Asked to respond to the news that a priest who served a cool five years in prison for possession and distribution of child pornography has been quietly working in the Vatican diplomatic corps since 2023—or at any rate to respond with something resembling the equanimity for which I am well known—I found myself reminded of a scene in Hamlet. You know the one I mean—the prince, having grappled with Laertes at Ophelia‘s graveside, proceeds to lay in to Gertrude, who dismisses her son’s anger as a fit of pique and predicts that in a few minutes
His silence will sit drooping
Drooping—that is to say, limply bent, downward-facing, over-wearied, ultra-dejected, only mildly idiotic—silence. That is the state in which I wish I found myself. Instead, like the melancholy Dane I am going to offer my thoughts (if you can call them that) on this case.
It should go without saying—although I grant that nothing does these days, especially in the Roman Catholic Church—that this is not just a grossly immoral state of affairs, one that would have been intolerable if it had gone on for forty-eight hours. Instead, for two years following his release he has continued not just in the clerical state but in the actual workaday service of the Vatican Secretariat of State, his once-former employer. This is beetle-headed. It suggests a posture of almost complete moral supinity, a state of perfect hebetude, a lackadaisicalness so advanced that it transcends all previous categories of outrage.
It is an insult to every child who has ever been raped, molested, or otherwise sexually exploited by a member of the clergy. It is an insult to every wife, every mother, every aunt, every grandmother who has ever undergone the mind-numbingly idiotic process of becoming “VIRTUS-trained” in order to give lawyerly credence to the imbecile notion that ordinary laywomen are the quondam or future perpetrators of sexual abuse in Catholic parishes. It is an insult to the faithful of the Diocese of Buffalo who as I write this are being asked to cover the check for a one-hundred-fifty-million-dollar settlement while their parishes are closed or merged, and to anyone else who has found him or herself on the hook for similar financial arrangements—which is to say virtually every man, woman, and child who has ever darkened the doors of a church or chapel these last twenty-five or so years. (A rapidly falling number of us, to be sure.)
Here‘s the thing. If this situation were clearly an accident, the result of some kind of clerical (no pun intended) cock-up, a disastrous name-related co-incidence or the result of some fools’s entering the wrong Social Security number (or whatever they use over there), it would be just about possible to chuckle grimly into the void and say, “Ah well, they'll get it right next time.”
There is zero evidence that this is what happened in this case. What seems to have occurred instead is that somebody actually thought this was a good idea. The mind doesn’t reel; it spins into infinity and falls into a supernova and explodes.
Like many American Catholics, I had hoped that this kind of thing would not continue under Pope Leo XIV. Surely—I pleaded with myself—he would immediately move the Church at least slightly in the direction of what we tedious Anglophones call “good government.” He would restore some semblance of order, not least in matters of finance and personnel. More to the point, he would remember how well it worked out in the old days when we used to give these people an out-of-the-way anodyne-sounding office job and hope for the best. He would recognize what hack journalists like yours truly call “a bad look.”
Wrong. “The habit-forming pain, / Mismanagement and grief: / We must suffer them all again.”
I know what some of you are about to say. Don’t just complain. Offer something constructive. So I’ll try that. For starters, this priest should be removed from his position and immediately laicized. The agonizingly obvious fact that his dismissal from the clerical state should have taken place half a decade ago should not prevent its being done now. After that, he should be deported from the Vatican City State and forced to find a job like any layman with his no-doubt unique résumé. If he later finds himself a menace to the children of the Italian republic, that will be a matter for the Carabinieri. In the meantime, he should also be asked to make restitution—under pain of excommunication, which he may or may not regard as a serious penalty—he should be told to repay every single blood-soaked penny (or whatever you call the one-hundredth denomination of their strange currency) to a religious order. He should undertake a serious penance, though not a public one. Furthermore, the official responsible for giving him this appointment should be stripped of his current responsibilities and asked to find some work more suitable to his talents, such as cleaning the toilets at the Burger King near the Colosseum.
Finally, Pope Leo himself—who after all inherited this situation from his predecessor—should take advantage of the possibilities afforded by the dubious miracle of digital communications technology and give a short, dignified apology to the people of God. He should then sit down with a half dozen of the best canonists and draft new laws that ensure that something like this never happens again—these should include (for starters) automatic laicization following convictions, stiffer criminal sentences when they are imposed by the Vatican itself. (My own recommendation would be to follows the norms once ably set forth by St. Pius V in Horrendum illud scelus; this, I realize, is supremely unlikely, hence my more measured suggestion above.) I hope and pray that he will rise to the occasion.
What else needs to be said? Until roughly the day before yesterday I had found myself lamenting a series of misapprehensions about our shared faith. In case you haven’t noticed, a lot of people are very obviously under the impression that the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church is some kind of special club or camarilla for people who do these things to kids. A more moderate view is that even if she is not literally a pedophile trade union fallen on hard times—fewer people contributing dues and so on—clearly a good number of her paid-up members have an iron in that particular fire and that an even larger perhaps ultimately unknowable number, while not exactly going in for that sort of thing themselves, nevertheless find themselves possessed of an inexplicable fondness for that species of criminal comparable to my own inexplicable affection for art forgers.
Everything I have written so far assumes that at least some curial officials recognize this state of affairs and find it a matter worthy of regret. But this is in fact a rather large assumption, more a private hunch of mine than anything. It could of course be that I am wrong. In this case, I wish someone would tell us. Say, “We just don’t think doing these kinds of things, especially when they involve children is that big of a deal. Obviously we recognize at some instinctive level that some of you—both the ones who pay and pray and all of that jazz and the horrified secular onlookers—don’t share this view. Which is fair. De gustibus. You say ‘potato,’ I say ‘pedophile.’ Agree to disagree.”
Anyway, where was I? When I sat down this morning to write, I thought I was going to unburden myself of some jocund remarks about a recent incident involving seminarians and a Yeti costume. Instead I give the last word to Hamlet:
What is the reason that you use me thus?
I lov'd you ever. But it is no matter.
