Yet another scandal involving Catholic priests abusing children and teens has been revealed, this time in Pennsylvania. From U. S. News and World Report:
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — A priest raped a 7-year-old girl while he was visiting her in the hospital after she’d had her tonsils removed. Another priest forced a 9-year-old boy into having oral sex, then rinsed out the boy’s mouth with holy water. One boy was forced to say confession to the priest who sexually abused him.
Those children are among the victims of roughly 300 Roman Catholic priests in Pennsylvania who molested more than 1,000 children — and possibly many more — since the 1940s, according to a sweeping state grand jury report released Tuesday that accused senior church officials, including a man who is now the archbishop of Washington, D.C., of systematically covering up complaints.
The “real number” of abused children and abusive priests might be higher since some secret church records were lost and some victims never came forward, the grand jury said.
While the grand jury said dioceses have established internal processes and seem to refer complaints to law enforcement more promptly, it suggested that important changes are lacking.
There are actually three grave scandals involved. The first and most serious is the child and teen sexual abuse. The second is the coverups by other priests and bishops. The third is that the man under whose papacy many of the abuses took place was canonized. That he created a climate in which the Church hierarchy were predisposed to cover up these abuses and shield the abusers can now hardly be denied.
I will not utter a word in defense of the abusers or their co-conspirators in the clergy. I am proud to be acquainted with the man who formulated the Chicago Archdiocese’s policy 35 years ago which amounts to “Call the Cops”. Don’t try to hush it up. Don’t shield the abusers. Don’t try to handle it internally as a disciplinary matter. Turn the abusers over to law enforcement. They are criminals.
I will not dwell on the anti-Catholic tone of many of the reports in the media. Neither the clergy nor the Church hierarchy are the Church, however much the clergy and the hierarchy think that is the case. IMO they barely qualify as Christians let alone as the Church.
In the Catholic tradition forgiveness has three prerequisites: confession of one’s sins, a sincere intention to change one’s actions, and penance. Paying the penalty for one’s actions is not penance. Neither is foisting the costs of your misdeeds on the laity. Confession, reform, and penance by the Catholic clergy and hierarchy are still wanting and long overdue.
This whole mess was set in motion by John XXIII and Vatican II, which opened the priesthood wide to homosexuals. John Paul II’s indifference to the scandal was a scandal in and of itself. There were always homosexuals in the priesthood, monasteries were rife with them. But the Catholic hierarchy today is saturated with them, now. A burn down to the 4th Century church is in order.
That said, a few years ago, at the height of the Catholic scandal, the US Dept. of Education published a study of sexual abuse in public schools. The report authors concluded that for every instance of a priest attacking an altar boy (more than 80% of all the reported abuse cases), there were about 200 incidents in the public schools.
That makes a sort of evil sense. The Catholic scandals were almost all homosexual priests seducing teenage altar boys. That, technically, is ephebophilia, not pedophilia. Public school teachers include both homosexual and heterosexual men and women and preteen and teen boys and girls, so the number of combinations possible is much greater than in the Church scandals.
Then, of course, there were the notorious scandals involving Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts, Brownies, et al., and now the sexual abuse scandals at Penn. St., Michigan St., Ohio St., USC, the list goes on.
One has to wonder whether the fact an adult wants to “teach,” “advise,” “mentor” young people is not itself an indication of a deranged, predatory personality.
The notorious fact that faculty at elite research universities generally want to focus on their own research and to have nothing to do with the students might be a good thing.
Whatever happened to our good old “stranger danger,” where it was imagined that it was strangers, not relatives, priests, pastors, teachers and Scout leaders well known to the children, who are the chief abusers? Our new mantra for kids needs to be changed to, “If you feel threatened or are abused by someone you know, tell a stranger.”
This issue strikes a particularly strong chord with me. I thought your treatment of the issue, especially separating the people from the institution, was thoughtful and appropriate, Dave.
This is horrible. We must never underestimate the cunning and drive of child sexual predators. Here in Ne. the head of the Cornhusker council of Boy Scouts Of America, (top guy) was convicted of molestation of Boy Scouts in his mid 60’s, rose to that position despite his conviction @ 19 in California of the same. When I was volunteering in cub scouts the rule was, no adult allowed to be ever alone with a child. Two adults present for the protection of both. This guy managed to gain so much reputation and trust he circumvented that rule.
My thought is that parents must gain the trust of their children to the extent that abuse will be exposed, but I know it’s gone on so long because pedophiles have an eye for the vulnerable.
The 4th scandal is that it took the Pennsylvania attorney general and state grand jury 14 years after the Boston Globe broke the story to begin the investigation that lead to the report. Certainly they were not naive enough to think that it couldn’t happen in the Keystone State. Under PA law, the Attorney General may petition the court to convene a multi-county grand jury. “In such application the Attorney General shall state that, in his judgment, the convening of a multicounty investigating grand jury is necessary because of organized crime or public corruption or both involving more than one county of the Commonwealth . . .†Title 42 – PA General Assembly § 4544. By affirmative vote of the majority of jurors, the investigative grand jury can submit its report to the court. After examination of the report, the court may issue an order accepting and filing the report as a public record with the court of common pleas provided that the report is based upon facts received in the course of an investigation by the grand jury authorized by the court and is supported by the preponderance of the evidence.
The report, as a public record, is protected from any libel claims and the media that reports on this public record can publish the story without liability for libel. While the statute of limitations may have run on claims for many of the victims that came forward, this report was the next best thing to getting their day in court and calling out the priests who violated them.
So, why wasnt’t this process started sooner? Particularly when the news of this problem was so prominent back in the early 2000s. Perhaps government officials and the media have been deaf to this issue or passive participants in the cover up. How will they atone for their sins?
I was brought up in the Protestant tradition, so all things Catholic kind of mystify me. I am not sure you are technically correct in separating the ministry from the church, but I think you are correct in your intention and in the way most of us think about it, so I would leave that to the Catholic theologians to debate.
I think that these tight knit, very religious communities that emphasize respect for the clergy and emphasize an us vs them mentality are a real hotbed for abuse. Certainly happened in my church. Then there was an overwhelming need to cover it up since no one wanted the whole community to be shattered if the truth ever got out. Better to have people abused or almost die (true story) rather than let the rest of the community find out.
Steve
That’s a reaction to long association with Catholic clergymen who, when they say “the Church”, frequently mean “the clergy”. My point is that the clergy and the Church are not synonymous. The laity and clergy together are the Church.
However, the Catholic laity does not hire, vote for, supervise or otherwise have influence on the clergy. To use the conventional metaphor we are the sheep and they are the shepherds. When a group of shepherds goes on a rampage, it is unfair to blame the sheep. These abuse and coverup scandals are entirely the crimes of the clergy. But, as you might detect in reading the comments in the thread on this latest scandal at OTB, the scandals provoke expressions of bigoted anti-Catholic sentiment rather than the anti-clergy sentiment which IMO is fully warranted.
Not being a religious scholar, (snicker) I say this at some risk. But it seems analogous to blaming the workers at Monsanto, or the chemical industry in general, for the actions of Monsanto management and technical people in the recent case. It just doesn’t follow logically.
Good analogy, Guarneri.
Dave- If you read the religion blogs, and have long talks with Catholic clergy, I think this is all a bit hazy. In spirit I agree with you 100%, but there has been this long running turmoil over what and who really determines the values of the Church. I am sure that you are aware of the angst over “cafeteria Catholics”. If the church really consists of the people who make up the church, then the church clearly believes in birth control and abortion. That is what they practice. However, the clergy, really the upper level clergy, are the ones who determine what the true beliefs are of the church. Basically, it is all centralized. In religion, this has some advantages, but it also has major problems, and the current crisis is a good example of why it is a problem. When the leadership goes bad, it is really hard to fix.
Anyway, sure I am botching this up, but it is one of the reasons why, besides my own personal experiences, I am always leery about these centrally controlled faiths. Not only are they controlled by a small group of powerful people, they are ruling with the authority of their God. To question them is to question the faith and your God.
Steve
Well, I see I took my fair share of abuse on the concept from a certain M Reynolds at OTB.
Agree with Dave’s commentary on this but I’ve long been troubled by Pope John Paul II’s association with the scandal. Troubled, in the sense that I have a deep respect and affection for him and can’t reconcile that with his being involved in a coverup. I have avoided dealing with my conflicted emotions by assuming that he was naive and perhaps somewhat willfully oblivious to what was going on (this would certainly be consistent with his general attitudes toward mercy and forgiveness, even if that was grossly misplaced here.) That doesn’t excuse it but it certainly stops short of a deeper complicity. If there’s evidence to the contrary I suppose I should want to know, and deal with it.
Regarding the pedophilia/ebophilia itself, I think some blame should be apportioned to the seminaries. I don’t know enough about how they are run, but have certainly seen a lot of conservative Catholics railing against the “lavender mafia” and if memory serves when I read the USCCB report of what was being done after Boston it didn’t seem that they addressed that aspect much at all. My own parish priest, a staunch conservative, has been apoplexic about the PA report and hinted strongly that his experiences in seminary made all of this unsurprising.
And finally, about what has been done- my personal experience is that some pretty strong reforms have taken place to the point of sometimes even mild excesses, like my husband being unable to attend classroom functions at our child’s Catholic school because he hasn’t yet had time to complete the training and background check- but erring on the side of caution is good. The program, called VIRTUS, had IMO a good emphasis on training folks to recognize and report red flag behaviors, some of which would not necessarily be obvious.
I question the timing of the recent investigation but if there’s anything potentially positive, is it perhaps good that the statute of limitations had expired, IOW has vigilance improved to prevent recent crimes? I hope so, anyway.
I’m Lutheran so I don’t understand many aspects of the Catholic Church.
I think, fundamentally, this is a power-structure problem. The Catholic clergy has too much power with too little oversight – a recipe for abuse in any power structure.
I agree, Andy. And while I agree with the distinction that Dave makes, the Church is not the clergy- I find myself agreeing with the many Catholics (the blogger who goes by the pen name The Anchoress most notably) saying that it is up to the laity to fix this mess.
Bishops have little oversight other than the pope. Priests are overseen by their bishops. When a pope and the bishops are more interested in preventing scandals from coming to light than in protecting children, this is what happens.
I wonder what she thinks the laity can do? The Catholic laity learns about these crimes at the same time as other Americans do. How can they prevent what they don’t know is happening? Under what authority? Stop being Catholics? They are already doing that. It solves nothing. As far as I can tell there is only one solution that is not doctrinal in nature: giving lay people much more authority than is presently the case. That won’t necessarily solve the problem, either, but it at least provides a possibility. Other things that might help: a married clergy, more authority granted to women whether lay or in orders.
The present Church hierarchy is very adverse to any of those reforms. All tend to invalidate the life choices they have made. It is human to want validation.
Chicago has had fewer of these cases because at the first whiff of scandal, our archbishop imposed the right policy. Bernardin was a great bishop. He’s the one who should have been canonized.
Francis is the right guy in the right place to address this problem if he has the guts. He’s a Jesuit. Jesuits don’t report to bishops. They report to their provincials and to the pope. Consequently, he would have a reduced loyalty to the bishops compared with a bishop who came up through the diocesan priesthood.
I wonder what she thinks the laity can do? The Catholic laity learns about these crimes at the same time as other Americans do
I think she is calling for the laity to insist on having some oversight role. That along with a renewed call for vigilance and speaking out when something doesn’t seem right, and in the spiritual dimension, prayer and fasting.
I know the hierarchy has been resistant but the point us that they’ve completely lost moral authority and the laity should seize the moment.
By the way I have heard that before about Bernardin, and our current bishop in ATL is Wilton Gregory who was Bernardin’s auxiliary. He also seems to be of that mindset (though who knows.) It’s gut wrenching to think what might be uncovered if there was a systemic review in all parishes.
One other thing Ms. Scalia expressed is a desire to see real penitence from the perpetrators and enablers, and a decrease in insularity, clericism, and opulent lifestyle for the hierarchy. That sounds about right to me, and although the laity have no authority to make those demands I would like for more people to voice these ideas on what it might take to even begin restoring trust.
One more thing is that to the extent that people talk about reform, there is going to be a split between those who see it only as a pedophilia problem and those who see a connection between that and a subset of gay male culture in the seminaries and priesthood. A reasonable argument can be made that the two issues are related based on gender and age of most victims.
Wilton Gregory is an old friend of mine, a good egg, and last I checked a rising star.