By now, most American Catholics who are at least 30 years old know of one Catholic priest (or two) who has been sent away for “treatment” by the diocese. If the priest was liked by the parish, most of the faithful remained hush-hush about why he got sent packing. If he was a distrusted priest, well, lay-lips might be a little looser: Was Father sent away for alcoholism? Did he have a girlfriend? Did he have a boyfriend? Did he harm a child? Maybe he just reached a point of burnout and needed a break…
The world of behavioral care centers or psychological care centers for priests is a mysterious world for most lay Catholics. The 2015 movie Spotlight starring Michael Keaton opened up a bit more on this front. The movie covered the true story of the Boston Globe “Spotlight” section which released the names of priests across the Archdiocese of Boston who had molested children for decades. Many of them were sent to such a psych unit, but only until being recycled back into active ministry.
One of the crescendos in the movie Spotlight was when a Globe reporter goes deep into the written annals of the Archdiocese of Boston to discover that “a medical sabbatical” was simply code for “priest took a break after molesting a child.” Such priests were indeed sent to psych units, but only for a limited time, as I mentioned above. After a year of “sabbatical,” the criminal was often put back into active ministry by Cardinal Law.
This movie wasn’t just another flick revealing an anti-Catholic bias (as I once desired to believe.) These horrible acts of abuse really happened in Boston, and Cardinal Law truly shuffled around predators parish-to-parish for a long time. (I lived across the street from Cardinal Law from 1996 to 2000 while studying pre-med and Boston College, my alma, so it hits close to home. I even met him.)
Before getting to the meat and potatoes of this article, I want to put two seemingly-unrelated things on the back burner here:
1) St. Augustine said, There are two things that kill the soul: despair and false hope.—Sermon 87. At this point, I could unfortunately make that the unofficial motto of my website. You see, it’s not that I desire to squash the little hope that lay Catholics still have in the hierarchy. It’s that I really believe in the words of St. Augustine seen above. Notice that St. Augustine didn’t write “False hope is a decent counterfeit until you obtain real hope.” He said “false hope kills the soul.” It kills the soul. That is a really big deal. You are going to see why this applies to being a realist when I write a little later in this article about good conservative men joining mainstream seminaries.
2) I know my website frequently delineates between conservative and traditional priests. I usually say they are not the same. I stick by that assertion in most my articles. But today, I am going to lob both conservative and traditional diocesan Catholic priests of the United States into one category: orthodox and faithful priests. This is because we are going to look at the fact that two types of priests usually get sent away for treatment: Those who have a perverse addiction and those who need a re-education camp for being too orthodox.
That latter category of good priests getting sent to the monkey-house generally includes both conservative and traditional priests. Notice above, I put usually in bold and italics because there are exceptions to those two categories. On extremely rare occasions, there might even be overlap. But hard cases make bad law for an article with limited space.
Continue reading at Padre Peregrino