Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The churches of North America are not yet empty, Breslin says. "But they're gradually emptying out. Collections are down. And it's not going to reverse. You just get the feeling that young people are staying away." When I ask him whether he thinks young families, the backbone of any organized religion, are still going to Mass, he stares at me in disbelief. "Would you?" he barks. "If you had younger kids now, would you go? I mean, it's horrible." (I do, and no, I wouldn't.)
Consider the case of Joseph P. Byrns, a priest who made the local news in New York a few weeks ago. Breslin hasn't written about Byrns, maybe because there's nothing exceptional about his story. Byrns was a prestigious figure in the universe of New York Catholicism; for many years he presided over a parish in the wealthy neighborhood of Douglaston, Queens, where he married John McEnroe and Tatum O'Neal in the 1970s.
Two years ago, during the dark summer of 2002, when the sexual abuse scandal spread across the continent like an uncontained wildfire, Byrns was caught up in it. He was accused by a fellow priest, a man in his 40s, of having abused him three decades earlier, when the younger man had served as an altar boy in Byrns' Douglaston parish.
Unlike so many other accused priests and bishops, however, Byrns didn't cut and run. Instead, he stood up in the pulpit of his current parish, St. Rose of Lima in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Ditmas Park, and "unconditionally" denied the charges, calling one of his accusers "deeply troubled and disturbed" and inviting parishioners to pray for the younger man. The mass-goers at St. Rose gave him a standing ovation. Bishop Thomas Daily, then the boss of the Brooklyn diocese, stuck by his man, insisting the allegations were untrue. One good priest, it seemed, had stood up against the hysteria and paranoia sweeping through the church.
Of course the story didn't end there. Byrns was quietly suspended from St. Rose after the Queens district attorney announced that the charges against him were credible, but could not be prosecuted because the statute of limitations was long past. Last month, on Aug. 18, state police hauled Byrns out of a Holiday Inn in the upstate town of Oneonta, N.Y., where he was apparently hiding out. The new charge? Byrns is accused of repeatedly fondling and sodomizing an altar boy at St. Rose, during exactly the same period when he was delivering impassioned sermons proclaiming his innocence.
Byrns is still entitled to the presumption of innocence, at least until a Brooklyn jury gets ahold of him. But the Catholic Church isn't; it exhausted that right a long time ago. The only extraordinary thing about Byrns' case is that it's not extraordinary at all: the pattern of incorrigible abuse, the arrogant denials and seemingly pathological lying, the stonewalling and waffling of the hierarchy (which now says it was never sure whether the earlier charges were true), the humiliating comic-opera arrest (when he saw the cops, the 61-year-old cleric tried to skedaddle out the Holiday Inn's back entrance; they chased him down in the parking lot). The fact that all this was buried deep in the local news -- "Perv Priest Nabbed" was the New York Post headline -- testifies to how inured we have become to such tales of corruption. Just another priest screwing the altar boys and brazenly lying about it. Geez, what do you expect?
Breslin doesn't exactly put it this way in his book, but the current scandal seems to represent all the sexual hypocrisy of the Catholic hierarchy, all its misogyny and homophobia, all its cosseting of tyrants and its not-quite-repented anti-Semitism, finally coming to a head. The idea that a religion built around a terror of sex and sexuality was sheltering predatory pedophiles in large numbers seemed too medieval to be believed, too much like the sniggering punch line to an anti-Catholic joke. Breslin reports that in his conversations with other Catholics who ought to have known better, like New York police commissioner Ray Kelly, they all report feeling foolish about how long it took them to understand what was happening.
"It was hard to understand, personally," Breslin says. "Being raised in Queens like that, I don't think I knew anybody who wasn't Catholic. All right, I knew some Jews, maybe a few Protestants. But everything you did was associated with Catholics. If you went to a pro football game, well, that was a Catholic thing." Still, anyone who belonged to the church (like Breslin) or who felt attached to it by blood and heritage (like me) cannot have been totally surprised when the truth began to come out. "You heard certain stories" about certain priests, he admits. "But I never paid the slightest attention whatsoever."
Now, with the institution's credibility shattered and its future in jeopardy, he says there is only one solution. "Those people have to get out of the sex business. Just get out of it. They have no idea what they're doing."
There is little chance of that. Conservatives within the church, including some truly frightening reactionary elements who view Pope John Paul II as a softhearted liberal, have seized on the scandal as an opportunity to drive leftists and homosexuals out of the priesthood. They are not just willing but eager to jettison undesirable Catholics like Breslin, who are insufficiently committed to the church's sexual and moral agenda. They seem to want a smaller, narrower faith obsessed with fighting abortion and gay marriage, rather than a big-tent religion that encompasses family-values conservatives, fervent opponents of the death penalty and Latin American socialists alike.
Some of the saner Catholic prelates, like Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C., have recently disavowed the wild notion that liberal Catholic politicians who favor gay rights or reproductive choice, from John Kerry to Jim McGreevey, are not entitled to receive communion. But make no mistake, these radical positions are spreading among the true believers; priests in central New York state, where I spend much of the summer, have been handing out bumper stickers to parishioners reading: "You can't be pro-choice and be a good Catholic." (No priests that I know of have suggested the corollary position, that you can't support the death penalty and be a good Catholic.)
