Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

As anyone who has ears to hear has heard, Cardinal Law resigned from the archbishopric of Boston. He tried many months ago, but the pope rejected his offer the first time.

Victims’ groups, please don’t lambaste me for this, but the person I feel most sorry for in this undying local scandal is…Pope John Paul II. I imagine what a loop this whole sordid mess threw him for - because the pedophilia story is not, at its bottom, about the Roman Catholic Church.

Consider the Crusades, or better yet, the Inquisition. Those were events the Church fully intended to occur, planned out, went out and did, and blessed people for participating in (provided they were at the right end of the Temporal Arm). The Pope has apologized for all that, hundreds of years after the fact, but for the intevening centuries such things were church policy.

It’s never been church policy to molest little boys. Priests who join (or found) NAMBLA are not the result of aggressively-interpreted Biblical texts or canon law. This scandal is uniquely American and, especially, Bostonian.

On the American side, consider a superficially unrelated phenomenon - the co-education of the all-male colleges. The Citadel aside, this social revolution was completed by the mid-seventies. In fact, the last few bastions of the Y-chromosome fell precisely because all-male schools had begun to attract a certain kind of student. A decade or two later, the all-female colleges felt a similar statistical pinch - the applicant pool dropped sharply, driving schools like Wheaton to co-educate.

What, then, did the all-male priesthood attract after the fifties - a period of American history when the marriage rate was higher than ever before or since? The church has suffered from declining vocations for decades since. As any college-admissions officer knows, a declining applicant pool means a declining quality of applicant.

Add to that the sexual revolution, which gave everyone ideas and, perhaps more notably, led to such openness from victims of abuse. I assume victims are quieter about the whole matter in countries where being a victim attracts less moral support. I’m not saying that’s a good thing - I’m just explaining the Only in America aspect of the scandal.

There are little scandals scattered across America, but the big scandal is Only in Boston. Only in Boston do we have the Boston Globe, and only in Boston did we have an archbishop who was the clerical equivalent of Billy Bulger, with Paul Shanley playing his not-estranged-enough brother Whitey.

Family comes first here, and then the law. At least, it’s been that way for a long time. I hear things are changing, but I’m not sure I’d turn in Veronica if she were on the lam. I certainly wouldn’t do it over some trumped-up Federal charge like racketeering.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 17th, 2002 at 5:32 pm and is filed under Boston. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.