SNAKE IN THE CHURCH : Clean up or run away?

The current sexual abuse crisis in the American church reminds me of the time we saw a dangerous snake go into our garage here in India. We knew it was in there, but we could think of no safe way to approach it. Everything we came up with seemed to make matters worse, and to put us in still greater potential peril. In the end, we had to empty the whole place, one box at a time, slowly and painstakingly, holding our breath lest we disturb it. When we finally found the snake, it was sleeping peacefully--an immense length of coiled danger--and with great trepidation, we managed to trap it in a box and carry it out to the woods, where we released it.

Analogies have a way of being too neat and clever, but I like this one. There are people who are so terrified of snakes that they would prefer to sell the house and move somewhere else rather than have to face the beast down. Others react with a foolhardy kind of bravado, claiming to have no fear at all, that snakes are not really that dangerous.

Two of my siblings have left the church because of the abuse of children by priests and the hierarchy's cover-up. For my sister and brother-in-law, coming on the heels of a series of incidents in their parish--one involving embezzlement of over $200,000 by the pastor and the refusal of the bishop to respond when it was brought to his attention--pedophilia was the last straw. A brother had left the church several years earlier and become an Episcopalian. He was the lawyer for seven boys (all from the same family) who had been molested repeatedly, over a period of years, by former priest John Geoghan. These most recent disclosures only strengthened his conviction that he had made the right decision when he left.

For me, however, leaving isn't an option. It seems too much like moving to another house because a snake got into the garage. It's still my house. The snake is the problem, not the house, and not even the garage. Why should I leave?

However, just as the discovery of the snake forced us to carefully dismantle the garage, looking into each and every closed carton and trunk, pushing aside the piles of accumulated junk and cleaning behind the towering heaps of newspapers, old bottles and cans, so is the present crisis an opportunity to confront the waste and debris clogging up our church.

Almost everyone I have spoken with about this is more horrified by the cover-up than by the pedophilia itself. Pedophilia is seen as an illness, an aberration which requires treatment. But the bishops, who pretend to be our spiritual leaders, have participated in the immoral protection of men engaged in criminal activity of the most despicable kind, and this one can neither fathom nor condone.

It is clear that the pedophilia crisis has achieved one positive thing. The structural changes in the church that lay people (and many of the clergy) have been crying out for for years may now actually take place. Not in a rush, of course. The hierarchy cannot be seen to be taking any notice at all of public opinion. But it is unthinkable that we will be able to carry on as if nothing has happened, as if we are safe leaving things in the hands of those who have been so deeply involved in such shameful events.

Having said that, however, I believe this has also made many of us see our own culpability, our own responsibility for allowing things to reach such a pass. We are the ones who have endowed the clergy and the hierarchy of the church with the mystique that has allowed them to function in secrecy, unquestioned by those of us who claim to be members of the same institution. It is all very well to point fingers at the Cardinal Laws and Egans and say that they knew and did nothing, but where were we? We ensure safeguards for our children where their teachers and their pediatricians are concerned. We make sure that we know the parents of their friends before we allow them to spend the night at their homes, and we get references for their babysitters. But if Father wants to take them out for a picnic?

Even more disturbing, we have allowed the system we now live with to take such a hold over us that we can no longer see how things could be different. Peter certainly did not live in the kind of powerful and majestic style that Pope John Paul is accustomed to, no apostle ever lived in anything like the splendor of a cardinal, a bishop, or even some lowly priests. We know that, but we still let it overpower us, even knowing that we are the ones paying for it.

When we found the snake in the garage, we called some of our friends to come and help us. We took that place apart, found the creature, and removed it, and then we set about restoring order to the chaos. It took quite a while and required considerable courage and resolve. But there really wasn't any other choice.