Sainte-Chappelle, Paris. Taken by the author.There is a circle of purgatory reserved for people who blog about popular TV shows. Most TV shows aren’t worth the attention they get, or the amount of effort required to write intelligently about them. But I have decided to go there today.
On the March 9 broadcast of Saturday Night Live, comedian Pete Davidson decided, as he often does, that snarky controversialism is a good substitute for funny. In a Weekend Update segment about rapper R. Kelly, Davidson joked, “If you support the Catholic Church, isn’t that the same thing as being an R. Kelly fan? I don’t really see a difference, only one’s music is significantly better.”
Setting aside the question of whether R. Kelly’s music is really better than Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and the African American Spirituals, all of which have been adapted for the Mass, let’s address the big question.
It is a fair one, in the sense that a lot of people share the same opinion. Why do people keep going to Catholic churches after all of the sex scandals? Isn’t that simply lending personal support to systematic sex abuse?
But to say this is to make a mistake, one most easily characterized as what I call the lumping error. The lumping error is the assumption that people you think of as “the other” are all alike. While your side may be nuanced and complicated, the other side is lumped together as simple, monolithic, and predictable.
It’s an error people make all the time. Ask a Democrat what he thinks about Democrats, and he will paint a picture of a diverse, complex group that agrees on many things, but disagrees about a few as well. But ask him what he thinks about Republicans and he will paint a picture of a pro-gun, religiously fundmantalist, anti-woman, anti-labor, anti-environmentalist tribe with very little internal dissent.
This tendency to lump people we don’t like into simplistic categories leads down unfortunate paths. People we know and identify with may make mistakes for complicated reasons, but people we don’t know are simply seen as bad characters. A friend caught doing something wrong is “a good person” who “meant well” and “should have known better”— more a disappointment than a bad person. But someone we don’t know who stumbles is just a “bad character” who broke the rules and needs to be punished. It is this tendency that explains why white collar criminals get short sentences in minimum security prisons, and drug addicts spend decades in federal penitentiaries.
A good example is Bill Clinton. For Democrats he was a person who did good things but happened to get caught in a bad act. That’s judging by situation. For Republicans he was a lawbreaker, liar, and philanderer who deserved to be in jail. That’s judging by character.
It isn’t hard to see that judging by situation is fairer than judging by character. To judge a person’s situation, one has to be acquainted with the facts — to know something about the person’s upbringing, background beliefs, culture, and underlying pressures like money problems or stressors. Anyone who wants to evaluate wrongdoing in a fair way would want to know these things. The alternative, to say, “He’s just a thug,” or “She’s just a spoiled rich girl,” or “She’s a drug addict, that’s all” seems shallow and unethical in comparison.
Davidson, who I think at one point hinted at being a lapsed Catholic, nonetheless falls into the lumping error. He takes the role of an outsider, making broad judgments about the other side, without nuance. He lumps all Catholics together, assuming every churchgoer willfully overlooks sex scandals in the Church, and for the same reasons.
Are there nuances here? Of course. First, let’s not forget that R. Kelly is a person, and the Catholic Church is an institution. Although it is often personally satisfying to equate one with the other, it is seldom helpful to do so. Some American soldiers committed atrocities during the Vietnam War. That doesn’t mean that all Americans today, or all Vietnam veterans, ought to be held accountable for that. Many Southerners opposed racial desegregation in the Sixties, but that doesn’t mean all of them did. (In fact, if all of them did, there would have been no progress at all. But there was.) We don’t generally hold entire groups responsible for the actions of one, or some, of its members.
None of this is to say that we should ignore past atrocities. But it does suggest an important point — responsibility for a crime rests primarily with the person who committed it. As such, responsibility for the crimes of Catholic priests resides primarily with the priests who committed the crimes, and secondly with the leaders of the Church who willfully ignored the problem. There is some tertiary guilt that goes to people who should have been aware of what was going on but ignored it because they could not believe an ordained priest would do such a thing.
But putting all those together, that is still a small number of people. It may be a significant percentage of priests, but when you add in the entire Catholic congregation of over a billion people, it is a fairly small number. I have been going to Catholic churches all my life, and I have never met a Catholic, priest, or layperson who I honestly thought was covering up a sex abuse case. I don’t think I am alone. Most of the people who attend weekly Mass have been as ignorant of the abuse that went on as people outside the church have been.
Although lumpers like Davidson would like to have it otherwise, the vast majority of churchgoing Catholics are just as appalled at sexual abuse as anyone else, if not more. Ask them, and they will give you many reasons for continuing to attend Mass, but none of their answers will include a willful approval of what the Church did.
Most of us continue to go because we continue to believe in the dogma of the Church. Beliefs don’t suddenly become false because members of the Church commit serious crimes, any more than the principles of the Constitution cease to be valid because a group of American generals napalmed a Vietnamese village in 1968.
There is a lot more to the Catholic Church than sexually deviant priests. A lot more. I give money to the Catholic Church, and these days I worry a little about that fact, but I am fairly closely connected with the church groups I give to and have a fair amount of confidence that the money is being used the right way. I do not have a hundred percent confidence. But I don’t see any organization on earth that I could give to with 100% confidence, so in that respect, the Church is no different from any other charity.
This should not be seen as letting the Church off the hook. The last time an issue of corruption came up in the news, our church pastor responded obliquely by saying “the Church is wounded” and needs our help. While this is an acknowledgment, it is not what I and lay Catholics are looking for. I don’t care if the Church is wounded. I want the Church to fix the problem and stop describing it as a tragedy. It is not a tragedy. It is a crime that a group of evil people perpetrated. As in any crime, I expect the perpetrators to be punished, and the situation that caused it to be rectified.
For people like Pete Davidson, it would be preferable that churchgoers like me stop going to church and stop sending the Church money, allowing the Church to die out completely. But this ignores the real problem. Allowing the Church to go away won’t end sex abuse. It won’t help the victims. And it is a disservice to the people who are Catholics and had nothing to do with this whatsoever.
A billion Catholics can’t be exterminated or made to walk away from their faith. I, for one, refuse to walk away from my faith because a priest chose to sexually molest a child. Such an action would be irrational and ludicrous. It is accepting Pete Davidson’s claim completely. That all Catholics are the same, and that every person who walks into a church on Sunday is a child molester. It implies there is no moral difference between a person who commits a grave sin and a person who is part of that same community. It implies that organizations are monolithic, and that guilt does not lie mainly (if not solely) with the person who commits the crime. I don’t know what the solution to sex abuse is. But blaming innocent people for the acts of the guilty is definitely not it.
There is much good to be rescued from the Catholic faith. One of the main teachings of the Catholic Church, one I very strongly resonate with, is that human society is fallen. Humans were created by God and are thus good, but since our creation we have become corrupted, partly by our choice but also through human nature, which is necessarily imperfect. Religion is the method of extracting the good from the corruption and fashioning a new, more perfect human.
The Catholic Church needs to set the situation right, at least as right as it can. This can best be done by those people who still go to church and are not part of the sin. Those people, who Pete Davidson thinks are indistinguishable from the fans of R. Kelly, are the Church’s best chance of getting things right, much as the firefighters who are willing to get closest to the fire are most likely to extinguish the conflagration once and for all.