The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (24 page)

Cases of confessional abusers have also involved high-ranking prelates, such as Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër of Vienna, who sexually attacked as many as twelve boys at the monastic school where he taught in the 1960s. In 2011, one
of Chile’s most senior priests, Monsignor Fernando Karadima, was accused of committing sexual abuse while hearing confessions dating back to the 1990s.
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In a class all his own as ‘confessional’ abuser, and yet indicative of Rome’s lax handling of the phenomenon, is a prominent cleric, the late Father Marcial Maciel, Mexican founder of the Legion of Christ—still one of the fastest-growing orders in the Church, with more than 500 priests and 2,500 seminarians in 15 countries. Through much of his ministry, Maciel, who died in 2008 at the age of eighty-four, enjoyed the reputation of a saint and worldwide builder of churches and schools. But he led a secret, depraved life, aided by the fact that every new member of the order was obliged to swear an oath never to divulge information about him under any circumstances.

Over several decades, Maciel ordered boys of twelve and younger to masturbate him, persuading them that they were helping him with a ‘medical’ condition. He also asserted, in an attempt to assuage their sense of guilt, that Pope Pius XII had given him permission to have assisted orgasms to release the painful build-up of semen. Of the many witnesses, the testimony of Juan Vaca will suffice. The first attack, one of many that persisted for several years, occurred in the junior seminary that Maciel had founded in Tlalpan, a borough of Mexico City.

One evening, Vaca, aged twelve, was called to Maciel’s bedroom, where he found the priest ostensibly ill in bed complaining of intestinal pains. Maciel asked the boy to rub his
stomach, then encouraged him to masturbate him. ‘I was in shock’, Vaca testified. ‘He was a holy man . . . a very loving man. He was my father.’ On a subsequent evening he abused Vaca together with a second boy.

Vaca said, ‘I told him I didn’t feel right. I wanted to go to confession. Maciel said, “There is nothing wrong. You don’t have to go to confession.”’ When Vaca insisted, he recalled, ‘Maciel said, “Here, I will give you absolution.”’ The priest then proceeded with the bestowal of a blessing. With that act Maciel crossed a boundary that the Catholic Church regards as reprehensible in the extreme. The offence, according to canon law, is known as ‘complicit absolution’. Other accusers would in time declare that Maciel gave them absolution as well for the sexual acts they had performed with him.
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For more than a decade beginning in 1995, victims of Maciel’s religiose debauchery denounced him to the Vatican, yet, under Pope John Paul II, they received no acknowledgement, let alone satisfaction. There was a perception on the part of Maciel’s victims and their lawyers that an official conspiracy of silence had been established by the Vatican. They cited documents issued by the Holy Office (guardian of Catholic orthodoxy), first in 1922 and again in 1962, entitled
Crimen Solliciationis
(The Crime of [Sexual] Solicitation). The document, on the face of it, called for secrecy in cases involving a priest’s abuse of the confessional to sexually abuse a child. The history of the documents, however, and their effects on the clerical abuse phenomenon are complex.
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Only after the death of John Paul II did his successor, Benedict XVI, move rapidly to deprive Maciel of his priestly privileges (known as ‘faculties’), ordering him into a permanent retreat where he was to ‘do penance’. He was never arrested and never charged by a criminal justice system in any jurisdiction. A measure of the protection accorded Maciel, despite evidence of his abuses dating back to the 1950s, was the systematic exoneration accorded him by a conservative Catholic media. An example of this involved a prominent American priest, the late Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor-in-chief of the journal
First Things
and close friend of John Paul II. Neuhaus continued to support Maciel in the pages of his influential Washington, DC–based periodical despite the mounting evidence against him. Neuhaus wrote, with a stylish flourish: ‘Stories about Catholic priests have a certain
cachet
—and for trial lawyers, a promise of cash—that is usually lacking in other cases.’ He went on to tell his readers that he had sought the opinion of an unnamed cardinal ‘in whom I have unbounded confidence and who has been involved in the case who tells me that the charges are “pure invention, without the slightest foundation.”’ In consequence, he said, ‘I have arrived at a
moral certainty
that the charges are false and malicious.’ In conclusion, he wrote, ‘It counts as evidence that Pope John Paul II, who almost certainly is aware of the charges, has strongly, consistently, and publicly praised Fr. Maciel and the Legion.’
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John Paul II had praised Maciel as an ‘efficacious guide to youth’ and had favoured the Legion with praise on many
occasions. John Paul’s verdict on the clerical abuse crisis, delivered in 2002, reveals much about the moral and cultural gulf between the realities of abuse for the victims and the rarefied, out-of-touch perspective of John Paul’s papacy: ‘We are personally and profoundly afflicted by the sins of some of our brothers who have betrayed the grace of Ordination in succumbing even to the most grievous forms of the
mysterium iniquitatis
at work in the world. . . . A dark shadow of suspicion is cast over all the other fine priests who perform their ministry with honesty and integrity.’
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His first thought, then, was of his own sense of affliction rather than that of the victims, and next for the image of the Catholic priesthood. When it came to the nature of the crime, he characterised it as ‘the mystery of iniquity’, taken from 2 Thessalonians 7, which speaks of the end of the world and the coming of the ‘wicked one’. Clerical abuse is not therefore the work of men, it is the work of Satan.

I
F THERE IS A ‘MYSTERY’
about clerical sexual abuse, however, it is how so many abusing priests have squared the circle of their offences against the young and have managed to continue in their ministries, appearing ‘holy’ to their congregations. How does an individual priest preach and administer the sacraments in one part of his life, and yet knowingly attack and debauch the youngest of his charges in another, even within the sacramental act of confession itself?

Up to a point, the answer appears to lie within the priest’s own upbringing as a Catholic child in the era, including his early catechesis and practice of confession, as well as in aspects of his seminary formation. The abuser’s own use of the sacrament of confession for himself, moreover, connects with those explanations. A priest in Queensland, Australia, went to confession some 1,500 times to admit sexually abusing boys. In a 2003 affidavit, the then sixty-eight-year-old Michael Joseph McArdle, who was jailed for six years beginning in October of that year, claimed to have made confession about his paedophile activities to about thirty different priests over a twenty-five-year period. He noted: ‘As the children would leave after each respective assault, I would feel an overwhelming sense of sadness for them and remorse, so much so it would almost be physical. I was devastated after the assaults, every one of them. So distressed would I become that I would attend confessionals weekly and on other occasions fortnightly and would confess that I had been sexually assaulting young boys.’ He said the only assistance or advice he was given was to undertake penance in the form of prayer. He claimed that after each confession, ‘it was like a magic wand had been waved over me’. McArdle’s affidavit would appear to contradict a widespread view in Ireland that child sex abusers are unlikely to admit their abuse to a priest in the confessional.
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The sociologist and psychotherapist Dr. Marie Keenan, of University College, Dublin, conducted a series of remarkable interviews with offending priests who had served their jail
sentences in Ireland. Her findings offer a unique resource for understanding the doublethink of priests who abuse children, and who not only remain active in their ministries but also appear to their congregations to be men of piety and devotion.

Most of the priests whom she interviewed for the project said they had routinely confessed their ‘sins’ to a fellow priest, confident that their crimes would be protected by the seal of the confessional. ‘Father A’, for example, spoke of the mechanical process of confession, whereby the slate was ‘wiped clean’, as he put it, and he could begin to feel good about himself again. ‘After each abuse occurrence I felt full of guilt and at the earliest opportunity I sought to confess and receive absolution’, he said. He admitted that although his confessions were ‘well-intentioned’, there was a sense in which he was going through a ‘mechanical process’. Absolution effected a degree of ‘relief and a feeling of a new beginning’. Father A was well aware that the efficacy of the sacrament depended on a ‘firm purpose of amendment’ and future avoidance of ‘occasions of sin’—‘there was always a resolution’ not to sin again. Uppermost in his mind, however, was the importance of
feeling
virtuous again—‘It effected a degree of relief’, he said. The discomfort to be endured in confessing his sins did not lay in confronting his guilt. Nor was it the prospect of altering his behaviour. Rather, it was the embarrassment of telling those ‘sins’ to the priest. And here the interview with Father A reinforced confession’s scope for avoiding moral realities: ‘It seemed to ease my conscience that I was truly
making an effort to change and to stop . . . and going to confession and being able to couch it in such a way that, you know, I didn’t have to give the full story.’
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In saying that he didn’t have to ‘give the full story’, Father A was admitting that he found a form of words that enabled him to secure absolution without being totally frank with the priest who was hearing his confession. The penitent could keep, with casuistic smartness, within the rules of the conditions of a valid confession in order to obtain absolution, and yet save himself embarrassment by a process of deliberate ‘amphibology’, as the morality textbooks put it—the art of saying something without actually saying it. Thus, instead of saying ‘I sexually abused a boy of nine years of age in an act of sodomy, and I am a priest’, he might say: ‘I performed an impure act with another person’, keeping his priesthood, and the age of his victim, to himself. Some priests might ask whether the ‘person’ was male or female, married or unmarried; yet, as confessors have told me in interviews, they would probably not ask whether the ‘person’ was a child, and it would not occur to them to ask if the penitent was a priest. Hence the penitent priest would tell the sin, and yet
not
tell the sin, an Orwellesque species of ‘doublethink’ of the kind we saw developing within the priesthood under Pius X in
Chapter 4
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Even as Father A described the manner of his confession to Dr. Keenan, he was engaging in doublethink: ‘Perhaps I minimized in my accounts, but I did not think so. I certainly agonized as to how to present the abuse, and maybe
the language used probably veiled the horror of the action. It was not open denial, but maybe it was not unadulterated truth either.’

Here the priest is struggling to keep his head above moral water. A crucial key to Father A’s strategy, shared by other priests interviewed for Dr. Keenan’s project, was the admission that his confessors were ‘carefully selected’ by him. In other words, he avoided confessors who might ask uncomfortable questions, or respond harshly to what they had heard. Only once, Father A stated, was he caught out. ‘I went to confession and this man absolutely just went for me . . . he just said to me, “you know what you are doing is not alone morally wrong but it is a criminal act.”’

The incident prompts consideration of the role of the confessors who either knew or guessed what their priestly penitents were confessing to, and who then neglected to react appropriately. At one point in his interview, Father A admitted his surprise that he had not been severely reproached more often. (‘In all the times I confessed to abusing a minor I can only remember one occasion when I got a reprimand or advice not to do this thing.’) Yet he had already explained that on most occasions he had not admitted to the confessor the true nature of his sin, or reported his status.
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What was in the minds of those confessors who failed to issue a reprimand? My attempts at eliciting the confessor’s perspective have not prospered. Out of the dozens of priests whom I approached, only one former confessor, now laicised, whose ministry ceased some thirty years ago, admitted that a
priest had come to him on more than one occasion to confess child sexual abuse. ‘What did you say to him?’ I asked. ‘I didn’t say anything’, he replied. ‘I gave him three Hail Marys or something like that. . . . We didn’t think such things were all that terrible years ago.’