, could undersell private insurers and so offer an attractive “public option” to people being pushed out of employer plans into an increasingly expensive individual market.
Conservatives opposed this scheme because they believed a public insurer could not introduce efficiencies that would lower prices without brutal rationing of services. Liberals supported it because they thought a public insurer would be fairer and more effective.
But in order to gain 60 votes in the Senate last winter, the Democrats were forced to give up on that public insurer, while leaving the other components of their scheme in place. The result is not even a liberal approach to escalating costs but a ticking time bomb: a scheme that will build up pressure in our private insurance system while offering no escape. Rather than reform a system that everyone agrees is unsustainable, it will subsidize that system and compel participation in it—requiring all Americans to pay ever-growing premiums to insurance companies while doing essentially nothing about the underlying causes of those rising costs.
Liberal health care mavens understand this. When the public option was removed from the health care bill in the Senate, Howard Dean argued in the Washington Post that the bill had become merely a subsidy for insurance companies, and failed completely to control costs. Liberal health care blogger Jon Walker said, “The Senate bill will fail to stop the rapidly approaching meltdown of our health care system, and anyone is a fool for thinking otherwise.” Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos called the bill “unconscionable” and said it lacked “any mechanisms to control costs.”
Indeed, many conservatives, for all their justified opposition to a government takeover of health care, have not yet quite seen the full extent to which this bill will exacerbate the cost problem. It is designed to push people into a system that will not exist—a health care bridge to nowhere—and so will cause premiums to rise and encourage significant dislocation and then will initiate a program of subsidies whose only real answer to the mounting costs of coverage will be to pay them with public dollars and so increase them further. It aims to spend a trillion dollars on subsidies to large insurance companies and the expansion of Medicaid, to micromanage the insurance industry in ways likely only to raise premiums further, to cut Medicare benefits without using the money to shore up the program or reduce the deficit, and to raise taxes on employment, investment, and medical research.
The case for averting all of that could hardly be stronger. And the nature of the new law means that it must be undone—not trimmed at the edges. Once implemented fully, it would fairly quickly force a crisis that would require another significant reform. Liberals would seek to use that crisis, or the prospect of it, to move the system toward the approach they wanted in the first place: arguing that the only solution to the rising costs they have created is a public insurer they imagine could outlaw the economics of health care. A look at the fiscal collapse of the Medicare system should rid us of the notion that any such approach would work, but it remains the left’s preferred solution, and it is their only plausible next move—indeed, some Democrats led by Iowa senator Tom Harkin have already begun talking about adding a public insurance option to the plan next year.
Because Obamacare embodies a rejection of incrementalism, it cannot be improved in small steps. Fixing our health care system in the wake of the program’s enactment will require a big step—repeal of the law before most of it takes hold—followed by incremental reforms addressing the public’s real concerns.
Breaking News Alert The New York Times Mon, April 05, 2010 -- 8:15 PM
ET
Obama Limits When U.S. Can Use Nuclear
Weapons
WASHINGTON -- President Obama said Monday that he
was revamping American nuclear strategy to substantially narrow the
conditions under which the United States would use nuclear weapons, even in
self defense.
The strategy eliminates much of the ambiguity that
has deliberately existed in American nuclear policy since the opening days
of the Cold War. For the first time, the United States is explicitly
committing not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states that are in
compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, even if they attacked
the United States with biological or chemical weapons, or launched a
crippling cyberattack. _______________________________________________________________________________________
On the "No Catholic argument with this," see John Finnis, Joseph Boyle Jr. and Germain Grisez, Nuclear Deterrence, Morality and Realism (Oxford, 1988), here.
My family and I lived in North Carolina for six years (1997-2003). They were formative years for my son Daniel. When Daniel was applying to colleges a few years ago, he wasn't interested in applying to Duke. (Daniel is now a sophomore at Northwestern; so Daniel and Rick do not have an undergrad college in common: Rick attended Duke.) But Daniel is, like Rick, a huge fan of Duke basketball. (My other, and younger, son Gabriel--who like my PhD-in-math brother Jim lives in the stratosphere of math and science--could care less about college basketball.) I just received a text message from Daniel, exulting over Duke's eventual win tonight. I have many failings as a parent. One of them: I raised a son who is in the thrall of Duke basketball.
The administrative committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic
Bishops gave a half-hearted welcome to news of the passage of the Obama
administration’s health care reform bill. “We applaud,” wrote Cardinal
Francis George, the conference president, “the effort to expand health
care to all.” “Many elements of the health care reform measure signed
into law by the president,” he noted, “...help to fulfill the duty we
have to each other for the common good.”
Praise was muted, however. The bishops had opposed passage of the
centerpiece Senate bill that failed to meet all their expectations. They
cited in particular provisions for protection of the conscience of
health professionals, the coverage of undocumented immigrants and
possible funding for abortions. All merit further legislative and legal
action as health care reform is implemented. The law’s imperfections are
many, but with the reform in place these priorities provide a platform
to address its shortcomings in the months and years ahead.
The great stumbling block to endorsing the bill was the fear that
under the terms of the core Senate bill, financing might seep out
through community health clinics to fund abortions. The evidence, the
bishops argue, was “compelling.” Certainly compelling for the bishops,
and for some others who have made extraordinary efforts to examine the
legislative language and weigh legal scenarios for possible future court
suits, but not compelling for many other legal analysts. Tenuous legal
arguments somehow hardened into matters of principle. (While the
conference’s general counsel later disclosed his legal reasoning, the
bishops’ reasons for drawing their conclusion were not available for
others to probe during the debate on the bill.)
The desire to make the prohibition on abortion funding airtight is
admirable, but the argument for doing so seems to have been built on a
tissue of hypotheticals that was far from conclusive. How could such a
hard and fast position have been founded on such contestable
foundations? How did the bishops come to depend so heavily on debatable,
technical questions of law? How did they banish doubt when opinions
differed so? If there ever was a prudential judgment that might have
been left to the practical reason of legislators, the possible backdoor
funding of abortion is surely such a case.
How, in the end, did very fine points of abortion-denial come to
weigh more heavily than guaranteeing health care to all?
