Do as I say, not. . . .

The New York legislature is again debating a change in the state sex-abuse law’s five-year statute of limitations, and guess who is fighting it tooth and nail? A coalition of Catholic and Jewish entities who do not argue that sexual abuse is actually good for children exactly, but rather that it is unfair to burden religious schools with a stricter law than that governing public schools.

If a teacher in the public sector sexually abuses your kid, you have only 90 days to complain formally, compared to five years for parochial schools. In addition, the new law would give people a one-year window to file a complaint based on incidents from any time in the past, undoubtedly triggering an avalanche of lawsuits and millions in damages for the local diocese, which so far has avoided the crippling legal bills seen elsewhere.

Given the hysteria over ‘recovered memories’ and the witch hunts against daycare workers that occurred in the 1980s, I’m almost persuaded by the argument that claims based on 30-year-old incidents ought to be treated with respectful skepticism especially when they make their way into courtrooms.

However, there is a big difference between an accused average citizen or kindergarten teacher and an accused priest or rabbi: power. The power of their offices and the power of the institutions backing them up.

Many a claim against priests went unanswered for decades because no one could fahtom them and because influential bishops could move the sanctified fathers around and protect them from the normal course of justice. There is evidence that a similar dynamic operates around synagogue bigwigs who run into such accusations and can call upon their impressive system of controls to suppress or discredit victims. So it is hardly surprising that only a mature victims’ movement would bring these tragedies into the light of day.

One Catholic representative said the law was designed to bankrupt his church, which is a bit slanderous. But even if it were true, I thought religion was supposed to teach us to face up to our sins and repair the damage we have caused, whatever the cost. If repentance doesn’t hurt, how do we know the sinner will not revert to the errors of his past ways?

Furthermore, given the current Pope’s dogmatic focus on theological purity to the exclusion of all else, I see no reason to trust the institution to weed out future abusers of any sort. His rehabilitation of the Holocaust-denying reactionary bishop, now retracted as an innocent mistake of ignorance, is revealing enough. We pore over his doctrinal beliefs with a magnifying glass, but who cares what he thinks about gas chambers?