COMMENTARY: If you’re Catholic, there’s a good chance you’ve known clergy who abused children and adults. Even those who didn’t commit such crimes probably knew others who did – and aided a cover-up or at least kept quiet.
The Catholic Church enabled serial abusers to repeatedly terrorize countless kids across the world for decades by using its power to silence victims and pressure police to look away.
The scandal has touched institutions I’ve known, including St. Michael’s High School in Santa Fe, where I spent years under the watchful eye of the Christian Brothers.
Heath Haussamen
I’ve been thinking about such religious institutions lately because of the recent grand jury report detailing the Catholic Church’s crimes in Pennsylvania, and the sky-high support among evangelicals for Donald Trump – a man who was recorded describing sexually assaulting women.
I spent 15 years immersed in evangelical culture, from college until 2014. When 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016, the “truth” I heard preached from the pulpit so many times seemed expendable. The greatest commandment – love of God and neighbor – was sacrificed for political power.
This week I can’t reconcile the way evangelical culture pounds chastity and purity into girls and women with its boys-will-be-boys attitude about sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh that date back to high school. “That’s not relevant,” Franklin Graham has said.
While part of evangelical culture, I often wrestled with such inconsistencies. The pastor at a conservative church I attended for years asked me in 2008 to help lead a discussion aimed at letting members know they could vote for Barack Obama and still be Christians. I was relieved that my church allowed political disagreement.
But when I wrote a column in 2012 in support of gay rights, I told that pastor I wanted to discuss it with other church members. He said Christianity was incompatible with gay rights. And while he pledged to continue talking with me one-on-one, I was not to promote gay rights in the church.
I have not returned to that church.
Leaving it behind broke my heart. People there supported me through challenging times, and I loved that pastor dearly – just as I once looked up to Christian Brothers I knew in high school.
But I couldn’t reconcile their individual love and charity with the oppressive beliefs and culture they fostered. I left behind organized religion in 2014 feeling deeply wounded.
In the years since, I’ve taken space to grieve and heal. Slowly, a deep faith has filled that void. Today it gives me hope.
Society is decaying. Our government. Our religious institutions. Our planet’s climate. Common decency and morals. You can literally see it in crumbling public infrastructure that’s been ignored, like bridges and schools, while three consecutive presidents have pumped billions into a border barrier designed to keep out our neighbors.
But history paints a clear picture of society evolving even through excruciating times like these. The Bible refers to people being refined by fire. It’s a painful, necessary process.
That process played out on live television in front of a U.S. Senate committee on Thursday when Christine Blasey Ford, beneath at voice that was at times frail and cracking, revealed immense courage and perseverance.
As Michelle Alexander wrote in The New York Times last weekend, “A new nation is struggling to be born, a multiracial, multiethnic, multifaith, egalitarian democracy in which every life and every voice truly matters.”
I want to believe that. On my best days, I do. Thursday was one of those days.
Heath Haussamen is NMPolitics.net’s editor and publisher. Agree with his opinion? Disagree? NMPolitics.net welcomes your views. Learn about submitting your own commentary here.