McCloskey's manipulative behavior with vulnerable women was certainly, in hindsight, telegraphed in things he wrote and in a series of interviews done for an ultraconservative presentation on marriage preparation for Catholics. For the discerning, red flags were popping everywhere (and YouTube provides abundant examples), but the sirens are blaring and lights are flashing in one particularly weird segment that can be found here:Further,. . . You see, he explains, in those regions of the world, while feminism has made "inroads," it is nothing like it is here in the United States. So that's why these truly Catholic men who "cannot find a good Catholic American woman who they would feel comfortable with" go searching for properly submissive women elsewhere. While those same men may not have looked hard enough around the home turf, often American women they find attractive are interested in careers, he asserts, not staying home and raising children.
That is the language and thinking of someone who became the face of one of Pope John Paul II's favorite organizations. McCloskey was a perfect model of what the late and hastily sainted pope saw as "heroic priesthood."
We are paying dearly for all of that right now. The peculiarities that came with John Paul's notions of priesthood — his insistence on rebuilding a cult separate and apart from ordinary people and the utter lack of judgment he showed in choosing his models for that project — became deeply woven into the fabric of an already corrupted clerical culture. What he advanced actually reinforced the worst characteristics of the culture.My regular correspondent had a similar take:It is not the sins of the individuals that should now be the focus. All humans fail; we are all capable of deception and worse. It is the institutional corruption that they came to represent. The failings hidden for years by the institution, in the case of McCloskey, Williams, Maciel and others. The power of money, in the case of Maciel and, more recently, of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, to buy them cover in the Vatican. The refusal on John Paul II's part, time and again, to listen to serious and credible allegations against Maciel and other abusers. He set the template in this era of scandal for how church leaders should proceed.
As you have noted previously, in the Mafia and other corrupt organisations they have something on everybody---that pay-off you accepted, that weekend getaway you expensed---and if it furthers the organisation's interests it will be exposed and punished at some point. This does not alter the fact that such activities are the normal way of doing business, and said exposure and punishment do not in any way signal a change.As I've expanded the scope of this blog, I've asked myself more and more why figures like Bernardin and Law rose as they did -- but before that, there was Spellman, who spent years as a confidant to Cardinal Pacelli.Whistle-blowers in such organisations tend to be people who got on somebody's wrong side and can no longer count on being protected, going forward. Indignation ensues, not always very convincingly. The later history of Eliot Ness suggests to me that "charismatic change agents" harbour character traits which have a darker side. Deeper cultural change has to take place in the organisation as a whole, or history continues to repeat itself.
