The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession
Page 16
The sexual exploitation of the confessional could be stealthy, devious, and long-term in the planning. A ‘Mrs. GC’ wrote to me of the sexual abuse inflicted on her sister after a long process of grooming that involved the priest seeking friendship with her parents and siblings. Mrs. GC was seven at the time, several years younger than the sister who was being groomed. The priest, a Father Brown, was a former missionary and popular in his South London parish. After Mrs. GC started going to confession, the priest would press her into service to make assignations for him with the elder sister. ‘I was the go-between. “Where is your sister?” he would whisper through the grille. “Tell her to come up to my room.” It all came to an abrupt end, although I didn’t know why for many years. He had taken my sister to the races one day and sexually abused her in an extremely gross manner in an empty compartment on the train coming back. She became a depressive; I’m convinced it was because of this experience that she eventually committed suicide.’16
While some abusers were careful to cover their tracks, others were quite blatant and would take extraordinary risks in public. One Father Grennan of Monageer in Ireland even flagrantly attacked an entire class of twelve-year-old girls, one by one, on the high altar of his Church in 1984. Other attacks took place within enclosed institutions where children had no parents to whom they could report. There were even examples of deaf children being abused by priests, the perpetrators confident that they would not be reported verbally. Some sixty former students of the Montreal Institute for the Deaf are currently bringing a class action lawsuit against the religious order of priests that runs the institution, citing sexual abuse over a number of years going back to 1980. Abuse within the confessional situation was an important feature of the allegations. A similar circumstance has been revealed in the case of Father Lawrence Murphy, director of an institution for the deaf in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and subject of the documentary film Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa. Father Murphy routinely began his seductions, carried out over thirty years, in the confessional.17
In a much publicised institutional case in Northern Ireland, Kate Walmsley was initially abused by a priest in the confessional box while being cared for by the Sisters of Nazareth in Derry. It appears that one of the nuns who helped run the institution had colluded with the abuse. ‘Every Saturday a nun used to hand me over to a priest’, Kate reported to the media. ‘Even if I was in the middle of a group of children I used to be taken out of the queue and kept to last. The first time this happened, when I was eight, he was putting his hands down my top and down my pants. He then started bringing me to a room behind the altar and he would abuse me there.’18
Confession is a ritual in which the penitents tell their own sins, not the sins of others; hence, it has never been a situation in which victims have felt encouraged to report occasions of abuse against themselves. But some attempts by victims to report a sexual attack by a priest to a confessor have resulted in further abuse. An example is described in the Ryan Report, which focused on abuse in Irish industrial, orphanage, and reform institutions. A victim alleged that when, in confession, he disclosed abuse by a priest, he was assaulted and raped by that confessor. According to the Cloyne Report, when priests were told of allegations against other priests outside of the confessional, they had neglected to share these charges with their bishop on the grounds that the allegations had the ‘character of a confession’, and were under the ‘seal’.19
THE ‘DATABASE OF Publicly Accused Roman Catholic Priests, Nuns, Brothers, Deacons, and Seminarians in the US’ and the US ‘Special Reports: Catholic Bishops and Sex Abuse’ comprise allegations of many offences committed by priests in a confessional situation who subsequently confessed or were found guilty in the courts of the United States. These databases, detailed and yet hardly comprehensive, show similarities with offences committed in many other countries. Attacks occurring during confession included kissing, digital penetration of girls, and sodomy of boys; the use of confession ‘to scout for victims’; ‘the asking of very intimate questions during confession and of using the confessional to learn people’s weaknesses’; the practice of masturbating young penitents who were ‘seated on the confessor’s lap’; encouraging children to drink alcohol before, during, and after confession; and showing children pornographic pictures in confession.20
The failure of bishops to act forms an important dimension of the abuse phenomenon in many reports. For example, in the diocese of St. Louis, Missouri, Archbishop Justin Rigali delayed dismissing priests until after the clerical abuse scandals broke in the archdiocese of Boston. One of these priests, Father Joseph Ross, had sexually abused an eleven-year-old boy during confession in 1988.
The failure of bishops and superiors of religious orders to act has been evident worldwide. Father Brendan Smyth, who joined the Norbertine Order in the Republic of Ireland in 1945, was credibly guilty of several hundred crimes of sexual abuse, many involving a confessional situation, spread over forty years in the Republic, in Northern Ireland, and in the United States. Neither the superiors of his order nor the bishops of the dioceses in which he worked reported him to the police. His first conviction followed a report to the police of his molestation of four siblings in Belfast. He fled to the Republic after his arrest in 1991 and hid out in Kilnacrott Abbey. The failure of the Fianna Fail Labour Party coalition to cooperate with his extradition led to the resignation of the government. In 2010 Cardinal Cahal Daly’s successor as Roman Catholic archbishop of Armagh, Cardinal Sean Brady, faced criticism after he admitted that he was the notary in 1975 when two teenage boys testified against Smyth in a canon law tribunal. The boys had taken an oath under threat of excommunication never to speak of their allegations again. Their submissions had been endowed, by the ecclesiastical authorities, with the secrecy of the seal of sacramental confession.
In other cases, bishops attempting to defrock priests for the offence recognised in canon law as solicitation of sex in the confessional found it difficult to prompt Rome into action. Laicisation was deemed to be the exclusive responsibility of the Vatican. For example, Bishop Manuel D. Moreno of Tucson, Arizona, failed to persuade Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to laicise a priest, despite a series of credible allegations made in 1997. The priest had been accused of five crimes, including sexual solicitation in the confessional. It took another seven years for the Vatican to defrock the individual. In the meantime, it was Bishop Moreno who took the blame publicly for the delay.
Cases of confessional abusers have also involved high-ranking prelates, such as Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër of Vienna, who sexually attacked as many as twelve boys at the monastic school where he taught in the 1960s. In 2011, one of Chile’s most senior priests, Monsignor Fernando Karadima, was accused of committing sexual abuse while hearing confessions dating back to the 1990s.21
In a class all his own as ‘confessional’ abuser, and yet indicative of Rome’s lax handling of the phenomenon, is a prominent cleric, the late Father Marcial Maciel, Mexican founder of the Legion of Christ—still one of the fastest-growing orders in the Church, with more than 500 priests and 2,500 seminarians in 15 countries. Through much of his ministry, Maciel, who died in 2008 at the age of eighty-four, enjoyed the reputation of a saint and worldwide builder of churches and schools. But he led a secret, depraved life, aided by the fact that every new member of the order was obliged to swear an oath never to divulge information about him under any circumstances.
Over several decades, Maciel ordered boys of twelve and younger to masturbate him, persuading them that they were helping him with a ‘medical’ condition. He also asserted, in an attempt to assuage their sense of guilt, that Pope Pius XII had given him permission to have assisted orgasms to release the painful build-up of semen. Of the many witnesses, the testimony of Juan Vaca will suffice. The first attack, one of many that persisted for several years, occurred in the junior seminary that Maciel had founded in Tlalpan, a borough of Mexico City.<
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One evening, Vaca, aged twelve, was called to Maciel’s bedroom, where he found the priest ostensibly ill in bed complaining of intestinal pains. Maciel asked the boy to rub his stomach, then encouraged him to masturbate him. ‘I was in shock’, Vaca testified. ‘He was a holy man . . . a very loving man. He was my father.’ On a subsequent evening he abused Vaca together with a second boy.
Vaca said, ‘I told him I didn’t feel right. I wanted to go to confession. Maciel said, “There is nothing wrong. You don’t have to go to confession.”’ When Vaca insisted, he recalled, ‘Maciel said, “Here, I will give you absolution.”’ The priest then proceeded with the bestowal of a blessing. With that act Maciel crossed a boundary that the Catholic Church regards as reprehensible in the extreme. The offence, according to canon law, is known as ‘complicit absolution’. Other accusers would in time declare that Maciel gave them absolution as well for the sexual acts they had performed with him.22
For more than a decade beginning in 1995, victims of Maciel’s religiose debauchery denounced him to the Vatican, yet, under Pope John Paul II, they received no acknowledgement, let alone satisfaction. There was a perception on the part of Maciel’s victims and their lawyers that an official conspiracy of silence had been established by the Vatican. They cited documents issued by the Holy Office (guardian of Catholic orthodoxy), first in 1922 and again in 1962, entitled Crimen Solliciationis (The Crime of [Sexual] Solicitation). The document, on the face of it, called for secrecy in cases involving a priest’s abuse of the confessional to sexually abuse a child. The history of the documents, however, and their effects on the clerical abuse phenomenon are complex.23
Only after the death of John Paul II did his successor, Benedict XVI, move rapidly to deprive Maciel of his priestly privileges (known as ‘faculties’), ordering him into a permanent retreat where he was to ‘do penance’. He was never arrested and never charged by a criminal justice system in any jurisdiction. A measure of the protection accorded Maciel, despite evidence of his abuses dating back to the 1950s, was the systematic exoneration accorded him by a conservative Catholic media. An example of this involved a prominent American priest, the late Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor-in-chief of the journal First Things and close friend of John Paul II. Neuhaus continued to support Maciel in the pages of his influential Washington, DC–based periodical despite the mounting evidence against him. Neuhaus wrote, with a stylish flourish: ‘Stories about Catholic priests have a certain cachet—and for trial lawyers, a promise of cash—that is usually lacking in other cases.’ He went on to tell his readers that he had sought the opinion of an unnamed cardinal ‘in whom I have unbounded confidence and who has been involved in the case who tells me that the charges are “pure invention, without the slightest foundation.”’ In consequence, he said, ‘I have arrived at a moral certainty that the charges are false and malicious.’ In conclusion, he wrote, ‘It counts as evidence that Pope John Paul II, who almost certainly is aware of the charges, has strongly, consistently, and publicly praised Fr. Maciel and the Legion.’24
John Paul II had praised Maciel as an ‘efficacious guide to youth’ and had favoured the Legion with praise on many occasions. John Paul’s verdict on the clerical abuse crisis, delivered in 2002, reveals much about the moral and cultural gulf between the realities of abuse for the victims and the rarefied, out-of-touch perspective of John Paul’s papacy: ‘We are personally and profoundly afflicted by the sins of some of our brothers who have betrayed the grace of Ordination in succumbing even to the most grievous forms of the mysterium iniquitatis at work in the world. . . . A dark shadow of suspicion is cast over all the other fine priests who perform their ministry with honesty and integrity.’25
His first thought, then, was of his own sense of affliction rather than that of the victims, and next for the image of the Catholic priesthood. When it came to the nature of the crime, he characterised it as ‘the mystery of iniquity’, taken from 2 Thessalonians 7, which speaks of the end of the world and the coming of the ‘wicked one’. Clerical abuse is not therefore the work of men, it is the work of Satan.
IF THERE IS A ‘MYSTERY’ about clerical sexual abuse, however, it is how so many abusing priests have squared the circle of their offences against the young and have managed to continue in their ministries, appearing ‘holy’ to their congregations. How does an individual priest preach and administer the sacraments in one part of his life, and yet knowingly attack and debauch the youngest of his charges in another, even within the sacramental act of confession itself?
Up to a point, the answer appears to lie within the priest’s own upbringing as a Catholic child in the era, including his early catechesis and practice of confession, as well as in aspects of his seminary formation. The abuser’s own use of the sacrament of confession for himself, moreover, connects with those explanations. A priest in Queensland, Australia, went to confession some 1,500 times to admit sexually abusing boys. In a 2003 affidavit, the then sixty-eight-year-old Michael Joseph McArdle, who was jailed for six years beginning in October of that year, claimed to have made confession about his paedophile activities to about thirty different priests over a twenty-five-year period. He noted: ‘As the children would leave after each respective assault, I would feel an overwhelming sense of sadness for them and remorse, so much so it would almost be physical. I was devastated after the assaults, every one of them. So distressed would I become that I would attend confessionals weekly and on other occasions fortnightly and would confess that I had been sexually assaulting young boys.’ He said the only assistance or advice he was given was to undertake penance in the form of prayer. He claimed that after each confession, ‘it was like a magic wand had been waved over me’. McArdle’s affidavit would appear to contradict a widespread view in Ireland that child sex abusers are unlikely to admit their abuse to a priest in the confessional.26
The sociologist and psychotherapist Dr. Marie Keenan, of University College, Dublin, conducted a series of remarkable interviews with offending priests who had served their jail sentences in Ireland. Her findings offer a unique resource for understanding the doublethink of priests who abuse children, and who not only remain active in their ministries but also appear to their congregations to be men of piety and devotion.
Most of the priests whom she interviewed for the project said they had routinely confessed their ‘sins’ to a fellow priest, confident that their crimes would be protected by the seal of the confessional. ‘Father A’, for example, spoke of the mechanical process of confession, whereby the slate was ‘wiped clean’, as he put it, and he could begin to feel good about himself again. ‘After each abuse occurrence I felt full of guilt and at the earliest opportunity I sought to confess and receive absolution’, he said. He admitted that although his confessions were ‘well-intentioned’, there was a sense in which he was going through a ‘mechanical process’. Absolution effected a degree of ‘relief and a feeling of a new beginning’. Father A was well aware that the efficacy of the sacrament depended on a ‘firm purpose of amendment’ and future avoidance of ‘occasions of sin’—‘there was always a resolution’ not to sin again. Uppermost in his mind, however, was the importance of feeling virtuous again—‘It effected a degree of relief’, he said. The discomfort to be endured in confessing his sins did not lay in confronting his guilt. Nor was it the prospect of altering his behaviour. Rather, it was the embarrassment of telling those ‘sins’ to the priest. And here the interview with Father A reinforced confession’s scope for avoiding moral realities: ‘It seemed to ease my conscience that I was truly making an effort to change and to stop . . . and going to confession and being able to couch it in such a way that, you know, I didn’t have to give the full story.’27
In saying that he didn’t have to ‘give the full story’, Father A was admitting that he found a form of words that enabled him to secure absolution without being totally frank with the priest who was hearing his confession. The penitent could keep, with casuistic smartness
, within the rules of the conditions of a valid confession in order to obtain absolution, and yet save himself embarrassment by a process of deliberate ‘amphibology’, as the morality textbooks put it—the art of saying something without actually saying it. Thus, instead of saying ‘I sexually abused a boy of nine years of age in an act of sodomy, and I am a priest’, he might say: ‘I performed an impure act with another person’, keeping his priesthood, and the age of his victim, to himself. Some priests might ask whether the ‘person’ was male or female, married or unmarried; yet, as confessors have told me in interviews, they would probably not ask whether the ‘person’ was a child, and it would not occur to them to ask if the penitent was a priest. Hence the penitent priest would tell the sin, and yet not tell the sin, an Orwellesque species of ‘doublethink’ of the kind we saw developing within the priesthood under Pius X in Chapter 4.
Even as Father A described the manner of his confession to Dr. Keenan, he was engaging in doublethink: ‘Perhaps I minimized in my accounts, but I did not think so. I certainly agonized as to how to present the abuse, and maybe the language used probably veiled the horror of the action. It was not open denial, but maybe it was not unadulterated truth either.’
Here the priest is struggling to keep his head above moral water. A crucial key to Father A’s strategy, shared by other priests interviewed for Dr. Keenan’s project, was the admission that his confessors were ‘carefully selected’ by him. In other words, he avoided confessors who might ask uncomfortable questions, or respond harshly to what they had heard. Only once, Father A stated, was he caught out. ‘I went to confession and this man absolutely just went for me . . . he just said to me, “you know what you are doing is not alone morally wrong but it is a criminal act.”’