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	Silva: Priestly Life Changed by Sex Abuse Crisis The Catholic New World [United States] Downloaded December 6, 2004 Father Robert J. Silva, president of the National Federation of Priests’ Councils, was busy with the federation’s usual work of representing priests on issues from pay and health care to spirituality and serving on the U.S. bishops’ committee on priestly life and ministry, when news of the clerical sexual abuse scandal hit in 2002. Suddenly, in addition to his public duties, he ended up as the public face of the priesthood, fielding 50 media calls the day the Boston Globe broke the story. At the same time, the council had to help accused priests defend themselves and advocate for their rights. Silva, ordained in 1965 for the Diocese of Stockton, Calif., spoke about how the scandal has affected priests with staff writer Michelle Martin. The Catholic New World: What does the federation do? Father Robert J. Silva: The National Federation of Priest councils has a two-fold purpose: to represent the priests of the country in some way, and then to assist in discerning the pastoral mission that we face. It does that by pulling together into a loose federation all the presbyteral councils who choose to affiliate with us (Councils from 126 out of 186 U.S. diocese participate.) We’re going to take up issues that deal with the way a priest lives, his humanity, his spirituality. Then I represent the priests to the media. Usually, the media are pretty good. For all the tragic things they are accused of saying and causing, they usually do pretty well. BBC, CBS, NBC, CNN, we’ve had them all in here with the scandal. TCNW: You deal with priests and media. What don’t they understand about each other? FRJS: The priests are afraid of the media, because the priests have a perception that the media sets the agenda and misrepresents them, and so they’re afraid and defensive whenever the media comes around. I don’t particularly buy that. I’ve learned that’s just not true. For example, when CBS sent a crew here to film in the middle of the crisis, everybody on the team was a Roman Catholic, and four out of the five went to Catholic schools. They would say to me, "Father, we hate this story, but we’ve got to do it." The problem is not that the agenda is set by the media. We set our own agenda and the media does its best to represent it. Although there are times when you will get a contentious reporter. TCNW: Are there things the reporters just don’t quite understand? FRJS: Yes, because they’re not theologians. TCNW: What happened when the crisis started? FRJS: When the crisis came, the very day the Boston Globe broke the story, the phone just started ringing. It was questions like, "What do you think of this? What do you think are the causes of this? Why did this happen? How could a priest do a thing like this?" I was stunned. I had no idea this was going on out there. I had dealt with cases in the ’80s and thought we were through that. The fact that we had to come back at it was very disturbing. We want to support the bishops in the task they have of leading, so at the beginning, the question was, where are the bishops? And how do I support them if at least some of them really haven’t been doing the job appropriately? There were some dilemmas to try to resolve. We had to move very carefully, because most priests are very afraid of the press. But the first instinct of a good priest is to take care of the victims and survivors. That was a big thing on my part: How do I reach out to them? Then I’m sitting in the chair where I’ve got the job of helping to defend some of those priests who were themselves perpetrators. And I have to start saying, well, these men have rights, too, and we need to be respecting those rights. I had to be very careful how I approached it all. TCNW: How has the crisis and the scandal changed priestly life? FRJS: Priests are much less free to engage in certain kinds of relationships. They’ll be much, much more careful with children. Open rectories—putting a teenager in the front office in the evening, when Father and the teenager are the only ones there? Wrong, absolutely wrong. It jeopardizes that young person and it jeopardizes the priest. Altar servers—the priest used to have a special relationship with the young people who were serving Mass. Can’t do that any more. In the last two parishes where I was the pastor, we formed teams of high school and college students to do the forming of new altar servers, because while I wanted to stick my nose in and be around, I didn’t want to be there by myself with the children. Sometimes, you walk into a schoolyard, and it’s like the Red Sea. It separates and you walk through. You can tell parents have told their children, be careful with Father. And they have to. It’s absolutely imperative that they do. What it’s done to the priests’ self-image? I think it’s really shaken priests. In the old model—the priest as one who is set apart, one who is configured to Christ the priest ontologically, a sacred person—there was a certain amount of reverence that people had for the priest. That’s gone. Big time. Even priests will say, "For me that’s not a model that works anymore. I don’t want to be separate and set apart that way." That whole sense of yourself as doing this particular work that has a sacred and infinite facet to it, it’s shaken. The other thing is, you’re always wondering, "What do these people think?" Especially when you’re sitting in an airport and you hear some guy saying, "There’s one of those blankety-blank-blanks." TCNW: Do you travel with your collar on? FRJS: I don’t anymore. I did one time coming out of New York, and man, I got the daylights scared out of me. There was a guy there who was saying, "There’s one of those blankety-blanks," and I thought, "Oh God, I’m going to get beat up." I’ve never worn my collar when I’m flying again. But some priests will say, "I’m not going to give in to that kind of stuff. You should be proud of who you are and take the beating." I’m proud of who I am, but I don’t know that I want to take the beating. It’s like putting a dollar bill on the desk of the teacher and then having the teacher walk out of the classroom. Why tempt? TCNW: You’ve talked about the "cultic identity" of the priest versus a more ministerial, pastoral model, and you seem to favor the latter. Why? FRJS: I don’t think the cultic model is wrong, but I don’t think it should be emphasized. It creates a clerical culture, and there’s an elitism to it. In the self-perception of the priests, if they’re not careful, they begin to see themselves as different from the laity. In some ways they are, of course, but I mean experientially, holding themselves outside of the laity, and in some ways above and beyond the laity. There’s a certain reality there. The sacrament does imprint a character and it does imprint an ontologic change, if you want to use Scholastic terms. But that’s Scholastic philosophy and theology. To have a priest identify himself that way specifically? I was trained as a psychologist. I have a problem trying to form somebody’s identity around mystical kinds of understandings of the reality they’re supposed to be identifying with. We’re human beings. Our identity has to be somehow grounded in the reality of how we interact with others. That’s more helpful. For example, if you take the cultic the model as a base, and you have a priest who abuses a child, it is God who is doing this. What do you mean you’re configured in this way to Christ? You mean, in an ontological way, I am configured to Christ, but I can still perpetrate this horrible evil? It’s a denial of the Christ that’s in you. Yes, but if that’s the perception out there, the person that’s being abused sees this alter Christus, this other Christ, abusing him. And the one who sees himself as this other Christ is going to have a psychological dilemma the likes of which is almost irreparable. We need to be very careful when we start messing around with philosophical realities as a foundation for talking about identity. TCNW: If child sexual abuse has always happened, why did it become such a scandal now? FRJS: It started in the late 1960s because of two things. Number one, children became human beings with rights. Number two is the women’s movement. The women’s movement sensitized us, and when women began to be able to speak out, and to speak out in places that made a difference, they were able to challenge a lot of the old notions, even legal notions. That’s made us very sensitive to the children, and more sensitive to the issue of child sexual abuse. Also, what people are seeing is a result of what came out of the (Second Vatican) council. People are claiming the church as their own. People are saying, "I am a baptized Catholic. I am a member of the church. It’s my church. It is not only my right, but my responsibility to speak." TCNW: Is the church moving toward a more pastoral model? FRJS: There’s a whole slew of folks coming along now who are saying, "The heck with that, I’m going back to the way it was." I think it’s a natural kind of swing, After every council—after every action, there’s a reaction. Were there abuses immediately following the council? There certainly were. But that doesn’t mean the council was no good. What they’re looking for is more security. They’re saying, you can’t make the priesthood simply a function. And I would say that too. The priesthood is definitely not just a function or a role in the church. The notion of "priest" existed long before Christianity. There’s something about priests that relates the concrete finite world with a world beyond itself, which gives people a sense of hope for their lives, that there’s more than this.
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