Washington — I do not know Frank Keating, the former governor
of Oklahoma, who has just resigned under pressure from that panel
of Catholics assembled by Church authorities to meditate upon the
sexual-abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church. All I do know
about him is that he is a straight-shooting former FBI agent who
served well as governor during a particularly grim period, the
Oklahoma City bombing. He has the support of many conservatives for
his public positions, and now he has the support of many
straight-shooting Catholics. Apparently in reviewing the many
instances of priestly pederasty in the institutions of the American
Catholic Church he was astringent in his judgments. That offended
many in the Catholic hierarchy. They waited for him to utter some
indelicacy. When he did they put pressure on him to exit stage
left.
What he said was that the bishops seemed to be continuing to
cover up the exact dimensions of the pederasty scandal in the
Church. He compared the bishops’ behavior to that of organized
crime, as in “La Cosa Nostra.” That brought the blood of the
archbishop of Los Angeles, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, to a boil.
Keating’s candor came in a letter to the man who appointed him to
head the National Review Board, Bishop Wilton D. Gregory. When his
panel requested information from the bishops about an errant
priest, Keating expected the kind of timely and candid response
that he might have expected from the citizenry when he was in the
FBI or the governor’s office.
The Church, Keating protested in the letter, is “home to
Christ’s people.” And he went on, “it is not a criminal
enterprise.” Wow, the last time an FBI typeublic about a national
institution, it was FBI director Louis Freeh testifying before
Congress about the Clinton Administration. I hope Keating thinks
better of the Roman Catholic hierarchy than the Clinton
Administration. The “home to Christ’s people,” Keating went on to
say, “does not condone and cover up criminal activity. It does not
follow a code of silence. My remarks, which some bishops found
offensive, were deadly accurate. I make no apology.”
Keating charged the bishops with resisting grand jury subpoenas
and suppressing the names of “offending clerics.” He wrote that “to
deny, to obfuscate, to explain away: that is the model of a
criminal organization, not my church.” It is also the model of a
corrupt bureaucracy, guilty of what students of the Catholic Church
have for generations called “clericalism.”
Clericalism is defined by The Oxford Dictionary of the
Christian Church as “an excessively professional attitude of
outlook, conversation, or conduct on the part of
clergymen….It is also used to describe undue clerical
influence in secular affairs.” Keating has run head first into
clericalism and it more than licentiousness is what is stalling a
review of this latest New Age scandal besetting the Church.
Clericalism is an impenetrable fog of false piety and esoteric
proceduralism that makes it very difficult for the Catholic laity
to deal with the Catholic hierarchy in any serious way. Frankly,
given the hierarchy’s reluctance to come clean with Keating it
seems to me his review panel was doomed from the beginning. Better
that the pederasts be handed over to the cops. That seems to be
what is going to happen.
There is a division of church and state in this country for
which we can all be grateful. By and large, Americans do not have
the clergy intruding into the secular domain. We also have a
tradition that no one is above the law, and if members of the
clergy have been breaking the law the civil authorities are best
positioned to deal with them. If the bishops believe they can snub
their own National Review Board, it is only a matter of time before
they find themselves answering to law enforcement officials and to
the courts. They may be able to give Keating a hard time, but their
bluster will not work with the courts — a good thing that.
