I had a long talk after church today with Steve, a friend who spent decades as a Roman Catholic lay leader before landing in our local Episcopal church about eight years ago. He was looking for refuge from an increasingly-conservative Catholic hierarchy, homophobia and sex abuse scandals.
Like so many other people in the Twin Cities, we'd both been following Madeline Baran's riveting reporting on Minnesota Public Radio on sex abuse in the St. Paul-Minneapolis archdiocese. A couple of times last week, I found myself sitting in my car, already at my destination, but unwilling to turn off the radio before Baran's story was over.
There were so many stories, but this one stood out for me. A young man called the diocese in 2006 to tell them his Catholic priest in New Brighton abused him as a 12-year-old altar boy in the early 1990s. . He's transferred to th diocese's "victim advocate" who tells him his case is a "he said/he said" In order to figure out if his claims were credible, said the advocate, the man would have to turn over all his psychological records, including any reports of drug or alcohol abuse.
By this time in the Baran's reporting, it seems pretty clear that the church would use such records to discredit him. It was like listening to a noir thriller. I wanted to yell, "Hang up the phone now! Get away!"
Because we already know the "victim advocate" is there to stonewall him. That the bar for "credibility" is so high----victims needed to be making the charge at the request of a "reputable" therapist; show no anger or "vindictiveness" and have accurate sufficient detail of exactly what happened---that almost no one willl be judged "credible." That there will be "studies" and "investigations" that designed to run out the clock. That yet another familty and victim will be discredited and blamed.
The man refused to hand over his psychological records. The investigation went nowhere.
So I asked my friend, Steve, how does this story end? What happens when an institution as big as the Roman Catholic Church seems unwilling or unable to change and deal with its problems? How long do we have to keep watching this particular movie? What's the Roman Catholic church going to look like in 15 year in the Twin Cities, assuming it keeps going in the same direction?
Steve said he thought the local churches would continue to shrink and age. The money will dry up. The diocese will go bankrupt or at best, have to close a lot of churches and schools. He said the resistance to change runs deep because the church has a closed top-down culture---"We're the church and no one can tell us what to do---"as well as a siege mentality. In St. Paul, there's a lot of "the Irish have to stick together." Ten or fifteen years ago, Steve said, the Star-Tribune had done a series on sex abuse in the diocese and the diocese brushed it off as yet another "anti-Catholic" campaign from the media.
So how do you change an institution like that? I asked.
Transparency, he said. And then you have to focus on the real needs of who you're serving.
It really reminded me of ed reform---but obviously without the sexual abuse. But there's a similar pattern of a large, powerful institution (in this case, the district and the union) stone-walling and resisting change.
There's the same "No one from the outside can tell us what to do" and a siege mentality that labels all critics as "anti-teacher" or "anti-public schools."
The failures continue. Kids get hurt. We blame the families. We slowly lose market share.
It's such a damn shame. Such a waste.
I don't know how you change it. But Steve is right. Transparency is one of the first steps. And lazor-like focus on who we're supposed to serve. Which in the case of the schools is the kids.
