If only…

Public school teachers could marry!

Oh! And mayors too! End the all-male celibate mayor discipline!

Speaking of which, those interested in the “How could people possibly get snookered by Maciel?” question should really read the masterpiece of rationalization in the paragraph above.

Down below, there’s a discussion going on in the vein of “What did John Paul II know and when did he know it?” variety. People are tossing around various pieces of pseudo-knowledge about John Paul’s various motivations and actions, all without, so far as I can see, one shred of actual evidence to support either the prosecution or the defense. The simple fact is, I don’t know, nor do you know, what JPII knew about guys like Maciel or Groer, nor what his motivations were. So our minds are left buzzing in a vacuum, hashing out whatever we remember somebody saying they think JP knew or did not know. One can speculate, but I defy anybody here to so much as give a coherent account of what a single day in the life of the Roman curia and the global episcopacy under John Paul actually consisted of. It’s incredibly specialized knowledge to which most of us are just not privvy, certainly not me. So all our combox speculations are, not to put too fine a point on it, silly. Both the ardent defenders and the folks who are sure that JP is guilty of something simply don’t know what they are talking about because, unless you are John Allen, you haven’t even begun to know what you are talking about.

Meanwhile, I think back to a woman I know who, after going to the same family dentist for years, was suddenly confronted with irrefutable evidence (in his own handwriting) that he had performed tens of thousands of dollars of unnecessary and fraudulent surgery on her and a hundred other patients (who were now suing him for 8 million dollars). She labored to find some way to “explain” what he’d really done. He couldn’t be that wicked. He was a nice man–a Christian even. Always smiling and warm. Always asking “How’s the family?” He even had given her generous amounts of time to pay the bills and has given her a six month pass on having to pay anything at all when finances were tight. He couldn’t have been a crook! (Eventually she faced the facts, but it was hard for her to accept.)

That, as I say, seems to be something hard-wired into us when we are face to face with somebody. We tend to extend trust and acts of goodness tend to reinforce that bond of trust. I suspect that is the place to start in trying to understand how guys like Maciel or Groer manage to sell themselves to people like JPII. Another complicating factor, of course, is “How well does the Pope actually know a given bishop?” This, again, requires John Allen-level knowledge that I, at any rate, do not possess. My *guess* is that the vast majority of ecclesial business the Pope has to conduct with the Church universal is mediated to him by layers of bureaucrats both in Rome and in the local dioceses. Some guy in a cassock says, “Here are the three candidates for bishop the local diocese offers. They especially like this guy here.” Then, a guy like John Paul, with the most eastern conception of the Papacy in a thousand years come along, and (as far as I can tell) nearly always does whatever the locals ask him to do. Such layers of bureaucracy (if experience is any guide) would tend to sheild him from untoward information about “indiscretions” on the part of Their Golden Boy (particular bureaucracies like the Legionaries which were designed by the Golden Boy to do exactly that).

But again: this is all speculation because I don’t know, nor do you, what happened. So John Paul (rather like Barak Obama) becomes a sort of blank screen upon which we project our various theories, hopes and fears. If it turns out that JPII knew what Maciel was and just covered it up, then I shall be very disappointed in him. But I will also be very surprised. I’m skeptical that it is so. His pattern was pretty consistent. If a bishop was simply a moron who handled his office badly, he tended to keep the bishop in office (not my choice, but what can I do about it?). If a bishop directly participated in abuse, that bishop was gone. So my *suspicion* is that JP regarded the charges against Maciel as unverified.

But then, what do I know? For that matter, what do you know? Unless you are John Allen, probably not much really.