Bit of an understatement. Image by Bec Shaw/Brocklesnitch, found on me.me.
Let's take a little walk through his testimony, shall we?
Back in the 1980s, Carlson was the chancellor of the Archdiocese of Minneapolis & St. Paul. During that time, he did not report to the police any allegation of child sexual abuse, not even when a priest admitted doing so to him. Now, about 30 years later, he says that he wasn't sure at the time if it was a crime for an adult to impose sex upon a child.
"Well," you might say (I mean, not you personally, you're reasonable, but the Royal You might say), "Carlson was just some rando, caught up in a scandal that would be decades at a slow boil - can you really blame the guy for trying to keep his head down and stay out of it?" I can almost see that - something truly awful comes your way, you go Deer In Headlights, you don't know what to do about it, and you want it to just go away. OK.
Except, first and foremost, as the chancellor of the Archdiocese, investigating allegations of abuse was literally his job.
Now, as I'm re-watching the Intelligence2 debate on whether the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world, I'm reminded that Ratzinger ordered the clergy to avoid the police and keep it all in-house so that the Church could "deal with it" (and I use that term oh so loosely) internally and in secret. "But," the Royal You might say, "Nuremberg defense?" Again, I can almost see that - but when your leader is Pope Palpatine, I believe that makes it even more important to defy evil orders in the name of good.
"But come on," the Royal You may defensively insist, "Can you really blame them for wanting to avoid a scandal? Can you really say that embroiling the Church in scandal would have done more good than harm, or even more good than letting the Church handle it internally?" Let's leave aside for the moment the matter that Catholicism's aid comes with proselytizing strings attached, and just grant that the Church does a bunch of good that could well be interrupted in the eruption of a scandal. Just, ahem, give me a moment here to choke down all the arguments I want to make. Gulp. Fine. But now Royal You is saying that whatever good the Church does so vastly outweighs the evil of child rape that said evil must be allowed to proceed in secret. So not only is Royal You saying that child rape can acceptably be made into a bargaining chip, a simple cost of doing business, but You're also saying implicitly that this bargain shouldn't be knowingly made by those receiving the aid and abuse. In other words, the claim being smuggled in is that not only is the aid worth the abuse, but nobody should be able to make that decision themselves. But then, I guess such a position is only to be expected from defenders of an institution that ignores consent in the first place.
Back to Carlson, though. He insists that he didn't know in the 80s that an adult having sex with a child was a criminal act. He says he didn't know how serious it was, that he knows it now but doesn't know when he became aware of the fact. And yet he wrote the Archbishop in the 80s to inform him that one family was planning to go to the police. Yet he doesn't remember anything about this, or much of anything at all, to go by his testimony. But this is all in line with his orders from 1987, instructing him explicitly to play dumb under any court questioning, which of course he also doesn't remember. And, I mean... good... job? Following orders you don't even remember, that's some Deep Magic right there. Or something.
This is all old hat to anyone who has either followed religious news in 2014 or ever read more than three posts on this blog, but I feel it salient to note the absurd level of defense to which the clergy has been reduced. All Carlson can do is play dumb, perhaps feeling cornered into defying his conscience for the sake of his career and its notably non-transferable skills, but that only takes the problem up a level: if You're going to paint Carlson as a cornered man, then it is the Church's hierarchy that is cornering him. Even if this lets Carlson off the hook (which it absolutely does not), it makes the problem as a whole even worse!
But moreover, coming to the reason I've been re-watching the aforementioned debate, to lean on ignorance of the law or morality is to directly undercut the purpose, mission, and history of the Church in positioning itself as the primary arbiter of, and sole reliable source for, morality in a fallen world. Very few crimes indeed can even remotely be considered worse than child rape - and I'm not interested in hashing out precisely what's the worst of the worst, just in noting that child rape is firmly down there in the "unspeakably evil" category - and so to say that the Church should not only get a secret pass on it but can plausibly defend itself by appeal to ignorance, then we find ourselves in what Bishop Berkeley would call a "MANIFEST REPUGNANCY" (emphasis preserved). For the Church to take the ignorance defense (which, remember, isn't an admissible defense) is to invite Stephen Fry's question, "Then what are you for?!"
Carlson's defense inevitably paints him as at least two of incompetent, criminal, and liar. If he is telling the truth and his memory is so faulty, then he is both incompetent (for ignoring his duty and having a shit memory) and criminal (in failing to properly report abuse). If he was ever competent in his duties, then he's lying about it and a big-time criminal besides. And if he is by some miracle not guilty of any criminal wrongdoing here, then he's clearly lying and also completely incompetent at whatever he's been allegedly doing. But this is being charitable to the point of ridiculousness - my money's on the trifecta.
Then again, I suppose I'm still harping on that same ol' canard, expecting an alleged bastion of goodness and virtue to live up to its advertising. Silly me.
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