The Forgotten Victims

At first blush, you’d be hard-pressed to figure how a trio of middle-aged nuns could be victims of the Church’s sex-abuse scandal.

But there’s no other way to describe the plight of the three Sisters of Bethany — one of them a hunched and wrinkled 69 — who will soon be evicted from the convent from which their order has ministered to East L.A.’s poor for more than 40 years. In a story that has garnered national attention, the sisters’ home is to be sold as part of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles’s pass-the-hat campaign to pay off more than $600 million in settlements to victims of clergy sexual misconduct.

The Bethany Three might yet land on their feet, but they’re still iconic of the scandal’s unsung victim class: the Catholic foot soldiers who have toiled in poverty for the sake of the Gospel, only to see the fruits of their sacrifices squandered and nullified because too many priests touched boys and too few bishops did enough to stop it.

Don’t misunderstand me: The greatest tragedy here is the harm done to the abuse victims themselves — the enduring trauma, the innocence stolen, the bitter barrier placed between their hearts and Christ’s Church. But it’s not the only tragedy. (I imagine it will be generations before we’re able to take accurate stock of them all, for they continue to erupt and unfold and cross-pollinate.) Another one, of which cases like the above are only the initial wave, is the dissipation of the American Church’s property, money, and resources.

The story of the Catholic Church in the United States is a mission story, a ghetto story, a story of work and sacrifice. Immigrants faithfully tithed of their little all to build churches, schools, hospitals. Priests and nuns worked for pittances to shepherd them and teach their children. In their lifetimes they accomplished the full integration of Catholics into American society, and as a legacy they left their successors a mighty endowment: valuable real estate, beautiful structures, prestigious institutions, and a flock that was every bit as educated, wealthy, and professional as the Protestants who’d looked down on its grandparents.

It is that legacy that the Church is now squandering, like the Prodigal Son, to pay for its indulgence in sin.

The numbers are so large they’re numbing. (California’s dioceses alone are on the hook for more than a billion dollars.) Perhaps that’s part of the problem: We’re not properly outraged by the payout figures because they’re too big to wrap our brains around.

Better to think about them in terms of beautiful churches in urban centers, testimonies to the faith and energy and charity of their builders, sold to become restaurants or trendy co-ops. Or the retreat houses, Catholic college campuses, and monasteries auctioned off, reverting from the sacred back to the profane.

Better still, maybe, to think in terms of nuns like the Sisters of Bethany, forced to abandon their home and ministry. Or of elderly priests in under-funded homes, robbed of a comfortable and dignified retirement. Or of Catholic schools that have to settle for third-rate resources and teachers who have to work weekends to earn a living wage.

I send my children to one of the latter: a little Catholic school run by little Polish nuns. Its monthly budget is such that the difference between happiness and misery, according to the Micawber Principle, can be measured in four or even three figures. It’s a tight ship.

What would even a sliver of the scandal payout mean to that school and a hundred like it?

In years past I’ve been employed by two American dioceses (one of them just reached a $198 million settlement). Neither made me a rich man, but in fairness I never starved in the gutter either, and in some cases I was treated with a measure of justice. Yet I also observed discouraging instances of fellow lay employees being squeezed; smart, ambitious folks who could have been lawyers or businessmen but used their talents to serve the Church instead, forced to toil for wages that put their (characteristically large) families well within range for governmental welfare. 

Have you ever passed a Volvo with a bumper sticker that read, “I long for the day when schools get all the money they need, but the Pentagon has to hold a bake sale to pay for a bomber”? Personally, I’d happily make a few cookies to help underwite the school play if it means we get to have the best bombers. But those in the Church who’ve pursued a life of austerity aren’t even getting to see the “bombers” — the grand works of evangelization that their thrift might have made possible. Their life of sacrifice has been simply flushed away instead.

What difference would even a miniscule percentage of those billions have made for such families, and thousands more?Or stolen, rather, by the same ones who were meant to put it to great use. That is a crime and a tragedy of its own order, and one that will require its own reckoning.