Upset at leadership but steadfast in faith
As she is every morning, Angela K. Lee was at St. Cyril of Jerusalem Catholic Church in Encino on Thursday to attend the 7:30 a.m. Mass.
Her presence there says much about how individual Catholics have reacted to the priest sex abuse scandals that have shaken their church. She still believes, and her prayers sought healing for abuse victims and for her church. While saying the rosary after Mass, Lee also prayed for clergy, including Cardinal Roger M. Mahony.
She shared with God her anger at church leaders, especially Mahony, whom she had long admired for his outreach to the marginalized. Now Lee says he mismanaged the cases that resulted in a $660-million settlement between the Los Angeles Archdiocese and abuse victims this week.
But when it comes to faith, the scandal has strengthened her belief, not undermined it. “This heartbreaking episode has taught me how vulnerable we are,” Lee said. “It has taught me once again that we are all sinners in need of God’s redemption and forgiveness.”
Polls indicate that Lee’s reaction mirrors that of many Catholics: They’re disenchanted with church leaders but steadfastly profess faith. Though giving to some dioceses dipped as scandals erupted across the nation, it has rebounded, and Mass attendance remains largely steady, the research shows.
But the discord has caused some to lose their faith. The crisis has also contributed to a change in the way some Catholics perceive priests, who are traditionally viewed as God’s representatives on Earth.
This viewpoint is shifting, according to Dean R. Hoge of the Catholic University of America. He is an expert on the sociology of religion and co-author of a new book, “American Catholics Today.”
“Catholics distinguish between Jesus Christ and the institutional church,” Hoge said. “People are too smart to believe that priests are representatives of God. These are men.”
He characterized today’s young Catholics as well-educated, culturally intelligent and “wide-awake” people. Two students at Loyola Marymount University in Westchester embody that view.
“Personally, I think there needs to be a line between God and the church,” said graduate student Mike Santa Maria, 23. “There is a perfect God, but not a perfect church. If the church truly reflects its people, it must reflect its brokenness as much as its talents and treasures.”
Senior Roxanne Gutierrez, 21, believes that all Catholics, not just priests, may be called to be representatives of God.
The crisis in the church, Hoge said, concerns human beings, not God.
“It’s not Jesus Christ in crisis,” he said. “It’s not the Bible in crisis. It’s the institution and decision-making that’s in crisis. And, we have to repair the damage.”
For some that damage has been severe.
James C. Robertson, now 60 and a party to this week’s settlement, says he was abused by two Catholic brothers at a Gardena high school in the 1960s. He is now an atheist.
“I thought I was worthless,” he said of his youth. “I was a Catholic and concerned about sin when the abuse was happening. But now, the only gift of this was the loss of the religion and its mumbo jumbo and superstition.”
Stories like this break Tara Welsh’s heart.
A member of St. Basil Catholic Church in the mid-Wilshire district who helps priests preside over the 5 p.m. Sunday Mass, Welsh says she doesn’t know any Catholic who isn’t glad that the abuse victims have been vindicated.
“Even with the tremendous support received, they haven’t fully healed,” she said. “Maybe they need to forgive. Maybe that’s the missing component.”
She also feels sympathy for dedicated priests whose calling has been besmirched by the scandal.
“Catholics have such a unique relationship to the priest,” she said. “It’s unlike any other faith -- because we see the priest as the Christ’s representative.”
Parish priests commit their lives to serving people and usually work in parishes assigned by the bishop of their diocese.
The pastoral duties include celebrating Mass and administering sacraments, such as baptism. In traditional church doctrine, the priest acts as the person of Christ -- in persona Christi -- when performing certain rites. For example, during confession, Christ is believed to be speaking through the priest when he absolves someone of sin.
Esther Miller’s spiritual struggle began in her teens, when she was molested by a priest at St. Bridget’s of Sweden in Van Nuys, she said. She had loved the church and thought that if someone God trusted was doing such things to her, she shouldn’t question it.
“I really believed God could have intervened, or he may say, ‘I designed this path for Esther and I am going to let her go through it,’ ” said Miller, 48.
“There was a period of time that I wouldn’t pray, and had to take time out and ask if God still loved me and what path was I to follow,” she said.
Two years ago the path led to Judaism. Miller, whose husband of 10 years is Jewish, converted mainly because she is “going to go back to the very roots of the Catholic Church.”
Miller, also a plaintiff in the case, added: “Oddly enough, the abuse and its trauma gave me a platform to get more faith and a newer, fresher faith.”
Lorenzo Najera, 42, was molested from the age of 12 to 17 at Santa Teresita Catholic Church in Boyle Heights, he said. For years afterward, he couldn’t enter a church. “I used to feel that God could not be talking through these hypocrites,” he said. “How could God speak through such evil people?”
But Najera, another plaintiff, still attends a Catholic church. Although he said he considered Protestant denominations, “I was born Catholic -- been Catholic all my life.”
In some families, the abuse scandals have led to divergent beliefs. Mary Ferrell, 59, of Lakewood was molested by a priest beginning at age 7 while studying catechism at Mary Star of the Sea in San Pedro, she said. She did not give her children a religious upbringing, but today her two daughters are active in Protestant churches, she said.
When Ferrell was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease not long ago, one daughter came to her, deeply concerned about her mother’s spiritual salvation.
“She was crying,” Ferrell recalled. “My response was, ‘I believe that I was a good person. I did good things for other people. If there is a God, I should therefore be going to heaven, whether I formally go to church or not.’ ”
Such reactions are not surprising to Father Thomas Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.
“I am amazed that anybody comes back” to the Catholic Church who’s gone through “this kind of trauma,” he said.
Addressing concerns like those voiced by Ferrell’s daughter, he said: “No victim is going to lose salvation because they left the Catholic Church because they were abused. God is not crazy. He is a very loving, kind father who is weeping for his children.”
Catholics make up 23% of the nation’s adult population.
Donations to local parishes have remained steady, but contributions to dioceses have dipped in recent years, according to a study by Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research on the Apostolate.
The study found that 38% of respondents donated to their diocese in 2002, when the scandals broke, but that the figure fell to 29% by 2005. Donations have since returned to levels before the scandals became widely known.
The study was based on national telephone polls and partially sponsored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Also, a Le Moyne College/Zogby Poll in March found that 70% of Catholics responding agreed that “the U.S. bishops are doing a good job leading the Catholic Church.”
For some, these are signs that the church will persevere.
Lee, the parishioner at St. Cyril’s, noted the church had survived many trials over 2,000 years. “But many saints and priests of various orders -- like Benedictine, Dominican and Jesuits -- gave their lives to rebuild the church,” she said. “The faithful, priests and lay Catholics, will rebuild the church triumphantly.”
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