Fr. Carlos Martins, Sir Alec Guinness, and what has been lost
By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Nov 29, 2024
I’ve never been one for the “celebrity exorcist.” Never read a single book by Fr. Gabriele Amorth. Never watched a single YouTube video by Fr. Chad Ripperger.
But Fr. Carlos Martins? I was hooked from Day One. I learned of him through his interview on LOOPcast. I’ve since listened to the entirety of his Exorcist Files podcast. I think it may be the single best presentation of the Catholic faith in the podcasting world right now.
Fr. Martins is much in the Catholic press this week. The Pillar broke the story of his public ministries being suspended due to an “Illinois police investigation over alleged inappropriate conduct involving children.” It was subsequently revealed that the incident was not sexual in nature but, as Rod Dreher describes it, “only touching a lock of (a child’s) hair as he was joshing with a group of schoolkids about his own baldness,” in front of hundreds of onlookers.
You can read the letter Fr. Martins’ lawyers sent to the Pillar here. The Diocese of Joliet told The Pillar that the letter was “accurate but incomplete,” whatever that means. Some news reports say a police investigation is ongoing, though Fr. Martins’ lawyers say they have not been told of one.
And there things stand for the moment. Except, of course, for the reactions of the Catholic internet. Some of Fr. Martins’ defenders hold the Pillar responsible for damaging the priest’s reputation by reporting the parish’s statement verbatim without making clear that the accusation was not sexual. Others are sharing photos of Pope Francis, and even the priest who reported Fr. Martins to the police, innocently touching children in ways like what got Fr. Martins in trouble. Still others side with the Pillar, and with the irate father who complained about Fr. Martins, saying the priest’s actions were indeed sexual or, at the very least, a transgressing of boundaries. And there has been much back-and-forth over the concept of a celebrity exorcist too.
Those are the two issues at which Fr. Martins is at the center this week. Where stands the Church, 22 years after the first wave of clergy sex abuse scandals. And what are we to make of celebrity exorcists (or at least, of this one). In this column, I will address the first of those two.
It’s hard to imagine from the perspective of 2024. But when news of clergy sex-abuse first started hitting the press in the 1980s, no one could believe it. Only the seemingly fringe papers of the left and the right, the National Catholic Reporter and the Wanderer, covered that beat. Child sex-abuse in general was not in the public consciousness as some sort of epidemic back then the way it is today. And the thought that a priest could ever commit such a crime? It was unthinkable.
Even secular media barely covered the issue until the revelations of 2002. That may have been due to embarrassment suffered by CNN in the early 1990s, when they hyped accusations against Cardinal Bernardin by someone who later recanted, and both the accuser and CNN apologized to Bernardin. For the rest of the ‘90s, secular media seemed to back away from the issue.
But then came 2002, when a judge ordered the Archdiocese of Boston to open its records on clergy sex-abuse. This began a cascade of horrifying revelations about the crisis and how it had been mishandled by the Church’s leaders. Thousands of lives devastated, billions of dollars lost, and the trust between the institutional Church and her members never fully restored.
That is the context in which Fr. Martins touching a lock of a girl’s hair, in front of hundreds of onlookers, can get him suspended from ministry. In reaction to the scandals of 2002, the Church bounced from one extreme to the other. They rightly put a stop to the practice of transferring accused abusers. But they instituted a policy so draconian that any accusation, no matter how flimsy, could end a priest’s career. Cardinal Avery Dulles warned of this possibility at the time the Dallas Charter was instituted.
I wish Fr. Martins had not touched that girl’s hair. It does strike me as imprudent, given the climate of fear bequeathed to us by an earlier generation of Church leadership who mishandled clergy sex abuse. But what a sad thing to have to expect of a priest. Martins’ defenders are quite right to point to images of other priests innocently touching children.
I am reminded of this touching story of what caused the actor Alec Guinness to convert to Catholicism, when he was playing Fr. Brown for a film:
The film was being shot in a remote French village. One evening Guinness, still in costume, was on his way back to his lodgings. A little boy, mistaking him for the real thing, grabbed his hand and trustingly accompanied the “priest.”
That incident affected Guinness. “Continuing my walk,” he said, “I reflected that a Church that could inspire such confidence in a child, making priests, even when unknown, so easily approachable, could not be as scheming or as creepy as so often made out. I began to shake off my long-taught, long-absorbed prejudices.”
A touching story and, viewed from today’s perspective, sad. The world in which that little boy took Guinness’ hand is a healthier world. A world that recognizes in the priest the very same goodness of Christ that Fr. Martins brings to those whom he has liberated from demonic oppression. A world in which Fr. Martins is suspended for touching a lock of a girl’s hair, in front of hundreds of onlookers, is one in which the priest himself is suspected of being an agent of the demonic.
Again, the horrifying revelations of the last 22 years are real. We must do what we can to heal the victims and the Church itself. But we won’t know we are there until an incident, whether the one that caused Sir Alec Guiness to convert or Fr. Martins joshing with a girl in front of hundreds of onlookers, no longer raises an eyebrow.
Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on Catholic Culture are solely his own. See full bio.
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