0. Prologue
Sometimes coincidences pile atop one another so thickly that even atheists could suspect the hand of divine intervention. Such a concatenation of coincidences surrounded my experience with Mea Maxima Culpa, a documentary on child abuse in the Catholic Church. Its trailer, portraying the scene of the crimes, a school for deaf children in Wisconsin, drew me in because of my interest in mysteries, because of a tangential relationship with my research in the European Renaissance, and also because I knew the film included representatives of the Church hierarchy. I like to hear all sides of the story, even when a valid claim for some sides is beyond imagining. My mind would travel, as Montaigne proposed in the original essays, “in my own way, genuine…without artifice.”
Since I seem to recall reading about “happy” slaves in a fifth-grade American social studies textbook, I’ve never trusted any authority unconditionally, regardless of how benign it may appear its ornate vestments or its elegant cinematography. Now, as a black woman and, secondarily, a trained scholar, that point of view has served me well. So, what started as musings on one film led to a quest where I sought out documentation to fact-check the events in the film — books, letters, memos, newspaper articles, and more. This foundation, then, expanded into a larger vista populated by abuses and excuses.
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I had my first encounter with the Catholic Church as a Girl Scout. In trying to get our religion badge, a relic of another era, my racially integrated troop, the only one in town, donned our spiffy uniforms and for several Sundays attended each other’s churches as a green-clad group of girls. We were integrated because we were all Army kids near the local military base, Ft. Campbell, Kentucky which had been desegregated for over a decade. Clarksville, where we now lived, across the Tennessee border from Kentucky, was only slowly catching up on its bumpy road toward inclusion.
As each church welcomed our troop of twelve-year-olds, we believed that we belonged, that churches were a safe space, because the Bible says they must “suffer the little children to come unto me.” This intermittent church odyssey was a revelation to all of us. At the white Methodist church, I recall being confused at the congregation’s lackluster singing, thinking how bored and passionless the people looked, as if they didn’t want to be there. At my black Baptist church, fellow troop members were astonished that church could be lively and “fun,” with really bumpin’ music.
But for all of us, except the lone Catholic among us, the beautiful Catholic church was a revelation, proffering majesty with its exquisite stained-glass windows, the gorgeous robes of the priest, the candles, the incense. We were children, innocent children. We couldn’t have described what we felt, nor could we have imagined what was happening to children our own age in other places, but in that moment, on our wide-eyed faces, I remember seeing what I now recognize as “awe.”
Professionally, for gratifying decades, I’ve loved, respected, performed, and taught Catholic church music, some of the greatest sacred music the world has ever known. My academic research includes the relationship between religion and dance among Catholics and Protestants in Reformation Europe, the era that gave birth to the Jesuits and to Montaigne. Jesuits would figure prominently in my Mea Culpa explorations. So, although agnostic with residual Protestant sensibilities, I’m interested in what the Catholic Church does. And because of my training in the early modern period — where dance joined drinking and theater-going as part of strong cultural markers in the conflicts between Protestants and Catholics — I’m interested in why they do it.
Demoralizing though it was to read about those who betrayed the trust, not to mention the minds and bodies of children, I burrowed into information as arcane as canon law in the Catholic Church, and as acclaimed as Academy Award-winning films. My mental machete hacked its way through jungles thick with lies, half-lies, self-serving hypocrisy, and other truth-choking vines. I climbed the peaks of understanding seeking truth, because I hoped it was there.
When I was nearly done with this exploration (or thought I was), my television just happened to be on CBS. The 48 Hours topic was the rape and murder of a young woman, purportedly by her parish priest, and the subsequent church coverup. The innocence of the victim, the silence of witnesses, the stonewalling of Church officials in Texas, and the enabling pusillanimity of public officials rang all too familiar. What a coincidence, I thought.
Seeking a bit of relief from exhausting research, I searched my home away from home, ABEBOOKS, discovering a collection of light mystery short stories on religious topics, a book entitled Unholy Orders. As it turns out, though, this search unearthed another book with exactly the same title, a nonfiction account of massive abuse among another body of vulnerable children — Canadian orphans in a Church-affiliated home in Newfoundland. In addition to the abuse among our friendly neighbors to the North, Unholy Orders, the nonfiction one, shared harrowing tales of abuses by a priest back in the States — this time, Louisiana. So by this point, feeling a bit haunted, I had a documentary film, a TV news show, and two books, linked by a leitmotif of sexual abuses committed by authorities in the Catholic Church.
Surely nothing else can crop up, I thought. Imagine my chagrin-flavored surprise when I turned to the internet, seeking previously stymied relief on Acorn TV, a video site that specializes in television shows from throughout the UK. Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, a charming series based on books by Kerry Greenwood, is set in 1920s Melbourne, Australia, a charming city I have visited. The Honorable Miss Phryne (pronounced FRY-nee) Fisher is a free-spirited “lady detective” in the flapper age before policewomen existed. She’s got pots of money, a couture wardrobe, and a license to drive her sporty Hispano Suiza.
With a taste of the drawing room comedy, Miss Fisher solves murders, all the while tackling societal issues like class struggle, women’s suffrage, divorce, homosexuality, and film as a budding industry. I settled in for a pleasant hour’s episode, contemplating the disappearance of a housemaid from a home for “fallen and friendless girls.” The home trains unwed mothers (“fallen”) and orphans (“friendless”) for household service while running its own laundry business (Miss Fisher’s scanty French undies being an ongoing scandal). The “friendless” maid had come to the staff of Phryne’s prim and class conscious, but kindly, Aunt Prudence. “Uh oh, not again,” I groan, when Phryne goes to the home and the scene shows long pristine halls of black and white tiles, with the sound of plainchant ringing in the background, and a nun in full black and white habit walking towards our heroine. Damn.
As it turns out, the nuns are not responsible for the white slaving that resulted in the disappearance of the maid and other house servants of “good character.” Believe me when I say I was relieved that the official Church was responsible for nothing more abusive than the work environment. The villain in the Miss Fisher episode wanted money for the nuns, counting the girls’ lives as worthless when compared to the greater glory of the Church. Here, art echoes life. Repeatedly, I found this dismissive theme in documentation of actual cases I consulted and interviews with cardinals and other Church officials explaining their preoccupation with saving the abusers rather than the abused.
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The HBO 2012 release of Mea Maxima Culpa caught and held my interest. With no cable TV, my belated access to this documentary via Netflix in 2013 coincided with the somewhat scandalous and nearly unprecedented resignation of Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict XVI, or as comedian J. Anthony Brown calls him, Bennie One-Six, which sounds like a character in some sort of thug life graphic novel (come to think of it, given Church history, that might not be too far from the truth). As news outlets worldwide were trumpeting the “unprecedented” part, I strolled down history’s memory lane to seek the origins of that “nearly” part. In my papal peregrinations, I found that Benedict became only the third in all of Catholic church history to resign that position, only the second to choose to resign, the first being over 700 years ago.
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Pope Celestine V, the only other pope to resign, purportedly, of his own free will, served for only a few months in the last decade of the thirteenth century. Celestine, a Benedictine hermit, born Pietro di Murrone, wore a knotted hair shirt and heavy iron chain daily. He fasted much of every week, and practiced four bread-and-water Lenten periods, annually. He had been taken unwillingly from his Abruzzi mountain fastness to serve as pope when political infighting between Guelphs and Ghibellines had left the church bereft of a pope for two years. Not satisfied with their hard-won victory, the Guelphs then subdivided into Black Guelphs and White Guelphs and fought amongst themselves. The choice of this unassuming — and more importantly, unaligned — monk seemed to be the only solution. He summoned the quarrelsome cardinals to Aquila where, humbly seated on a donkey, he was consecrated.
Serving from Naples, Celestine proved that leaving well enough alone might have been a better Church strategy than dragging a hermit from his hermitage. He decorated his single room like his mountain hut, and refused gifts to no one, all the while disdaining the vicious politics practiced amid the grandiose lives of the Roman Curia. In his opinion, all of this intrigue detracted from the time needed to perform acts of piety. His decision to be done with the papacy coincided with the Curia’s desire to be done with him. So, the first papal resignation occurred in 1294.
Cardinal Gaetani, related to three popes (Innocent III, Gregory IX, Alexander IV) on his mother, Perna Orsini’s, side, was the selfsame person who had pushed the unworldly Celestine as a solution to the original gridlock. Before becoming Boniface VIII, Gaetani justified Celestine’s resignation in the name of the church’s self-preservation. Curiously, I noted a kinship between the eventual thirteenth-century Catholic pope and W. Bush’s eventual twentieth-century Methodist vice president, Dick Cheney. Like Gaetani, Cheney was tasked with finding Bush’s running mate after refusing the position himself, like Gaetani. One by one, Cheney discredited each potential candidate, such as Oklahoma politician Frank Keating until, presto change-o, the only choice left was the chooser who “reluctantly” took the post. As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barton Gelman put it in Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, by the time this played out “the biggest man in Oklahoma was political roadkill, crushed under wheels he never heard coming.”
Likewise, Celestine was victim of Gaetani’s chariot wheels after which, as Boniface, he rushed to undo every decision Celestine had made, save two: the regulations concerning the conclave of cardinals when choosing a new pope and — wait for it — the right of a pope to resign. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Powerful men corrupted by their power regardless of the era.
Dante Alighieri one of Celestine’s contemporaries, was so outraged at the resignation that he condemned Celestine in Canto III of the Inferno, placing him in Hell’s anteroom, among those cowardly fence-sitters who were hateful to God and to his enemies, alike.
Here, leave all suspicion behind;
All dead cowardice here doth meet.
We have come to the place I have told to thee
Where you will see in agony,
Those who have lost their minds. (Canto III, lines 14–15)
Full disclosure: Remember that Black and White Guelph thing? Dante was not exactly a disinterested party. He was a White Guelph. The elevation of Boniface resulted in supremacy of the Black Guelphs [insert white fragility joke here]. If you’re concerned about Dante’s banishment of poor Celestine to the anteroom, don’t worry. He exiles Boniface five circles down in Canto XIX’s eighth circle of Hell among the greedy simonists, those who sold church positions to enrich themselves. Dante accused him of having assaulted la bella donna [the beautiful lady], a metaphor for the Church. Apparently, even Boniface’s poetic biography of Celestine, Opus Metricum, didn’t endear him to fellow poet, Dante. In the preface of his translation of the Inferno, John D. Sinclair colorfully refers to Dante’s view of popes Nicholas III, Boniface VIII, and Clement V as “a crescendo of iniquity.”
Meanwhile, Celestine, seeking a return to his hermit’s life, as opposed to the medieval photo ops Boniface had planned for him, escaped and evaded Boniface for quite a while before he was captured and confined until he died in questionable circumstances. Today’s church apologists consider the rumor that Boniface put a hit out on Celestine to be “utter calumny” although they do admit that “guards” may have treated the former pope “rudely.” There’s no mention of why a hermit needed guards or why he had to run away or why he had to be captured.
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A Roman conclave elected Gregory XII pope in 1406. This might not have been a problem had there not been another pope at the same time in Avignon — Benedict XIII. This schism in the church only moved toward resolution when both Greg and Bennie agreed to renounce their claims in favor of a new vote for one pope to join the conflicted factions. Both Gregory, whom the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia calls the “legal” pope, and Benedict, the “antipope,” had agreed to meet in Pisa, so they could be removed from office simultaneously. Neither showed up. The cardinals in attendance elected Alexander V. So now we have three popes.
Meanwhile, Gregory had agreed to suspend the naming of any new cardinals. Unfortunately, he seemed to have let the commandment against lying slip his mind, naming fourteen more, including four of his nephews. He then declared Benedict and Alexander “devastators of the church.” But six years later, Greg resigned, Bennie One-Three retired, and Al relinquished his hold on life, so Martin V was elected — Schism ended. Gregory became only the second pope to resign, but this time under duress: Now, fast-forward 598 years.
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Wait. Before going on to Bennie One-Six, perhaps I should back up and mention one more Benedict: Benedict IX. Technically, he should be among the resigners, because he sold the papacy for cold hard cash in the middle of the eleventh century, but then he reclaimed it and served three more terms before the Church got rid of term limits. It’s hard to know where to place him, but the Catholic Church considers him to be a “disgrace to the Chair of Peter.”
Whoa. Considering Pope John XII, who mutilated enemies, cutting off noses, ears, hands, etc., and died, paralyzed, in the act of adultery; considering Leo V, who had several illegitimate children and apparently killed some of his enemies; considering Innocent IV who “allowed many abuses,” including torture during the Inquisition; and considering Urban VI, who tortured and excommunicated his enemies, to which the Catholic Encyclopedia responds that he “acted unwisely in treating them so cruelly,” Benedict’s “disgrace” must have really been something.
And these are just the papal sins the Church itself admits. Those outside the Church have something to say about popes Sergius III, Leo X, and others, also accused of killing enemies. One of these others, Alexander VI, was a practicing member of the infamous Borgia family and father (yes, father) to Lucrezia. The Catholic Encyclopedia and Wikipedia assert that accusations of corruption against this early sixteenth-century pope (such as those found in the rabid Encyclopedia Britannica, I guess) are based on claims by his enemies.
Both Catholic-influenced articles deal with Alexander’s numerous progeny in a matter-of-fact manner that, in Wikipedia, omits any judgment whatsoever. The Catholic Encyclopedia praises him as “strictly abstemious in eating and drinking, and a careful administrator” recalling “his handsome and imposing figure, his cheerful countenance, persuasive manner, brilliant conversation, and intimate mastery of the ways of polite society,” only mentioning in passing that he continued his “evil” ways into the papacy, although they credited this never-married Prince of the Church with a “strong paternal affection” for his eleven (!) children (apparently they didn’t talk to Bernardo, the eighth child, taken from his mother and, unlike his siblings born before and after, kept in hiding ostensibly because he was the first child sired after his father became a cardinal with papal aspirations). Catholic Encyclopedia entry author James Francis Loughlin approves of Alexander’s good judgment in keeping his children mostly away from his official residence, while providing lavishly for each. Oh, and in case you need a refresher, the vow of celibacy was indeed in place and had been since the eleventh century.
This puts Benedict XVI in context. Ratzinger served under Pope John Paul II as Dean of the College of Cardinals and head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). In this latter role, Cardinal Ratzinger took the lead in dealing with accusations of child abuse among the clergy, beginning in 2001. His Wikipedia entry, obviously written by papal partisans (as are, apparently, all Wikipedia papal entries I’ve checked against other sources), neglects to address the fact that Bennie had been head of the CDF since 1985 and abuses had been reported as occurring in increasingly massive numbers since the 1960s.
Produced and narrated by Alex Gibney, this low-key, yet startlingly effective film, bases its narrative on incidents at St. John’s School for the Deaf, run by the Catholic Church in Wisconsin. Over a period of more than twenty years, beginning in the 1950s, Father Lawrence Murphy was abusing hundreds of deaf male children. In the crafty manner characteristic of pedophiles, he targeted the most defenseless children, those whose hearing parents did not know or would not learn American Sign Language (ASL). As a result, the parents and their children, the most vulnerable of an already vulnerable group, depended on Father Murphy for their communication. As devout Catholics, the parents refused to hear the plaints of their own children, even when told of Murphy’s abuses.
This is where Mea Maxima Culpa comes in. Throughout the film, the filmmakers prove the widespread nature of this problem by referring to similar abuses in Ireland, Continental Europe, South America, and Africa. In fact, as Bishop Accountability reports, due to the efforts of German survivor Matthias Katsch, it is now known that one abuser Wolfgang Statt, a Jesuit priest:
Admitted in a 1992 letter to his superiors that he had sexually abused high schoolers in Berlin, Germany as well as in Spain and Chile in the 1970s and 1980s. Statt worked in parishes in Chile 1985 -1991. He left the priesthood in 1992. Statt admitted the abuse in a January 2010 Der Spiegel interview; subsequently at least 20 of his former students surfaced with allegations against him. Statt left Chile in January 2010, headed for Buenos Aires, Argentina.
These international cases highlight the Wisconsin case, filtering it through the prism of this broader context. This broader view is particularly important given the “few bad apples” defense commonly heard in cases like these, a defense similar to that used for abusive police officers whose relationship to abusive priests is striking. But more on that later.
