What to do with priest abusers

“Blessed are the invisible for they remind us not of the potential for cruelty in all of us,” says Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea in NC Reporter.  She presents an argument against “amputating” clerical abusers.  Out of sight, we lack them as there-but-for-the-grace-of-God examples.

We also cut loose predators into the general population:

Recidivism is a problem among sexual abuse perpetrators. . . .   Priests . . . may be at particular risk. One analysis of sexual offenders found that men who were unmarried and who abused boys that were not family members were somewhat more likely to re-offend than other perpetrators.

Further, we know that significant life stressors can induce psychological regression in which even men who stopped abusing begin again. A priest who loses his vocation, home, manner of dress, and circle of colleagues is at risk to regress and to re-abuse.

She proposes “a Penance, Productivity, and Provisioning Program for these men.”

The penance would be voluntary, as the price of remaining a priest:

. . .  in a containment and healing center administered and secured by secular professionals. . . .  these men would agree to live here for the remainder of their lives. They could not leave the center without a security guard accompanying them. There would be no TVs, computers, or phones in their rooms and reading material, like magazines, would be screened to prevent pornography from entering the centers. Each man would work with a therapist and/or spiritual director to develop an individual penance program, including prayer. Residents would turn over their assets, retirement funding or salaries to the centers to defray the costs of their care. [Italics added]

O’Dea means business.

They’d have to be productive:

Baking bread, tilling the soil, candle making and other crafts, teaching other residents are all possibilities. Some could generate income to help sustain the centers at less cost to Catholics. In addition, residents could make themselves available to researchers seeking to learn more about commonalities among abusive priests.

She also reaches into the history of the church.  So far, this is looking like a monastery.

Provisioning (?), they would be fully authorized to do sacramental ministry among themselves and

would receive room and board, medical treatment, psychotherapy, and spiritual direction according to individual plans. Bishops would commit to visiting their priests annually to extend pastoral care and to remain conscious of the role of sexual abuse in the lives of these men, their victims, and the wider Catholic community.

Bishops would have reminders they need to protect all concerned, including victims.  These priests would be buying into the highest spiritual, supernatural goals of the priesthood.

Even offenders who turned down this program, choosing rather to “be separated from the priesthood without salary or other benefits canonically possible to withhold” would remain the bishop’s responsibility, reminding them men that they are “priests who betrayed their vocations and should be making reparation.”

Amputate a limb and feel “phanton pain,” she would have the Vatican remember when it considers cutting off offenders, O’Dea says.

The “diseased” part is gone but suffering continues. Maintaining the abusing priest’s attachment to the body of the church keeps him, his victims, his crimes, and his needs visible to hierarchy covenantally required to hold all of that in their sights.

She packs an awful lot into that — and in this program of rehabilitation and renewal that seems truly churchly.

Who is she?

Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea, a clinical psychologist, was the only mental health professional to address the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on the sexual abuse crisis at their 2002 Dallas meeting, and she was one of the clinicians speaking about sexual abuse to the Conference of Major Superiors of Men that year. Frawley-O’Dea is coauthor of Treating the Adult Survivor of Childhood Sexual Abuse, and coeditor of Predatory Priests, Silenced Victims.

I read the latter book and recommend it.

Later: Reader John, who had monastery experience many years ago:

I would agree with Frawley-O’Dea but feel that not enough attention has been paid to sexual abuse by ministers of other denominations. I have heard from several persons who were victims. When a Protestant minister abuses he is held responsible personally, but a Catholic priest is in part protected by the diocese he serves.

Which has been part of the problem.  O’Dea wants dioceses to claim their own, accepting responsibility without simply protecting offenders in the sense John means it.

Later: Reader D approves:

I appreciated seeing this. It reminds me of the AA facility at Guest House in Minn. for priests, which is a 6 month or so (spa-like) treatment center, with clinical psychologists, classes on alcoholism, doctors, AA meetings, priestly camaraderie, etc.
 
This plan goes much deeper, is more rigorous of course and is for the duration. Sounds more Christian to me than turning them out into the world to fend for themselves or as predators.
 
A redemptive plan. She’s on to something.
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Barack, we hardly knew you . . .

Two Dem pollsters in WSJ:

During the election campaign, Barack Obama sought to appeal to the best instincts of the electorate, to a post-partisan sentiment that he said would reinvigorate our democracy. He ran on a platform of reconciliation—of getting beyond “old labels” of right and left, red and blue states, and forging compromises based on shared values.

He lied!

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They know what sells

Gang of leakers going for broke:

WikiLeaks, frustrated at the lack of splash of recent leaks on its whistle-blowing website, has rolled the dice to try to raise its profile by teaming up with news organizations in its latest dump of classified documents.

And they know the expose of Chinese torture of Tibetans, N. Korean, Russian stuff, etc. will never have the legs of an expose of the U.S.  Or of madrassas indoctrinating kids, Islamists plotting terror (another man’s name for freedom-fighting), flabby willingness of Western sell-outs to paper over and mollify-by-any-means Islamists in their midst.  (Chi Trib still respectfully quotes CAIR — in this case, TribCo-owned Sentinel — stuck in fear of Islamaphobia.)

Some places they can’t get into (they depend on U.S. intelligence for that), others they can but aren’t interested.  Atrocities by Americans!  There we go.  (Or by Israelis, pretty much the same thing.)

In releasing a “War Diary” of 76,000 secret U.S. military reports from the war in Afghanistan , the web site was unapologetic about its agenda. “We hope its release will lead to a comprehensive understanding of the war in Afghanistan and provide the raw ingredients necessary to change its course,” the authors said.

That’s in Chi Trib about WikiLeaks, where a fellow with an intriguing organization predicts more of the same:

That [extreme difficulty in finding leakers] means that more partnerships between WikiLeaks and the mainstream media could be on the horizon, said Tom Rosenstiel, founder and director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Intriguing, and very wise.  Who can object to excellence?  Realizing that, I am on the verge of announcing my new organization, Project for Excellence in Everything (PEE), which is bound to take off.  Motto?  “Everyone PEEs.”

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Come out, get out, says vicariate

Local RC authorities in Rome distance selves from recently outed same-sex acting-out priests:

Rome, July 23 – Catholic Church authorities in Rome on Friday urged gay priests to come out after an Italian newsweekly ran an expose’ claiming many of the clerics in the capital led a “double life”.

“No one is forcing them to stay priests, only getting the benefits,” said a statement from the Vicariate of Rome, led by Cardinal Agostino Vallini, one of the Vatican’s top figures.

“Coherence demands they should come out into the open,” it said. “They never should have become priests”.

They also throw down the already-thrown gauntlet.  A great struggle here, gay-life-appreciators vs. faith-defenders.  Much more to come on this extremely important Catholic-church issue.

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Clarence Page on Sherrod, Breitbart et al.

Only the black Ag Dept. official who talked to an NAACP group last March and the white farmers she really did help emerged with “grace and dignity intact” from the recent brouhaha, says Chi Trib’s Clarence Page. 

The culprits included the Obama White House, Ag Secy. Vilsack, NAACP’s Jealous, and Fox host O’Reilly, who at least draws a major media pay check.  But the one Page concentrates on is the “blogger . . . defiant dope,” shame-lacking, guilty-hand-washing Andrew Breitbart, who ran a video clip out of context and set off a panic among Obama aides, the Ag Secy, and the NAACP leadership, all of whom responded like scared kittens and ultimately blamed other people.  “We now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles,” said President Obama, for instance.

Naturally, Page concentrates on Breitbart.  Besides nailing ACORN some months back, he “was [this time] after the NAACP,” because of its “recent call for the tea party movement to rid itself of ‘racist elements.’”  Breitbart said running the Sherrod clip was “about tarring . . . the tea party movement with the false charge of racism,” to which Page, in full sardonic mode: “Right.”  Moreover, Breitbart runs “willfully conservative Web sites” — the worst kind, we might add. 

“Bring it on,” says Page.  “There’s plenty of room on the Web,” adding, as if we were not in at least the second decade of Internet warfare: “Let the consumers decide whose version of journalism is worth their time.”  You’d think he’d go light with that sort of talk.

For consumers he had straight-from-the-shoulder advice: “Keep a healthy skepticism.”  For practitioners of “citizen journalism,” he had “Remember the old school lesson . . .: Getting the story right is better than getting it first.”  That old-school wisdom, from a seasoned practitioner.

And then another nostrum that an old-school practitioner might just hesitate to pronounce in a time of widespread plunging mainstream circulation and plummeting reader and viewer confidence: “Bad journalism eventually produces its own punishment.”  Bankruptcy, for instance.

In any case, readers can now (at last) view Breitbart’s work “with [again] the healthy skepticism that it deserves.”  Thank heaven.

As for the other culprits, “the folks in the White House and the NAACP,” he has this: “Don’t let fear of a charge of racism from the right impair your common sense.  . . .  Don’t take the bait.”  Thing never to forget is you’re not the racists.  It’s the other guys.

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Same-sex ministry

New improved version of my Chicago Catholic News story (now trashed to cache) about same-sex ministry is up.  It begins:

Church Reporter: Priest in business of “helping same-sex-oriented people calm their urges and live chaste lives


(UPDATED: 7/22/10) Speaking at the monthly Catholic Citizens of Illinois luncheon on July 9, Fr. Paul Check pressed one of the hottest social-climate buttons around, converting same-sex people to opposite-sexers — in their behavior if not in their orientation.

As recently installed national director of Courage, which performs chaplain services for 12-step programs in 100-plus U.S. dioceses, including Chicago and overseas, he’s in the business of helping same-sex-oriented people calm their urges and live chaste lives according to Church teaching.  . . . .

Thank you for your patience in this matter, and call again.

===============

Later, from my “heterosexual buddy in Ann Arbor,” a cautionary, nay, a wholly negative note:

Rots a’ ruck to the well-intentioned Fathers.  My biased view is that (beyond sincere) prayer there is little that Priests or any others can do to redeem committed homosexuals.

Admittedly, my view is  biased by my experience as a practicing (psycho)therapist, from which vantage point, I failed over and over again to recover  normalcy for homosexual patients who (GENUINELY AND DEEPLY, AS IT SEEMED TO ME) wanted to regain their preference for normalcy — at the end, I felt that the failure was mine, and that the disorder was (by its origins and sub-societal support) a chosen style of life, rooted in some basic physical disorder, and thus (ought)not be subject to moral condemnation.

Whatever the truth of all of this, I came away from this professional experience convinced that the victims of the disorder had no personal responsibility for the homosexual lifestyle that they practiced, and thus should be as immune from social condemnation as are persons who suffer from arthritis or post-traumatic anxiety.

More to come, from this quarter, about whether changes can come to these individuals.

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Where’s that lede anyhow?

Buried-lede alert, buried-lede alert . . . Why would Manya Brachear focus on the issue behind the story rather than the hard news, as in her Sunday Chi Trib story, “U. of I.’s teaching partnership with Catholic Church draws scrutiny”? 

She leads:

The flap over a University of Illinois adjunct instructor dismissed after making controversial remarks about homosexuality arises from an unusual partnership between the state university and the Roman Catholic Church.

But the hard news, that a second U. of Illinois faculty investigation is under way, in addition to one about why the teacher, Kenneth Howell, was fired and how, is way down:

Faculty and administrators now will review that policy [the “unusual partnership”] to determine if it violates the separation of church and state or threatens academic integrity. They hope to conclude their investigation before the fall semester begins.

I’m assuming the first investigation has been reported.  Such a partnership is not new, by the way: my cousin, the late David Bowman, S.J., taught Catholicism at the U. of Iowa in the late ’50s under much the same rubric. 

But by Sunday’s big paper, the first investigation had become an afterthought for Brachear and her editors, for whom the church-state issue, rather than academic freedom, was the really interesting thing.

But hard news comes first.  Fran Spielman of the Sun-Times comes to mind.  Columnist Mike Royko was always after news, as opinionated as he was: it was what he was raised on, starting, I presume, at City News Bureau.  Columnist Robert Novak sought never to write a column without something new that he’d uncovered. 

Moreover, why the absence of interest in the freedom issue, in this case to what extent the protected species that is the gay and lesbian community got such prompt, thorough response from university authorities?

Nothing wrong with a trend story, of course.  Slow news days depend on them.  But this spotting an issue and selling the story with it has an eagerness factor that damages credibility.  Detachment, please, and a bit more reporting, as of similar situations if there are any, and if there are none, then it’s an even bigger story, rather than a mildly irritating one.

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