What the Catholic Church still doesn’t get about the sex abuse scandal (Contribution)
There is something rotten in Philadelphia – and it’s not the sports teams.
Ana María Catanzaro, the chairperson of the Archdiocesan Review Board for clerical pedophilia has gone public of how the church has systematically violated its own stated policy.
The issue here is not that there is clerical abuse of children, but that even after putting corrective polices in place, the official church hierarchy covered up such abuses.
Catanzaro said that the whole board contemplated resigning en masse in March, but did not “because we had nothing to be ashamed of, and because we felt we still had a lot to contribute.”
Her stance is more courageous in defense of the church than the kowtowing to the hierarchy in all matters because Catanzaro cites the Constitution of the Church, Lumen Gentium , that the laity is “equally responsible for building God’s kingdom on earth.”
The detail offered by Catanzaro in Commonweal magazine is worth a direct reading. It merits attention because the problem is not found only in Philadelphia.
Church officials insisted on monitoring the procedures of the board and at the same time withheld key information and prevented direct interviews that are normal procedures in United States’ jurisprudence.
Cardinal Rigali of Philadelphia has a well-deserved reputation for good administration. Rigali, it will be remembered, used both diplomacy and hard-headed decision-making for the retirement of former Scranton Bishop Martino and was quick to retract previous claims when faced with a recent Grand Jury indictment of wayward priests.
He is also one of the most powerful of U.S. prelates in the naming of bishops.
So his “mistakes” are important because they disclose the thinking at the apex of American Catholicism, an issue not directly addressed in the latest John Jay report that downgraded the role of homosexuality or celibacy as causes of abuse.
The issue is neither the cardinal’s sincerity nor his acumen: both are spoiled, I think, by his theology.
Like many bishops, Rigali has a top-down concept of church.
Instead of trusting decision-making by legal professionals in the laity, the cardinal withheld information that would likely have produced evaluations so clear he would have been forced to accept the conclusions.
One key problem cited by Catanzaro was how current U.S. legal definitions are replaced with jargon from canon law.
The criminal code, for instance, classifies “grooming” of children to gain their confidence before sexual activity as culpable.
The archdiocese, instead, insisted on wording like “the Sixth Commandment of the Decalogue” and imposed the age of 16 from canon law as the measure of adulthood rather than the U.S. code’s age of 18.
I have little confidence that the latest instruction from the Vatican on how to run such review boards has fundamentally altered the power structure that allows the hierarchy to side-step local law and lay competence.
Resolution of the on-going scandal to Catholicism will not come by repeating the apologetic cant of the Catholic League that “everybody else does it,” pointed out in national and local media.
The real issue is that the moral authority of the church depends upon meeting a higher standard.
The cover-ups by bishops made worse what an individual cleric once did.
Moreover, it is unavailing to call the media “anti-Catholic” and to disparage the faith of protesting Catholics.
As Catanzaro suggested, it is time “for bishops to accept that their attitude of superiority and privilege only harms their image and the church’s.”
These are difficult times for all Catholics.
If you believe that the Holy Spirit is working among us, then you might hope – as I do – that the end is at hand for the clerical mentality that views all decision-making in the church as top-down.
News flash: laypersons are empowered by Baptism to provide leadership to the bishops because Holy Orders do not confer infallibility.
Perhaps, as the new Vatican guidelines (III:f) suggest the laity “cannot substitute” for the authority (potestas regiminis) of individual bishops: but only a fool would say that our input can never improve the bishops’ decisions.
Let them be humble and ask our advice: we also are the church.
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Roman Catholic Church Abuse Report Blames Woodstock For Pedophile Problem
It took five years for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ commissioned report to come out and blame the tumult of the 1960’s for the child sexual abuse scandal that has plagued the Church for over a decade now.
Of course, this means that those priests who abused children after the 1960’s had access to time machines and were able to go back in time to abuse children in the eras before they were born, thus contaminating the time stream and violating the Temporal Prime Directive.
The one notable thing about this report is that it does not blame gays for the scandal.
Instead, it blames Woodstock and the Summer of Love.
The report says, the abuse occurred because priests who were poorly prepared and monitored, and were under stress, landed amid the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s.
Known occurrences of sexual abuse of minors by priests rose sharply during those decades, the report found, and the problem grew worse when the church’s hierarchy responded by showing more care for the perpetrators than the victims.
However the study notes, that there was little evidence before 2002 “that diocesan leaders met directly with victims.’’
Instead, church leaders focused on the abusive priests rather than on their victims.
Researchers at John Jay, also concluded that gay priests were no more likely to abuse than heterosexual priests.
In fact, the study noted that gay men began entering the seminaries “in noticeable numbers” from the late 1970s through the 1980s. By the time this cohort entered the priesthood, in the mid-1980s, the reports of sexual abuse of minors by priests began to drop and then to level off.
If anything, the report says, the abuse decreased as more gay priests began serving the church.
The study also found that celibacy could not be blamed for the abuse epidemic.
Nor could seminaries have done a better job screening for likely offenders because abusive priests had no common profile.
And while abusive priests have often been branded pedophiles, in a declaration that will no doubt stir controversy, the report says that fewer than 5 percent actually met that definition and said, “The majority of victims were pubescent or post-pubescent,’’ the report states. “Thus,’’ they wrote, “it is inaccurate to refer to abusers as pedophile priests.’’
However, the study’s authors seem to redefine what constitutes pedophilia by suggesting that the prepubescent period ends at age 10, while, major associations of psychiatrists typically define pedophilia as interest in children 13 and younger.
There appears to be a problem with the logic offered by the report.
This qualifies as a false correlation. Abuse cases appear to rise in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and drop from the 1980’s and onward.
That likely has something to do with several factors that the report does not appear to take into account very well.
The first is that many of the victims of abuse from the 1930’s through the 1950’s are probably very reluctant to come forward due to cultural norms held at that time would make it less likely that they would want to come forward.
Victims from 1980 through 2010 are less likely to come forward just yet due to not having overcome the shame of being molested, and that is if they actually remember being molested as anything other than a nightmare.
The next issue that does not seem adequately addressed is the fact that child abuse victims from before 1963 (the actual start of the 60’s) may not be alive today to report their abuse.
There is, after all, a war in there where a large number of young men died.
Now, for the reality check. As mentioned in the report, only about five percent of the priests who served during the time covered by the report abused children or young adults.
This means that only about five percent qualify as pedophiles or ephebophiles. According to the report, less than four percent qualify as pedophiles while just over one percent as ephebophiles.
Oddly enough, this fits with what several studies claim is the percentage in the general population of pedophiles and ephebophiles in any given population.
That aspect of the report is no doubt going to upset Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, who has been blaming gays for the whole thing for some time now.
People are saying that the report will not satisfy either Liberals or Conservatives, and the reality is that it will probably not satisfy anyone except for the most ardent supporters of the Roman Catholic Church because it does not actually address the real problem.
People are not upset about the fact that there are pedophiles in the Roman Catholic Church. There are pedophiles anywhere where children congregate.
Any profession where children are involved is likely to have pedophiles in it.
There are teachers, school guidance councilors, pediatricians, day care workers, and on who molest children.
The problem is that the Roman Catholic Church put its needs above those of the children and refused to report the crimes to the police.
What is more, they often moved priests who were accused of assault around in order to avoid prosecution.
Pedophilia in the Catholic Church has never been the problem, so the report on the causes is not the answer.
The excuse of it being the 1960’s does not pass muster either.
Simply put, the report is trying to assuage fears that are not at the core of the scandal, but rather trying to divert attention from the fact that the crimes were covered up.
As President Richard M. Nixon learned, it is not the crimes that get you, it’s the cover up.
THE LAITYTUDE 