The Boy Scouts of American and the Catholic Church have been well respected institutions in American society for decades. The Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church have cultivated a public image that is wholesome, healthy, and good. Now, their reputations are threatened by institutional ineptitude in the face of a crisis the scale of which neither has faced before. As new revelations come to us in Chinese water torture fashion, the institutions themselves are beginning to show signs of crumbling from a lack of trust. The road that led to this erosion of public trust is eerily similar for both institutions. Let’s look at their similarities for a moment:
1)both have had numerous allegations of sexual abuse of minors, 2)both have been slow to respond to those allegations, often preferring to dismiss the allegations or waging an attack campaign against their accusers, 3)both have documented their own scandal in secret archives or secret folders the institutions have kept serving as their own indictment, 4)both have refused accountability and transparency.
Organizations and public institutions such as the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America won’t survive without the public trust. Once that public trust is gone, the institutions will cease to be effective. Unfortunately, as of this posting, both groups seem to be hell bent on self destruction. On the one hand, we have revelations that the Pope himself mishandled at least one abuse case involving a priest in the 1970’s which allowed the priest two decades’ worth of access to more children. This week, the damning evidence of cover-up and concealment has been revealed in the Boy Scout trial underway in Oregon.
Secrets, cover-ups, conspiracie to cover-up-these are not the hallmarks of great American institutions.