Why the panic? Because there were predators about in those days, just as there are today. And just because Jerusalem was the seat of Judaism doesn’t mean a child wouldn’t be raped, killed or sold into slavery. It happened to Joseph.

And now we know it’s happened to thousands of other children by the hands of men the world over who claim to act in Jesus’s name. While that’s horrible, an added horror is that other men – who lay claim to moral leadership, the men for whom the word “sanctimonious” was coined – covered up and defended the crimes.

The Catholic Church’s pederasty scandal has gone global and now coils its tentacles around Josef Ratzinger, a / k / a Pope Benedict XVI. Did he – when he was a cardinal – ignore warnings about a rabidly pederastic priest in Wisconsin, as the New York Times reports? Did he – when he was a bishop in Munich 30 years ago – approve the transfer, rather than the prosecution of pederast priests under his jurisdiction?

There’s a famous story about American political organizer Saul Alinsky. In the 1960s, two Catholic seminarians came to him for advice. They were drawn to the civil rights movement, but their superiors disapproved of priests’ involvement in what the church (wrongly) considered secular social issues. What should they do, they asked?

Mr. Alinsky had a question of his own: Do you want to be a priest or a bishop? If civil rights is important to you, dive into the work, but know your career in the church hierarchy will never advance. If you want to be a bishop – perhaps telling yourself you can do more good once you’ve achieved a position of authority – then forget about the civil rights movement.

I think it’s clear which choice Mr. Ratzinger made. It’s equally clear he hasn’t done any good. This pope is famous for bringing the full force of canon law down on the heads of priest and nuns who oppose his will, especially those who call for a preferential option for the poor and alienated. Communists, he calls them.

If the priests and bishops are not good at policing their own, they are good at message discipline. Ask your parish priest about the church’s sexual abuse scandal. The Vatican line is that yes, sins were committed, but only by a very few bad apples.

This, of course, begs the question of how many molesters have gone unreported. A common feature of the victims’ stories is that they were warned no one would believe them if they turned in the priest. Certainly they had reason to fear being subjected to shame in the small societies of Catholic parishes of the 1960s and 1970s.

For the sake of this brief argument, let’s make the unlikely statement that we have now caught all the guilty priests. Statistically, they may constitute a small percentage of the priesthood, but one need not sodomize a child to share the guilt. There were the bishops who knew about this behavior and shuffled the priests around, rather than turn them over to the authorities as they should have and so the number grows.

There are the priests who work in diocesan administration, handling the paperwork for the transfers – so the number grows. Let’s not minimize the guilt of this latter group. Stop and think about their actions. They knew children were being raped and they obfuscated, shuffled priests and hid the crimes. They bullied the victims’ parents into silence, using the faith and obedience of their flocks as tools against them.

Here in Vermont, then-bishop of Burlington, John Marshall, in the 1970s told Catholic prosecutors that if his priests’ crimes were brought to light, the prosecutors would be guilty of “the sin of scandal.” A school was named for this man recently.

So there were the pederasts, the bishops and the priest administrators. There were also the pastors and associates who served alongside the pedophiles, some of whom probably turned their fellow priests in to the bishops – but not the police. They too, knew and so the number grows still larger.

I’ve known priests all my life. The priests of a diocese are a fraternity, like members of the same police force or a military unit. They know each other very well; their capacity for gossip is unrivaled. Consider the case of Father Robert Trupia, a molester whose predilections were so well known in the diocese of Tuscon, Arizona that other priests referred to him as the “chicken hawk.” What a wonderful inside joke. Ha, ha, ha.

And what of the rank and file? Surely, many have left the church over these scandals, swelling the tide that was already flowing away from the church’s insistence on making itself irrelevant to the concerns of its people. For those who remain, it’s easier to keep blinders on and pretend nothing happened or that it’s all in the past.

Since we began with a gospel, let’s end with one, Matthew, chapter 25: “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do to me.”

© Mark Floegel, 2010

Sunday is also the 66th anniversary of the execution of Franz Jaegerstaetter. Mr. Jaegerstaetter was an Austrian farmer beheaded by German military authorities for refusing to take part in what he considered an unjust war.

Although it’s fun to badmouth Nazis, what was done to Mr. Jaegerstaetter was not unusual for the time. The penalty for desertion was death in armies on both sides of that war and while some avenues of conscientious objection were open, no nation allowed its citizens to disavow the war effort.

Mr. Jaegerstaetter’s actions were based on his religious convictions and while one need not be religious to recognize the evil of the Nazis – or any unjust war – Mr. Jaegerstaetter’s case illustrates the yawning gulf that often opens between preaching and practice.

From accounts of his life, Franz Jaegerstaetter was a typical country youth who sowed his wild oats, got in his share of fistfights, etc. etc. In 1936, he got married, settled down and began a serious investigation of religion and morality.

When the German-Austrian “Anschluss” of 1938 was put to a general vote, Mr. Jaegerstaetter was the only one in his village to oppose it, citing a dream in which he saw a gleaming train that thousands of people ran to board. He heard a voice say, “This train is going to hell.” On waking, he associated the train with Nazism.

So yeah, people probably thought he was a kook. Conscription time came and Franz refused to go. When he cited his faith as the ground of his refusal to fight, he was urged to join up to prevent godless Bolsheviks from destroying European Christianity. (This must have been one of the earliest sightings of “Kill a Commie for Christ.”)

He was offered a place as a non-fighting medic. He refused. He said his objection was not to killing another person in wartime per se, but that any participation on his part would be an admission Hitler’s regime was legitimate and Hitler’s wars were just.

Did Hitler really need Franz Jaegerstaetter’s legitimacy? He already had Goering and Goebbels and von Ribbontrop. Was Jaegerstaetter so grandiose, that he thought the withholding of his consent would matter to anyone? Or is it different? When Jaegerstaetter accepted responsibility for his single grain of sand, did he make it morally impossible for anyone to do less? The Talmud says that someone who saves one life saves the whole world. Perhaps the opposite is also true. Perhaps someone who allows one person to die damns the whole world.

So was Jaegerstaetter Christ-like? In his death, did he accept all the sins of the Germanic people? I don’t think so. The only soul he owned was his own.

His priest and bishop urged him to join the army and fight. They said any citizen who obeyed duly appointed authority was absolved from personal guilt. (Clearly, they had funny ideas about “duly appointed authority.”) Mr. Jaegerstaetter refused. He was asked to think of his family – his wife and four daughters. He wrote: “Many actually believe quite simply that things have to be the way they are. If this should happen to mean they are obliged to commit injustice, then they believe that others are responsible… I am convinced that it is still best that I speak the truth even though it costs me my life.”

And so it did. After the war, American sociologist Gordon Zahn investigated Mr. Jaegerstaetter’s life. The Bishop of Linz, who’d pleaded with Mr. Jaegerstaetter to go along and get along, told Mr. Zahn – even with full awareness of the horrors of the Nazi regime – that Mr. Jaegerstaetter was wrong and that the true heroes were the Catholics who obeyed, joined up, fought, killed and died.

A bishop’s political reality is precarious. The good shepherd, Jesus said, leaves his flock to find the stray sheep. What if the whole flock strays and only one sheep remains in the green pastures by still waters? Surely, the shepherd must chase the strays, but must he also condone the straying?

A German youth who did join – first the Hitler Youth and then the German army – was Josef Ratzinger. Now he is Pope Benedict XVI. In 2007, he beatified Franz Jaegerstaetter, moving him along the path to sainthood. Pope Benedict says he did not espouse Nazi beliefs. He says he joined and served against his will. I believe him. I am in no position to judge his life (or anyone else’s, for that matter).

I will, however, meditate Sunday on my own failings. At what points does my life touch injustice or evil? Modern society is very good at the division of labor. Like an auto assembly line, we all have to contribute just a bit for something to happen, whether that something is good or evil. Just because someone else is more responsible for injustice in our society does not absolve me of my role – even if the bishop says it does. That’s just another reminder not to let anyone do my thinking for me.

© Mark Floegel, 2009