Klavan: The Enemy Is In The Church

Andrew Klavan gave his thoughts on the latest sexual abuse scandal within the Catholic Church, where a grand jury report released on August 14 revealed that over 300 priests were involved. On Wednesday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan asked why Pope Francis isn’t cleaning this up.

“The enemy is not the editorialist who goes off in outrage against the Catholic Church. The enemy is not me when I say these things. The enemy is the devil who is in your church, he is in your church, this has got to be pulled up root and branch. I mean it shouldn’t be, you know, God bless Joshua Shapiro the AG in Philadelphia for the work he’s doing, but it shouldn’t be a guy named Shapiro who’s doing this work, it should be a guy in the church, your Pope should be doing this.”

Video and transcript below:

My first reaction to this latest Catholic abuse scandal in Pennsylvania was: Now I know why Pope Francis is against the death penalty, he can’t afford to lose that many priests. To read the details – and I’m not gonna go into the horrific details, although I am gonna talk about what those details mean a little bit – this is just an absolutely blistering report by a grand jury.

Good job to Joshua Shapiro, a liberal Democrat I hate to say it, but he did a great job and the grand jury – you could just tell their hearts were bleeding as they talked about this. This is over 300 priests they found with over a thousand victims, and those are just the ones that they really felt they had the goods on, they said there are probably thousands of victims all throughout Pennsylvania – six counties I think it was.

The story is basically this, that priests were grooming, raping these children, mostly boys but some girls as well, and the diocese and the bishops had developed an actual system for how to cover this up. Seventy years, a lifetime this went on.

So whenever these horrific stories come out, the question that I ask myself is how do we speak about this usefully without devolving into virtue signaling outrage, because people spend time trying to find words to express the evil of it and trying to say how horrible it is, and really underlying that is just our desperate desire to communicate to one another that we are not these people, that we are the righteous. That’s why we just want to express the outrage and describe this in the worst terms we can possibly come up with. Of course, there are no terms, there are no words for something like this, and I’m not righteous – that’s the other thing, that no one is righteous, not one, and I’m not righteous and I’m not trying to signal to you that I am a righteous person. But I think we all know what this is, we all know this is satanic evil, we all know that this is the depths of evil.

I believe the Nicene Creed – I believe in one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, and in the Nicene Creed that word Catholic means “universal,” it means that there’s one church covering us all. But I don’t believe that the Roman Catholic Church necessarily is that Church. There was a time in the West when the Roman Catholic Church was that Church, if you were part of Christendom you were part of the Roman Catholic Church, with the Protestant Reformation that changed, there was a splintering of churches and this hostility still goes on, we still have conversations here where the Catholics and the Protestants are fighting with each other.

I never care about those conversations. Why? Because I just want to get to Jesus. If you get to Jesus with the Catholic Church, if another person gets to Jesus through the Lutheran Church, great. But I will tell you this – Catholics are always telling me, jokingly – they are the one true church. I don’t believe that, but I do believe when they call it the “Mother Church,” that it is the mother church.

All the other churches come from the Catholic Church and the most anti-Catholic theologian I know, who’s probably our god-King Jeremy – is a Catholic. He doesn’t know it, but he’s a Catholic. He’s really arguing at the fringes of Catholicism. It is really Catholicism that explained and created the structure of Christianity, Western Christianity as we know it, and all the other churches came out of rebelling against that. In the same way you can rebel against your mom, you still come out of your mom, and the Catholic Church remains the Catholic Church, and that makes it the mother of churches and that makes it all of our business. That is why we all pay attention to the Pope, that is why we all have a stake in what happens there.

When you look at what happened in these Pennsylvania things, it had the stamp of true satanic evil. I studied the Holocaust a long time just trying to understand it as a Jew, just trying to know what that was about, and there are certain things, a certain touch, that the devil has that just marks these things. It has to do with wit in a way, it has to do with a kind of evil wit.

I always say I’m somebody who doesn’t take a lot of things seriously, I make a lot of jokes about a lot of things and I always say: “Everything in life is funny except other people’s suffering.” The reason I say that is because we’re all joking at the world’s corruption, we’re all joking at the terrible things that people do, and why is that funny? It’s funny for the same reason it’s funny to see a guy in a tuxedo slip on a banana peel. We all know we’re supposed to be something better than we are, and when we see a politician taking money and selling services, when we see people abusing each other, there’s something funny about watching somebody who should be an angel descending into corruption.

But when you’re laughing at that, you’re laughing along with God, because God is looking at this thing and saying: “Oh man, it’s right here for you, all the good stuff is right here for you and you’re going that way,” and there’s something comical about that. But when you look at it from the other side, and you look at the people who are being hurt by that corruption, you look at the people who are being hurt by that cruelty, you’re looking at the people who get hurt, it stops being funny, right? That’s when you’re not laughing with God, that’s another kind of laughter, and there’s something about the way these priests abused these children that had kind of a wit to it, a kind of invention to it that is always to me the mark of evil, the mark of true genuine evil…

…When you can look at the Catholic Church, and say that this is what it is, that the mother of churches is this, that disgraces the word of God. I won’t say it, let Jesus say it: “What sorrow awaits you, you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees, hypocrites. For you shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You won’t go in yourselves, and you won’t let others enter either. What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees, hypocrites, for you cross land and sea to make one convert, and then you turn that person into twice the child of hell you are yourselves.”

All these innocent priests, Rod Dreher was a good Catholic writer, he’s been on the show. He put up a list of tweets from a Father Phillip Devous, he says: “I’ve given my whole life to serving Christ in his church since beginning the seminary in 1994. Every year has brought fresh revelations of the darkest corruption along with criminal moral perversion coupled to unbelievable levels of incompetence. Then I read the papers and catch the evening news and I see Cardinals and bishops that I know for a fact are lying with impunity, deploying weasel words and fake emotions.”

I mean that’s what I see too when I see them coming out and saying this stuff. You know, I hear “the Pope said the latest silly thing that he said that has nothing to do with Catholic law” and I think: “Why aren’t you cleaning this up?”

So, here’s the thing, I get into debates with Catholics sometimes and they’re very good at arguing and, they’ve got 2,000 years of doing it. I hear them say things like “well there are more child abusers in the teaching profession, or just as many in the teaching profession as in the Catholic Church” or whatever they say. That doesn’t wash.

If you are stopping people, if you are closing the door to the kingdom of heaven, you are committing a sin against the spirit that is immense, and if you’re the mother of churches it affects us all, it bleeds down unto us all.

So, the enemy is not the editorialist who goes off in outrage against the Catholic Church. The enemy is not me when I say these things. The enemy is the devil who is in your church, he is in your church, this has got to be pulled up root and branch. I mean it shouldn’t be, you know, God bless Joshua Shapiro the AG in Philadelphia for the work he’s doing, but it shouldn’t be a guy named Shapiro who’s doing this work, it should be a guy in the church, your Pope should be doing this.