I’ve been called a traitor, a zero, and worse for daring to say that the Marine Corps deserves support for vigorously investigating war crime allegations stemming from incidents at Haditha and Hamdania. But as I examine my motives, I realize it has something to do with my personal feelings as a Catholic about the Catholic Church and its approach to various sex scandals in recent years.
One natural response of faithful Catholics to this scandal has been to minimize the matter, declaring it an exaggeration, the product of media hype-scrutiny of the Church and hostility to its message. This counter-charge is surely true in many cases. Yet blaming the messenger ignores the real source of these scandals: the offenders themselves. Various officials in the Church made the suppression of the scandal a higher priority than justice. The faithful in some cases acquiesced. The few would be sacrificed for the many. Numerous bishops paid victims money from the Sunday collections in the form of confidential settlements, while they reassigned offending priests to other parishes, where they could victimize others and continue to discredit the Church, one soul at a time. Yet the secret remained hidden; the Church was free from scandal, for a time.
These leaders desired to keep the Church’s reputation intact by hiding the truth from the faithful, but in the process they hindered justice, allowed the problem to worsen, and ultimately set up the Church for cataclysmic reputational harm when all of these scandals broke at once. Some supporters of the Marine Corps ask that it treats something similarly scandalous–allegations of atrocities against innocent civilians in Iraq–with the same approach that the Catholic Church employed to it shame–an approach that prioritizes the institution’s reputation over justice. We are told that these are Marines, after all, and no honorable Marine would do such a thing. Who are you going to believe, a Marine or an Iraqi? A real Marine, a grunt, or a JAG REMF? Marines, like priests, are human beings. They can submit to weakness, frustration, anger, and temptation like anyone else. It is a profound form of ignorance and wishful thinking that so quickly dismisses claims of atrocities, especially during a counterinsurgency.
In retrospect, the best response to scandals for the Catholic Church would have been for the Church to quickly and openly investigate these offenses, identify the perpetrators, and dispatch them to civil authorities for punishment. Today the Church is far more cognizant of the risk of child sexual abuse and far more aggressive in rooting out offenders from the clergy. The Marine Corps, to its credit, also knows that any gain to its reputation from suppressing allegations of atrocities will be short-term, at best. It knows that a morally comprimised military will command public support in neither America nor among the Iraqi people. Yet their supporters outside the ranks persists in questioning this informed and far-sighted judgment by the most highly ranked Marine leaders.
The defenses of the accused Marines have the same air of unreality as the defenses raised in favor of priests accused in various sex scandals. After all,, the vast majority of priests have lived honorable lives of humility, hard work, and obscurity. In the American Church, at least one expert estimated that fewer than 1.7% of priests were guilty of any kind of sexual misconduct with minors, of which a much smaller number were genuine pedophiles. Yet the fact that the vast majority of priests and clergy are decent does not mean that misconduct does not occur. We know it did.
It is all the more important to discover if allegations are either genuine or bogus so that the wrongly accused can vindicate themselves and so that the Church as a whole can have some confidence in its leadership, the clergy. So long as scandals go unpunished and unpublicized, everyone that participates in the suppression of the truth bears some measure of guilt. In Hamdania as in Boston, these august institutions owe it to themselves, their reputation, and their supporters to investigate and punish wrongdoers who have abused their authority.
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