"A compelling gothic tale in which evil triumphs over virtue."
"Fallen Order is meticulously researched and beautifully written" |
The Star, South Africa Church cover-up of sexual abuse Of all sexual predators, adults who abuse children in their care are rightly condemned as the vilest of the vile. But when in recent years a spate of cases involving the Roman Catholic Church became painfully public, Christian Wolmar wrote in Forgotten Children: the secret abuse scandal in children's homes that "church authorities reacted as they have done everywhere, arguing that they, like the rest of the world, were ignorant of sexual abuse until very recently." They emulated the normal response routine of embarrassed bureaucrats everywhere: shoot the messenger. Cardinal Bernard F.Law of Boston, his country's top prelate, attacked the American media for anti-Catholic bias - a media which dared to point out that he had been covering up, and even recommending for promotion, one particularly egregious sexual offender for not less than 20 years. As the festering boil bust, a new theory began to make the rounds. Sexual abuse was just "an American problem, blown up by a scandal-seeking media." Said John Allen, CNN's Vatican correspondent: "I have heard it come up repeatedly in private conversations, [in] views expressed by several intelligent, cultured Catholic leaders of both left and right. To put it more bluntly than these men ever would, in part they blame the Jews." Ahhh, the Jews. Why didn't we think of that before? Dr Karen Liebreich is certainly not a member of the US media; rather, a historian from Britain's Cambridge University. Jewish? With that name, possibly, so if you're one of those who likes to blame Jewish conspirators for everything from the rand exchange rate to the recent drought, then don't bother to read on. For what Liebreich has done is uncover the story - sedulously concealed by such ostensibly reliable sources as the Catholic Encylopaedia - of how priests preyed on their vulnerable young victims more than three centuries ago. The ensuing debacle resulted in the near-disappearance of one of the Catholic Church's leading and most intellectually prominent orders. In Liebreich's opening words: "In 1643, after a failure by the Church hierarchy to deal with child abuse scandals among their members, a group of priests took control of the Order of the Clerics Regular of the Pious Schools. "It would be anachronistic to call this group a paedophile ring, but it is nevertheless true that a man accused of abusing the boys in his care was promoted to universal superior of a Catholic teaching order, supported by a small group of like-minded preists, and with the full complicity of the Inquisition and the pope himself… The initial cover-up was ordered by no less a man than the patron saint of all Christian schools." It all started with an Aragonese priest, Jose de Calsanz, who "left Spain in 1592 when Cervantes was struggling with an early draft of his novel Don Quixote." Three-and-a-half centuries later, in 1948, Calasanz was to be declared by Pope Pius XII the "Celestial Patron before God" of all popular Christian schools in the world. His achievement were undoubted, but he had also set a sad precedent for cover-ups. Arriving in Rome, Calasanz found sybaritic opulence side by side with dgrading poverty. A mere 14 publicly funded teachers catered to a population of 100,000, and Calasanz made it his life work to rectify this situation through the provision of free church schools. His cause flourished, appreciated by all but the 14 original teachers, who felt Calasanz was doing them out of thie rmonopoly. Like many ascetic, hard-working idealists, Father Calasanz imagined others to be as noble as himself. He said his members would "live like angels in the world; in their senses without sensuality; in their flesh, with no carnal affection." Alas, 'twas not to be. The first worm to peek out of the apple appears to have been a Father Melchiorre Alacchi, who in the course of a sea voyage as visitor general in 1627 may - or may not- have been responsible for "a touch on the breeches" of another brother in the close-packed sleeping quarters. And we all know what that leads to… Scandal continued to shimmer around Father Melchiorre-s reputation, but it is with one much worse than he that we are concerned. In the year 1629, "Father Stefano Cherubini, son and brother of eminent papal lawyers, headmaster of the Neapolitan Pious School, accepted member of Neapolitan society, closely trusted colleague of the father general and recipient of the lengthiest and greatest number of letters from, had been abusing his pupils, in the order's largest school." Calasanz was informed. His reaction? The saint-to-be wrote to Cherubini: "There is no one in the world today that wishes more than I that this rumour disappear." It didn't, of course, any more than happened four centuries later in Cardinal Law's archdiocese. More charges of sodomy with his pupils were laid against Cherubini. Calasanz's reaction: Promote the errant pedagogue/paedophile out of the way. "I want this business to be kept quiet, which will benefit both the party under investigation and our Order," Calasanz wrote. Next, burn the paperwork. It wasn't enough. Even promoting Cherubini yet again didn't suffice. Not even making him head of the order - roughly equivalent today to making a child molester the government's minister for child welfare - sufficed to stem the growing outrage. Finally, reluctantly, in 1646 the papal authorities stirred themselves out of their lethargy and suppressed the order, reducing it to the status of a congregation, with no vows. Some professed members baled out. Others "Saw the suppression of the order as a good opportunity", writes Liebreich. One such was Father Bernadino Testino, who became chaplain and confessor in a church in Palermo. "Soon one of the elderly ladies whose confession he heard became very fond of him and adopted him." So far, so good. But the "widow's house was full of gold and fine furniture and Father Bernadino became impatient to possess his inheritance…(He) prepared a delicious meal of the widow's favourite foods, sprinkled on some poison and watched her expire before his eyes. 'And since there was no one else at all in the house, the ungrateful adoptee, the matricidal son, and most unworthy priest could at his liberty pack up the money, the silver, the gold and all the other things he desired and depart safely…" Flowery as is this prose, I can't help thinking that Patiricia Cornwell - she of the Kay Scarpetta medical examiner novels - could have teased a whole book out of that one paragraph alone. But even she couldn't have improved on the bathos of the all-too-believable ending in which "the ex-Piarist was never heard from again, although Father [Vincenzo] Berro, recounting the tale, was hopeful that he had deid a very horrible and painful death". Nor is it that surprising that the Piarist Order was re-established within a few decades, by a church whose peculiar ideas on sex meant, then and now, that the authorities were often more concerned with the welfare of the perpetrator than that of the victim of abuse. Liebreich concludes with a demand for "the modern Catholic Church" to take "a closer look at the history of the Order of the Clerics Regular of the Pious Schools." Good call. But is she going far enough? Is there not, on the evidence of the last few years, good reason for the Church to take a hard look at the whole self-satisfied, secretive structure? Let such an examination also consider the absurdity of selecting the most intelligent, motivated, vigorous youngsters of all classes (those whom Nature has programmed most strongly to procreate), removing them from their community's gene pool by condemning them to unnatural celibacy… and then wondering why "scandals of the flesh" happen. A policy change here may not stop abuse, but it might just curb it. Fallen Order is published by Atlantic Books at R160. |
