The news of clerical sin has become so commonplace, journalistic interest attaches now to the absence of sin. A story in The New York Times is headlined, "Scandal Wrenches Church but Not Its Teen-agers." The dateline is Dedham, Mass., and the story tells of prayer night at St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church, where 80 teen-agers were "huddled together on the floor of the candlelit parish center basement." Their youth minister reminded them that they were two weeks away from Pentecost, and one week from Mother's Day. "Jesus," he told them, "is always with you."
Father Chris Hickey, a priest at St. Mary's, told the reporter that he was "devastated by the revelations about priests abusing young parishioners. 'I broke down in January, thinking about the betrayal of trust.'" Man bites dog in Dedham, Mass. A priest tending to the spiritual needs of teen-agers, rather than sexually abusing them.
Even though it is nowhere alleged that disclosures of sinful activity by priests impugn the integrity of the entire ministry, that nevertheless is the passing legacy of the current scandals. One priest reports to a friend that he will not hear the confession of a teen-ager, save when someone else is nearby to attest that there was no mischief attempted. That can sound paranoid, but one can excuse excesses of caution by the innocent to guard against what seems corporate taint.
Such has happened before in the history of the Catholic Church. A reader recalls a sentence in "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" by Samuel Eliot Morison in respect of priestly chastity. "In an era when grandees, bishops and princes of the Church openly paraded their mistresses and procured honors and titles for their bastards, nobody criticized Columbus for not marrying the mother of his second son."
Thirty years after Columbus discovered America, Martin Luther was preaching the inadvisability of obligatory celibacy. "These things are matters of choice and must not be forbidden by any one, and if they are forbidden, the forbidding is wrong, since it is contrary to God's ordinance. In the things that are free, such as being married or remaining single, you should take this attitude: If you can keep to it without burdensomeness, then keep it; but it must not be made a general law." Three years later, the man who became Pastor Luther was married.