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opinion
Exposing the clergy
All
over the western world, clergy are caught abusing children daily.
Isn't it time to break our silence about child abuse by the clergy
in Malta, asks Victor Paul Borg?
It seems an incredibly suspicious submersion of the truth that
the Catholic clergy and pastoral volunteers in Malta, where the
institutional presence of the Catholic Church is so pervasive,
have not been fried by even one case of child abuse, particularly
sex abuse. Perhaps the church is doing a foolproof cover-up job.
More likely, the tight silence on child abuse in Catholic care
is a reflection on Maltese society's perception of the clergy
– in the public psyche, the clergy are still considered infallible
and still largely unchallenged in their monopoly on morality.
In Europe and North America, the Christian institutions and clergy
have dug themselves a grave with the repeated exposure of child
abuse in the past ten years. The latest scandal in Britain's Catholic
Church at the beginning of December has once again made headlines:
Father David Martin is being accused posthumously of sexually
abusing at least one child before he died of AIDS in 1998. In
a sense, there is nothing new about sex abuse by Catholic priests
in Britain. In the past five years twenty-five Catholic priests
have been convicted of sex abuse – Father Joe Jordan, who
has this year started serving an eight-year jail sentence, has
received the severest sentence – and cases of sex abuse are
surfacing, on average, every three months. What is new in Father
Martin's case is that his superiors had known he was HIV-positive
and covered it up.
I don't find it surprising that sex abuse by the clergy is widespread.
It is a well-documented fact (unless you have your head in the
sand) that many priests, especially in the past, became priests
to hide their homosexuality. If they remained single and closeted
gays they would attract the prying attention of family and friends
– "When will you marry?" Suspicion on the nature
of the person's sexuality would follow. In priesthood these men
found refuge from society, and perhaps in the strength of their
self-convinced vocation they believed they would be able to suppress
their sexuality. But it's hard to put a tight lid on sexual desire
that is so primeval a human instinct, especially the obsessive
sexual urge that leads to sex abuse of children in the first place.
Children are easy targets whom you can impress into silence.
Let's not limit ourselves to sex abuse here, because other forms
of abuse (there are over ten forms in the UN's rights of the child
charter) can be equally as grave. Particularly relevant to traditional
Christianity is the custom of exercising discipline by hitting
children. I still remember the daily swats on my face at the Catholic
school I attended, the Sacred Heart Seminary in Gozo. I can still
feel the surge of rage and the shame of having the outline of
a palm imprinted across my cheek. The school's overseeing prefect
(I can't remember his name or title), who was a priest, was known
for his authoritarian regime, always pacing the corridors with
that face of an angry watchdog. Once, in a sense of injustice,
I slapped him back; in return, he hit me until I cried and made
me kneel in a corner until I peed in my pants. How scarring to
a 13-year-old can that be? He was probably responsible for the
reason I dropped out of the church for good at sixteen in rebellion
(later I became an atheist by conviction).
At the same school, another father was widely known among us kids
as a predatory homosexual. He would pretend he was tidying us
up by shoving our shirt into our pants, then his hand would slip
down our crotch for a fleeting touch. He never went any further,
probably because we realised his game and he was scared we would
resist and squeal. I remember his full name, but I won't name
him here because his pretence was so obvious that it's unlikely
he could go further, and his actions could hardly harm us.
The reasons for mentioning these incidents are not to embark on
a witch-hunt or to undermine the Catholic Church. (Although, remembering
the prefect who hit me at school has triggered a surge of rage
as I write this and if I had to see him now, I don't think I would
be able to stop myself lashing at him.) Anyway, I suppose what
I am trying to show is that we can make an intelligent guess that
child abuse by the clergy, especially sex abuse, in Malta is probably
happening somewhere as you read this. Underneath the holy legitimacy
of their frock and collar and their vows of celibacy, priests
are humans with human failings and misgivings. If you're suppressing
homosexuality, young boys who can be manipulated into a mantle
of silence might seem safe outlets of desire.
Also, don't expect the Catholic Church itself to investigate and
expel those in its folds caught of abusing children. As sociologists
and anthropologists tell us, an institution – no matter how
honourable its intentions – takes more interest in its self-preservation
than revealing anything that might tarnish its reputation. It's
up to us – especially the media that needs to wake up from
its self-imposed, probably subconscious, silence – to expose
and root out child abuse in the Catholic Church and make the church
take stock. Above all, it's about time we start perceiving the
clergy as being humans who are neither above the law nor beyond
public scrutiny.
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