The Church has underestimated the reality of evil

France report as horrifying as what was uncovered in Ireland, writes David Quinn

Has the Church underestimated the reality of evil in the world for the past 50 years? Jean-Marc Sauvé, a retired senior judge in France, believes so. He headed a commission established by the Church to investigate the scale of child abuse within French Catholicism. The report of his commission was released last week what it found is every bit as horrifying as what was uncovered in Ireland and elsewhere.

Using a methodology that some have criticised, the commission estimates that between 1950 and 2020 around 300,000 people were sexually abused as children in Catholic settings. Two-thirds of the abuse was carried out by priests.

The report says that there are about 5.5 million French people alive today who were abused as children by someone, often family members. Going back to 1950, the number would be much higher.

Report

A report called ‘Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland’, found an even higher number here, proportionately speaking.

But even if the number abused by priests and lay Catholic workers is half what the Commission estimates, it is still a crime crying out to Heaven for vengeance.

Reflecting on the finding Sauvé, a committed Catholic, said: “For the past 50 years, we have tended to hold an ecclesiastical discourse according to which everyone is beautiful and kind… This is false. There is good and evil. And the evil that disguises itself under the garments of salvation is the worst.”

This is one of the best reflections on the nature of the scandals I have come across in years of writing and reading about this terrible phenomenon which has caused so much devastation not alone to the victims, but to the ability of the Church to bear witness to the Gospel.

To blame only the “ecclesiastical discourse” of the last 50 years would be misleading, of course. The scandals have existed much longer than half a century. The report itself goes back 70 years. Children in institutional settings are especially vulnerable, and institutions date back centuries. There was plenty of abuse in non-Catholic settings also.

But perhaps the “discourse according to which everyone is beautiful and kind” has stopped us being able to analyse properly what we were confronted with and therefore deal with it honestly and forthrightly and take the correct moral actions.

Therapeutic categories

Evil has often been reduced to therapeutic categories. According to this thinking, if a person does something very wrong, it can’t be due to evil, it must be due to a sickness in them, a psychological malady in need of treatment.

Therefore, when a bishop or religious superior was confronted with an allegation that a priest or religious had sexually abused a child, alongside the instinct to cover-up and protect the Church’s reputation, was a wish to obtain help for the priest (notably not for the victim).

He was not seen as a sinner, but as someone with an illness, a compulsion they could not resist and for which they were not really responsible. In fact, this attitude was directly reflected in the commentary on canon law produced by the Canon Law Society of Britain and Ireland in the 1990s.

The priest would be sent away for counselling and then returned to his ministry ‘cured’, whereupon he would begin abusing children again.

An attitude that prioritised mercy over punishment also took hold. Was it correct to punish someone who was really sick, not evil, senior Church figures asked themselves?

But this kind of thinking obscured the reality that the act of abuse was itself evil. It also obscured the distinct possibility that the person carrying out the abuse was not merely ‘sick’, but evil in their heart.

As Sauvé says, “the evil that disguises itself under the garments of salvation is the worst”.

Evil often works in a person by convincing them that what they are doing isn’t really evil at all. Perhaps the abuser told themselves that the age of consent was too high, and their 13-year-old victim was really consenting, or that the rule of celibacy was too onerous and should be abolished anyway?

The human mind can convince itself of all sorts of things and turn black into white. History is full or examples. Popes launched bloody crusades convinced they were doing God’s will. People were burnt at the stake for the same reason.

In more recent times, millions died in the gulag, sent off in the name of creating a more just and equal society.

Hitler thought he was making the world a better place when he ordered the Holocaust.

Convince

If people can convince themselves that such gigantic crimes aren’t really evil, on the contrary, that they are good, then we can talk ourselves into anything. And that is how evil works. Few enough people like to think of themselves as evil, or that they do wicked things. A minority are well aware, and they enjoy it, but for the most part this isn’t how the human mind works. Often, we disguise our evil so well we don’t even recognise it.

The Church above all should be able to recognise evil when it sees it. But again and again, evil has managed to disguise itself in the Church as well.

There is also a current, ongoing reaction against preaching about sin too much in the past. Nowadays we hear more about the sins of society, not individuals.

But a cursory reading of history should be enough to convince anyone that evil runs like a deep vein through human nature. We are not merely beautiful and kind. There are too many examples of people doing horrifying things to each other on both an individual and collective basis to believe that.

The political philosopher, Edmund Burke, is supposed to have said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

But the problem is even worse when we persuade ourselves that evil is good, or that the seemingly ‘evil’ person is actually psychologically unwell.

When this happens, evil grows unchecked, as it did deep in the heart of the Church.