Photo credit: St. John Paul II Parish of Milwaukee
Lost in the daily news of ever more mayhem in our era of the New Vulgarity was the story of the closure of St. John Kanty Roman Catholic Church. Located on Milwaukee’s Southside, its final mass was celebrated last Sunday. The parish properties will be sold. Coverage on TV news, about 100 seconds worth, mentioned the $250,000 needed to renovate the church buildings and the parish school. In today’s market, that’s the cost of an average house in a decent neighborhood.
Actually, such announcements are hardly newsworthy these days. There’s even a Milwaukee Archdiocese website listing closures and parish mergers. By 2020, half of its parishes will have closed. But that brief news segment came just weeks after the Pennsylvania attorney general’s report on yet another Catholic Church sex scandal. It catalogues thousands of crimes committed by hundreds of priests. Of course, it reminded me of our local history of scandal.
As you’ll recall, the victims, hundreds of them, after years of litigation, finally received $21.5 million (a pittance compared to other settlements) divided among them. Nearly $20 million was paid to the attorneys of both sides. The winners, obviously, were the lawyers. For then-Archbishop Timothy Dolan and the priests who orchestrated the scandal and its cover-up, there was no expulsion into the darkness or the gnashing of teeth. In fact, Dolan was elevated to cardinal and transferred to New York City (where, by the way, he reportedly spent $2 million lobbying to prevent changes in the statute of limitations laws that would allow the pursuit of sex offenders).
I don’t know if Dolan came up with the so-called cemetery fund ploy to hide church assets from sex abuse claimants. Maybe it was his clever lawyer’s idea. Either way, rather than a pursuit of justice, their strategy was a conniving shell-game to deny justice and dignity to the victims. Apparently, neither lawyer nor client saw fit to rise to the moral stature of the “good Catholic” and settle the matter. A mock mea culpa and pretense of compassion came only after all means of avoiding accountability had been exhausted.
Amazingly, such accounts of mass crimes and criminal conspiracy to conceal them do not result in mass resignations or mass defrocking of the perpetrators or of those who enabled them decade after decade. Instead, there’s the obligatory scapegoating of gays, although the abuse was equal opportunity. The Pennsylvania report mentions a young female victim’s pregnancy and subsequent abortion, for example.
Some, like Catholic League President Bill Donahue (salary $500,000) trivialized that report, saying, “rape isn’t rape without penetration,” among other outrages. Other church leaders called for the pope to resign. That last bit seems more a political tactic than an act of contrition. Ironically, for all the machinations, the effort to “defend the institution,” as the protection of criminal priests is often called, has ultimately served to undo it.
And so, we come to the closure of our local Catholic churches. I feel sorry for those parishioners who, I presume, are good Catholics. But, as an ex-Catholic, at least I don’t have to feel
