There are times when it’s necessary to step back and completely re-evaluate our basic assumptions about people.
There are those whom we expect to be corrupt — namely politicians and CEOs. Often their poor ethical standards are attributed to their positions of political and monetary power.
But what about people who are considered to be moral leaders, individuals to whom faithful congregation members admit their deepest transgressions and seek out spiritual and emotional guidance?
It turns out that some holy men are just as corrupt.
What began as an isolated, but nonetheless tragic, exposure of sexual abuse of children by clergy in the Catholic Church has become a multi-national scandal.
Disturbing new details of the ordeal filter through the media each day, as priests in the U.S., Ireland and Germany are accused of molesting hundreds of children — 300 cases have been reported in Germany alone, according to the BBC.
According to The Washington Post, a single priest in Milwaukee, Wisconsin was accused of molesting 200 deaf school children. What’s more, Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI, has been accused of stopping the case against the pedophile priest, in addition to poorly managing other sexual abuse cases.
In 2001, Ratzinger, then a Cardinal in the Vatican, even published a memo instructing clergy to refer all abuse cases to his office and to maintain secrecy on the cases under threat of excommunication, according to the Associated Press.
In order to hide the child abuse from the outside world, Ratzinger dangled what many believed was the eternal fate of their souls in their faces by forcing otherwise good people to choose against protecting innocent children.
And now he is the Pope, a figure many associate with the highest moral standards.
Many people are asking what we can do to prevent further abuse of children. I think prevention starts with reconsidering the assumption that faith makes people better.
Obviously, in the sad, traumatic truth for hundreds of molested children, the men of faith who were supposed to be trustworthy friends violated their innocent bodies.
As one woman described in an NPR story, as an 8-year-old girl, she believed a priest would only do right things to her. So, when a priest lured her into a dark room and raped her, she placed the blame on her own shoulders for not being able to stand the pain he inflicted upon her.
Ought these allegations cause Catholics, or the religious in general, to reconsider the concept of endowing one man (or appointed individuals) with the level of moral authority this man wields? What about the amount of respect unconditionally granted to men simply because their outfits includes a special collar?
Why ought we consider religious figures better equipped to make decisions about how we should live simply on the basis of their faith?
The pedophilia running rampant throughout the halls of the Catholic Church should encourage each of us to contemplate the innate fallibility of man. We should consider whether it is wise to raise our children to believe that popes and other religious leaders deserve reverence simply because of their titles. Doing so allowed the most repulsive of crimes to be committed against children for decades.
These men are human and, obviously, no less subject to corruption than the rest of us.
Reach Becky at rrubens1@asu.edu
