NIALL CARSON/AP PHOTO
Pope Francis claimed to know nothing of the Magdalene laundries before arriving in Ireland, a sign of institutional denial.
This article appears in the September/October 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
The Truth at the Heart of the Lie
By James Carroll
Random House
For Catholics and others repulsed by the continuing tragedy of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church, James Carroll’s The Truth at the Heart of the Lie arrives as a welcome, trenchant, and highly readable dissection of a global humanitarian crisis, though not all will embrace his surprise prescription for reform.
As a former Catholic priest, best-selling author, and an op-ed columnist covering Catholic themes for The Boston Globe for more than 20 years, Carroll is ideally suited to delve into an issue that has vexed the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and roiled the Vatican while undermining the Church’s moral authority for more than two decades.
Told as “A Memoir of Faith,” it offers an intimate, frequently anguished first-person account of Carroll’s journey from a boy who felt the presence of Jesus Christ at a young age, through his restless questioning of his vocation, and finally to his alienation from an institution he still loves.
His final turn is triggered by the Church’s failure to stop powerful priests from sexually molesting children, its refusal to address the root causes of the phenomenon, and, most pointedly, by his disillusionment with Pope Francis, a beacon of hope for Carroll and millions of other Catholics when he was elected nearly a decade ago.
The specific moment of Carroll’s alienation flares during the pope’s 2018 papal visitation to Ireland, the scene of some of Carroll’s most memorable writing. Francis arrived following a decade of horrific clergy abuse revelations in the once devoutly Catholic nation, including the highly publicized scandal of the Magdalene laundries, where unwed mothers were forced to live in servitude and where, at one location, more than 800 infant corpses were discovered, many of them victims of malnourishment and neglect.
Although Francis has repeatedly denounced clericalism, Carroll rightly accuses him of doing everything possible to support its “twin pillars.”
Yet the pope said he knew nothing about the laundries before arriving in Ireland, a comment that, for Carroll, perfectly encapsulated the institutional denial that has allowed the clergy sexual abuse scandal to continue unabated. “I had never heard of these mothers, they call it the laundromat of women where an unwed woman is pregnant and goes in these hospitals,” the hapless Francis said. “I don’t know what they call them.”
When he learned of those remarks, Carroll’s immediate thought was, “A lie. Pope Francis is lying.” How could he not have heard of the infamous Magdalene laundries, at that point the subject of several documentaries and the roundly praised Philomena, the 2013 movie starring Judi Dench? But even if Francis weren’t lying, Carroll says, ignorance was just as bad. “A taut wire in me snapped,” he recalls. “Pope Francis’s Magdalene denial did it, and in an instant my core belief was called into question and my entire life changed.”
Carroll, who previously analyzed Church doctrine and history in the award-winning Constantine’s Sword, attributes the endless clergy abuse crisis to clericalism, the uniquely Catholic culture surrounding the Church’s all-male priesthood and hierarchy—an ancient, secret society accountable only to itself with headquarters in the city-state of Vatican City.
Although Francis has repeatedly denounced clericalism, Carroll rightly accuses him of doing everything possible to support its “twin pillars.” Namely, the “inhuman” celibacy requirement for priests and the exclusion of women from the clergy.
Catholic priests were permitted to marry and father children for more than a thousand years, until the First Lateran Council in 1123. With the passage of that draconian requirement, Carroll writes, priests’ wives and children were driven into poverty, prostitution, and slavery, “a massive crime against thousands of innocent Catholics—especially women.”
Carroll’s profound disappointment with Francis and what he repeatedly calls the Church’s “misogyny” will strike a responsive chord with Catholic women who saw the new pope as a means of expanding on the liberal reforms of the 1960s and Vatican II, only to see him affirm the efforts of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI to permanently ban women from the Catholic clergy, saying theirs was “the last word” on the subject.
As the Francis papacy draws to a close—he is 84 and recently underwent surgery for diverticulitis—Carroll’s pointed disillusionment is sure to figure in history’s assessment of Francis’s tenure as leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics, as well as his attempts to thwart the conservative currents set loose during the 35-year reign of his predecessors, John Paul and Benedict.
Francis has struggled when it comes to backing up his liberal pronouncements and personal assurances with lasting action.
Without question, Francis has shaken up Church conservatives by downplaying their anti-abortion crusade and attempting to reposition Catholicism as a “church for the poor,” specifically the swelling ranks of the world’s migrants and refugees. He unveiled his attempt to reset Church priorities almost immediately after his election, in 2013, when he met with Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Peruvian theologian and founder of liberation theology, which seeks to realign the Church with the world’s dispossessed by urging Catholics to take political action to correct social injustice, a school of thought condemned by Benedict when he was head of the Vatican office that enforces Church orthodoxy.
Francis notably affirmed his allegiance to the poor and social justice movements within the Church two years later when he declared Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero a martyr and later presided over the process that led to his canonization, or sainthood. Romero, a staunch advocate for the poor in poverty-stricken El Salvador during the 1970s, was assassinated by a right-wing death squad while saying Mass.
Since then, Francis has continued to lead the Church in a liberal direction with statements underscoring the dangers of unfettered capitalism, warnings about global warming, and the obligation of Catholics to act to protect the environment. “Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue,” he says in a papal encyclical. “[I]t is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience.”
But Francis has failed to address or to even acknowledge a range of urgent contemporary concerns that, as Carroll notes, all fit under the rubric of human sexuality. In addition to his failure to consider permitting women to become priests, and the halfway measures he has taken to prevent clergy sexual abuse, he has dodged celibacy, birth control, and gay marriage. Francis famously signaled tolerance for LGBTQ Catholics when he was asked how he might act as the confessor of a gay person and replied, “Who am I to judge?” But the Church continues to view homosexuality as “an intrinsic moral evil,” as Benedict has said, and gay marriage is not permitted.
Francis has also struggled when it comes to backing up his liberal pronouncements and personal assurances with lasting action, a fact underscored by his effort to rein in conservatives who control the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, especially those seeking a mandate to prevent President Joe Biden from receiving Holy Communion unless he renounces his support for abortion rights. Following a June vote to create a “teaching document” on the meaning of the Eucharist, the USCCB said, “There will be no national policy on withholding Communion from politicians.” But the document is unlikely to be considered for approval until a November bishops’ conference, leaving plenty of time for the internally riven American bishops to amend their statement. It’s as if Francis, who prefers a conciliatory approach to the ideological warfare raging within the global Church, has never understood that the Church is a political institution, and that lasting reform and meaningful spiritual advances can only come after consolidating political power.
Carroll’s assessment of Francis and his overall indictment of the Church for its inability to effectively address the clergy sexual abuse crisis has all the markings of an airtight case, and it may well be that. But he makes a surprise shift in his concluding chapters and epilogue—“A Catholic Manifesto”—when calling for change.
Rather than leave the Church, Carroll calls on dissenting Catholics to stage a rebellion from within by establishing a beachhead for anti-clericalism and a more humane Church “on the ecclesial inner margin,” even if that means giving up Sunday Mass, as Carroll has. Harking back to his days as a Catholic priest counseling young draftees seeking to avoid the Vietnam War, he says, “Think of us as the Church’s conscientious objectors. We are not deserters.”
In part, Carroll’s argument is practical: The Church is a worldwide community of more than a billion people, including thousands caring for the poor and healing the sick, that “is not going away” anytime soon. As such, it is an institution with the potential to make great humanitarian strides. Indeed, Carroll goes so far as to say that “a reformed, enlightened, hopeful Catholic Church is essential to the thriving—even the survival—of the human species.”
His argument is also spiritual, as he looks back to the early days of Christendom, before the Church ruled that only priests may deliver the Eucharist, before the celibacy requirement, before the era of empire, when so much of the Catholic dogma Carroll finds objectionable was codified into church law. In particular, he looks to the Book of Matthew, where Jesus says, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”
Many Catholics will be grateful for the hope Carroll offers. “Hope is a choice,” he writes. Others, perhaps the survivors of clergy sexual abuse and their friends and families, may be appalled by a spirit of appeasement, or simply saddened by the vision of a Catholic Brigadoon that will never return.
