Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God

Just a couple of days ago I watched the award-winning 2006 documentary Deliver Us From Evil, which focuses on the Los Angeles area. Pedophile priest Oliver O’Grady was of course shuffled around from parish to parish by a holy bureaucracy which promised angry parents, after every accusation, that the priest would never, ever work around children again. This film also traces the cover-up to the top.

Watching it I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell it would take for my Catholic friends to quit the church. The same thing had actually happened in my own area — local priest discovered to have a history of child molestation. “Oh, he fooled the bishops and archbishops into thinking he had reformed. Could have happened to anyone!” Denial. Deep denial.

Deliver Us From Evil is probably unique in that there are many interviews with the defrocked priest himself. He admits culpability and yet … minimizes it in strange ways. He sounds so soft-spoken, so thoughtful, so sensitive and apparently thinks of himself that way. Fools himself first: the secret to being a very good liar.

Someone in the film made an interesting argument: one reason the Catholic Church is able to tolerate pedophilia in priests is because in their view sex for priests is wicked, period. It’s sin. Doesn’t matter whether it’s consensual or not, female or not, adult or child. Sin is sin is sin. And of course we all sin. These things happen.

There is actually a Church doctrine in Latin which translates as “keeping up appearances.”

Watching it I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell it would take for my Catholic friends to quit the church.

Actually, the RCC is losing huge numbers.

In the last few years, they’ve lost 22 million people. AFAICT, none of my Catholic relatives go to Mass any more. One of ten US citizens is an ex-Catholic.

The RCC doesn’t seem to care. They haven’t been able to get good priests for a long time and it is showing. Even the Bishops and Archbishops seem to be not very bright, twisted old men.

Vancouver Sun Douglas Todd

The Catholic church is losing huge numbers of members. If ex-Catholics were their own denomination, they would make up the third largest denomination in the United States, according to The National Catholic Reporter. Canadians have much to learn from a powerful new study released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which shows that one out every 10 Americans is now an ex-Catholic. {Scroll through my take on more Catholic church issues.}

“Any other institution that lost one-third of its members would want to know why. But the U.S. bishops have never devoted any time at their national meetings to discussing the exodus. Nor have they spent a dime trying to find out why it is happening,” writes Jesuit Father Thomas Reese continues

I watched last Monday night. Powerful and hard to watch. The 2 hour, not funny version of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VABSoHYQr6k

The above mentioned Deliver Us From Evil (comment #2) streams on Netflix. Mea Maxima Culpa is listed on Netflix DVDs as availability unknown. But it can be “saved” for if and when it becomes available. If other Netflix subscribers “save” it, it might encourage them to buy more such documentaries.