{"id":30221,"date":"2016-09-07T05:00:40","date_gmt":"2016-09-07T09:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/?p=30221"},"modified":"2016-09-07T05:42:08","modified_gmt":"2016-09-07T09:42:08","slug":"what-we-can-learn-from-mother-theresas-defense-of-a-pedophile-priest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2016\/09\/what-we-can-learn-from-mother-theresas-defense-of-a-pedophile-priest.html","title":{"rendered":"What We Can Learn from Mother Teresa’s Defense of a Pedophile Priest"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Mother Teresa has finally been proclaimed a saint by the Catholic Church, offering people around the world\u00a0an opportunity to revisit her life and legacy. I knew that there were many problems<\/a> with the Mother Teresa myth\u2014that she believed that poverty was beautiful and that she denied her patients anesthetics and had her hospitals reuse needles\u2014but I most certainly did not know about her defense of a pedophile priest. Take a look at this except\u00a0from a 2012 article<\/a> about the situation:<\/p>\n

Yet documents obtained by SF Weekly suggest that Mother Teresa knew one of her favorite priests was removed from ministry for sexually abusing a Bay Area boy in 1993, and that she nevertheless urged his bosses to return him to work as soon as possible. The priest resumed active ministry, as well as his predatory habits. Eight additional complaints were lodged against him in the coming years by various families, leading to his eventual arrest on sex-abuse charges in 2005.<\/p>\n

The priest was Donald McGuire, a former Jesuit who has been convicted of molesting boys in federal and state courts and is serving a 25-year federal prison sentence. McGuire, now 81 years old, taught at the University of San Francisco in the late 1970s, and held frequent spiritual retreats for families in San Francisco and Walnut Creek throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He also ministered extensively to the Missionaries of Charity during that time.<\/p>\n

In a 1994 letter to McGuire\u2019s Jesuit superior in Chicago, it appears that Mother Teresa acknowledged she had learned of the \u201csad events which took from his priestly ministry these past seven months,\u201d and that McGuire \u201cadmitted imprudence in his behavior,\u201d but she wished to see him put back on the job. The letter was written after McGuire had been sent to a psychiatric hospital following an abuse complaint to the Jesuits by a family in Walnut Creek.<\/p>\n

\u201cI understand how grave is the scandal touching the priesthood in the U.S.A. and how careful we must be to guard the purity and reputation of that priesthood,\u201d the letter states. \u201cI must say, however, that I have confidence and trust in Fr. McGuire and wish to see his vital ministry resume as soon as possible.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are a couple of things going on here. Note first that Mother Teresa\u2019s concern was for \u201cthe purity and reputation\u201d of the priesthood, and not<\/em> for the wellbeing of potential victims. We\u2019ve seen this time and again when sex abuse scandals hit a religious congregation\u2014the immediate concern is not for the safety of the community\u2019s children but rather for the reputation<\/em> of the community. Next, note the concern for McGuire\u2019s \u201cvital ministry\u201d\u2014this concern for the ministry of the perpetrator is a common theme in response to sex abuse that occurs within religious communities. And finally, note that Mother Teresa has \u201cconfidence and trust\u201d that McGuire will not reoffend (or at least, this is the implication I read here). And yet, he did reoffend. Multiple times.<\/p>\n

In the past two years, two\u00a0different cases of sexual abuse have hit the conservative religious homeschool community in which I grew up. When I first started blogging, I was unaware of any sexual abuse in my community of origin. I fully believed other bloggers who wrote about the Sovereign Grace Ministries sex abuse coverup or other similar cases, but I had never seen the dynamics they wrote about in action. Now I have. And one theme I\u2019ve noticed is an\u00a0immediate compassion for the perpetrator\u2014his life is going to be ruined by this, his reputation will never recover, how terribly sad, how hard that must be for them.<\/p>\n

I cannot tell you how weird it is to sit and listen to someone wax on and on about how difficult this situation must be for the perpetrator, how sad that he\u2019s in jail, how terrible that his life is ruined, without so much as a nod to\u00a0his victim<\/em>. Sometimes it seems like the victim does not exist, like the perpetrator exists in a vacuum. And when the victim is mentioned, it is to\u00a0impugn their character. Well, she always did act inappropriately around other children. And you know, we have to remember that she was known in her family to be a compulsive liar. And so I\u2019m left sitting here, watching as victims are either rendered invisible or put on trial in place of the perpetrator.<\/p>\n

You see this in Mother Teresa\u2019s letter. She doesn\u2019t mention the victims. Instead, her concern is for the reputation of the priesthood and the ministry of the pedophile priest. Her assumption that he would not reoffend suggests that she knew very little about the dynamics of child sexual abuse, a serious problem for one who worked with children as often as she did. This is another\u00a0recurring\u00a0theme\u2014those in my own community of origin professed to to care deeply about children (it\u2019s why they were homeschooling, after all), yet I\u2019ve spoken with parents there who did not know what \u201cgrooming<\/a>\u201d was. This is inexcusable.<\/p>\n

How does this happen? That is something I\u2019ve been struggling to understand myself. It can\u2019t be chalked up to tribalism alone, because the abuse in question tends to occur within a given tribe.\u00a0Partly there\u2019s a reluctance to believe ill of individuals you know\u2014and when the victim is a child and the perpetrator an adult, adults in the community tend to know the perpetrator better than they do the victim. Partly, too, there is a lack of respect for children as full persons\u2014children are seen as easily swayed, less trustworthy, and so forth. On some level, then, the adult perpetrator is a full member of the tribe while the child victim is not. The adult perpetrator has a ministry to others, a family to care for, a church to lead. The child does not.<\/p>\n

Perhaps one way to combat these tendencies is to make children more fully members of their community, to value children\u2019s inherent personhood, to elevate children\u2019s voices and ideas. While few still adhere to the idea that children should be \u201cseen and not heard,\u201d children are often still expected to be obedient and respectful to their elders above all else, their position and interests\u00a0subordinate to the needs of adults.\u00a0What if this could be changed? Would this help guard against a victim being rendered invisible, or having their character put on trial? Perhaps not fully, but it\u2019s something to think about nonetheless.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mother Teresa has finally been proclaimed a saint by the Catholic Church, offering people around the world an opportunity to revisit her life and legacy. I knew that there were many problems with the Mother Teresa myth—that she believed that poverty was beautiful and that she denied her patients anesthetics and had her hospitals reuse needles—but I most certainly did not know about her defense of a pedophile priest. <\/p>\n

Click through to continue reading!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":845,"featured_media":30224,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,25],"tags":[24],"class_list":["post-30221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-evangelicalism-fundamentalism","category-christian-patriarchy","tag-children"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat We Can Learn from Mother Teresa's Defense of a Pedophile Priest<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Mother Teresa has finally been proclaimed a saint by the Catholic Church, offering people around the world an opportunity to revisit her life and legacy. 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