Can the Catholic Church Reform From Within?
By Sarah Jones, writing for The New Republic
12-15 minutes
The numbers alone are staggering: 1,000 victims, 300
priests. On Tuesday, to collective horror, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court
released the results of its grand jury investigation into child sexual abuse in
the state’s Catholic dioceses. The report spans all but one of the state’s
dioceses and documents abuse that goes back decades. “There have been other
reports about child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church,” the report
begins. “But not on this scale. For many of us, those earlier stories happened
someplace else, someplace away. Now we know the truth: It happened everywhere.”
Tale after tale of unimaginable exploitation and cruelty
make up the grand jury report. One priest tried to tie altar boys up with rope. That same priest also belonged
to a child porn ring with other priests. In a detail that reads
like a fever dream, clergy gave victims large gold crucifix necklaces, which marked the children as prey to
other members of the ring. One priest collected trophies of urine, pubic hair, and menstrual blood from
female victims. Another impregnated a minor and urged her to get an abortion.
Throughout it all, the church stumbled over itself to
protect its priests and its reputation. In 1996, the Pittsburgh diocese
received a report that one priest had been repeatedly accused of “sexual
impropriety”—he remained a priest until 2004. When dozens of parents
complained that a different priest had inappropriately touched and ogled their
naked sons at a Catholic school, the diocese removed him from the school, but
issued him a letter of good standing in 2014 that denied that there had ever
been any report of wrongdoing.
What happened in Pennsylvania is similar to what infamously
occurred in the archdiocese of Boston, where victims were bribed
into silence and accused priests were transferred to new parishes. What
happened in Pennsylvania and Boston is similar again to what happened on the island of Guam, where there are 200 clergy sex abuse cases
for a population of under 160,000 people and where the archbishop himself stood
accused of rape. Other clergy scandals are unfolding in the cities
of Buffalo and Rochester, New York; in Baltimore, Maryland; in Chicago,
Illinois; in the countries of Ireland, Poland, Argentina, Australia, and
Paraguay. The scandal is as universal as the church.
At this point, what could the church possibly do to cleanse
itself in the eyes of its congregants and the world? And if the church cannot
police itself, is there anything outside authorities can do to intervene?
The church’s secrecy is a repeating fact throughout the
Pennsylvania grand jury’s narrative of predation. While dioceses did take some
complaints seriously and removed priests from ministry, it’s clear that accused
priests did not consistently face justice from their own church. Instead,
dioceses shuffled priests from parish to parish. The report implicates some
prelates: Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who served as the bishop of Pittsburgh before
becoming archbishop of Washington, D.C., repeatedly allowed accused priests to
remain in ministry, usually at the recommendation of the church’s own treatment
centers for abusive priests.
How deep does the problem go? The sheer size of the Catholic
Church means it’s difficult to know the extent of clerical abuse. In recent
years, however, church officials have made efforts to provide a systematic
approach to oversight and accountability. The Dallas charter, first created by the United States
Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2002 and revised in 2005, 2011, and 2018,
requires dioceses to publicize procedures for reporting abuse and to create
review boards for investigating claims—boards that will include lay people as
well as clergy. It further orders dioceses to “demonstrate a sincere
commitment” to the “spiritual and emotional well-being” of victims and forbids
dioceses from entering settlements that require confidentiality from victims
unless it’s at a victim’s request.
The most important documents to emerge from the charter
include two reports commissioned by the church in conjunction with the John Jay
College of Criminal Justice. The first, released in 2003, examined the church’s abuse
record from 1950 to 2002; the second, released in 2011, examined the “causes and
context” of Catholic clergy abuse, and says the absence of “human formation”
courses at Catholic seminaries contributed to abuse.
“Before, there was spiritual formation, intellectual
formation, and pastoral formation,” explained Sr. Katarina Schuth, O.S.F., the
endowed chair for the scientific study of religion at the Saint Paul Seminary
and a contributor to the 2011 John Jay report. “Pope John Paul II required that
there be a fourth area of formation, human formation, which included a good
deal of more in-depth education about celibacy.” The idea was that previously
the church had not properly prepared priests for a lifetime of celibacy. As a
result of the human formation initiative, according to Schuth, abuse cases
receded from their peak in the 1960s and 70s.
But the Pennsylvania scandal, combined with recent
revelations that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick rose to the upper echelons of the
church even though some officials knew he had sexually abused seminarians and altar boys,
shows that there is a limit to the church’s willingness to take responsibility
for the decades of suffering it has caused. When confronted with the realities
of abuse, it covers it up, retreats to a defensive crouch, or attributes abuse
to external, rather than internal or doctrinal, factors.
On Tuesday, the archdiocese of Washington, D.C., launched a short-lived website dedicated solely to the defense of
Cardinal Wuerl. Some priests also offered up scapegoats. “Men who have suffered
sexual abuse, in particular as a child, should not be admitted to priestly
formation,” tweeted Fr. Kevin M. Cusick. “They need help of an intense
kind and that would not be it. On the contrary, for some it has proven an
insuperable temptation. Children should never be thus placed at risk.”
At the religious journal First Things, Fr. Dominic
Legge, O.P., who teaches systematic theology at the Pontifical Faculty of the
Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., blamed gay priests. “First, we need
to investigate the past and have a transparent accounting of the failures. How
were known networks of active homosexual priests (and bishops) allowed to
continue?” he asked. Legge recommended screening out priests who have
“a history of deep-seated homosexual attraction.”
Legge isn’t the first Catholic to pin clergy abuse on the
presence of gay priests, or to link homosexuality with predatory behavior. The
Vatican’s then-secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, told the Chilean bishops’ conference in 2012 that “many
psychologists and many psychiatrists” had told him “that there is a
relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia.” In 2018, Chilean police
raided the same bishops’ conference as part of an investigation into child sex
abuse committed by members of the Marist Brothers.
The 2011 John Jay report rejected any causal link between homosexuality
and child sex abuse, and so do other clergy. “It’s true that many of these
cases are men abusing boys. But you can’t blame all gay priests,” Fr. James
Martin, S.J. told me in an email. “It’s very close to saying homosexuality
leads to pedophilia, which is the worst kind of homophobia. The reason you
don’t see counterexamples of the many healthy celibate gay priests is that
they’re afraid to come out—now, more than ever, in this environment of blaming
and stereotyping.”
Martin also rejected the idea that clerical celibacy is the
root problem. “I think a clerical culture of secrecy and privilege contributed
more,” he wrote. “Most abuse happens in the context of families, but does
anyone believe that heterosexuality or marriage causes abuse? Blaming it on
celibacy is really missing the boat.”
But the church’s highest officials are still reluctant to
relinquish that privilege and secrecy. In New York and Maryland, the church opposed bills that would have expanded the statute of
limitations for child sex abuse cases, further restricting accountability for
pedophilia and more. (The archdiocese of Baltimore did not return a voicemail
requesting comment; the New York State Catholic Conference did not have a
spokesman available for comment.) And it is worth remembering that the only
reason we are having this discussion is that Pennsylvanian authorities stepped
in. If the church truly intended to shed light on past and present abuse, it
wouldn’t have taken a grand jury investigation to expose the abuses in
Pennsylvania. For his part, Martin believes that if the statutes are expanded,
secular institutions should be included in that expansion, an argument echoed by Fr. Thomas Reese, S.J. at The
National Catholic Reporter.
Aside from expanding that measure in a way that includes
secular institutions, there’s little secular authorities can do without running
afoul of the First Amendment. The constitutional wall between church and state
means that the state has an obligation to protect the church’s ability to
conduct business in accordance with its doctrinal dictates—which means reform
to doctrine, priestly oversight, education, and systems of accountability can
only come from within. Victims of clergy abuse do not even have a universal
right to sue the church for negligence that contributes to abuse; some state
supreme courts have ruled against it on religious freedom grounds (others have
permitted it).
In any case, it is already illegal to abuse children. Crimes
committed by predatory priests aren’t just crimes against the Catholic
faithful. They are crimes against all society, to which Catholics belong.
Priestly crimes do not end at the doors of the church; they afflict
neighborhoods and cities and states, too. The church then has an obligation to
the public as well as to its own laity. And that obligation is to tell the
truth, and to do so in the open, even it it harms church coffers.
It is possible for the church to fulfill its obligations
without sacrificing its constitutional rights. In a July column for The New York Times, in response to
the McCarrick scandal, Ross Douthat urged Pope Francis to convene an inquest,
“a special prosecutor—you can even call it an inquisition if you want—into the
very specific question of who knew what and when about the crimes of Cardinal
Theodore McCarrick, and why exactly they were silent.”
Douthat’s call resembles an earlier thought experiment by
Jennifer Haselberger, a whistleblower who resigned from the St.
Paul-Minneapolis archdiocese over an abuse cover-up. Haselberger, a canon
lawyer, suggested a truth and reconciliation committee, based on
the post-apartheid South Africa model. Haselberger’s proposal would still be an
internal investigation, but its results would presumably be public—and that is
exactly why Haselberger has said her experiment will never take shape as a real
effort. “If we had bishops all of a sudden admitting to knowledge and
actions...in any kind of public forum, we’d never be able to prevent that from
being used against them, which could lead to criminal prosecutions, civil
liability, we just can’t control that,” she told the National Catholic Reporter in 2014.
On Thursday, two full days after the grand jury report
broke, the Vatican released a six-sentence statement about the report’s
findings. Lessons must be learned, said the Holy See; abuse is “morally
reprehensible.” It urged accountability, but did not explain how it planned to
achieve that goal. Meanwhile, Pope Francis’s current itinerary for an upcoming visit to Ireland lacks a visit with victims of
clergy abuse. Victims and faithful Catholics alike must then hope and trust
that the church’s current procedures are enough to prevent future outbreaks of
abuse—that the Vatican takes the problem seriously, though its prelates and
even the pope either contribute to the problem or respond tepidly to its moral
and criminal outrages.
One of the most disturbing details of the Pennsylvania
report did not describe the abuse of children. “Abuse complaints were kept
locked up in a ‘secret archive.’ That is not our word, but theirs; the church’s
Code of Canon Law specifically requires the diocese to maintain such an
archive,” the report states. “Only the bishop can have the key.”
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