Where’s Greeley When We Need Him?
Father Andrew Greeley’s last appearance as a Sun-Times columnist was the morning of Halloween. Going away wasn’t his idea. Mark Hornung, editor of the editorial pages, told us, “It was time for some new and different voices.”
In due course the Philadelphia Inquirer located Greeley and asked him to write something. Because Greeley appreciates a Chicago audience at least as much as a national one, he wanted this commentary to run locally as well. The Tribune wasn’t interested; the Daily Southtown was. The piece elaborated on what he’d told Ahern.
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Greeley did not make too much of this. A Tribune editorial had commented that “as has been widely noted, there is more than a little irony in the fact that this charge has been leveled against Bernardin. He was the first American bishop to wake from the hierarchy’s collective slumber on the issue of clergy sexual abuse, the first to recognize it as an untreated cancer that was costing his church in dollars, members and faith.”
Wages of Sin
Andrew Greeley wasn’t irritated only by the Sun-Times. He appeared prominently–along with Steven Cook and Cardinal Bernardin–on the CNN special Fall From Grace that aired November 14. But when Bernardin and Greeley were interviewed early last summer they knew nothing of Cook. Neither did reporter Bonnie Anderson. Cook’s harrowing memory was still unknown then even to himself.
“Just as something demonic hates the innocence of the unborn, and Him from whose hand they come,” wrote Father Charles Fiore, a Dominican priest from Madison, Wisconsin, in the conservative Catholic newspaper the Wanderer, “so there is something Satanic which speaks to destroy the innocent joy and trusting vivacity of the children, the hope and assurance of the future.”
Victor, author of a recent book called Satanic Panic, and Jason Berry, whose book Lead Us Not Into Temptation described in detail the Chicago archdiocese’s attempts to squelch accusers of priests (two families were even sued for libel), look at the subject of repressed memory through very different eyes. Victor, for example, admired the highly skeptical cover story on repressed memory in last week’s Time. Berry much preferred the cover story in U.S. News & World Report, which told the tale of a 38-year-old professor who abruptly recalled being molested by a counselor at a summer camp he’d attended as a boy. The professor tracked down the counselor and, according to the article, captured a confession on tape.
As for hypnosis, he read from a paper by a University of Victoria psychologist, Stephen Lindsay, that’s going to be presented at Clark University: “Although hypnosis can dramatically increase the amount of information people report about past events, there is a wealth of evidence documenting that the increase is often as great–and sometimes greater–for inaccurate recollections as for accurate ones.”
