THE FLAVOR OF SIN

Pedophile Priest Killed in Prison Attack (Svea Herbst-Bayliss, 8/23/03, Reuters)

Defrocked priest John Geoghan, a central figure in the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal, was killed on Saturday by a fellow-inmate in the prison where he was serving a sentence for child rape, a state prisons official said.

"There was an incident involving John Geoghan and another inmate around noon on Saturday. Geoghan sustained serious injury and was brought to Leominster Hospital where we was pronounced dead shortly before 2 p.m.," said Kelly Nantel, a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Department of Corrections. [...]

The Archdiocese of Boston, where Geoghan had served as a priest in many parishes, described his death as "tragic."

"The Archdiocese of Boston offers its prayers for the repose of John's soul and extends its prayers and consolation to his beloved sister Catherine at this time of personal loss," said Christopher Coyne, a spokesman for the Archdiocese.

Attorney Mitchell Garabedian, who represents many young men who say they were molested by Geoghan, said he was shocked and surprised to hear of Geoghan's death.

"My clients would rather have seen John Geoghan be punished in a way seen fit by society," he said. "They would have rather seen him endure the rigors of two more trials and endure the pain of more prison sentences."

Having failed to treat others with dignity John Geoghan died without dignity and that cycle surely is tragic. What he did was evil and he deserved to be punished for it, but by a reasoned action of our society, not on the impulse of another low-life. Personally, I tend to believe his crimes were so horrible, so transgressive, that even the death penalty should have been imposed. We should value human dignity so highly that the cost of violating it in the way John Geoghan did should be to lose your own life. That process too though should be dignified.

Meanwhile, there's an important element here that may be worth our while to consider. It's always tempting to think of people like John Geoghan as monsters, as so fundamentally different from us that they're barely human and their lives just don't matter. Here's a passage from a recent book review that frames the ideas involved nicely, REVIEW: of Hellfire Nation by James A. Morone (Jackson Lears, New Republic) :

Occasionally adolescent high jinks affect the history of thought. Consider the episode recounted by Augustine in his Confessions. "There was a pear tree near our vineyard, loaded with a fruit that was attractive neither to look at nor to taste. Late one night a band of ruffians, myself included, went off to shake down the fruit and carry it away.... We took away an enormous quantity of pears, not to eat them ourselves, but simply to throw them to the pigs." Augustine agonized at length about the sheer perversity of his motives. "Could I enjoy doing wrong for no other reason than that it was wrong?" Certainly, "it was not the pears that my unhappy soul desired. I had plenty of my own, better than those, and I only picked them so that I might steal. For no sooner had I picked them than I threw them away, and tasted nothing in them but my own sin, which I relished and enjoyed. If any part of one of those pears passed my lips, it was the sin that gave it flavor." And so a boyish escapade became a primary text of Christian thinking about sin.

For what became known as the Augustinian view, sin was a subjective experience, a self-satisfied pride that allowed the sinner to take pleasure in acts that actually alienated him from God, the source of all being. To be sure, sin had a social dimension, too. Stealing the pears by himself, Augustine wrote, "would have been no fun and I should not have done it." The desire to have "partners in sin" made it harder to exercise moral responsibility, "because we are ashamed to hold back when others say `Come on! Let's do it!'" But at bottom the Augustinian conception of sin was more psychological than social: it was an elusive but innate perversity -- a tendency toward estrangement from all creation -- rooted in every human soul, which could only be transcended with the aid of divine grace.

Of course there have always been other ways of thinking about sin. The chief alternative to Augustine's inward emphasis was the notion that evil is a palpable entity outside the self, one that could (and often did) take material and even fleshly form. The purest form of this belief in Augustine's time was the Manichaean heresy. Augustine had been a Manichee himself for ten years, and much of the intellectual drive of his autobiography arises from his struggle to free himself from the Manichees' materialist conception of evil by developing a subtler one. But subtlety never translated easily into the idioms of popular Christianity, which imagined sin embodied in either an actual devil or a demonized other -- the witch, the infidel, above all the Jew. Though theologians condemned the Manichaean heresy, the Manichaean tendency to divide the world into a virtuous "us" and a sinful "them" flourished in Christian tradition, animating absolutisms, inspiring crusades, and consigning the other to flames in the next world and sometimes in this one.

Still, Augustinian ideas survived, too. They sustained the doctrine of original sin, which despite its sometimes devastating impact on the human psyche at least preserved an emphasis on the universality of human corruption, refusing to isolate sin in particular groups of offenders. For centuries, when Christians thought seriously about sin, they turned to Augustinian tradition. The English Puritans who settled North America, for example, were nothing if not serious about sin. They insisted on a covenant of grace, not of works. This meant that the performance of apparently moral acts was mere mummery without a regenerate heart. The key to salvation was not morality, it was piety -- the spiritual state that resulted from an intense inner search for union with the deity.

This was precisely the sort of struggle that Augustine described, and it was at the core of American Puritanism. Oscillating between an exalted experience of divine grace and a deep sense of human depravity (including one's own), the Augustinian strain of piety dissolved the comforting delusion that evil could be situated outside the self. The attempt to live virtuously required constant questioning of one's own motives, constant awareness of one's own capacity to confuse self-interest with self-sacrifice. Sin was fleeting, insubstantial, evanescent -- but ever-present, in the hearts of the pious as well as the prodigal.

If John Geoghan deserved to die it was because he had so estranged himself from all Creation, from God and from all of us. It was because he was really quite like us, but plunged himself deep into the depravity that resides within us all and that we are commanded to resist, not because he was some kind of demon, affected by a sinfulness that the rest of us are untainted by. Whether for good or ill--and those of us who believe in freedom must think it good--we have free will, and John Geoghan freely chose to behave in an evil manner.

Whether God is so forgiving of Man that he forgives even such men and extends divine grace to even those of us who so completely embrace our innate depravity we've no idea. I only know that I don't have that great a capacity for forgiveness within me. It is surely not a good thing that John Geoghan was murdered--for that's all this was is a murder--but it's beyond me to see how it's a bad thing that he's gone.


MORE:
Geoghan's Death Is Described: Fellow Inmate Jammed Cell Door During Attack (Jonathan Finer, August 25, 2003, Washington Post)

John J. Geoghan, the former priest and convicted child molester killed in a Massachusetts prison Saturday, was followed into his cell just after lunch by a fellow inmate who bound and gagged him before strangling him with a bed sheet, according to a union representative for prison guards.

The attacker, whom authorities identified as Joseph L. Druce, jammed the electronically operated cell door to prevent guards from opening it. He tied Geoghan's hands behind his back with a sheet and gagged him. He then repeatedly jumped from the bed in the cell onto Geoghan's motionless body and beat the defrocked priest with his fists. [...]

Druce, 37, was immediately isolated and will be charged with murder, investigators said. Massachusetts does not have a death penalty, so it is unclear what additional punishment he could receive since he is serving a life sentence for strangling a man in 1988. He also was convicted while in prison of attempting an anthrax scare by sending envelopes filled with white powder and covered in Swastikas to about 30 Jewish lawyers nationwide in 2001.

The Worcester County district attorney's office said that Druce was born Darrin Smiledge but changed his name while in prison. Druce's father, Dana Smiledge, told the Boston Globe that his son hated Jews and blacks and had a grudge against gays.

So much for justice being served on behalf of the abused children, eh?

MORE:
GRACE GREATER THAN OUR SIN [Words: Julia H. Johnston, in Hymns Tried and True (Chi-ca-go, Il-li-nois: The Bi-ble In-sti-tute Col-port-age As-so-ci-a-tion, 1911); Music: Daniel B. Towner, 1910]

Marvelous grace of our loving Lord,
Grace that exceeds our sin and our guilt!
Yonder on Calvary’s mount outpoured,
There where the blood of the Lamb was spilled.

Sin and despair, like the sea waves cold,
Threaten the soul with infinite loss;
Grace that is greater, yes, grace untold,
Points to the refuge, the mighty cross.

Dark is the stain that we cannot hide.
What can we do to wash it away?
Look! There is flowing a crimson tide,
Brighter than snow you may be today.

Marvelous, infinite, matchless grace,
Freely bestowed on all who believe!
You that are longing to see His face,
Will you this moment His grace receive?

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 23, 2003 11:59 PM