On Roman Polanski's Self-Defense and the Patriarchal Roots of the Catholic Abuse Crisis

 

Amidst the current crisis of the Catholic church, it is interesting to read Roman Polanski’s recent defense of himself after he left the U.S. some years ago, having served only 42 days for anally raping a 13-year old girl he had drugged before he raped her.  Polanski’s self-defense was published several days ago in the journal La Règle du jeu, published by his friend and staunch defender Bernard-Henri Lévy.

As Michael Stickings points out in the HuffPo summary of Polanski’s statement to which I link above, Polanski deserves the same right anyone accused of a crime should have—the right to defend himself.  But what’s troubling, Stickings notes (and I agree), in Polanski’s current self-defense is that he continues not to accept any responsibility at all for his actions. 

As Stickings concludes,

So many years have passed, and it still seems pretty clear that Polanski thinks he did nothing wrong.

I'd be a bit more sympathetic if he showed an iota of remorse, and if he were truly and genuinely honest both with himself and with us.

And that, of course, is where many of us find ourselves now vis-à-vis the pastoral leaders of the Catholic church: we’d be able to muster more sympathy for them amidst their current crisis, if they showed even a scintilla of remorse for years of covering up the sexual abuse of children, and if they manifested even basic honesty about their response to the abuse crisis and its cover-up.

As I wrote back in January when Polanski’s defender Lévy passionately defended Pope Benedict against what Lévy views as media scapegoating, Lévy’s apologia for Benedict is troubling when one reads it in conjunction with his similar defense of Roman Polanski against what Lévy calls “the howling of the pack.”

In Lévy’s view, (like Benedict) Polanski is the scapegoat in a drama that is all about lust for blood—the lust of a pack of media wolves and those colluding with them for the blood of a man who has done nothing worse than many men do.  A blood lust driven by a social psychology of artificial, worked-up frenzy about the sexual abuse of minors, which will lead to shameful actions against both innocent men and men who have actually molested minors . . . .

One even hears echoes of Polanski’s argument now from some defenders of Benedict and of clergy who abuse minors, with the assumption that priests who have sexually abused young people are being dehumanized, turned into despised objects whose humanity is ignored while crowds howl for blood.

And with its concomitant assumption that the rape of minors is somehow understandable, something to be placed within a context of sociological and psychological explanation that helps us to recognize the humanity of those abusing children—if not the humanity of the young people abused by these men.

And here’s what strikes me as I read Polanski, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and defenders of abusive priests who promote such arguments: sexual abuse of minors has long been ignored and excused within many cultures because it is, far and away, men who are abusing children.  Men who have all the power in their hands . . . .

Men who have constructed social worlds that work to their benefit, if also to the detriment of everyone else in those social worlds. . . .

As Matthew Rindge notes in his HuffPo article about the abuse crisis to which I linked yesterday,

The Church hierarchy has . . . demonstrated a consistent commitment to protecting its male leaders, preserving its image, and portraying abusers as victims (though even some recognize that drawing parallels with anti-Semitism is a bit of a stretch).

A consistent commitment to protecting its male leaders: the abuse crisis would likely not exist—not in the dramatic, seemingly intractable shape in which it exists for us now—and the cover-up would not be so thick, if women had power in the church.  Women in positions of pastoral authority in the Catholic church would almost certainly not have been abusing children with as much abandon as some male pastors have exhibited in abusing children.  And they would not likely have covered up the abuse with as much alacrity as the male leaders of the Catholic church have displayed for years now in their cover-up.

I continue to maintain that one of the problems those of us analyzing the abuse crisis have to confront in the abuse crisis is that society at large has generally looked the other way when it comes to abuse of children—all forms of abuse of children.  It has done so because society at large is male-dominated. 

In its callousness towards the sexual abuse of minors and its penchant for covering that abuse up, the male Catholic hierarchy is simply mirroring the male-dominant attitudes of most societies around the globe.  Rather than being the countercultural sign that they claim to be, who are reaping grief now for having stood up against the prevailing norms of secular society, Catholic leaders are to a shocking degree merely aping the behavior of men everywhere in the world, when men have unchecked power.

One of the roots of the abuse crisis in the Catholic church is patriarchy.  That crisis will not be effectively resolved until that root is addressed candidly and with deliberate action to reform a church badly out of kilter because of its system of allocating institutional power on the basis of gender.

Once again, I’ve chosen as the illustration for this posting a lithograph of German artist Käthe Kollwitz.  This is Kollwitz’s 1942 work "The Seed for the Harvest Shall Not Be Ground Up."  As with other of her works in the period between the two wars and during World War II, it shows a mother seeking to encircle her children with her arms, to save them from violence.  I continue to propose that these images of mothers encircling their children are depictions of the kind of sanctuary that church is called to be, but which it often fails to provide, particularly (in the case of the Catholic church) to children.  If maternal images governed the church, we would not be the kind of church we have become at this point in history.