Quick Thoughts on Cardinal McCarrick

In the last few days, a bombshell story has dropped that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, retired Roman Catholic Archbishop of Washington, D.C., has been suspended from ministry as a result of a "credible allegation" of unwanted sexual contact with a minor when he was a priest of the Archdiocese of New York.  Here are some unorganized reactions.

1.  Don't Take Your Eye Off the Ball.  I have a prediction--not based on any secret evidence, just a hunch--that the victim who made a "credible accusation of abuse" is male, and was a teenager at the time the event occurred.  Fifteen, sixteen, maybe even seventeen, something like that.  [Edit: turns out I was right]  When that comes to light, and it will, there will be a segment of people who will say "see, this is what gay men do," and others who will say "well, jeeze, I mean, it's not really a kid, right?"

Both of those takes are wrong and beside the point.  The relevant mental category for assessing Cardinal McCarrick is not "gay/straight" or "pedophile/non-pedophile" but "sexual predator/non-sexual predator."  Consider this, taken from a statement made by a seminarian (and, thus, an adult) during the time McCarrick was the Archbishop of Newark:

McCarrick, wearing just underwear, got into bed with one of the priests: “Bishop McCarrick was sitting on the crotch of Fr. RC As I was watching TV with Fr BL [full names appear in the documents], bishop McCarrick was smiling and laughing and moving his hands all over Fr. RC’s body. Bishop McCarrick was touching Fr. C’s body, rubbing his hands from head to toe and having a good time, occasionally placing his hands underneath Fr. C’s underwear. [I was] feeling very uncomfortable while trying to focus on television, and Fr. B.L., started smiling. As I looked at the bed next to me, Bishop McCarrick was excitedly caressing the full body of Fr. R.C. At that moment, I made eye contact [with] Bishop McCarrick. He smiled at me saying, “Don’t worry, you’re next.” At that moment, I felt the hand of Fr. B.L. rubbing my back and shoulders. I felt sick to my stomach and went under the covers and pretended to sleep.”

"Don't worry, you're next."  Change the genders of the people involved, and this transcript could have come from one of Harvey Weinstein's victims.  Is it that surprising that someone who says "don't worry, you're next" to a early-20s seminarian would do the same to a 17 year old that caught his eye?  Especially in the 1970s, prior to any consciousness inside the church that minors was a No Go Zone?  Not really.  McCarrick targeted the people that were available to him, as predators do, and he liked men as opposed to women (and thus had a "target rich environment" in Roman Catholic circles).  Otherwise, he's Weinstein 2.0--same M.O., same behavior, same results.  Don't get sucked in to unproductive discussions about sexual orientation, usually raised in bad faith.

2.  A Pox On All Their Houses.  A commonality between both sides of the great divide between Catholics into "liberal" and "conservative" factions is the belief that most of the abusers are on the other side.  So, if you are conservative, all the abusers are liberal gays (because all conservatives are straight--just ask them); if you are liberal, its the repressed conservatives that act out as part of their pathology.  Both of these are fantasies; this stuff is pervasive.

It's important to understand, as Rocco Palmo lays out in this summary, that McCarrick is on "team liberal."  Two of the four most prominent American Cardinals in the Francis dispensation--Kevin Farrell in Rome at the Council on Laity (or whatever its called) and Joseph Tobin in Newark--are McCarrick proteges. The point is not, as surely the conservatives will be soon trumpeting (if they haven't already), that "see, it is mostly the libs!"  Instead, the point is that these "teams" are far more fluid and illusory than people want to believe.  McCarrick, the person who pushed Tobin and Farrell, was appointed to all of his bishoprics by Pope John Paul II.

It's Team Red and Team Blue all the way down.  Different power brokers have their squad of people, and those squads may have inclinations one way or the other that will affect things on the margins, but at the end of the day they are all kind of the same.  If the reporting was to be believed, Pope Francis was elected in large measure because one group of Italians was feuding with a different group of Italians, and so the first group decided to stick it to the second group by electing an Argentinian.  The 'liberal" Pope Francis has bent over backwards to stand behind the "conservative" Cardinal Pell, and look how well that worked out for him.     

That not to say that the Catholic church would not change meaningfully if Pope Francis was replaced with Cardinal Burke.  It just means that, at their heart, all sides and factions have the same underlying culture, with the same cultural pathologies.  It is this culture, and not any particular set of political and theological positions, that drives these issues and problems.  Making the Roman Catholic Church more liberal (or conservative), without changing this underlying culture, is not going to fix the problem.  It is shuffling deck chairs on the Titantic.

3.  Everyone Knew and No One Cared.  Along the same lines, there is a lot of finger-pointing over who really cares about policing clergy ranks for sexual misconduct.  Conservatives love to point to the (entirely real) failures by Pope Francis on this score to argue that Pope Benedict's papacy was some halycon era of diligence.  Nonsense.  That statement from the seminarian I quoted above?  The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith knew about it in 2006, in the heart of the "tough" and "zero tolerance" Benedict/Cardinal Levada era.

The institution of the Roman Catholic Church is still operating on the "two boxes" model I have spoken about before.  They have been forced, essentially at gun-point, to carve out an exception for sexual contact with pre-adolescent kids, and place that into a double-bad separate box.  Ostensibly, contact with minor adolescents is also in that box, though the reaction to McCarrick will be a test of how serious that commitment is.  But the notion that consent and autonomy are relevant considerations in assessing sexual behavior is clearly not part of the equation.  That seminarian hiding under the covers in that hotel room knows that Archbishop McCarrick has total and unfettered discretion to decide whether or not he gets to become a priest.  There is no recourse, no appeal.  And I promise you Archbishop McCarrick understood that, too.  Forget the half-assed groping--that report chronicles a profoundly exploitative situation, with an obscenely lop-sided power dynamic.  That's what's important about the report.

And none of that was remotely relevant to the CDF in '06.  I am pretty confident they looked at the report, saw that there were no kids involved, and round-filed it.  Yeah, yeah, gay sex is Very Bad, but if we kicked out every priest who was fondling another guy, half of the parishes in the world would be without clergy.  The consent and exploitation dimension is not part of the equation in evaluating the situation.  The understanding of sexuality and how it is or is not moral and appropriate, the one accepted by the vast majority of people that are sitting in their pews, is wholly absent.

I would tell them to read Just Love and educate themselves.  But they did read Just Love--and condemned it. 

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