Appalling abuse

by Editor · April 8, 2001

Catholics will be appalled at the notion of priests coercing nuns (and other Catholics) into having sexual relations. Let us not put too fine a point on it: coercive and non-consensual sex is called rape.

The Vatican�routinely so tight-lipped in such matters�has acknowledged the abuses, and Church authorities have already taken steps (with varying degrees of success) to confront them. The Vatican�s candid statement validates the reports, which were compiled by senior members of women�s congregations and published in an article by the US weekly National Catholic Reporter. This serves as a measure of how seriously Church authorities take the allegations.

The abuse by what seems to be a tiny minority of priests has been ascribed to prevailing cultural mores. This provides for a reasonable explanation, but let no one have the explanation serve as a defence. A priest who manipulates his status in a community to break his vow of celibacy by coercive means abuses his sacred office, and has no place in the clergy.

Likewise, the unidentified bishop in Malawi, who dismissed the heads of a diocesan women�s congregation after they protested about diocesan priests having impregnated 29 nuns, must be made to answer for his negligent conduct, and pertinent action taken against him.

The harm such behaviour has caused the Church is incalculable. How many young women who hear God�s call to the religious life will contemplate alternative life options in fear (real or perceived) of being raped or otherwise abused by men they should implicitly trust?

One may wonder if the time has not come for the Vatican to consider ordaining as priests, at least in specific regions, virtuous married men (viri probati), a call that increasingly emanates from Africa.

However, one must not lose sight of the fact that aberrant conduct in the priesthood is not so widespread as to taint the entire African Church. Sr Marie McDonald, who compiled one of the four reports, has emphasised that the shocking cases she came across were not representative of the clergy in Africa. The Vatican has asked that the scandal caused by a few priests should not obscure the “often heroic faithfulness of the great majority of men and women religious and priests.”

This, however, will not be the conclusion of the readers of secular newspapers, upon whose (mostly balanced) reporting anti-Catholic and anti-clerical propagandists will no doubt seize.

This highlights the importance of the Catholic press. Readers of The Southern Cross will have received, in this edition, a much more comprehensive and precise picture of the shocking revelations (and the response) than what they would have gleaned from the secular press, enabling them to form a well-grounded opinion and to dispel public misperceptions