Deliver Us To Evil
(February 6, 2006)
In a seemingly never-ending stream, another
high profile scandal of ecclesiastical sexual abuse of boys and young
men has captured headlines in recent days. A retired priest from the
U.S., now resident in Italy and in his later career associated with the
Vatican, has been accused of sexual assault going back to a few decades
ago when he was a church pastor in the eastern United States. After the
inevitable denial was issued, other men have come forward claiming
sexual abuse at his hands when they were youths.
By now, we have come to realize that this
squalid and predatory behavior is endemic to clerical circles, and
especially those of the Catholic Church. While it is undoubtedly
practised only by a minority, that minority seems to be significant,
and has no doubt been active for centuries. What has emerged into the
public eye in the last couple of decades is the tip of an ugly and
pitiless iceberg that for so long has waylaid many a newly-launched
human ship and crippled its voyage of life.
Such betrayal of trust and despoiling of the
innocent should awaken the most angry and indignant reaction on the
part of lay and clergy alike. Yet what we have consistently seen in the
Church hierarchy is cover-up and stonewalling, an unwillingness to
institute zero tolerance and a shifting of the guilty
from one location to another, opening up fresh opportunities for
further depredation. This has been as much a scandal as the sexual
abuse itself. Clearly, the overriding concerns of the Church are
to protect its image, not to protect the most vulnerable in its
congregations. As for those congregations, while dismay about these
practices has certainly been expressed, there has been no censure
directed where one might think it also belongs: on God himself for
failing to provide the missing protection.
One should reasonably expect some outcry against the Deity for not
'curing' those he has called and placed over them, or at least giving
them the strength to resist their unnatural proclivities (even when
they are sent to counselling sessions for that very purpose); if
he is believed amenable to performing miracles and answering prayer,
surely working such miracles in his own household ought to assume top
priority. On the other hand, knowing that he is a Teflon God, immune to
criticism and scandal—if only
because those ministers are so efficient at
indoctrination, so adept at instilling a fear of doubt and a reluctance
to hold him
responsible for any evil whatsoever—these are
perhaps concerns which
do not trouble him. He knows from experience that no matter what
he does or fails to do, believers will always turn once more to his
praise and worship.
This news of yet another blight on the face of
institutionalized religion became juxtaposed in my mind with
impressions created by a recent TV documentary series on Auschwitz
which marked the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp
and others like it in 1945. While the two are not to be equated in
terms of character or severity (if only because the latter was horrific
beyond imagining), I found myself drawing certain metaphorical
comparisons.
We are born into this world as part of a long
and ongoing evolutionary chain of human life, marked only by minor
local differences in external appearance; inside we are all the same.
Yet we have managed to separate ourselves into a myriad of ghettos,
mostly defined by characteristics we have chosen to blow up out of all
proportion; many are based on views of the world which bear no relation
to reality. The most important of these ghetto divisions, and certainly
the one which is least connected to rational and verifiable knowledge,
is the one determined by religious faith, by fantastic and totally
unfounded fancies of supernatural dimensions and otherworldly beings.
Those fantasies to a great extent determine our self-image, our social
ties, our commitments and choices in life, our politics, our
prejudices, and very often our evils. We have committed ourselves to
our own concentration camps.
Part of the life of these camps is to send our
children to schools where, while teaching them 20th and 21st century
developments in literacy and literature, in mathematics, science and
history, we also insist on filling their minds with the religious
'knowledge' of 20 and 30 centuries ago. While teaching them to
exercise logic and critical thinking in the former areas, we suppress
those techniques in the latter, indeed we teach them to avoid and fear
the application of such things. In the schools, and in the churches
which form the focal points of our self-imposed ghettos, we
indoctrinate them to place their primary focus in life on an
unpredictable, omnipotent
being whom no one can verify, on the imaginary prospect of a heaven
above and a hell below, on a set of beliefs which run counter to
rationality and science, on an unseen world of angels and devils and
vast scenarios of salvation and damnation. We fill them with fear and
guilt and an obsessive sense of sin. Then we expect them to make their
way in a world which those beliefs only serve to dismiss and distort
and denigrate as unimportant and even dangerous to our eternal fate. We
rob them of healthy
sexuality, of human pride, of a proper knowledge of the ancestry of
both ourselves and our universe; we stunt their wisdom and their
growth. And we create a sense of separateness from other human beings,
other faiths and societies, other ghettos. Too often, these ghettos
teach intolerance, hatred, cruelty—if not
deliberately (though
sometimes so), then as inevitable side effects. Ironically, we do this
to our children because our parents did it to us, stretching back in a
long line of indoctrination and superstition which few have been able
to break.
Now, to these soul-destroying elements a new
dimension has been added—or at
least newly revealed, perhaps the most
destructive of all: sexual abuse on the part of those who have created
and drawn us into their ghettos and concentration camps. By
rights, it ought to discredit and bring down the whole corrupt
business,
for a God who would permit such a thing within his own purview is not
worth a shred of devotion, or faith. Several years ago, after a spate
of revelations about the preying of clergy and other church-based
figures on children, after a number of television documentaries and
films like "The Boys of Saint Vincent" focusing on the devastating
effects on young lives of this form of abuse, I happened upon a
literary contest in a popular magazine inviting short story
submissions (of less than a thousand words) on the theme of "A Secret
Place." To express my outrage and distress at these revelations,
I decided to fashion a story reflecting them, in which the "secret
place" was a dual one: the place at the center of this concentration
camp where a young life was assaulted and despoiled, and the place
within the victim himself where the evil had been insinuated and
buried. I also placed the story within the context of my boyhood church
and its remembered images, for while there was no scandal that I recall
or was aware of at the time I grew up within its ghettoed walls, there
could well have been one which only a perpetrator and his victims were
aware of, as in those days such activities were well and truly hidden.
No victim who might have had the courage to speak out would ever have
been believed, but it would be the ultimate naivete and foolishness to
think that the sexual abuse of children by the ministers of God,
revealed as so widespread in the last quarter century, is a new
phenomenon which has arisen only during that time. (Please note that
this does not represent the memory of any personal experience.) My
submission, not
unexpectedly, failed to be chosen for a prize, as the winners were to
be published in the magazine, and that kind of courage on the part of
the publisher would have been
too much to expect. Now in response to this latest scandal, I am
sharing it for the first time. I have changed the title from the
designated "A Secret Place" to one which to me better reflects the
depth of what it represents, one in keeping with the thoughts expressed
in this Comment. Lest the irony be missed by any readers, the title is
a twist on a line from a much-recited Christian creed.
*
Deliver
Us To Evil
The air had the smell
of
freshly delivered oil, and some of it was burning in the new furnace.
Only a few months earlier there had been the reek of coal here, black
food for an antique barrel of a thing which had filled half the
chamber, but while it stood he had not yet entered this place. The hand
which led him down the heavy wooden stairs was big and firm, though the
voice speaking hollow pleasantries that did not register on him held a
faint tremor.
As they
descended, the tremble in his own, much
smaller hand impinged on his awareness. It had not been there moments
earlier when they walked down the long aisle between empty rows of
ornately backed benches, under the vaulted ceiling. Up there, the air
had been full of familiar smells. Of wood and plaster, fine cloths and
slabs of marble which his childish hands had occasionally rested upon.
And there were other odors, sacred ones; and a Presence.
When they
reached the bottom of the staircase and
entered the sprawling furnace room, the voice above him said softly,
"He is here again today. Can you feel it?" But the little hand clasped
in the firm grip was feeling other things, as the walls of a different
room began to dissolve. He knew suddenly that he had been here before,
perhaps not long ago. The sensation was strange in his young mind, and
the accompanying feelings brought a wave of apprehension.
When he was led
toward a corner, formed by the rough
concrete wall and the gleaming belly of the tank where the oil was
stored, there were other sensations which rushed into consciousness. He
realized that within moments there would be a blanket laid in that
corner and that he would find himself upon it, with the cool clammy air
of the place dimpling his exposed skin. Soon there would be sounds from
his mouth, in dismay and disbelief, even pain, mixed with those from
another: sounds held muted, with a strangled passion, holding their own
demons.
"He is here."
But was He the same one as lived
upstairs? The one displayed at the sacramental heart of each holy
service, with rapt faces upturned in innocence, need and devotion? Or
had the steps down into the earth brought them to a spot closer to
regions where a different one dwelled, one spoken of in tones sometimes
thundered, sometimes hushed, in dire warning and dread fear? What sort
of universe could contain such diametrically opposed beings? How could
humanity serve both? Were they both present at this moment, here in
this secret place?
It was a place
very close to home, yet immeasurably
far, a hollow carved inside another dimension. Here trust was answered
by betrayal, guileless friendship by pitiless exploitation. Here the
waters of redemption turned foul, sticky and inundating. From this
place there was no escape.
When the
invasion came upon him, the walls could not
stand and the last ramparts collapsed in a shiver of desecration. The
full quota of energy in the little body was needed for endurance. The
form above, no longer sheathed in neutering black, blazoned its gender.
It demanded and begged, exulted and whimpered. From the altar of
worship, it had descended to a wanton saturnalia, a feast of slaughter
on a captive sacrificial lamb.
When it was
over, there followed the familiar
threats and cajoles, the talk of Him who had been with them and
approved, of lessons taught and learned, a wiping of tears and other
emissions. There was an urging of secrets to be shared and hidden. Once
more the form that had revealed its all too earthly status was sheathed
in dark concealment, with the heavenly garland of gleaming beads
haloing the waist, the seal of re-sanctification. When the trembling
hand was returned to the firm guiding grip, the latter was once more
warm and paternal.
The little body
stumbled as they ascended the heavy
stairs, but freed from the fury of the siege it could now attend to
rebuilding the fortifications. In the hidden castles of the mind the
walls could once again rise from the rubble. Down the long aisle the
footsteps echoed, retracing their way toward the statues which attended
the altar, their bleeding hearts and sad faces a lament for the world
whose only salvation lay within these walls. When they reached the odor
of decayed incense clinging to the linens and stone of the holy place
itself, the presence of God washed all else away and the battlements
stood once more, cleansed and purified of conscious memory. Together
they knelt and prayed.
In the Father's
house are many mansions. Not all
stand open to the light. But the rooms of a child's mind contain their
own secret places where death can be stored and kept at bay. The murmur
of spirits confined behind those walls will live to haunt the man.
Rusty and stubborn are the doors when the time comes to open them.
*
Earl Doherty
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