8.        DISHONESTY Deceit, denial, silence, and cover-up are in the hierarchy’s DNA. The church wasn’t born with deceit, denial, silence, and cover-up as part of its make-up. These tactics have developed because of seeing the institutional church through a distorting lens. Common sense tells us that church officials use these tactics to hide shameful behavior and preserve existing institutional structures. And, these are men of God! What is the character of the God that these men worship? Or is it that they have confused God with the institution? Deceit.  Garry Wills argues (Note 8.1) that deceit is built-into the highest levels of the church. Wills says Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae because advisors “convinced him that it would shake people’s faith in the church for the papacy to reverse its course.” Wills contends that this is a recurring pattern in modern church history (since roughly 1850). Wills writes
			In what we shall find is a recurring pattern, truth was subordinated to ecclesiastical tactics. To maintain an impression that Popes cannot err, Popes deceive—as if distorting the truth in the present were not a worse thing than mistaking it in the past. Paradoxically, the teaching part of the church is continually tugged off from the truth, or made to shy away from its consequences, precisely because it claims a special access to the truth. The papal record has to be whitewashed, even when that effort inhibits sincere attempts at good works—as when the effort to express sorrow over the Holocaust was blocked, at every point, by a nervous reassertion of the church’s essentially innocent behavior toward the Jews.
		Further on in the book’s introduction, Wills says:
			The irony is that the very attempt to prove that the church has never changed leads to innovating arguments, to modern adjustments or additions, that just show how ill they accord with the monument they are trying to shore up—as when the gender of the apostles is adduced to support a male monopoly on the priesthood, after the ancient and real reason for that monopoly, a belief in female inferiority, has become unusable.
	That sentence is too long, and Wills’s writing style is off the “fog index” scale. But what he says, after I reread it and rewrite it a couple of times so I can understand it, is right on.  It passes my personal smell test.   Why the deceit?  There seems to be a number of reasons.  Here’s my list: •        Lack of faith in, and focus on, Jesus’s scriptural claim to be truth.  I am the way, the truth, and the life (John 14.6). •        Lack of faith in Jesus’s promise that the truth shall make you free. Truth has another consequence. According to Flannery O'Conner, "You shall know the truth . . . and the truth shall make you odd." •        Lack of humility. Pride goeth before the fall, or in the new translation: Pride leads to destruction, and arrogance to downfall (Proverbs 16.18). •        A sense that lies may be necessary to help the Holy Spirit to do Her/His job (Note 8.2). The attitude seems to be: salvation of souls demands the maintenance of a saintly aura for priests and of an image of a church that must, like Caesar’s wife, be beyond reproach. Ergo, it’s OK to lie or at least bend the truth. Crazy logic to be sure, but it fits the facts.   •        An ingrained, historical habit of covering up. As we all know, bad habits are tough to break.   •        An inability to admit sins and mistakes. Doesn’t this flow from the arrogance of having the ultimate truth and of being infallible? •        Dishonesty about the church never having taught anything erroneous. What about usury? Slavery? Let's get real, fellas! One of the lawyers for the survivors of clergy sex abuse who secured the $85 million settlement in Boston said about Archbishop O’Malley (Note 8.3), “If that had been Cardinal Law saying that, I would not have accepted it. I have deposed Cardinal Law. I would not believe him even telling me what his name was. But O'Malley I believed to be honest." Maybe there’s hope. Honesty really is the best policy. Denial.   I’ve recently learned a lot about denial listening to survivors of sex abuse by clergy. When you've been abused, sometimes denying it is the only sane thing you can do. Denial protects. Being in denial is like being in a box, or closet, or womb. Consciously or unconsciously, you can’t handle the light of day, the truth of the abuse, so you stay in your box, closet, or womb. The enclosure of denial provides safety, but denial has its own set of problems. When you summon up enough courage to venture out, you gain light, but lose the safety of your box, closet, or womb. You trade the darkness and safety of the box for the light of day, which presents a new set of problems.   Denial is not an attribute exclusive to the hierarchy. The disease afflicts the laity also: "Whatever Father (the pope, the bishop) says, he's got to be right." The enormity of the sex scandal and cover-up is breathtaking, contributing to the denial. The truth is sometimes too difficult to handle. Denial is sometimes the only defense mechanism we can muster. Some people deny that the Holocaust ever happened, that we ever went to the moon.  Some say the CIA engineered 9/11. Denial’s first cousin is minimization. A prime example of minimization is the American bishops "defense" that says sex abuse by Catholic clergy of minors is no greater in the Catholic Church than in the general population. This apologia is a poor imitation of the famous "if the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit" defense. It may fool some of the people, but, in the court of enlightened public opinion, the defense is laughable and damnable. The bishops or their immediate delegates hand-picked Catholic clergy, tested them and observed them throughout their seminary training, supervised them, appraised their performance on the job, transferred them, promoted them, disciplined them when necessary, and in too many cases protected the abusers among them from the police when these few committed crimes against minors, some of them little children. One has to marvel at the size of the cajones of a cardinal or bishop who in effect says "we've got a terrible child sex-abuse problem in this country and together we all have to do something about it." Shamelessness has no limit. Silence.  The third chapter of Ecclestiastes is one of the most famous in all of scripture. It describes a “time for every purpose under heaven.” Verse 13 identifies a “the time for silence and the time for talk.”  Proper discernment tells us which is which. Silence can be positive (silence is golden) or negative.   The institutional church practices two types of negative silence. Type I negative silence is the silence of denial, the silence of passive aggressiveness. We all know it. An example from everyday life is when someone, often a family member, unfortunately, gives us the silent treatment. Nothing can be more infuriating. The official church until recently used Type I negative silence about clergy sex abuse of minors. The church uses Type I negative silence about the vocation crisis, gays in the priesthood, the number of Catholics leaving the church. Denial is parent to this type of silence.   Sullivan (Note 8.4) captures the Bishops’ passive compliance with the Roman dictum for silence about the causes of the priestly vocation crisis:
			What is truly amazing, however, is the mass compliance to the Vatican's directive on the part of the bishops of the world. The bishops, after all, are on the front lines of this crisis. They experience firsthand the struggle of their priests, the deprivation of their people in the thousands of parishes with only one or no resident priest, and the frightful fact that the crisis is growing worse every day.
	The institutional church imposes Type II negative silence on clerical dissidents. Rome prohibits clergy from discussing a married clergy and women priests. The church officially silences dissidents. The names Leonardo Boff, Dom Helder Camara, Charles Curran, Hans Kung, and Edward Schillebeeckx come to mind (Note 8.5). The church doesn't value dissent or free speech or dissidents. Free speech, an article of American faith, is not an article of faith of the institutional church. I volunteer at a local community college helping the instructor prepare immigrants for their citizenship test.  Our study of the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble of the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights has heightened my awareness of these articles of the American creed. Seeing the official church trample free speech and other basic human rights spelled out in these documents boils my American blood. The second part of Ecclestiastes 3.13, “the time to talk,” and recent events cry out that the silence must end. But we need more than talk; we need leadership and action.   Dallas. In June 2002, in Dallas, as a direct result of the Firestorm in Boston, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) issued a policy in response to the sex abuse of minors by clergy. In the preamble to the "Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, Revised Edition" (Note 8.7), the U.S. bishops acknowledge a crisis without precedent "in our times," admit their "mistakes" and role in the suffering of innocent victims and their families, and pledge "with God's help and in full collaboration with our people to continue to work to restore the bonds of trust that unite us." The bishops are bureaucrats and wordsmiths, not leaders or prophets. Examining their words is essential to discern their agenda. The words "to restore the bonds of trust that unite us" convey that the bishops are interested in restoration of the status quo, not reformation, not real change; that they are playing on the emotional bonds of sheep to shepherds, of children to parents, of family members to clan. "Collaboration" speaks not of partnership but of something akin to the collaboration of the French Vichy Government with the German Nazis in World War II. Did the wordsmiths use the wrong word? It can be argued that "collaboration" is the right word. For 17 years before the Boston Globe precipitated the Firestorm in Boston, the National Catholic Reporter ran numerous stories of sex abuse of minors by priests and the coverup by many bishops. Yes, the laity's passivity has the effect of collaborating with many bishops' proactive cover-up. Those hated money-grubbing lawyers and liberal anti-Catholic media people were the ones who exposed the scandal, not the "faithful." For some Catholics the bonds of trust were never broken and never will be; for others they can never be restored because they are based on a dying authoritarian and feudal model of the church. The charter proclaims a "zero-tolerance" policy for "even a single act of sexual abuse of a minor." Article 8 of the charter authorizes the establishment of an Office for Child and Youth Protection at USCCB national headquarters. What the policy didn't do was address key issues of the cover-up. Today the most visible, media- savvy bishops (e.g., Bishop Gregory, Cardinal McCarrick), being good organization men, are continuing the cover-up through minimization, misdirection, and, we'll soon see, I predict, statistical slight-of-hand.   The USCCB (Note 7.6) named former Governor Frank Keating of Oklahoma to chair the Advisory Panel, later renamed National Review Board,  monitoring the new USCCB Office for Child and Youth Protection. The USCCB also appointed Washington attorney Robert S. Bennett and Illinois Appellate Court Justice Anne Burke of Chicago as high-ranking members of the Advisory Panel. Sex abuse survivors were also named to the panel. Other panel members were named later. One of them was Leon Panetta, the former White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton.
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