Remora

Because LI has spurned the water of life, and is one of those unfortunates who will be processed on the left hand of our Lord transiting to the eternal gnashing of teeth that reportedly awaits our type, one would think that the abuse being hurled at the Catholic Church by a press that is normally servile to religious groups to a point of intellectual abasement that is hard to stomach would warm our hearts. Well, it doesn't.

Sunday, I was listening to a NPR interview with Alan Cooperman, who with Lena H. Sun wrote a Sunday article for the Washington Post , Hundreds Of Priests Removed Since '60s:
Survey Shows Scope Wider Than Disclosed

The intro grafs tell the story:

"The Roman Catholic Church has removed 218 priests from their positions this year because of allegations of child sexual abuse, but at least 34 known offenders remain in church jobs, according to a survey of Catholic dioceses across the United States by The Washington Post.

The survey also found that at least 850 U.S. priests have been accused of sexual misconduct with minors since the early 1960s, and that more than 350 of them were removed from ministry before this year."

In the interview on NPR, Limited Inc believes that Alan Cooperman said (we don't have a transcript) that in his research, which took in a forty year period, about 1 percent of the priesthood had probably been involved in some kind of sexual misconduct.

What the interviewer never asked, what no paper is asking, is how this compares with Protestant denominations, or with the secular equivalents of pastoral care: psycho-therapy, self-realization groups, etc. Now, LI's wild guess is that the Catholic church is well within the norm. That is, given the opportunity for sexual misconduct (a term that is pretty opaque) among a group of people who have to do with counseling, "spiritual" advice giving, and other activities that involve a traffic in what Freud called transference, and given the personality types attracted to the role of "helper," a good one percent will use their positions to have sex. However, there's no investigation of Baptist churches, or New Agey groups in Sedona, or of Freudian psycho-analysts, in the papers.

So where's the beef, the j'accuse here? It is this: the more the media piles on the Catholic church, the more the images begin to resonate with the anti-Catholic propoganda endemic in in protestant Europe and protestant America in the nineteenth century. Limited Inc has begun thinking of the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, a book that was published in the 1830s. That was a decade in which Irish immigration began to bring out anxieties among the Protestant establishment. Two convents were actually attacked, one in Massachussetts, one in South Carolina. Maria Monk alleged that she was unwillingly immured in a convent in Montreal, in which the nuns were treated as sexual tools of priests, who would periodically cull and kill the infants that were the tragic fruit of said priests' lust. In other words, the psycho-pathology of millienarianism, as described by Cohn in The Pursuit of the Millenium. He goes back to classical sources, finding Latin anti-Christian texts that describe the sect as one promoting incest and extreme promiscuity, with baby sacrifices and the whole lot. This constellation of elements pops up again and again in Western history, now directed at the jews, now directed at some cult. In the case of Maria Monk, there was an amusing afterwords to her confessions -- a falling out among her 'ghost-writers." It is as if the authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had wanted a piece of the copyright action. The story is told in this essay by Ruth Hughes:


The first thing you have to understand about the Awful Disclosures is that they are not true. The second thing you have to understand is that Maria Monk had very little to do with writing it. Her story is a pathetic one, just not the one she would have you believe. Maria Monk was born to a Protestant family in St. Johns, Quebec in 1816 or 1817. In an affidavit written after the scandal of the Awful Disclosures broke, Maria Monk's mother described her as an uncontrollable child, a fact she attributed to a brain injury suffered when Maria was little more than a toddler: a slate pencil was rammed into her ear, penetrating her skull. From that time on, according to her mother's testimony, Maria was uncontrollable and subject to wild fantasies. Her only known contact with a Catholic institution was as an inmate of the Magdalene asylum in Montreal. When it was discovered that she had become pregnant while resident in the asylum, she was asked to remove herself from that institution. It was then, aged eighteen and pregnant, that she met William K. Hoyte, head of the Canadian Benevolent Society, an organization that combined Protestant missionary work with ardent anti-Catholic activism. Hoyte took Monk as his mistress, and together they traveled to New York. At this late date, we will never know how much of the story originated with Monk's disordered imagination and how much of it was created by the opportunistic Hoyte. Hoyte called upon his fellow nativists, Rev. J. J. Slocum, Rev. George Bourne, Theodore Dwight, and others; collectively they wrote the Awful Disclosures. Maria Monk is believed to have contributed details of the city of Montreal and of the practices she observed in the Magdalene asylum. This much is known because shortly after the publication of the Awful Disclosures, the cabal began to fight amongst themselves over the profits, and several suits and counter-suits were initiated in the New York courts: Slocum was the principal author, Hoyte and Bourne were major contributors, and the others mostly just offered suggestions. Slocum and Maria Monk banded together in suing the others and their publishing house, Harper and Brothers. Maria Monk then left Hoyte to became the companion of Slocum. Monk was still under-age, and Slocum was appointed her guardian.

The first edition of the Awful Disclosures carries the imprint of Howe and Bates. If you look to find other titles put out by that publishing house, you won't find much. Howe and Bates were employees of Harper and Brothers. Harper was worried that their Catholic customers would desert them if they published Maria Monk's book, but they could not deny themselves what looked to be a lucrative enterprise. They created the dummy publishing house of Howe and Bates to insulate themselves from any fallout. Interestingly, the only other work I have found with the imprint of Howe and Bates is a refutation of Monk's claims.
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LI's point, dear reader, isn't that the accusations of pedophilia in any given case against a priest are untrue -- rather, the point is that the systematic accusation against the Catholic church is beginning to assume a form that seems to be all too consonant with the elements that have legitimated persecution in other eras. And it isn't as if these elements aren't always underfoot in the Barbaric Yawp we call the U.S.A. -- remember the Satanic Ritual Abuse hysteria of the early 90s.