HERE we go again. Following press reports, the Vatican admitted this past week that it has known for at least several years about missionary priests, particularly in Africa, raping nuns, impregnating some, and forcing a number to have abortions.
According to secret Vatican reports made public, corrupt African bishops either turned a blind eye, citing cultural reasons, or gave minimal punishments to the offending priests - this while meting out harsh discipline to the powerless nuns abused by the clerics.
This sounds like the plot summary of an upcoming Miramax film. Sadly, it's not pulp fiction, and no amount of Vatican spin can minimize the horror.
It seems that the Church has yet again given its enemies a stick with which to beat it, handling this matter with an eye more toward protecting its reputation and its own bad priests than seeking justice for those upon whom the rogue clerics preyed.
"This appears to be a scandal of monstrous scale, but it could only have grown to these proportions because those in authority failed to take appropriate action as soon as they learned of it," said Donna Steichen, an orthodox Catholic activist and writer.
Not so fast, says a veteran American missionary priest with many years of experience in the jungles of Africa as well as within the Vatican.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the priest said that the problem was researched, discussed and acted upon by Vatican officials long before the internal reports were made public last week.
"Quite often people aren't aware of steps that are being taken. The difficulty is in many cases proving the truth," he said.
"We have to be fair, and this takes a lot of time. And most of the cases people aren't aware of because we try to maintain confidentiality."
"People have this mistaken idea that the Vatican is this all-powerful bureaucracy that gives orders people have to follow at once, but it doesn't work that way," he said. "The local bishop has a lot of power."
In some cases, he said, bishops know serious sexual misconduct is ongoing, but are afraid to take disciplinary action because, given the current priest shortage, there would be few clergymen left to tend the faithful.
This doesn't happen only in Africa, the missionary said. The United States and Europe have problems, too, but he theorizes that errant Western clergy are more discreet about their affairs.
These things are not purely private matters between a priest and his lover. It can affect Church practice. There's a reason why American Catholics rarely get homilies explaining and promoting the Church's teaching on chastity, for example.
A well-placed Catholic priest with whom I spoke said that not long ago in one U.S. diocese, its former prelate was intimidated into distancing himself from a pro-chastity ministry to homosexuals.
Gay activists told him that if he backed the ministry, they would publicize the names of sexually active gay priests in the diocese. There were so many, the powerful prelate backed down rather than face public scandal.
An orthodox Catholic priest friend in a faraway American diocese told me last week that a subculture of unchaste gay priests is tolerated by his local chancery.
"Some of them even have their lovers living with them in the rectory, hired as ‘liturgical consultants,'" he said. "One was caught with stacks of gay porn in his closet, but he's still a priest and even serves in a leadership position in the diocese."
Everybody sins, and can repent and be forgiven. But the failure of Church authorities to root out chronic sex offenders with due diligence and sack them without apology undermines the morale and confidence of believing Catholics, priests and laity alike.
"The refusal to take timely action has pervaded the whole Church since the Second Vatican Council," charged Steichen. "We have seen it here in pedophilia cases, in clerical homosexuality, and over and over in less sensational matters. It destroys faith."
And how. Reacting to the Africa scandal, my priest friend said: "I'm almost in tears. You don't know how discouraging this is."
American Catholics shouldn't be surprised that so many priests are screwed up about sex, he observed, given the degenerate sexual mores of the culture that formed them.
But he knows that's no excuse, and he knows that these egregious scandals unfairly stain the reputations of good priests, and poison relations between clergy and laity.
He has concluded that the Church is left with only one realistic solution to the problem of priests who show no commitment to their vow of chastity, and bishops who tolerate them.
"Purge," he said. "From top to bottom." Amen.