Los Angeles: Land of Sex Abuse

Here’s the quote:

“Unfortunately it doesn’t surprise me,” he says. “It is a culture of indifference where the priests are looking out for the priests. They don’t want to get involved or make accusations, so they turn away. They are more concerned about protecting their own jobs and reputations.”

Damn those Catholics and their weird and unique hothouse of institutional ass-coverage! Nowhere else in American society do we find this kind of thing tolerated! Why, we oughtta… Oh. Wait. What? That’s not the quote? Oh! Here’s the quote:

“Unfortunately it doesn’t surprise me,” he says. “It is a culture of indifference where the teachers are looking out for the teachers. They don’t want to get involved or make accusations, so they turn away. They are more concerned about protecting their own jobs and reputations.”

The crimes against these children, both in the Church and in the schools, are horrible–and a sign that something is very wrong with our culture. The problem with the Church’s response was not that it was uniquely hideous. It’s that it was so bleakly and ordinarily hideous. The Church’s failure was not that it fell monstrously below what ordinary people do in circling wagons and covering butts, but that it *did* what ordinary people do when it should have done what saints do. It is the backhanded compliment hell pays heaven that everybody is appalled–and rightly so–by the Church’s failure while the even more massive failure of our schools in this regard tends not to make anything like the splash in our culture. This is as it should be, since judgment rightly begins with the household of God.