Sacred Ground

by Eboo Patel

  It was raining and cold outside, and Father Geoghan was about to arrive. Mueller put coats on the boys and raced them out the door, driving them to their parish, St. Mary’s in Melrose, where she asked to see Reverend Paul Miceli, a parish priest who knew both the family and Geoghan. Miceli was overwhelmed by the story. Mueller later testified that he said, “He will never be a priest again. It will never happen again.” That was 1973. Geoghan would continue his sexual abuse of boys while wearing a Roman Catholic collar for the next twenty-three years. His principal targets were the boys of poor, overwhelmed, single mothers, women who felt blessed to have a father figure in the lives of their sons. It was an arc of abuse that lasted nearly thirty years and that likely included somewhere between five hundred and a thousand victims.

  Church officials knew from the very early days. Parents like Joanne Mueller told them in emotional personal meetings. Family members too intimidated or ashamed to confront a church official in person wrote letters telling their stories. At least once, another priest caught Father Geoghan in the act. One victim tells the story of a priest walking in on Father Geoghan as he was performing oral sex on the victim in the upper rooms of a rectory. “Jack, we told you not to do this up here,” the victim recalled the priest saying. Geoghan was not only moved time and time again, he was also given plum assignments, including a summer-long retreat in Rome with $2,000 of spending money.25

  Writer (and liberal Catholic) Anna Quindlen said of the clergy child-molestation scandal that “the bishops . . . were allowed to make their own laws.”26 It is not just a figure of speech. In May 1993, as the ironically named Cardinal Law, who had been head of the Archdiocese of Boston since the early 1980s, was trying to discern a way forward through the mounting allegations of priest sexual abuse, he asked a group of eminent experts in the field of child sexual abuse to advise him. They came for lunch at his palatial Italian Renaissance residence in the Brighton area of Boston. Carol Newberger, a child psychologist, was very clear about the proper procedure: report any cases to the civil authorities, remove any accused priest immediately, and keep them as far away from children as possible, because the likelihood of repeated behavior is extremely high. After studying the cases, she and the other experts told Cardinal Law in no uncertain terms that he and the Catholic Church had mishandled the situation, paving the path to further abuse rather than preventing it.

  The more they talked, the more they felt they were not getting through. According to Newberger, the cardinal sat stone faced and silent most of the time. When he finally spoke, it was not to voice his sympathies for the victims and their families or to declare his anger at the priests who would abuse their collars; it was to say that the Catholic Church had its own ways of dealing with such matters. In situations like these, the cardinal stated, canon law had to be considered.

  The words fell like a hammer on the gathering of child psychologists. “Whatever we had just told him didn’t seem to be registering,” Newberger later said. “Canon law was irrelevant to us. Children were being abused. Sexual predators were being protected. Canon law should have nothing to do with it. But they were determined to keep this problem, and their response to it, within their culture.”27

  For people familiar with the anti-Catholic tropes of previous eras, this sounds like the worst of the Evangelical predictions coming to fruition: It is priests abusing their privilege to prey on others. It is the sexual abuse suffered by Maria Monk (who, incidentally, was a fictitious figure), except forced on poor prepubescent boys instead of a novice nun. It is the Catholic hierarchy being party to the ugliest evil.

  And though there has been a responsible movement seeking appropriate reform so that such a scandal never occurs again, there has been no widespread panic about Catholic influence in America. There is no legislation pending in twenty-plus states to make canon law illegal. Newt Gingrich, when he was talking about his Catholic faith on the campaign trail, was not asked if he would allow canon law to protect pedophile priests were he to win the White House. Senator John Kerry, a Boston Catholic and the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 2004, was not accused of being the tip of the spear for the Catholic hierarchy’s American takeover. Nor were Vice President Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House from 2008 to 2010. Nor, to my knowledge, were any of the six Catholics who serve as US Supreme Court justices. Catholics have gained significant influence in American society, even while some of the most respected members in their fold have been guilty of abusing the power of their collars in the most reprehensible ways. The American public has made very little connection between the two.

  In fact, Evangelicals have swung in the opposite direction, a dynamic illustrated by their support for both Newt Gingrich and his fellow Catholic in the 2012 Republican primary, US senator Rick Santorum.28 It was Santorum who received the plurality of the Evangelical vote in Iowa and Santorum who won states like Alabama and Mississippi, where approximately eight out of ten Republican primary voters are Evangelicals. Santorum is a life-long Catholic and very publicly associated with the conservative wing of the Church. His opposition not only to abortion and same-sex marriage but also to contraception has been a hallmark of his political career. Many Evangelicals cheered when Santorum accused one of their fellow Protestants, Barack Obama, of having a “phony theology” not based on the Bible. The Evangelical mega-leader Franklin Graham, son of the famous Billy, said on morning television that he couldn’t say for sure if Obama (again, his fellow Protestant) was Christian but felt entirely certain of Santorum’s good standing in the faith.29 And when Santorum declared that he wanted to “throw up” when he read Kennedy’s Houston speech, in which JFK stated his belief in the absolute separation of church and state—a speech that Kennedy gave to assuage the concerns that mid-twentieth-century Evangelicals had about too much Catholic influence in the White House—early-twenty-first-century Evangelicals supported Santorum in the face of the public outcry.30 Fifty years ago, Evangelicals organized an all-out effort to prevent a nominal Catholic from winning the White House because they were afraid he would take his marching orders from the Pope. In the 2012 Republican primary, Evangelicals organized an all-out effort in support of a Catholic candidate who promised to do precisely that.

  In the early 2000s, as the clerical-abuse scandal was unfolding, Robert Putnam was undertaking an ambitious statistical survey of Americans’ attitudes toward the various religious groups in our nation. The results showed that Catholics were among the most favorably viewed. Muslims, on the other hand, were at the bottom of the likeability barrel.

  Looking at this data, it occurred to me that the two big media stories about religion during those years were Muslim extremism and clerical molestation. Barely a week went by without a story of a suicide bombing or an accused priest on the evening news. Both Muslim extremism and clerical molestation involved only the smallest fraction of the larger body. Why did the first taint an entire religious community while the second didn’t? Why were ordinary Muslims (who were far more likely than any other religious community to be killed by Muslim extremists) suspected of actually being terrorists, while most Catholics were viewed as victims of predatory priests? Based on his research, Putnam believes that the central reason is that most Americans, over the course of the past two generations, have had the occasion to meet and become friends with Catholics. In that process, they’ve learned to admire things about the Catholic faith, and they’ve learned that fears of Catholic domination are somewhere between unfounded and ridiculous. Most Americans are far more likely to associate the Catholic faith with their Catholic friends than with pedophile priests. Unfortunately, the same is not true for Muslims. Not enough people report a positive relationship with a Muslim or appreciative knowledge of Islam to counter the negative representations they see on television.

  It’s hard to overstate the role of Evangelicals in all of this. For many generations, they were the chief perpetrators of anti-Catholic prejudice. Now they seem to have turned that animu
s toward Muslims, using some of the same archetypes that they once applied to Catholics—a religion bent on domination, a tradition inherently opposed to freedom, a seditious force within our nation. I’ve heard people draw a straight line between the anti-Catholicism of the past and the Islamophobia of the present, essentially saying that the Evangelical impulse is to hate someone, the only question is who. I find that cynical. Seeing only the consistency of prejudice clouds a more important story when it comes to Evangelicals—the story of change.

  The fact is, when it comes to relations with Catholics, Evangelicals have traveled a long way in a very short time. And the Catholic issue isn’t the only area in which Evangelicals have changed. On everything from attitudes toward AIDS to protecting the environment, from race relations to relations with Jews, there is marked positive progress. Evangelicals constitute 40 percent of our nation, too huge a group to write off or to get wrong, and one with cultural power even greater than their numbers suggest. Simply put, when Evangelicals change, America changes.

  The Evangelical shift around Muslims is starting to happen. Some of the most powerful allies Muslims had during the Ground Zero Mosque debate were Evangelicals. Jim Wallis, of the Christian social-justice organization Sojourners, was on television regularly sparring with the anti-Muslim crowd, saying that his mother always told him to stand up to bullies on the playground and that’s all these people were. Gabe Lyons, founder of the Christian learning community Q, invited Imam Feisal to share the stage with him for a plenary presentation at the 2011 edition of the Q conference, one of the most important gatherings in the Evangelical movement. But for me, the most striking story of an Evangelical supporting Muslims was of a pastor with a strong Southern accent and a megachurch outside of Dallas, a guy who knows something about prejudice and change.

  Growing up as an Evangelical Christian in East Texas in the 1960s, Bob Roberts remembers guest preachers climbing into the pulpit of his father’s Southern Baptist church and talking about the pope as “the Great Whore of Babylon,” the false prophet referred to in the Book of Revelations destined to lead a false church bent on world domination. The books he checked out of the church library said much the same: Catholics are not Christian. They believe in things like penance and good works, they have a different Bible, they pray to Mary. They do not know Jesus.

  “That’s what you were taught?” I asked.

  “And it’s what I taught others,” he responded. “I started preaching as a teenager. I took the idea of spreading the one true faith very seriously, and I was good at it. I’d get up in pulpits and tell people about the false prophet, the false church, the false prayer. It was all part of teaching right and wrong, convincing them to stay on the one true path, the path of conservative Evangelical Protestant Christianity.”

  In 1985, at age twenty-seven, Bob started his own church in a Dallas suburb called Keller. But what he really wanted to do was be a missionary, to take his gift for bringing people to the one true path to those wandering astray in the darkest corners of the darkest places in the world. Each time he went before the International Missionary Board of the Southern Baptist Convention and presented his skills and wishes, he was turned down. He did not take this in stride. He would pray, “God, I am your faithful servant and a heckuva preacher. I can do you lots of good in the world. Why won’t you let me help you?” Finally, an opportunity presented itself.

  “There was a guy at my church, a Vietnam vet who had been shot down three times in the war,” Bob said. “He’d become a medical doctor and done quite well for himself. He had some contacts in North Vietnam, and he suggested we go there, spread the gospel and such.” If there was one group Bob feared more than Catholics, it was Vietnamese Communists. Growing up, he’d watched the guys he looked up to, who laughed and played baseball and bought Cokes for the kids, go off to Vietnam and come back in stony silence, broken, or not come home at all. “I remember sitting in my dad’s car with the windows down as he went in the funeral home to visit a family whose son had been killed in the war,” Bob said. “I could hear the wailing outside.” Bob was scared, but he was also excited. Who better to convert than your former enemies? It was a sweet sort of revenge to bring those who once sought to kill American Christians back to the straight path. You could call it a holy victory. At that time, in 1995, Vietnam still severely restricted religion, so Bob couldn’t go formally as a missionary; he had to get a humanitarian visa.

  Bob got to be friends with the Vietnamese authorities. The rule was no preaching, but Bob didn’t want to just go sightseeing and have lunches with dignitaries. His church back home was involved in all kinds of community projects. Some of the Vietnamese officials knew about those, and they proposed he try to launch some in Vietnam, starting with building schools and clinics. It became something that galvanized Bob’s whole church community. Delegations started going to Vietnam regularly—sometimes twenty delegations a year—building schools and clinics. Wherever they went, there was always another group of people who seemed to be there first, who had already built schools and clinics and were happy to work with the Northwood church group on more projects: Catholics. When Bob asked one why they were involved like this, he answered, “Well, we believe in works.”

  There was only one functioning Protestant church in North Vietnam at the time. Bob remembers driving the roads around Hanoi and being surprised to see old, run-down Catholic churches, a vestige of French colonialism. He remembers thinking to himself, “If the Vietnamese people are ever going to come to know Christianity, it’s probably going to be through those churches.” And then he caught himself: Catholics aren’t Christian, right?

  Bob remembers seeing an old Vietnamese Catholic priest coming out of one of the churches wearing a collar. Just being openly identified with a religion was taking a great risk. The Communist government had the authority to arrest religious leaders, an authority it exercised frequently. On that fact alone, Bob admired this man’s faith commitment.

  The man was nervous when Bob approached him but seemed calmed when Bob said he was a Christian. Bob told him that he was part of a group that was bringing Americans to Vietnam to build schools and clinics. The Catholic priest nodded, happy to learn that Americans knew something of Vietnam other than the war. He noted that much of his work was building schools and clinics as well; it was part of the Catholic faith. Bob asked if there was anything he could do for the priest. The man said he needed Bibles.

  This was a perfect missionary opportunity. This agent of the Great Whore of Babylon was relying on Bob, a follower of the one true path, to bring him the Scriptures. One of the greatest cleavages between Catholics and Protestants in American history was over which Bible to use. The Catholic Bible contains several books the Protestant Bible does not. Riots broke out in several American cities in the nineteenth century because Protestants believed Catholics were going to use their Bible in public schools. Bob could have easily sent this man thousands of copies of the Protestant Bible and taken pride in bringing the true Gospel to a false follower in Communist Vietnam.

  Instead, when Bob returned to Keller, he called the closest Catholic church, St. Elizabeth Anne Seton. He introduced himself to the priest as a fellow Christian who had just returned from Vietnam, where he had met a remarkable Catholic priest ministering to the people at great personal risk to himself. The man needed Bibles. The priest at St. Elizabeth told him to come over; the two of them should get to know one another.

  As Bob’s church grew, so did its relationship with Vietnam. It was a two-way exchange. Youth from Vietnam would come for extended visits to Texas, always staying with families who were part of Bob’s church. They weren’t forced to come to church, but they generally did, and they participated in the youth group, too. Truth is, this made some of Bob’s congregants nervous. These Vietnamese kids were, after all, Communists and atheists. Part of what Communists and atheists are taught to do is brainwash Christians, right? Could this be happening right in their church’s youth group? Bob w
asn’t worried, and to ease the nerves of some of his more skittish congregants, he participated in a very personal way in the exchange program, taking Vietnamese kids into his home.

  On September 11, 2001, as Bob listened to the surreal news of planes being hijacked and used as weapons on American soil, he was at the dining table with his Vietnamese exchange student. The first thing he did was make sure everyone he knew in New York City was OK. Then he said a prayer for his family and his country, and especially that young Vietnamese kid sitting at his table, whose parents on the other side of the world were probably out of their minds with worry, wondering what kind of crazy country they had sent their son to. Then he thanked God for guiding him to work with Communist Vietnam in the company of Catholic priests. Such peaceful, lovely people, those Vietnamese. Such a generous community, those Catholics. He was very grateful that his church had no relationships in the Middle East or with Muslims, a bloodthirsty lot if there ever was one. He wanted to live a good, long life, not get his head chopped off by a terrorist who prayed to a false god in a strange language.

  It didn’t take Bob long to discover the irony in his thinking. He had been taught to hate Communists, and above all Vietnamese Communists, but had found himself overcoming his fear through personal relationships. He had been taught to revile Catholics as followers of a false church, but had learned to admire the great personal risks they took for the opportunity to serve others. Perhaps the same thing would happen if he ever got the chance to work with Muslims. Bob was starting to see a new wisdom in his own faith, especially Jesus’ command to love your enemy. “The whole point is that when you love someone, they stop being your enemy,” he told me. “Maybe there’s no such thing as enemies, just people we don’t know and haven’t met.”