The following began as a post on Facebook; it has since been slightly expanded.
Most all of my gentle readers are surely aware by now of the clerical sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church which has been going on for decades and which has implicated 300 priests, victimised over 1000 children, and brought grief to thousands more Pennsylvanians. This horrific pattern of behaviour, moreover, was deliberately and systematically covered up by the Catholic bishops, and even the Vatican has not escaped criticism in this regard.
It has been grievous, shocking, sickening and outrageous to read. It ought to be so for anyone, Catholic or not, and yet - after a warranted fashion or not - I feel rather ‘close’ to this as an Orthodox Christian. However, I have thus far avoided discussing it here for two reasons; you may judge them as you will, be they noble and appropriate or not.
Firstly, I am convinced that there is a right way for us ‘Easterners’ to discuss these abuses, and a wrong way. The wrong way, in my own view, would be anything that even remotely smacks of gloating, of triumphalism, of pharisaical pride, of ‘I thank thee, Lord, that I am not like this Papist’. We Orthodox Christians do have plenty of beams in our eyes, both personally and collectively, and we do no one any good by reaching for motes. We may lack the institutional structure that allows for a cover-up the size and scale of what was seen in Pennsylvania, but that says nothing about the state of our own parishes. The clerical celibacy question is probably more relevant, but we of all people should be able to understand that temptation visits celibates and monks more strongly than it does laypeople, whether Catholic or Orthodox.
Second, this simply isn’t the time to argue the superiority or inferiority of one or the other church’s praxis or ecclesiology. However ‘justified’ such argument may seem, it’s profoundly insensitive and unjust to the victims of clerical abuse and cover-up, to use them as props in a sectional battle.
Make no mistake. This scandal will be a stumbling block to the faith of many Americans. If Ivan Karamazov would turn in his ticket to the Kingdom of God over the unavenged tears of only one small innocent child, how many more will hurl back their tickets in spite at God, spitting curses, as they behold the unavenged tears of a thousand small innocent children, the victims of those same depraved men whose job it is to divide the word of truth and proclaim the Kingdom of God, to proclaim Christ? You murderer-priests, you vipers, you wicked tenants! Not one, but many more Ivan Karamazovs will come of this scandal. A great nihilism will be the bitter fruit reaped by the church, and the harvest will be entirely deserved.
What is asked for now? Fr Steve Clark puts it simply: ‘We need to stand with the victims. That's all we need to do.’ I couldn’t agree more. We must not turn our faces away from the innocents. We need to demand justice – a justice that will be to their good first and foremost, but also to the good, ultimately, of our Latin brothers and sisters generally. Let justice be done for the victims first, and let us hope and pray and demand that the Vatican start doing the right thing by them now.
All the foregoing is really just a long-winded way of saying that all I pray now is that the victims receive closure and recompense both from the ecclesiastic and from secular authorities, sooner rather than later. May such a prayer fall from my lips without malice; may no malice befall by this prayer, but let justice be done.
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