Can the Catholic Church sin?
Institutional Responsibility
We’ve learned recently of
more children molested and raped by Catholic priests, and of more cover-ups by Church higher-ups, likely leading all the way to the Pope Benedict XVI. Is it right to scorn the Catholic Church as an institution? When is it right to hold an organization in moral contempt for the actions of an employee or member? There are two main questions.
The first is whether he committed the offense in his official capacity, at least incidentally related to his institutional responsibilities and authority. If a priest killed someone while driving drunk, it wouldn’t impugn the Catholic Church as an institution, at least not directly. It’s a little different for the Church than other organizations insofar as priests have dedicated their entire lives to the institution and its teachings and, as such, everything a priest does in some sense reflects upon the Church. But we can still draw a line between the activities a priest performs though his position as a priest and everything else. And the molestation is a case of the former. The offenders had access to children because they were priests charged with caring for or educating these children, somewhat analogous to a daycare worker; anything they do with these children in their capacity as caregivers or educators qualifies as incidental to their official responsibilities. These molestations and rapes were committed on the clock.
The second issue is the complicity of institutional leadership. The leaders direct the institution as a whole. They speak for the institution. If they decide that the institution will take an action, the institution then stands for that action. If the crime in question is an isolated incident and leadership works honestly to prevent its future occurrence, it seems inappropriate to hold the organization as a whole responsible, or to put the act in question on the organization’s moral ledger.
There a number of ways, however, to implicate leadership. Maybe they actively encouraged the immorality in question, for instance, with a CEO directing his salesmen to commit fraud. Or maybe they discouraged the acts, but did nothing to ensure the activity stopped. Or maybe they did nothing at all, but with full knowledge of the issue.
While not actively encouraging molestation, Church leadership is complicit. They were aware of these heinous acts and their standard response was to shuffle offenders to different parishes, rather than to excommunicate them and report them to the authorities. They decided that bad PR for the Church was worse than the risk (the guarantee?) of more molested children.
So, by these two parameters-official capacity and leadership complicity-it seems appropriate, if not obligatory, to ridicule the Church in general.
There exists a separate and deeper question, of course, over what it means to hold an institution as a whole responsible. Moral responsibility depends upon the capacity to choose, and institutions don’t have free wills in that genuine manner. We can fictionalize them and pretend that they do for pragmatic or legal considerations, as in the law of respondeat superior, which defines the circumstances under which an employer can be legally responsible for an employee’s tort. But in reality, institutions are merely collections of individual people, who maybe we ought to consider in isolation. Just because the Church is stained does not mean that a given priest-one who had no knowledge of the situation or had knowledge of the situation and worked to rectify it-should be affected morally. One wonders, though, how many fit into these categories.
Regardless, even if we cannot hold an institution responsible according to technical moral definitions, we can still examine it from a broader moral perspective, considering what values official actions aim to promote and whether official activities were a force for good or bad, justice or injustice.
When it comes to the widespread molestation and rape of children, these sorts of questions are not hard. The Catholic Church, considered as institution, from a consequentialist perspective, on this specific point, was a force for profound evil and injustice. That the Vatican and other bishops-as men of supposed moral training-have the gumption, arrogance, and hubris to even debate this point disrespects just about anything that should matter to them, not the least of which are the wellbeing of children and the teachings of Christ.
Parents leave their children with priests in a church because they are priests in a church, supposedly pacific and learned men living and working in a house of safety and virtue, indeed, a sanctuary. Some priests abused this trust in the most shocking manner, in their capacity as priests, with Church leadership looking the other way at best. The Devil works in mysterious ways.
-Jake
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- The Church and gay marriage
- How do you solve a problem like the Pope?
- Separation of church and state = more church
- The open society and its enemies
- WWTD? (What would Tiger do?)
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