"Father Ron"

By Damien Cave

Mar 11, 2002 | Read the story

I think I might have encountered a priest with a problem similar to Father Ron's.

I was 15 and, in confession one day, that priest pressed me to confess some sins he was certain I was committing. But I hadn't the faintest idea what he was talking about in such oblique terms, and became increasingly confused and upset the more he continued to press me. Eventually he became angry and refused me absolution. It was only as I walked home, shaken and in tears, that the penny dropped: He'd been talking about sex! He'd wanted me to confess my sexual sins, and was completely unwilling to accept that a 15-year-old girl could be as obliviously asexual as in fact I was.

That experience broke my heart and drove me from the Church. Obviously I'd been lied to: Priests in the confessional are not acting as God's agents. If they were, that priest would have known I was telling the truth. But he didn't, so he was only a man. They are all only men.

Was that priest a sort of voyeur? I think he must have been. Certainly he appeared to have a need to hear about sex acts, and it overcame his good sense.

Should he have been defrocked? Should Father Ron? At the time I would have said yes, but now, 46 years on, I don't think so. I think that the priest I encountered shouldn't have been hearing confessions, because he had human needs that were getting in the way. But if his pastoral performance otherwise was fine, as I imagine it was, then why shouldn't he be allowed to contribute in the ways he was able?

Similarly, I don't think Father Ron should ever have been discarded as he was. That was simply awful, as giving and humane as he apparently was in all other ways. He should probably not be working with kids of the type to which he felt attraction. I say "probably" because we distinguish in the rest of adult life between sexual looking and touching. There are even jokes about it. So I'm not convinced that simple looking should ever be punished, even if it's looking at children. Certainly someone with that attraction should have psychological assessment and help in case there's a potential for looking to become touching. But punishing looking itself? That feels too close to thought crime, doesn't it?

What about Cardinal Law? I don't believe Mr. Law should resign or retire. He is not someone being driven by intrapsychic forces over which he has little or no control. He is someone who repeatedly condoned -- colluded with -- criminally destructive behavior simply to avoid damage to himself and his fiefdom. That skates close to the clinical definition of what used to be called criminal psychopathy. So I believe Mr. Law should first be sacked by Rome, and then prosecuted as a criminal accomplice by the civil authorities. It's the least they can do.

But Mr. Law will walk away untouched, of course, even while poor Father Ron goes on suffering for his sin of looking. Only the little flies ever get caught in the law's web. The bigger ones always break free and go on their way unharmed. Why should this case be different?

-- Anonymous

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