When Will We Be Civilized?
Rudolph H. Weingartner
In the
recent New York Review of Books blog,
Garry Wills gives four tough “assignments” to Pope Francis, that must be
carried out if he is to succeed in eliminating sexual predation by members of
the Catholic clergy.* I don’t think
that he is optimistic about their implementation. The issue is hardly new. Discussion of priests molesting children goes back some
decades; the practice, I would guess, goes back centuries. Discussion, moreover, has largely
focused on responsible supervision of clerics in their interaction with
children, with special emphasis, of course, on the removal and punishment of
transgressors. Carrying out these
two functions effectively are surely necessary conditions for the elimination
of sexual predation but just as surely not sufficient. But the elimination of the priestly
requirement of celibacy, which would take us closer to sufficiency, is not
likely in the foreseeable future or even beyond it.
No command to maintain celibacy, to say the least, is a cause of sexual
harassment and rape in the American armed forces. The increase in the last few years of such incidents is no
doubt related both to the increased numbers of women who have entered the military
and to the considerable broadening of the roles they there assume. But the fact that these crimes occur at
all is rooted in the arrogance of the perpetrators that they can just take what
they desire and in the abysmal failure of the the military establishment to
deal with the issue—from being discreet recipients of complaints to conducting
tactful investigations to meting out effective punishment when guilt has been
determined.
Sexual
harassment to the point of rape is clearly widespread on college campuses all
around the country. The causes are
similar to those in the military: arrogance and institutional failure to deal
with the issue, from dubious agencies where complaints can be lodged to
inadequate methods of investigation to punishment that mostly falls far short
of serving as a deterrent.
We are
more than a decade into the twenty-first century, and are speaking about the
United States, a country that prides itself to be a leading member of the
enlightened West. We have made
great strides in the acceptance of homosexuals, even if we have not yet reached
the open-mindedness of ancient Greece.
And of course we have long professed to believe in the equality of men
and women, looking down on those corners of the globe—in the Middle East and
Africa in particular—where women are treated as inferior to men.
And
yet, in three large spheres of our own world we are only beginning to learn to
cope with a serious aspect of the reality of the inequality of men and women, not to mention to implement adequately
our professions of love for our children.
Ongoing discussions make it clear that the will to do the right thing is at best half-hearted and that a
country rife with investigative know-how and sophisticated policing and
judicial institutions is unable to deal with widespread criminal behavior. When, indeed, will we become
civilized?
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