The Church Sex Abuse Crisis. Dialogue with an Atheist

 

Dear Daniel,

I was sexually abused as a child. I have had lifelong health problems because of the damage.

 

I don't talk about this much. Here's one reason why. Listeners invariably rush to condemn my abusers. I recoil. I chastise these listeners. They don't understand. They assume that immediately condemning my abuser is the righteous thing to do. It's not. It's garbage. It's narcissistic, and it violates justice.

 

Visible bruises marked my body. I was unkempt. When I was in second or third grade, I reported a couple of the predictable health side effects – bleeding and rashes in private places – to a higher up and this higher up did nothing. Doctors, nurses, neighbors, elected officials, teachers, nice girls and boys, not only did nothing to help, they participated.

 

Abused kids are often overweight; fat is a form of insulation, like a wall around a besieged city. We are ugly, no matter our features, because we wear our fear, pain, and outsider status. Rather than helping, teachers called me "Big Ox" and chastised me for wearing sloppy attire. Other kids mocked me. "You got fleas," and "Minnesota Fats" were what two popular boys shouted whenever I was in view. A guidance counselor called me "weird" and "shy." A teacher, in whose class I slept soundly, to compensate for lack of a safe place to sleep, totally ignored my red-flag behavior. A professor, who also told Polak jokes in class, said I had "problems with authority."

 

A friend was also abused. A very popular teacher saw that this kid was alone and different and bullied him mercilessly. The teacher died recently and was praised in an obit and in a Facebook group. I finally said something that went against the cascade of encomiums. Emboldened by my post, another friend spoke up. She witnessed the abuse, but, of course, being just a school kid, she could do nothing. Most of these people were not Catholic. Some were non-white. Blaming Christianity or the West is hogwash.

 

That's why I can't stand it when people say, "Oh, your abuser was so bad." Humanity abuses children. I follow child abuse cases in the press. One thing they all have in common is people in power seeing and not acting. And I am part of that humanity, and I abused others. In addition to being bullied, I bullied others. I saw that I could make kids, including boys, cry, and I did. I have turned my back on people I could have helped, had I only spared a moment's more compassion.

 

Daniel, you wrote, "There is no club, however old or divine, which I would remain a member of … if that club did what the Church has done. There are limits to one's tolerance, I think, and the sexual torture of children, abetted at the highest levels, is way beyond all those limits … There is no organisation, no group, no club, no church, no faith, no community, none whatsoever, that I would continue to be a part of … however divine or meaningful it was to me, however ancient and venerable it was, if it was guilty of even a fraction of the crimes the Church is guilty of." One must "close the door in disgust." One must find "alternatives" "without the taint."

 

I am impatient with your position. I do not respect it. I also fear it, because it inevitably associates me, as a victim, with ineradicable "taint." Your approach does not help. The insistence that one is more pure, that one belongs to corporate bodies without taint, is part of the problem.

 

You don't want to be a member of a corporate body that does terrible things? Give me a break. Look at this charming photo of Otto Wachter and his family. Are you categorically different from them in any way? No, and neither am I. The Holocaust, the megafauna extinction, slavery, My Lai, Rwanda, rape, female infanticide, you name it, we – humanity – did it. "Nothing human is alien to me." There is no label, not "Catholic" not "Atheist" not "Western" not "Oriental" not "The Huns" not "Them" that locates any of us in a pure category. When you study the perfect, diabolical, historical storm that conjured Nazism, you see that, under the same circumstances, many of us and those we love would be at the wrong end of the whip.

 

Tom Holland, an atheist, speaks with wisdom and appreciation of the Christian concept of original sin. He gets how democratic, and how helpful, this concept is. We are *all* sinners. We require a mechanism to work through our filth. Imagine a society that emphasizes the purity of an exalted few, and the impurity of others. This emphasis on purity requires that the pure act as if their filth does not exist. Only the impure may address tainted sewage. Actually, I lived in that society, in the Hindu sub-continent. Brahmins crap in public. Untouchables are assigned to address others' filth. It's a very bad situation.

 

Now imagine a society that isn't obsessed with dividing the pure from the impure, and allows plumbers to be highly paid. I prefer that culture, one without high-flying, unworkable ideas of the pure v the impure.

 

Christianity offers egalitarian plumbing: Christ's sacrifice, our confession, making of amends, and renewal of our commitment to live in accord with Christ's example.

 

Only Catholic priests molest children? What a lucky planet you live on. Boy Scouts, Orthodox Jews, popular show business figures, all have had their scandals.

 

I was raised Catholic, went to Catholic school, attended mass daily if not weekly, interacted with priests one-on-one and with friends, and never had an inkling of this behavior. After stories first came out, I asked Catholic friends. They had no idea, either. No, abuse is  not central, not essential, not exclusively Catholic. There are features of Catholicism that facilitated it, just as there are features of Boy Scouting and show business that facilitated abuse in those corporations. I want those features to change.

 

Whataboutism wants to turn attention away. I don't want to do that. I celebrate every New York Times article exposing church sex abuse. Rather, I mention abuse beyond the church to note the selective outrage of those who falsely and hatefully equate Catholicism with pedophilia.

 

How much does it cost to buy a girl in Hindu Nepal or Buddhist Cambodia or Thailand, a sex tourism hotspot? Child sex trafficking is rampant in these countries. Purchasers are often Muslim Arabs. One online source says that five to ten thousand Nepali women and girls are trafficked into sex slavery every year.

 

As a survivor of child sexual abuse, it bugs me no end that enemies of Catholicism focus exclusively on victims of Catholic priests, and ignore the much larger number of non-Catholic children openly bought and sold, often by Western tourists. I knew a family in Nepal who had thirteen children, the last a boy. The girls were all "mistakes." The Vedas tell the parents that only a boy can light the parents' funeral pyre, thus ensuring them a felicitous reincarnation. The girls? They're doomed. Muslim purchasers can fall back on Koran verses about "what your right hand possesses" and Mohammed's example for the sexual abuse of children. The New York Times would probably not publish these facts. Rather, we get another article about bad, bad Catholics.

 

Daniel, you are an Atheist. Atheists are a corporate body. Atheists commit sex abuses. For years now misogyny, actual rape, support for actual rapists, and disgusting, misogynist threats against women have been rampant in Atheist communities. Do you recognize Atheism's filthy taint? Are you closing the door on Atheism? No. You believe it to be true, you are not a rapist, and you do not believe rape to be essential to Atheism.

 

You cannot retire your humanity, though you share that identity with Nazis. You cannot retire from Atheism, though you share that belief and community with rapists and misogynists of the lowest type. I will not retire from Catholicism, though I know it to be imperfect, just as I am imperfect.

 

Again, as Holland points out, Christianity offers a mechanism for addressing humanity's fallen state. We accept Christ's salvific sacrifice on our behalf. We confess. We repent. We make amends. We change our behavior.

 

As Holland darkly warns, and Douglas Murray has written about this, too, the post-Christian West offers no such mechanism. In place of Christianity's system, the post-Christian West offers "cancel culture" and public shaming. If you said something stupid in a tweet ten years ago, you must be crucified for that tweet in perpetuity. You will never be allowed off your cross.

 

The thirst for purity is a red flag. It's the first stone on the path to atrocity. Look to the man who put into practice some of the Enlightenment ideas of men like Diderot, of "Mankind will never be free till the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." Robespierre was known as the Incorruptible One. Beware the Incorruptible One. Translate "purification" into German, Russian, Cambodian, Rwandan, Serbo-Croatian, and, indeed, The King's English, and the word you get is "genocide."

 

I used to give talks to groups of adults who had been abused as children. Afterward, listeners would ask, "How did you survive?" and "How did you not become a serial killer?" Christina, an Atheist, insisted that I had "one caring adult" in my childhood. She had read somewhere that that's how abused kids get through. She's wrong. Being wrong pissed her off so badly she "unfriended" me on Facebook.

 

I had no caring adult. God got me through. Atheist insistence on child abuse as the essential, exclusive feature of Catholicism, which now must be jettisoned, will hurt humanity. Christ offers healing.

I could tell you, in detail, details that would, indeed, make you cry, how I came to forgive my abusers, abusers who never asked for my forgiveness. Long story short. The God who created the universe became human, like me, suffered, like me, and, in extremis I can only imagine, said, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." His death was my door to a different life than being, forever, a hunched, clenched, rageful, vengeful, blind, sadistic, incurable victim of abuse. Don't take that door away from others.