A recent New York Times editorial asked, “Why do we have zero tolerance for some criminals while others get a pass?” In light of what’s happening in government – and the Catholic Church – it’s an important question. So is, What are we going to do about it?
As the Times editorial noted, Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen, for example, have been cheating people, hiding money and ripping off government for a long time. Much of their behavior was blatantly illegal. How is it they didn’t come to the attention of authorities before now?
Why have white collar crime prosecutions, like tax, corporate and securities fraud, been falling dramatically? In May, 2018, 459 white collar crimes were prosecuted, down 8.4 percent from the previous month, and down 35.4 percent from five years ago, according to Justice Department data. (These are likely to be corporate offenses, not the large-scale crimes involving the government currently.)
Over two million incarcerated Americans are in correctional facilities, ranging from federal prisons to juvenile correction facilities, military prisons, detention centers, and Indian Country jails, according to the website www.trac.syr.edu. Relatively few inmates have committed white collar crimes and only about 150,000 of them on any given day have actually been convicted of a crime. Almost half a million are being held on drug offenses. Over 8,500 young people are behind bars for “technical violations” of probation, and 2,300 youth are incarcerated for “status” offenses, i.e., behavioral issues like truancy. In 2010, incarceration numbers by race per number of people in these groups were Whites, 380; Latinos, 966; Blacks, 2207. What’s wrong with this picture?
White collar crime became a term in 1939 because of concerns that law enforcement was paying too much attention to street crime and not enough to crime committed by people in high status occupations. Today, it seems, without a special counsel investigation to trap white collar criminals, they simply carry on, undetected or un- prosecuted. It doesn’t help that a series of Supreme Court decisions have made it harder to prosecute white collar crime at the same time that enforcement resources have begun to dwindle due to terrorism threats and anti-immigration sentiment.
No one understands how to evade prosecution better than Donald Trump. As a blogger put it on a recent Vox.com blog, “From his empty-box tax scam to money laundering at his casinos to racial discrimination in his apartments to Federal Trade Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission violations, Trump has spent his entire career breaking various laws, getting caught, and then plowing ahead unharmed.” Some role model.
Meanwhile, the revelation of heinous sex crimes within the Catholic Church, from Pittsburgh to the Pope’s back yard, presents another appalling example of white collar crime –by men who literally wear white collars.
I first learned of the travesties of the Catholic clergy from an adult student some years ago. Abused by a priest as a youth, he became a priest “to prove,” he said, “that there could be good priests.” Sometime into his priesthood, he began researching cases of sex abuse within the church and among its hierarchy. That quest led to his leaving the priesthood and conducting in-depth research resulting in a huge database of offenses and who had committed them. He became an educator and advocate, but he fell fatally ill and died at the age of 42. I think of him often now and wonder what he might have contributed as Catholics, and others, confront the huge betrayal of one of the most trusted institutions on earth.
One of the things he told me was that there were a large number of nuns who were “pimping” for priests, so nothing I’ve learned since then actually surprises me. He also said that some of the most prominent church leaders in the U.S. had hired the best lawyers in the country and were getting away with what they had done. The Church, of course, helped by paying off people, relocating priests, and protecting their reputations at all costs.
Now the Church, and the Pope, find themselves in what could be the greatest crisis in the modern history of Catholicism, and rightly so, because no white-collar criminal should be allowed to get away with a crime, least of all a crime that harms the most vulnerable among us.
It’s infuriating to see Donald Trump and his ilk chugging along, one dangerous, cheating affront after another. But it’s deeply disturbing to see Pope Francis, the leader of a nation of sorts who seemed to bring the Church (some kicking and screaming) into the 21st century, remain silent on the crux of the issue before him -- a massive, Mafia-like sub-organization within his Church that has brought terrible suffering to so many. His silence on policy change speaks volumes. Unless he is willing to bring the guilty to justice, what future can there be for his organization? Just as “thoughts and prayers” have proven inadequate in government, so too have they been useless within the Church.
Where justice is called for, there should be no divide between political parties or ecclesiastical liberals and conservatives. Too much is at stake. We are called upon, each and every one of us, to press the leaders of both church and state to have the courage to purge corruption wherever it resides. The time for talk, whether from the Pope or the President, has come. The time is now.