June 11, 2002
Sex Rules
by Diane Christian
Sex Rules
by Diane Christian
Anthony De Palma, in a June 9, 2002 New York Times article titled “Redrafting the Church’s Rules on Redemption,” points out that the Catholic religion based on redemption and forgiveness has conflicts in dealing sternly with sins like the sexual abuse of children by priests. The current scandal has forced the American bishops to formalize and publish their policies for addressing these past, present, and future sins, which are also crimes. Their current plans include zero tolerance for future transgressions and a one-strike exemption for past infractions.
Many are uneasy with any tolerance and many are also uneasy with zero tolerance. De Palma quotes Sister Camille D’Arienzo from Brooklyn as saying “If you have zero tolerance, in many instances you are virtually killing the priest. Are we willing to sacrifice forever the possibility of goodness in a person who has sinned once?” He quotes Law Professor Susan Stabile, as arguing that “If someone has remorse, and the record shows there is no continuing danger to others, the appropriate response is forgiveness.” What rules should apply?
A simple American answer here is to remember the separation of Church and State. It is a religious act to forgive; it is a state act to indict and prosecute crime. ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.’
Easier said than done. In the middle ages one of the bitterest power struggles between Church and kingly authority was over the judgment of priests. The Church demanded superior and sole authority. Thomas à Becket and Sir Thomas More both were killed because they refused to privilege their kings over the Pope on issues of moral authority.
The Catholic idea of God invokes a concept of absolute judgment and knowledge. God sees the heart and is not misled by power and deceit. And God will finally judge truly. Errors made in this corrupt world will be set right. Goodness will be rewarded and evil punished. An afterlife will judge this life.
This is not just a Christian concept, but a wide-ranging religious one. Egyptians for over 4000 years have rendered images of a last judgment where the human heart is weighed against the ostrich feather representing the goddess of justice – Maat. If the heart is even with the feather, the soul is just and right-acting, and proceeds to the realm of Osiris. If the heart weighs heavier, it is evil and unrighteous, and it is gobbled up by the crocodile god, Ahmet, who lurks under the scales of balance, eager to eat the unworthy. There is no appeal: you match divine righteousness and live with Osiris, or fall short and are eaten by Ahmet.
This religious concept of final judgment requires divine action and usually eternal time; religious judgment is long-term. Legal criminal judgment – except in the issue of capital punishment – is limited and narrow. A specific act, not your whole life, is judged. The judge and jury are not God but rather guardian and appliers of laws which are imperfect. The sister from Brooklyn and the law professor are speaking from religious and defense perspectives, no doubt echoing in their counsels of mercy the words of Christ that we shouldn’t forgive just seven times, but seven times seventy times.
With regard to children, though, Christ had harsher words:“If anyone causes the downfall of one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for him to have a millstone hung round his neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea.” Christ’s treatment of the woman taken in adultery is merciful. He saves her from a crowd eager to stone her, with the law on its side. He lets her go with an instruction to sin no more. Would he say the same to a priest abusing a child? I’d bet more on the millstone. In that passage about "better he drown than cause the downfall of a little one" Christ goes on to say such things will happen but woe to the one by which it does.
The bishops aren’t saying this. As my very proper 98-year-old Catholic aunt remarked, “They used the rug.”What’s being swept under the rug is not simply dirt.
The bishops are uneven on sexual issues. They’ve drawn harsh mortal sin lines of sexual morality against birth control and abortion and non-heterosexual, non-married sex activity, yet they have denied and have facilitated the sexual abuse of children.
The priestly office is not a private role. The sexual abuse of children is a crime which cannot be cloaked and rewritten as the tragic sin of an erring human. That’s the sinner’s story, not ‘the little one’s.’ When Christ gave Peter the power of binding and loosing, he gave him the command to feed the lambs, feed the sheep. The power of religious law is only for the sake of the flock.
The Church’s real confusion is not between forgiveness and punishment. It’s between sin and crime. Sin can be forgiven if one acknowledges the evil and repents and intends to avoid it. All elements – confession, remorse, repentance – are required, which is why pedophile priests like Paul Shanley, who assert that the children seduced them, don’t qualify.
The act of forgiveness is religious, to bring the sinner back to the community and right action. It imitates a loving God and is guaranteed by divine judgment and sanction. It varies in different religious cultures, some of which demand harsh temporal punishment even if they allow eventual redemption. The preliminary act for forgiveness is indictment, the formal separation of the violator from society. Accusation excludes where forgiveness includes. Both are social acts, necessary tactics. The religious act of forgiveness tries to transcend bad acts, but the secular act of accusation names the offense. Sin and crime may coincide but they are not the same. Sin is defined by divine aegis, crime by civil authority.
In criminal court you are guilty or innocent of a specific act. The social meaning of your act is predicated on knowledge: if you reasonably thought the person coming toward you with a knife was going to murder you, you may not be found to have committed the crime of murder, or any crime at all. If your guilt is determined, its severity may be mitigated if you had a reason or were inflamed by passion, but what basically matters is the transgression. The criminal courts do not have the power to forgive crimes; they are empowered only to judge the fact of them, and set the appropriate punishment for them.
The sexual abuse of children is a sin for priests, egregious and heinous. In many cases, the Church that forgave and treated and reassigned such priests facilitated further abuse. The sexual abuse of children is also a crime for priests, as it is for everyone else. For that, both priests and Church should be judged. Church authority can religiously address issues of forgiveness. Criminal judgment is a task the bishops have neither the inclination nor the authority to do.
Frank De Palma, "Redrafting the Church's Rules on Redemption," New York Times, Week in Review, June 9, 2002
Editorial, "Bishops at the Crossroads," New York Times, June 9, 2002
Brooks Egertron and Reese Dunklin, "Two thirds of bishops let accused priests work," Dallas Morning News, June 12, 2002.
Diane Christian is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Buffalo. She was a Sister of St. Joseph for nearly eight years.