Is the Catholic Church Too Big to Fail?

The Wall Street banks were considered too big to fail and were forgiven for driving the economy into the ground and wrecking the lives of millions of Americans and who knows how many other people on the planet. They were not only forgiven, they were pumped full of trillions of dollars and allowed to go back to business as usual.

If Boeing or General Motors or any other giant corporation gets into serious financial trouble, they too have friends in high places to come to their rescue. Is this the same reason, too big to fail, why the Roman Catholic church, after decades of revelations about widespread sexual child abuse as well as continuing sexual assaults on seminarians and nuns, can avoid being held accountable for hideous crimes it has perpetrated and then covered up?

Why, in fact, do we use the euphemism “sexual abuse” for an act that amounts to rape and physical assault when talking about the felonious acts of the clergy of any religion? If public school teachers were accused of such crimes on a scale the Catholic clergy have perpetrated, would we demand nothing more than apologies and promises to do better? Would we continue to pay taxes without a substantial, basic overhaul of the educational system? Why do we leave it to the Vatican and the same people who have enabled and covered up clerical criminality for so long to take the necessary action?

The Church claims more than a billion members worldwide. It lives off the money those members contribute along with substantial corporate investments and other income. How many of those billion are practicing or even believers, I have no idea. What I do know is that no one in the Wall Street banks responsible for the Great Recession of 2009 faced criminal charges as a result or their criminal behavior. And I am not aware of any prosecutions of Catholic or other clergy on a scale commensurate with the crimes that have been alleged against them. Why not? Why are we satisfied with apologies and reforms instead of demanding long jail sentences?

Why also are we not hearing more of the details of specific, individual crimes that have done severe physical as well as lifelong psychological harm? I have in mind the rape of a boy by a clergyman reported in the New York Times, not Catholic in this case, who had to be operated on to repair the damage done to him. Such stories, when they are about media moguls or public officials, fill the front pages of our tabloid newspapers and much of the TV news. Why are graphic descriptions of assaults by those who are not the victims of priests and other clergymen appropriate for the media but the same acts by clergymen are not? Individual stories, whether shocking or heartwarming, engage our feelings in a way no statistics can. Those late-night TV shakedowns by organizations trolling for our contributions always show the appealing faces and withered bodies of individual children. Even legitimate charities attempt to connect individual suffering human beings with individual donors. News media trade on a fact of human nature: the tale of a specific individual is a tragedy, the report of thousands is a statistic. We rarely read about or hear graphic descriptions of clerical criminality, only reports or statements by victims who were “sexually abused,” usually over a period of years. But one graphic description is worth a thousand such reports, just as the account of an individual family who lost their home as the result of a predatory bank is worth any number of cold recitations of the number of such homes that defaulted.

The Catholic Church lost much of North America and almost all of Europe even before the current sex scandals were exposed. It has since concentrated its efforts in Africa and Latin America where it faces serious challenges from evangelical Protestantism. But it’s not yet in danger of going out of business. None of its lay members have any vote about who fills the ranks of their clergy. That clergy claims divine appointment – the same assertion monarchs used to make. Some Catholics agitate for a priesthood that includes women or for the right to use birth control, but they have no power to do anything more than humbly request such reforms. The Church hierarchy retains all authority to itself while demanding complete obedience from its members under pain of excommunication and eternal torture in an afterlife. It is an institution predicated on its own authority, not on democratic principles.

As long as we give our financial and corporate institutions permission to set their own rules we will continue to suffer the consequences of their greed. And as long as we accept the idea that autocratic religion, or “faith” as it is euphemistically called these days, can operate shielded from substantial consequences for its bad behavior, we will suffer the abuses that come with allowing such institutions the privilege of being too big to fail and too big to jail.