Week by week, Christians worldwide stand to profess their belief “in all things visible and invisible.” That provides a useful way for thinking about the McCarrick report.

Let us look first and foremost at who is invisible in the report: the victims. Then, let us look at what is blindingly obvious in the report at every turn:  an entire ecclesial culture which must be radically transformed.

Two years ago at this time I was on sabbatical. The news of McCarrick having broken in June 2018, I set aside my book project and ended up writing Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power. I read many horrifying things in researching that book, but the one that filled me with the greatest rage did so because there, too, the victims were not just invisible but dehumanized.

Mothers saw McCarrick grooming and fondling their sons in their own homes. The men in their lives — their husbands, their pastors, and their bishops — disbelieved them.

A report in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles quoted clerical officials who exploited the invisibility, the impotence, of immigrants and their legally precarious status to turn them into a dumping ground for abusive priests. “There is no need to take corrective action, because folks who were undocumented won’t report,” in the words of the November 2018 NPR report quoting curial e-mails. Thus already traumatized populations of immigrants were revictimized by sadistic “shepherds.”

Pope John Paul II (R) greets Washington’s Archbishop Cardinal Theodore Edgar McCarrick at the Pope’s weekly general audience January 15, 2003. (Photo by Franco Origlia/Getty Images)

Stories of double trauma abound in the McCarrick report. Time and again we read of victims and their families who, having suffered at McCarrick’s hands, are then belittled, silenced, disciplined, and even told to go to “confession” with a priest who then himself sexually assaulted the victim all over again.

Let us look first and foremost at who is invisible in the report: the victims. Then, let us look at what is blindingly obvious in the report at every turn:  an entire ecclesial culture which must be radically transformed.

Mothers saw McCarrick grooming and fondling their sons in their own homes. The men in their lives — their husbands, their pastors, and their bishops — disbelieved them. Many of those sons learned to downplay and rationalize McCarrick’s behaviour. It was just a “massage” or an extra-long “hug” from “Uncle Ted” as he insisted they all call him.

Pope Benedict XVI flanked by US Cardinals (from L) Justin F. Rigali of Philadelphia, William H. Keeler of Baltimore, Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles, Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington, DC (emeritus), Edward M. Egan Archbishop of New York, at the weekly General Audience 28 June 2006. (Photo credit: ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP via Getty Images)

Seminarians subject to McCarrick’s predations or witnesses to them, were made to suppress their suffering. If they could not do that, they heard lies from superiors who said they would do something about it and never did. The conclusion is relentless, and unmistakable: clerical perks, privileges, and powers must be protected at all costs; the victims can go to hell.

I started writing about sex abuse in the Church in 1992 in my native Canada, shortly after the first major report there about clerical abuse. For nearly three decades now, the tone and style of these reports has remained consistent: they are bloodless bureaucratic accounts in which victims are invisible while the clerical structures of the Church are a self-evident and unquestionable good which cannot be touched.

Time and again we read of victims and their families who, having suffered at McCarrick’s hands, are then belittled, silenced, disciplined, and even told to go to “confession” with a priest who then himself sexually assaulted the victim all over again.

That culture not only protects itself, but it descends into even greater depths of depravity and cruelty when it mocks the very victims of sex abuse and claims they suffer no serious harm. A recently as February of this year, I still needed to make clear that any churchmen denying or downplaying the devastating effects of abuse is talking pure rot.

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick (C) greets Pope Francis (L) during Midday Prayer with more than 300 U.S. Bishops at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle on September 23, 2015 in Washington, DC. (Photo credit: Jonathan Newton-Pool/Getty Images)

We are still seeing that sort of denial or downplaying.

Not only does the report show no familiarity with the profound and lasting trauma that abuse causes: neither do most of the immediate reports and Tweets discussing it. Instead, in some perverse Apologetics Olympics, people have raced into print to claim the report puts Pope John Paul II, or Archbishop Viganò, or Benedict XVI, or Francis in a good or bad light depending on whether one likes or loathes them and their ministries. I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would do this, now or ever again.

Any attempt to excuse the actions of any Churchman named in the report is otiose. After thirty years of such reports, the idea that the Church has any credibility left to protect is absurd: that ship sailed long ago to the edge of the abyss, and fell into darkness from which none of us living today will emerge. The recovery of the Church’s legitimate authority to teach, sanctify, and govern is now a project for the ages, and not only will all these bogus apologetics not help: they are making things worse.

After thirty years of such reports, the idea that the Church has any credibility left to protect is absurd:

Such efforts continue to leave the victims invisible and irrelevant: instead revealing, for the thousandth time, that we only care about “healing” the reputation of the institution, not about healing the damage done to beloved human beings created in the image and likeness of God. Let me put this bluntly: if you care more about protecting the reputation of some past (or present) prelate than about helping a victim then you are part of the problem.

If we want, instead, to be part of the healing process, we must seek out the victims and listen to them for as long as it takes. Never again must a future generation of the Church read a report of a criminal cardinal swanning about simoniacal sinecures in New Jersey, New York, Washington, Rome, and countless other places while all his victims languish in deliberate obscurity.

Only once we have made invisible victims visible can we hope to regain their trust by next going on to abolish the current system of episcopal appointments and implementing other major reforms, about which more another time.

Dr. Adam A. J. DeVille is associate professor and chairman of the Department of Theology-Philosophy, University of Saint Francis (Fort Wayne, IN).

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