People will not welcome Emily Yoffe’s allegation in Slate that Fr. Robert Drinan, the congressman-priest who became the spiritual father of pro-choice Catholicism, once assaulted her:
Several years earlier, my family had worked for the election of our congressman, Father Robert Drinan, an anti-Vietnam War, pro-choice priest. He was in town for a fundraiser or town meeting, and I went. Afterward he offered me a ride to the subway. (You’d think I would have learned.) He was in his 50s, and as he drove we chatted about college. We got to where he was letting me off, he turned off the engine, and he began jabbering incoherently about men and women. Then he lunged, shoving his tongue in my mouth while running his hands over my breasts and up and down my torso. It seems like the set-up for a joke, a Jewish woman being molested by a Jesuit. As we tussled, I had probably the most naïve thought of my life: “How could this be happening, he’s a priest!”
As I shoved him off and opened the car door to get out, I saw I had left a smear of my pink lipstick on his clerical collar. Again, I told no one. It was embarrassing, revolting, and I had no desire to make accusations against a congressman, especially one I admired. [ . . . ]
As we’ve seen too many times, coming forward in a case like that opens a woman up to character evisceration. Father Drinan died in 2007, and I’m aware that I’ll be assailed for besmirching the memory of a distinguished man.
The state of Massachusetts, where the alleged incident took place, prosecutes such actions as crimes of indecent assault and battery. Those convicted are put on the registry of sex offenders, which of course bears with it a very significant stigma.
Drinan’s family has replied with the following statement, “We find it odd that anyone would come forward with this allegation decades later when our uncle is dead and in no position to defend himself.” A fair enough point, perhaps, but then victims hardly bear a responsibility to carry their assailants’ secrets to the grave.
June 21st, 2012 | 5:50 pm
For priests and politicians, there is no correlation between political persuasion and propensity for sexual misconduct. It’s sad that it’s so pervasive.
June 21st, 2012 | 7:07 pm
Joe: I’m afraid the same is true for men at large, if the numbers of those sexually abused by family members and friends are true. So shameful.
June 21st, 2012 | 7:42 pm
One wonders if Drinan made unwanted advances to young women in his own family. Re-reading the neice’s statement with this in mind, things begin to fall in place.
June 21st, 2012 | 8:04 pm
This victim is to be commended for her courage for speaking up about being sexually abused. And yes, it takes a long time for child abuse victims to be able to even speak of it.
We hope that others who have knowledge or may have been harmed by Fr. Robert Drinan, will contact the police, a therapist, or a support group. That is the best way to expose wrongdoing, protect others and start healing.
Judy Jones, SNAP Midwest Associate Director, 636-433-2511
snapjudy@gmail.com
(SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, is the world’s oldest and largest support group for clergy abuse victims.
SNAP was founded in 1988 and has more than 12,000 members. Despite the word “priest” in our title, we have members who were molested by religious figures of all denominations, including nuns, rabbis, bishops, and Protestant ministers and increasingly, victims who were assaulted in a wide range of institutional settings like summer camps, athletic programs, Boy Scouts, etc. Our website is SNAPnetwork.org).
June 21st, 2012 | 8:31 pm
This victim is to be commended for her courage for speaking up about being sexually abused.
What if she is not telling the truth? Is it more believable because Fr. Drinan was “an anti-Vietnam War, pro-choice priest”? What if she is misremembering something that must have happened 35 years ago? There are incidents from my childhood (not of abuse, thankfully) that other family members give accounts of utterly different from what I remember.
June 21st, 2012 | 8:35 pm
We will see if the Boston Globe, Drinan’s hometown newspaper and supporter of his numerous congressional campaigns, gives this story the coverage it deserves. Methinks not…he was their kind of priest, ideologically ‘correct’ on all their favorite issues.
June 21st, 2012 | 10:28 pm
Thus my comment Publius.
Clerical sex abusers and politicians who engage in sexual misconduct come in all political persuasions. There is no correlation between propensity and politics. Those who search for that correlation are saying more about themselves and their own priorities than the cleric or politician. As to John Edwards or Mark Sanford, I do not care who is the Republican and who is the Democrat. I do not care if Weakland or Maciel would be “progressive” or “conservative.”
Methinks those who attempt to see a correlation between a political belief and sexual misconduct are searching for schaude
June 22nd, 2012 | 1:02 am
[...] Allegations of Sexual Assault Against Fr. Robert Drinan - Matthew Schmitz, First Things [...]
June 22nd, 2012 | 4:51 am
[...] in a message to world leaders at the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development.A woman has claimed that the late Fr Robert Drinan, a Jesuit who served as a US Congressman, sexually assaulted [...]
June 22nd, 2012 | 9:11 am
No “victim is to be commended for her courage for speaking up about being sexually abused” unless the incident is true. In this hair-trigger, sexual-totalitarian age of hysteria I automatically side with the accused. Like Christ in John 8, I stand with the adulteress regardless of her guilt and stare down the mob.
Luckily, our legal system (still) does, too, under the venerable concept of innocent until proven guilty. We tend to skip over that complication when the crime is salacious enough, as Mrs. Jones — and seemingly her entire snappy organization — does above. Drinan’s family points out that natural skepticism and common logic conveniently vanish when the accusation is sufficiently sordid: why is Yoffe making this public to the nation five years after his death and thirty-five years after the incident? Not only is the accused conveniently deceased, the statute of limitations has lapsed, so her destruction of a man’s reputation comes at no cost to her.
Drinan was a disgrace to the priesthood and an example of the inappropriate mixture of church and state, so brazen and anti-Catholic that he set a precedent the Magisterium used to discourage all clerics from public office. Maybe he was a dirty old man of the cloth too. We used to restrain seedy behavior by shaming such people and/or kicking their butts outside the jurisdiction of the law. By making every awkward advance a capital crime we have turned the legal system into a cudgel favoring, indeed encouraging, accusation.
Most young women will receive unwanted attention in their lives. We don’t discourage creepy and essentially innocuous behavior by subjecting it to the high standards of legal proof. In the absence of such standards here on the internet, accusation becomes a summary instrument more powerful than the punishment of the guilty — as many good priests (or every good priest, insofar as they are stereotyped as predators now), Duke Lacrosse players, and other falsely accused men know. “Which office do I go to get my reputation back?”
The bottom line is this. We have become a nation of oversensitive wimps, unable to withstand another’s sin through our own virtuousness and predilection for forgiveness. The reason Yoffe didn’t bring the incident to light was because it was a different time, before instant mass-communication, easy accusation and over-sharing, when we withstood the petty assaults of fellow sinners rather than seeking the sinner’s comprehensive condemnation. Justice is the Lord’s, not the mob’s. When we are sinned against, we don’t whip up public frenzy, we turn the other cheek. That doesn’t mean we tolerate the spread of evil! It means we become strong enough to absorb and transform the slings and arrows of life, through the power of Christ, into something good. This late addendum to a man’s obituary is nothing good. It is scandal in the original sense of the word. And Yoffe needs to get some holy perspective more than Drinan needs to be retroactively punished.
Matthew
June 22nd, 2012 | 12:34 pm
Joe,
You misunderstood what I wrote. The Boston Globe took the lead in pursuing the clergy sex abuse scandal in Boston, in part out of a desire to silence their nemisis, Cardinal Law. As of this moment, they are not reporting the Drinan story, and I’m not sure they will. My point was in regards to media bias, not whether Repubs or Dems are more likely to engage in this conduct.
June 22nd, 2012 | 12:45 pm
Matthew King –
“We should be careful to get out of an experience all the wisdom that is in it — not like the cat that sits on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot lid again — and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.” – Mark Twain
Seems to me Christ averted a rush to judgment; that’s not the same thing as ‘siding with the accused’.
June 22nd, 2012 | 12:56 pm
Well, I can relate to saying nothing for years. I’m in my late 50s and when I was 12 I was molested once, briefly by my family physician, which utterly, irrevocably changed my life. He’s dead now too, and when I think about what he did, and how it affected my life, it makes me very angry. But it took me years to even consider telling someone official about it, and by then he was dead. I can’t think of a good reason, at this point, for telling. I do wonder if he did it to anyone else. Telling would hurt his family, it might hurt my family, and it might not do me any good either. And he isn’t going to hurt anyone else any more.
But I can certainly understand the desire to tell. I would like to tell, especially if I thought it would do some good. Maybe this woman has the same need, and believes it will give her some healing. I’d like to believe telling my story would give me some healing, but in my case, I doubt it.
At any rate, waiting years to tell is not surprising to me. I completely understand it, and I understand telling as well as not telling.
June 22nd, 2012 | 1:09 pm
Actually speaking, the attitudes dear Fr. Drinan had towrds responsible political thinking are, even at this late stage, more serious and damaging than those described by Emily Yoffee. Much more presecutable, damaging and taking of life….and continue to this today.
June 22nd, 2012 | 1:12 pm
Matthew, I would agree with much of what you say but we don’t turn the other cheek when someone comes at us with a knife, or with the intent to rape. Context. I agree wholeheartedly that all good priests (which is most of them) are secondary victims of the abusers. I believe a lesson to take away from this is that abusers seek any postition which offers access, authority, and privacy. If that’s a church, a school, a daycare center or congressional office they will use it. From what I can see this is not just a Catholic problem but a problem period.
June 22nd, 2012 | 1:41 pm
I don’t agree with everything that Yoffe writes, but Matthew, you just made her point for her. The column cited three unprovoked incidents of molestation or sexual assault on an underage girl or very young woman, and the reasons (always abundant) in each case for saying nothing and letting the issue lie.
But justice is not served when children and the vulnerable withstand “the petty assaults of fellow sinners” and leave the assailant free to continue to offend. Nor is sexual abuse and molestation the sort of crime to which you can simply turn the other cheek and learn to forgive and forget. It haunts and it wounds, and even for those who do forgive, it leaves deep scars.
The horrors that have unfolded at Penn State abundantly prove the danger of saying nothing. Sandusky is of course innocent until proven guilty, but if a small part of what his many accusers say is true, he is a monster who surrounded himself with a mob of protectors while his young victims were stranded and alone.
Yoffe’s choice to name names and tell her story is difficult. It would have been easier if she had made these allegations decades ago, and she acknowledges that too. But her point is that too many children and men and women do remain silent, for a myriad of reasons. And sometimes coming forward with the truth can prevent more evil from taking place.
I am a young woman and consider myself most fortunate that I was never assaulted before I reached the age of 18. Most of my college roommates were not so fortunate.
There are liars who make baseless accusations. It happens every day, surrounding every sort of crime. I’m not convinced it happens more often in allegations of sexual misconduct. But I do know that sexual predation of the strong on the powerless is a devastatingly common reality, and I believe that we should “speak for those who cannot speak for themselves” rather than rushing to discredit those who do come forward.
Moreover, you must deeply misunderstand Christ and John 8 if you say he would stand against the mob with those who molest the innocent, “regardless of guilt.” I think he would say those predators would be better served with a millstone tied around their necks.
June 22nd, 2012 | 2:30 pm
It is always easy to accuse the dead. Interesting how we pick and choose which priests we are “happy” to hear accusations against. We should all be prayerful, both for the repose of the soul of Father Drinan and for the well-being of his accuser, irrespective of the truth of her allegations.
June 22nd, 2012 | 3:03 pm
David Nickol said:
“What if she is misremembering something that must have happened 35 years ago? There are incidents from my childhood (not of abuse, thankfully) that other family members give accounts of utterly different from what I remember.”
While you may have a point, she was 18 or 19 years old at the time, not 3.
June 22nd, 2012 | 3:25 pm
Dan wrote:
Of course not! My point was, the idea that an awkward-pass-until-proven-predatory is evidence per se of “the intent to rape” is the problem no one considers amid the mass hysterics of accusation. Which is why I said, “That doesn’t mean we tolerate the spread of evil!” Our job is to discriminate between the truly evil and the accidental or innocuous, rather than allowing the accuser to make those determinations for us by virtue of mere accusation.
Hope wrote:
You misunderstand. We are not talking about children in the midst of proximate danger. We are talking about a mature woman reflecting on an incident 35 years ago. Children are not constitutionally equipped to withstand evil on their own — turning the other cheek requires the utmost human strength. And “leav[ing] the assailant free to continue to offend” is not what I mean about “absorbing evil.” That would be more like “ricocheting” evil.
I have similar experience. I am more surprised when women reply no abusive incidents in youth than when they do. But that doesn’t mean we should stretch the definition of “youth” or “abusive” just to make extra-sure we cover every possible event. That is an invitation for abuse of another kind — revenge against the innocent, as demonstrated in the Amirault case.
No offense for anyone who endured true evil, but our reaction to accusation must include something more than pathos and pity for the self-proclaimed victim. I realize this may necessitate unnecessary discomfort to true victims who deserve nothing more than to heal, but their plight is not the only priority to consider. We do not eliminate evil with evil, we don’t achieve catharsis through hair-trigger, up-front scapegoating. That is a chief lesson of The Cross.
I am not even talking about the out-and-out “liars who make baseless accusations.” I am talking about the gray areas (such as 35-year-old memories) wherein we are tempted to color the truth for purposes of selfish closure. It is an understandable temptation! But it is not justice.
Ah, there’s the heart of it. And so much of this depends on your Christianity. The adulteress was guilty, and Christ spared her from the rightful demands of justice. The point of John 8 is justice is the Lord’s, not ours, primarily because God is infinitely merciful. We do better imitating God’s mercy than attempting to effect justice in this world. At very least, it is the side we should err on.
Of course our Merciful Lord “[stood] against the mob with those who molest the innocent, ‘regardless of guilt’” with the all-important admonition to the molester, “Go and sin no more.” What is the least forgivable sin? Unforgiveness. Justice is between the sinner and his God. Human beings cannot make victims whole again, and we cannot restore justice perfectly: no murdered child will rise from the grave by our power, no recompense will truly restore the abused, what’s done is not undone, the Glorified Body of Christ still bears scars. We can only take revenge. But we can forgive. That is a perfection within our power.
We fail to forgive because we mistake it for an insouciance about justice, as if our forgiveness somehow denies the depravity of the crime. “I could never forgive him!” is the rallying cry of the one who wants to emphasize the primacy of his outrage above all other things. But true forgiveness does not underestimate or underreport the crime one bit. If you can believe it — literally, if you have faith — you understand that God’s mercy is greater than any transgression, and we are made whole again only through uniting ourselves with and imitating that mercy.
I offer a prayer for the pain of your acquaintances. Until the day when “every tear shall be wiped away,” we have to console ourselves with that apparently impotent token.
Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”
Matthew
June 22nd, 2012 | 3:39 pm
I’m entirely up for prosecuting crime. I’m not so keen on all the media whoop-up and hysteria over sexual crimes: such crimes need to be treated as crimes, not as salacious attention-grabbers for media outlets striving for immediate relevance to internet readers.
With respect to the accused’s ministerial status, that matters not one whit—either to protect him, OR as cause for doing a wholesale bashing rant on religion, etc., etc. There is no logic to this.
June 22nd, 2012 | 4:36 pm
While you may have a point, she was 18 or 19 years old at the time, not 3.
Anonymous,
Actually, I thought it was interesting that she didn’t seem to know her exact age for this incident when she was specific for the two earlier incidents. And she’s a journalist. Why couldn’t she say whether she was 18 or 19?
Now, I have no reason to assume she is not telling the truth pretty much as it happened, but 35 years is a long time. (There are some fascinating studies about what happens to memories as the years pass.) It is not at all farfetched to raise the possibility that a 35-year-old memory has been significantly distorted. I have no particular stake in vindicating Fr. Drinan, but I have a feeling many people on First Things would be more skeptical of a 35-year-old story about a priest who was a Republican rather than a Democrat, a prominent pro-lifer rather then pro-choice, and a Vietnam War protestor. Look how long it took many in the Catholic Church to accept the truth about Fr. Marcial Maciel. Look what happened with Fr. Corapi. People have a tendency to quickly reject what they don’t want to believe and quickly accept what they hope (sometimes secretly) to be true.
June 22nd, 2012 | 4:45 pm
What if she is not telling the truth? Is it more believable because Fr. Drinan was “an anti-Vietnam War, pro-choice priest”?
We can’t change the past, but we can change the future.
We must keep this in mind when we struggle with how to deal with such issues. We have a responsibility to keep our children safe. But we also have an obligation to hold each person innocent until proven guilty. The two demands are in conflict: we must search for the best possible path – I fear there may be no path that does not involve a trade-off somewhere, yet neither concern is negotiable: children must be protected, and accused must have their presumption of innocence and their right to a fair trial.
June 23rd, 2012 | 1:40 pm
Although I have never been a fan of Fr. Drinan, I do not believe Yoffe’s story. There is no proof or even any evidence that this incident ever happened. Nor will it ever be possible for Yoffe’s to substantiate her story since this event allegedly took place 35 years ago. Moreover, Fr. Drinan is dead and cannot defend himself. We only have Yoffe’s story and that is all it is, a story.
It is very reasonable to ask why she waited so long to come forward. Justice cannot be done when one waits decades to come forward with an accusation of sexual misconduct against someone else. Justice cannot be done but damage to a person’s reputation can be, especially when the accused is a priest since all priests accused of sexual misconduct are now presumed to be guilty.
Of course, this unfounded allegation comes with the added bonus of making the Catholic Church look bad and that may be Yoffe’s intention.
June 23rd, 2012 | 2:11 pm
Those who contend that 35 years is a long time to reveal an assault by Fr. Drinen, do not understand how shameful such things are, and when it involves a powerful person in politics or religion, what hope does one have of being believed? A dear friend, a nurse, became addicted to painkillers and lost her license. In her late 50′s she underwent counseling and hypnosis and remembered that the “candy man” who lived down the street from her, repeatedly preyed on her. Her elderly parents were not only shocked but ashamed that they could not have protected her when she was very young. My brothers and sisters were all molested by family members in the 1940′s. It has taken decades for us to reveal this to each other. We were not protected by a parent who was aware, and it was tossed off as inconsequential by other adult members of the family. Just read stories of molested children, and the horrible, sometimes life-long damage it does, the shame attached, and the long journey to healing and forgiveness ahead. With God’s grace, and often months if not years of counseling, the healing will come. I believe with all my heart that the Lord does not permit anything to happen to us that is ultimately not for our own good. I pray for those who failed us.
June 24th, 2012 | 12:36 am
I cannot help but notice twenty people offering an opinion of which there might be three or four willing to suspend judgement or offer a tincture of skepticism. Hope none of the rest of you are ever on a jury.
June 24th, 2012 | 10:19 am
For those who would give Fr. Drinan the benefit of doubt, why would Ms. Yoffe make up a story like this? Fr. Drinan is not exactly famous any more. A very few readers of First Things could tell you who he was and what his influence was. And First Things readers are far more knowledgeable on topics that would touch Fr. Drinan and his legacy.
Second, Ms. Yoffe’s testimony is every bit as strong as that that was used to convict priests in the previous couple of decades (a ridiculously low standard, to be sure), but she doesn’t seem to be going for any settlement. Victims of sexual abuse need closure, which, ironically, means publicly disclosing the incident.
June 24th, 2012 | 7:15 pm
Anyone who is an assiduous reader of the Catholic press can tell you who Robert Drinan, SJ was. His name has been mud for some time.
What people who have been sexually molested might benefit from is a function of their own inner life. Doubt there are too many hard and fast rules about that.
I imagine Emily Yoffe’s attorney at some time and place might have been able to extort funds from the Society of Jesus, should the Society have elected to treat that as part of the cost of doing business. Ordinarily, making a pass at a 19 year old post adolescent is neither a crime nor a tort in the courts of the civil government. It likely would interest an ecclesiastical tribunal, were the canon lawyers doing their job. There aren’t any legal fees in that, however.
You are correct, bishops often faced impossible situations in that they were called upon to fairly and reliably adjudicate claims based on uncorroborated testimony decades after the fact. People who were repetitive and obnoxious in their condemnations of the bishops studiously refused to acknowledge that (Leon Podles) or were irked, bored, and impatient when anyone brought it up (Rod Dreher).
I have no clue why she would lie, but people do, and no just society takes away someone’s liberty, property, livelihood, or reputation on the basis of gruel as thin as her testimony. I will say she either had an incredible run of bad luck (three sexual assults in ten years), is embellishing severely (and referencing David Nickoll’s remarks, that would be my guess re the first assault), concocting one or more of these tales out of whole cloth, or had no idea in her adolescent years of how her non-verbal cues might be interpreted. And, yes, not bothering for 35, 40, and 45 years to report this material should diminish one’s inclination to endorse her story.
I have no idea whether she was manhandled by these characters or is engaging in an exercise in self-dramatization to make some sort of cultural or ideological point or just because she was on deadline and out of material. I will never know and neither will the rest of you.
June 24th, 2012 | 8:14 pm
We are morally obligated to presume that Fr. Drinan was innocent. Yoffe has not offered any evidence that he molested her. She has come forward with a completely unsubstantiated allegation. Her story may seem plausible but that does not mean that it is true and unless she comes forward with evidence, we have to presume that it is not true.
Everyone is entitled to his good name, to his reputation, even a priest who has died. Detraction and rash judgement are serious sins. No one, not even an alleged victim of sex abuse, has the right to damage someone else’s reputation. The burden is on her to prove that Fr. Drinan did this. It is not on anyone else to prove that he did not.
June 25th, 2012 | 1:37 am
I will offer an observation. Ms. Yoffe was evidently not bothered by Fr. Drinan when he was in office, and ultimately advanced to a high position in Congress, sitting on the powerful House Judiciary Committee, since he backed good liberal causes. It would have been interesting if he had been brought down while still a member of Congress, although those good liberal causes may have suffered.
Ms. Yoffe differs from most sex abuse victims in that (by her own admission) she made a political decision not to come forward.
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