Justice requires that the bishops not argue the statute of limitations issue from two polar opposite positions according to how it suits their own interests. I am not saying this to be a dissident or to be seen in confrontation with the Church. I am saying this because I love the Church, and this double standard is destined to be the next wave of the scandal. If revised and retroactively applied statutes of limitations are unjust in civil law, they are just as unjust in canon law. As Archbishop Charles Chaput wisely wrote in First Things, ("Suing the Church," May 2006) "Statutes of limitations exist in legal systems to promote justice, not hinder it."
GREED AMONG THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS
Early in the 2002 crisis, Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote a landmark article for America magazine, "The Rights of Accused Priests." In the eight years to follow, what Cardinal Dulles called the Church to adhere to has evaporated. The first action taken today when a priest is accused is to minimize his priesthood and separate him with as much distance as possible from the support of his diocese and the life of the Church.
This is what makes the possible outcome of forced laicization a cruel and deeply unjust conclusion. When a priest has been accused from so long ago that the claims cannot be proven, his forced removal from the clerical state connotes a pretense that accusations against him are unrelated to his being a priest. That is rarely ever the case. I was put in harm's way because I am a Catholic priest, and because it is widely known that claims against priests, however ancient, are lucrative.
Even prison guards see this point. Prison guards are often accused of wrongdoing in the context of their work as prison guards. One asked me one day how the Church defended me. I told him that the Church did not defend me at all, that from the moment I was accused I was suspended and entirely on my own for both finding and funding a defense. He was appalled, and said that no sane person would ever work in a prison if that was what happened when guards were accused.
I was accused for only one reason: a long practiced policy of quietly settling all claims against Catholic priests regardless of merit to keep publicity to a minimum. This was the first insight of "A Priest's Story," the two-part analysis of the case against me meticulously researched and reported by Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal in 2005. The lure of money, and corporate decisions to settle every claim, now drive the scandal. As Ryan MacDonald wrote in a recent issue of The Catholic World Report, "Greed ranks right up there with lust among the Seven Deadly Sins."
This practice now involves mediated settlement procedures that place all priests at risk for false claims. I described how this occurred in my own Diocese in my most recent Catalyst article, "Due Process for Accused Priests" (July/August 2009). I have been told that this article should be read by every priest. It can be easily emailed from "Catalyst On-line" on the Catholic League website.
TO AZAZEL
This Year of the Priest, along with the previous fifteen, have not exactly been for me the ideal of a priestly life I wrote of when I described my ordination in "Pentecost in the Year of the Priest." Priesthood landed me in prison, and, despite what the local papers have sensationalized, it wasn't because of something I have done.
I have written of some of the triumphs in prison, and many of the more poignant moments of grace, but most of these have not been a result of anything I did. There have been low points too, times of darkness so dark that I did not think I could bear them. Some of my friends suggested that I end the Year of the Priest with an assessment of priesthood in the valley where I live, and not just on the mountaintop of triumph. I've written some of this already. Have you read "The Dark Night of a Priestly Soul"?
If not, please do and please pass it along to others. Perhaps it should be among the enduring legacies of the Year of the Priest. As one person wrote to me, "The Dark Night of a Priestly Soul" needed to be written, and no other priest but you could write it." That meant a great deal to me, but I have no way to know if it's true.
What is to be the legacy of the Year of the Priest? I think I can only answer that by telling you where it leaves me. When Ryan MacDonald wrote "To Azazel: The Gospel of Mercy in the Diocese of Manchester," he described the lowest point for me, not only of the Year of the Priest, not only in all of my sixteen years in prison, but in the entire 28 years of my priesthood.
The priests whose attitudes Ryan MacDonald described have no understanding of how tenuous their own rights are when mine could be so easily trampled upon.
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