Bishops Just Hope to Divert Attention by Sacking Keating
Maybe it should've been on the sports page instead of the front page -- "Church 1, State 0" -- but still, there it was, at the top of the news in my Sunday paper: "Clergy Abuse Panel's Chief to Step Down."
Watergate gave us the Saturday Night Massacre.
Now, Priestgate has given us the Sunday Morning Mass Massacre.
Thirty years ago, in a moment of high principle and low politics, the attorney general of the United States resigned rather than obey President Nixon's order to fire the special Watergate prosecutor who was boring his way into the White House's wiretapping and cover-up secrets.
This weekend, in Priestgate, a former prosecutor was forced to resign as head of the Catholic Church panel trying to ferret out the truth about priestly sex abuse and its cover-ups.
Frank Keating, a Catholic and an ex-G-man who became governor of Oklahoma, was doing what he was supposed to do, running a panel of lay Catholics enlisted to keep an eye on how well the church was doing in stopping priests' sexual abuse of parishioners:
He opened his mouth and spoke his mind.
Well! We certainly can't have that.
Keating had Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony in mind -- among other churchmen -- when he ruminated last week to my colleague Larry Stammer about the "stunning, startling" resistance to coming clean that he'd been encountering. He spoke about an "underside" of his church's leadership, of "very clay feet," and then said this: "To act like La Cosa Nostra and hide and suppress, I think, is very unhealthy. Eventually it will all come out."
The only thing to come out so far is Keating. He resigned, a word which in this context evidently means "jumped or was pushed," because Keating had said through a spokesman that he stands by what he said. So "resigned" means the bishops and the National Review Board, created by the bishops to help overhaul the church's corporate image, wanted to dump Keating.
(Corporate language like this may sound like real English, but it isn't. When a company says its CEO is resigning to "spend more time with his family," what it often really means is that he'll be getting to know his defense lawyer very, very well.)
Keating is a politician, and I'm sure he knew that you can't use the Mafia and the Roman Catholic Church in the same sentence without making headlines. And what followed the headlines was the drippy public hand-wringing, the moralizing, the deploring. How unhelpful of Gov. Keating. How counterproductive. How ungentlemanly. And him a Catholic, too.
