I know that I talk about my time as a US Air Force chaplain quite a
bit. I wouldn’t be surprised if you get
tired of hearing my ‘war stories’ so much.
When I mention my experience during that phase of my rabbinate, I always
look carefully for rolling eyes. I
seldom see any, probably because you know I’m looking for them!
As I’ve mentioned in
the past, one of the joys of my service during those years, was the comradery
between chaplains of different faiths.
For example, during my years at the Air Force Academy I worked with Martin
Fitzgerald, a Catholic Priest. He and I
were at about the same point in our respective careers, and we had both
completed assignments in Europe just before being transferred to Colorado: Father Marty had been in Aviano, Italy; and I
was in Mildenhall, UK. We were both in
our mid-forties, and struggling to maintain good physical fitness. Father Marty decided to try mountain biking,
and I was already an aficionado of the sport.
Because our cadets were seldom in need of our ministrations during the
day, we could absent ourselves from the office sometimes. So Father Marty and I occasionally broke away
from the office and went for a bike ride together.
During those years,
I got to experience the world through the eyes of my colleagues who were
Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Muslim. Whilst Father Marty and I were at the Academy,
sometimes spending time together away from the office, the American Catholic
Church was going through a very turbulent time.
It was when the huge scandal of Catholic priests in the Boston Archdiocese
sexually abusing minors came out. In the
one city, some 90 priests were documented to have been abusers. John Cardinal Law, the Boston Archbishop, was
forced to resign. The Archdiocese still reels
under the financial and moral effects of the scandal.
The worst of it wasn’t priests abusing
children. It was the Church’s
cover-up. Moving the offending priests
around from parish to parish. Systematically
hiding what was happening. When the
story broke, it brought similar behavior in many other cities, and similar
cover-ups, to light. The extent was
world-wide. Any reasonable observer
would conclude that the entire church, up to and including the Pope himself, knew.
It was a difficult time to be a Catholic
Priest. I could see the pain on my
colleague’s face every day.
This week, on the
recommendation of a friend, Clara and I went to see the movie Spotlight. The
film chronicles the investigative process of an elite group of reporters at the
Boston Globe. How they doggedly and systematically uncovered the
church’s actions to keep the truth about the extent of the abuse from coming to
light, and protecting the priests. But
there’s an important subplot. The same group
of reporters had stared at convincing evidence of the priest sexual scandal
five years before the events chronicled in the film. And they had missed it entirely.
The movie is only partly about the
church’s duplicity. It’s really more
about how we react when we have knowledge that is just too terrible to
accept. Especially when that knowledge
calls into question an institution that is seen as beneficial to its
constituents. Beneficial being an
understatement in this case. The
Catholic Church is seen by its members as no less than the conduit of G-d’s
favour. In Boston, a city whose
population is 57 percent Catholic, the Church provides an array of social
services that benefit the entire city. It
was therefore not only the Church that quashed the truth. Even dedicated journalists unconsciously
ignored what was in front of their faces for years because it was too terrible
to contemplate. It was the denial phase
of grief recovery on a mass scale.
I’m not sure that denial on that
scale is a reality anymore. It was not
only the scandal of sexual abuse by Catholic priests that took away our
innocence in this regard. Starting with
the Watergate break-in and cover-ups that called into question the integrity of
the President of the US, it seems that my whole life has been spent against a
backdrop of the fall of one institution after another. No sector of society has been untouched by
it. And the Catholic Church has not been
the only religious institution to show itself as wanting in this area. A number of the most prominent Protestant
ministers and evangelists have suffered moral failures. And in our own Jewish circles there have been
such scandals. Orthodox Rabbis accused
and convicted of child sexual abuse.
Recently, a Reform Rabbi in Seattle accused of serial inappropriate
relationships with minors and women under his pastoral care. And lest you think that it is sexual behavior
that is everybody’s downfall, note that Rabbi Yoshiyahu Pinto, an Israeli Orthodox
Rabbi who ran a worldwide empire, was recently sent to prison for bribery. Ehud Olmert, the onetime Prime Minister of
Israel, was also sentenced to jail in the scandal.
The level of cynicism directed towards
almost any institution today, religious or otherwise, is a result of generations
of leaders of institutions losing sight of the values, for which they were
formed. Developing an inflated sense of
themselves. Justifying their moral
failings by the good that they do. And
by others denying the evidence of their wrongdoings. Sometimes in concert with the leaders of
those institutions. Sometimes inadvertently. When an institution does so much good, how
can it be so affected by rot from the inside? So even when reporters were presented with
convincing evidence, they did not want to believe it.
I’ll let others come away from
seeing Spotlight, thinking negatively about the Catholic Church. For me, the takeaway is that we are all
accountable for our moral failings. Accountable
to Hashem, no less. When we claim to
represent the Holy One, we should expect close scrutiny. And we’d best behave in such a way that we
can stand up to that scrutiny. Shabbat
shalom.
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