“If the church could throw open its stained glass windows and let in some air, invite women to be priests, nuns to be more emancipated and priests to marry, if it could banish criminal priests and end the sordid culture of men protecting men who attack children, it might survive.”
Thus saith Roman Catholic New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in Sunday’s Times. I’m not a Catholic, and I’m not at all interested in suggesting what Roman Catholics must or must not do to change or save their church, our mother church. That’s not my business.
But I have great sympathies with what she says about “the sordid culture of men protecting men.”
Decades ago—the principals are all dead and gone—I sat in a consistory meeting as if I were the attorney for the prosecution. The alleged perp was a man who had—in my opinion—taken advantage of a much, much younger woman he claimed to be protecting from her own insecurities. In this drama, everyone had feet of clay, including me—let’s just make that clear.
But what became just as clear during the inquisition—and it was that—was that the alleged perpetrator had, for better or for worse, taken great comfort from the fact that the judicial body he was facing was entirely male. What he assumed was that they’d understand.
“Look, she wanted me to do it,” he told us late in the proceedings, simply assuming that the tribunal before him would shake their collected heads, shrug their shoulders, and declare him innocent—really, the victim. After all, if a man is somehow propositioned by a woman, a man—being a man—is, well, powerless to control that unique implement we are both blessed and damned, it seems, to carry.
He didn’t get away with that defense, but that he never doubted his own innocence, given the “she-led-me-on” defense, made perfectly clear he was confident a jury of his peers would exercise the quality of mercy. Equally clear to me was that if he had offered that defense before a board composed of the opposite sex, he likely would have fared no better than Custer’s men’s bodies before the knives of Lakota women after his—and their last stand.
I won’t criticize those who argue against women-in-office on the basis of their view of the integrity of scripture. I don’t believe those people are right about the nature of scripture, but I respect their views.
Still, I don’t think Maureen Dowd is all wrong in asserting that what the Roman Catholic church needed in the last four or five decades was some women to hear the cases of those young men aggrieved by priests who used their office as an excuse to abuse boys in their charge, like those in the awful Wisconsin case.
What has hurt the Roman Catholic Church more than anything in the last decade is the way in which church hierarchy simply covered up sexual abuse. I think Dowd is right. Had that hierarchy included women, those most horrifying problems simply would not have occurred as frequently.
Are women smarter than men—more prescient, better judges of human character? Not necessarily. But I do think women have a richer and fuller understanding of what it means to be a victim of abuse.
Thus saith Roman Catholic New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in Sunday’s Times. I’m not a Catholic, and I’m not at all interested in suggesting what Roman Catholics must or must not do to change or save their church, our mother church. That’s not my business.
But I have great sympathies with what she says about “the sordid culture of men protecting men.”
Decades ago—the principals are all dead and gone—I sat in a consistory meeting as if I were the attorney for the prosecution. The alleged perp was a man who had—in my opinion—taken advantage of a much, much younger woman he claimed to be protecting from her own insecurities. In this drama, everyone had feet of clay, including me—let’s just make that clear.
But what became just as clear during the inquisition—and it was that—was that the alleged perpetrator had, for better or for worse, taken great comfort from the fact that the judicial body he was facing was entirely male. What he assumed was that they’d understand.
“Look, she wanted me to do it,” he told us late in the proceedings, simply assuming that the tribunal before him would shake their collected heads, shrug their shoulders, and declare him innocent—really, the victim. After all, if a man is somehow propositioned by a woman, a man—being a man—is, well, powerless to control that unique implement we are both blessed and damned, it seems, to carry.
He didn’t get away with that defense, but that he never doubted his own innocence, given the “she-led-me-on” defense, made perfectly clear he was confident a jury of his peers would exercise the quality of mercy. Equally clear to me was that if he had offered that defense before a board composed of the opposite sex, he likely would have fared no better than Custer’s men’s bodies before the knives of Lakota women after his—and their last stand.
I won’t criticize those who argue against women-in-office on the basis of their view of the integrity of scripture. I don’t believe those people are right about the nature of scripture, but I respect their views.
Still, I don’t think Maureen Dowd is all wrong in asserting that what the Roman Catholic church needed in the last four or five decades was some women to hear the cases of those young men aggrieved by priests who used their office as an excuse to abuse boys in their charge, like those in the awful Wisconsin case.
What has hurt the Roman Catholic Church more than anything in the last decade is the way in which church hierarchy simply covered up sexual abuse. I think Dowd is right. Had that hierarchy included women, those most horrifying problems simply would not have occurred as frequently.
Are women smarter than men—more prescient, better judges of human character? Not necessarily. But I do think women have a richer and fuller understanding of what it means to be a victim of abuse.
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