THE CHURCH'S SEX-ABUSE CRISIS What the media coverage & commentary about the sex-abuse crisis have missed
Steinfels, Peter
THE CHURCH'S SEX-ABUSE CRISIS What's old, what's new, what's needed-and why Peter Steinfels There are scandals and then there are scandals. Most are ugly, absorbing, and quickly forgot-ten. A few...
...And why did it take so long...
...But the opposite is more the case...
...Newsweek's March 4 cover story on Cardinal Law says that "In 1984, the story of Gilbert Gauthe, a child-abus-ing priest in Louisiana, exploded into the national press...
...already on extended sick leave in California (but serving part-time in a parish), he was now sent into treatment...
...Bishops underwent the equivalent of crash courses in sexual dy-namics and came to terms with the inadequacy of "go-and-sin-no-more" policies...
...Today's announcement adds to mounting revelations of sexual abuse by pedophile priests that have rocked the Catholic Church in recent months...
...Quiet settlements and sealed court records are not neces-sarily sinister...
...What turned out to be a deceptive reprieve, post-1993, re-vealed other weaknesses...
...In the current climate, many bishops are finding it prudent to remove these priests from any min-istry, too...
...Rev-elations of atrocities committed by American troops in Viet-nam or Central America ought to make headlines today, although these U.S...
...Time magazine's April 1 cover story dates the Gauthe scan-dal more accurately but then declares omnisciently that "at least" since then, "the U.S...
...That may be the more im-portant truth...
...How do you know...
...There is also the fact that the break between past and present is not at all clear for another part of the indictment, the un-publicized settlements with sealed court records that have led to charges of "cover-ups" and "hush money...
...The bishops emphasized pastoral care for victims and screen-ing of seminarians, they struggled with the risks involved in reassigning offending priests after apparently successful treatment, they prodded Rome to ease church law so that recalcitrant priests could be more readily dismissed...
...With emotions at the current pitch, it is hard to say these things without being accused of whitewashing the church or denying the suffering of victims...
...The second is that this conduct occurred fifteen, twenty-five, thirty, or more years ago...
...Nor can even the most steadfast escape the im-pulse to take some distance from a soiled church...
...Would any parent or victim, dissatisfied with an official response, ever think of going to the diocesan paper for an independent investi-gation...
...Education, upward mobility, new cultur-al attitudes, and probably the scandal itself reduced the Catholic deference to clerical and hierarchical authority that had often permitted abuse to go unchecked...
...The special committee assigned the topic eventually produced solid, detailed work...
...No one of these solutions will suffice, although an adroit mixture of spiritual renewal, institutional checks on the self-protective ethos of the clerical culture, and cooperation with the law may...
...Consume a steady diet of those stories, and read them in the context of "news"- that is, of events that mainly happened yesterday or last week or at most last year-and it takes a very concentrated mind not to assume that references to an "epidemic" of "re-cently disclosed" abuse do not fall into the same category...
...One legal expert who has worked on church matters for decades told me, "Eighty percent of the time it was victims who asked for confidentiality...
...Cook's lawyer, Stephen Rubino, currently being cited in the press as though he had no history of his own, or-chestrated the accusation with CNN to gain massive news coverage...
...Fourth, that the Catholic Church has been engaging in a massive cover-up, hiding cases from legal authorities and settling suits on the sly...
...While some amount of "normal" homosexual and heterosexual attraction to older adolescents might be damped by classic discipline, it should not be forgotten that many of the worst sexual offenders have been products of old-school seminaries and repressive attitudes toward sex that were the embodiment of a traditional version of clerical obedi-ence and asceticism...
...It was no accident that the first sentence of the Boston Globe's first big story on Geoghan referred to "the cloak of secrecy...
...And even when the pressure was on, the bishops had never been able to respond with the decisiveness that the scandal demanded...
...It is no exaggeration to say that years of pastoral work have been undone in a few months...
...This window of transition came far too late and took far too long, but it did occur...
...All this is on the record, and it offers the most straightforward explanation of why the recent spate of revelations contain so few from the past decade: Something really did change...
...Between 1985 and 1993, the American bishops were dragged kicking and screaming into deal-ing with sexual abuse by priests...
...Priests who have served the U.S...
...The center of gravity of the American Catholic populace is mod-erately liberal, which means believing that tolerance, plu-ralism, open discussion and inquiry, the equality of men and women, the ideal of intimacy in marriage, and many other typically "modern" values are authentic ways of living Chris-tianity...
...In many instances, the available evidence does not rise to the level of prosecutable action...
...The church may be doubtfully blessed with another deceptive pause...
...Revelations, accusations, admissions, denials have rolled down day after day like an avalanche of mud, to the point that sorting through and examining the claims and the issues have become almost impossible...
...This vacuum has not just happened...
...But that claim raises further questions...
...en-gaging") because that is exactly the indefinite way it has reg-istered in the public mind...
...There is a terrible vacuum of leadership at the highest levels of American Catholicism...
...There are many reasons for eventually opening Latin-rite ordination to married people...
...Many bishops, Cardinal Bernard Law re-portedly a leader among them, resisted any national action that might infringe on the independence of bishops in their own diocese...
...As a teenager working at a Boy Scout camp, I discovered and reported that a top camp official was mo-lesting fourteen- and fifteen-year-old staff "trainees...
...The Catholic Church, tragically, took much longer...
...Would any diocesan paper ever think of raising ques-tions, about either local or national developments...
...Po-lice, physicians, and priests should never be counted on to patrol themselves...
...Much of the information coming to light today would not, in fact, even exist if church officials had not made civil settlements with victims in the 1990s instead of following an older pattern of fighting cases where the statute of limitations and the cred-ibility of accusers would have provided favorable terrain for a church "victory...
...Tabloid coverage has played its part in the present scandal, of course, both on the new forms of tabloid TV as well as in tabloid papers...
...on the contrary, most appear to be in the hands of the law...
...Of course, different interpretations are possible...
...More concrete measures were taken in 1992 by Chicago's Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, appalled to discover his error in reassigning an accused, superficially treated priest who had promptly repeated his offenses...
...Catholics are owed a visible, public examination of the pre-1993 failures, a full review of the post-1993 changes and how they have or have not operated, and a compre-hensive account of what has surfaced and been done in the last months...
...What leadership requires What will happen next...
...I have deliberately stated this indictment in the present perfect ("have been preying...
...Finally, the trial and sentencing of Porter in 1993 galva-nized many bishops, Cardinal Law among them, to comb files for lurking Porters and to get them into treatment or out of the active priesthood...
...Horrid facts have been mixed with half-truths, half under-stood...
...My only inkling comes from recalling what I observed in the late 1950s...
...Some dioceses publicized their policies, set up hotlines for complaints, and conducted pre-ventive education programs for clergy and diocesan em-ployees, though sometimes only the minimum legally required...
...Occupations characterized by shared experiences of prolonged or difficult preparation and intense confronta-tions with life-and-death events naturally close ranks...
...Now church leaders are lamenting that the sexual abuse scandal has un-dermined that trust...
...The reporting, especially on television, was prob-ably less accurate, more biased, and more sensationalized than anything seen recently...
...Yet the possibility that the current sexual abuse scandal has been widely misun-derstood does not mean that it is overblown...
...Then the stories naturally set these specific events in the wider context...
...But the Gauthe story did not explode into the national press in 1984...
...Having in-terjected the year 1985, Time goes on to describe the subse-quent situation in a past tense ("Dioceses lapsed into a pat-tern of denial and deception") that rhetorically transports the reality of previous decades into the post-1985 period of slow learning and forced change...
...The Saint Louis Post-Dispatch surveyed 178 of the U.S...
...As far as I can tell, waiting...
...Catholics report friends and family members who have started attending other churches...
...When one reads the graphic de-scriptions of predatory acts, when one tries to absorb the lifelong damage to so many victims, when one considers the violations of trust, the invasions of family homes and rela-tionships, the besmirching of fellow priests, and the dissipation of resources contributed by the laity and desperate-ly needed for other purposes, the connection between the scandal and its enormous impact appears straightforward and without need of further puzzling...
...Unfortunately, with the pressure off, there was little thought about an overall approach to han-dling them...
...Not long ago, they took a great deal on trust from church leaders, although often with a grain of cynicism...
...Dealing with sexual abuse, in short, was not high among Vatican priorities...
...The Boy Scouts soon changed their ways...
...Hard-core pedophilia or the more nu-merous cases of serious psychosexual immaturity may only be disguised or aggravated by a return to the body-denying asceticisms and seminary practices of old...
...Geoghan was one such case...
...There was also the inexplicable reluctance of some of my co-workers to involve themselves in confronting behavior they clearly suspected...
...Rome, during the years 1986-88, had spent its en-ergies trying to banish the Reverend Charles E. Curran from teaching moral theology at Catholic University...
...At the same time, legitimate distinctions between past and present cannot be brushed aside as irrelevant...
...And how much did things change...
...This points up a serious shortcoming of the bishops' 1985-93 reorientation...
...The perpetrator was immediately sent packing and victims sent home...
...At this point everyone urges a favored solution...
...But what did it signify that the effort was spearheaded not by a cardinal but a bishop, however much respected, from Bismarck, North Dakota...
...The American bishops' con-ference has been repeatedly reined in, with power shifted to the cardinals (especially to the one currently most para-lyzed), to the point that nothing happens without looking over one's shoulder for approval...
...Since 1993 only a very, very few priests having credible past allegations in their dossiers have remained in or been returned to standard parish duties...
...First, if something changed, exactly what was it...
...Polls of Catholics register their massive loss of confidence in their leaders...
...The Catholic Church can reinforce that instinct with aversion to "scandalizing the faithful," a handy theological rationale for not opening the secrets of the clergy or the divisions with-in the hierarchy to lay eyes and ears...
...An independent diocesan press might have saved the church from a disaster, or at the very least prepared Catholics to put the recent revelations into perspective...
...For the most part, individual stories almost always give the time frame of the particular events being reported, for example, "A spokesman for the Podunk diocese announced today that it had settled suits charging three priests with abusing minors in the 1970s and 1980s...
...Other leaders, these Catholics sense, comprehend but comply, publicly endorsing posi-tions that are privately questioned...
...But the period 1985-93 nonetheless marks a break in the story...
...And if the changes were not enough (which can almost be taken for granted, in view of the present mess) what more must be done...
...It is always hard to know how thoroughly changes at the top filter through the ranks and translate into decisions on the ground...
...It is the preexisting erosion of trust that has shaped the way Catholics have perceived-or have been primed to misper-ceive-the scandal to begin with...
...Since Catholics everywhere have been profoundly af-fected by deeds in distant dioceses, such an exercise of lead-ership must be national and not just diocesan...
...If that is so, why has the current scandal proved to be so much worse...
...Either they seize the tiller and change course or they go under...
...The watershed years were almost certainly 1992-93...
...In the end, the bishops could endorse advisory "princi-ples," but they could not produce anything resembling a na-tional policy...
...These do not appear to be limited to the past but to have continued to the present time...
...Recall the Rev-erend Bruce Ritter, founder-hero of Covenant House, New York's refuge for runaway youth...
...Any generalizations will always be challenged with at least a handful of counter-examples...
...Sec-ond, that church authorities have been facilitating these crimes by reassigning molesters to parish after parish de-spite complaints...
...Recent young victims, it explains, may merely feel incapable of going public until they are adults...
...These facts alone could explain the pauci-ty of recent cases coming to light...
...To be sure, most parishioners express shock and sorrow while declaring their faith unshaken...
...The cardinal assembled a blue-ribbon committee that not only culled forty years of diocesan records to identify potential abusers and remove those still active but recommended a new model for handling accusations, a lay-dominated committee (including a victim or victim's relative), a nonclerical gatekeeper, and a publi-cized hotline...
...The phrases summing up these charges run like mantras through the news stories: "shut-tling pedophile priests from parish to parish," "stonewalling the victims," "paying hush money...
...In fact, keeping settlements secret, a fairly standard legal step, has probably been the mutual prefer-ence of church officials and victims in many cases...
...Seasoned observers of Catholicism are straining-and fail-ing-to find a comparable event against which to measure the current crisis...
...The maga-zine quotes a plaintiff's lawyer: "We'll find out in about 2015...
...Embarrassing state-ments from on high, inept, ill-stated, or ill-explained...
...Second, what is past cannot be ignored or dismissed...
...The scandal may no longer be victimization of minors...
...This man is someone I respect...
...But the current impatience, anger, and alienation also arise from the cumulative effect of years of irritations with what looks like the indifference, incompe-tence, or arrogance of church leaders...
...Seminaries also began seri-ously screening candidates and sought a middle ground be-tween the older harsh suspi-cion of sexuality and the flout-ing of celibacy that marked some institutions in the post-conciliar reaction...
...Although the story of predatory priests was demoted from nightly news to occasional revivals during a sweeps week or following extraordinarily large settlements, church offi-cials were aware that a tremendous backlog of cases remained from earlier decades...
...Hiddenness, dark secrets in dark places, have become almost as much an element in the cur-rent scandal as the sexual harm itself...
...As an American I must acknowledge a histo-ry of genocidal attitudes toward indigenous peoples and centuries of crimes against humanity perpetrated in the slave trade and slaveholding...
...A third solution, now generally favored by everyone, is re-liance on civil authorities to investigate and resolve allega-tions of sexual molestation...
...What is the public perception of the scandal...
...It will demand collective action but also the courage and capability of individuals who emerge like a Lincoln or a Churchill, to make the necessary stand and speak the necessary word...
...Or James Porter, a laicized priest from Fall River, Massachusetts, whose serial predations were on the scale of Geoghan's...
...Providing a safeguard against sexual abuse is not one of the most persuasive...
...It should manage, by voluntary consent if not by canon law, to establish a national policy, beyond the present advisory principles, to which dioceses would be held publicly accountable...
...reach out to victims...
...Second, if what we are seeing is not a new, post-1993 wave of sexual abusers but rather the same wave once again, why do most people, including well-informed Catholics, includ-ing anguished priests offering apologies from pulpits, have a different impression...
...Sealed records have become a symbol of a lack of transparency in general that goes a long way in explaining why recent revelations, de-spite their vintage, have created a scandal well beyond its forerunner...
...The biggest single factor was probably Steven Cook's false accusation made in November 1993 (and withdrawn 108 days later) against Cardinal Bernardin him-self...
...rebuff ing...
...Interviews surface raw anger...
...and to force a revision of the bishops' stance on combating AIDS...
...Still, it can say that there is no "way of knowing whether the pedophile epidemic is being checked...
...The recent dis-closures of Catholic dioceses that have concealed instances of child sex abuse and left abusive priests unpunished ob-scures the reality that most dioceses in the United States have been addressing this problem for years...
...A few change history...
...to strip Seat-tle's Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of his powers...
...Whatever form it takes, recovery of trust will demand an exertion of leadership American Catholicism has virtually never seen in its history...
...What gets left out is the fact that those other "mounting revelations" are equally of deeds done one, two, or more decades ago...
...Yet the current scandal, I would argue, is not what it seems...
...Presumably celibacy would survive in any case, in religious orders and among some diocesan priests...
...The media's interest may burn itself out or provoke a backlash by tarring innocent clergy...
...This underlying fissure between appearance and reality is why some scandals change history...
...But what is needed to limit the devastation of the present scandal is something prior: a restoration of con-fidence in church leadership...
...Where...
...They engaged experts, stud-ied the medical realities, met with victims, revised local dioce-san policies, and scrutinized the quality of treatment centers...
...it will still be secrecy and hypocrisy...
...Commonweal has proposed a panel of "experts" ("The Whole Story," April 5) to address the scandal...
...On the other hand, the shocking nature even of old cases, so irrec-oncilable with the way the priesthood is understood, may feed the scandal for a long time to come, especially if Amer-ican cases are linked with scandalous conduct, old or new, that has been disclosed in Canada, Ireland, Britain, France, Austria, and, most recently, in Poland...
...Priests and bishops faithful to the celibacy they publicly profess are certainly likely to be more steadfast guardians against sexual exploitation of all kinds than if they are them-selves compromised...
...Fifteen years of talking to dioce-san attorneys," he said...
...If the bishops are not willing to undertake the task, a commission of lay Catholic notables could be formed, chosen from left, right, and center, adequately funded by private contribu-tions, and prepared to compensate for its obvious lack of official authority by publicizing which dioceses do and do not cooperate...
...Some "facts" are wrong...
...The current flood of revelations about Catholic priests sexually prey-ing on minors and the failure of Catholic officials to expose these outrages is taking on the dimensions of a history-chang-ing scandal...
...As for what has changed, it is almost certain that church authorities long since ceased to "shuttle pedophile priests from parish to parish...
...But calling the cops is not the panacea frequently imagined...
...But in the present climate, his testimony and that of dioce-san attorneys just won't suffice...
...The real problem with abolishing celiba-cy as a requirement for ordination, a solution that some Catholics now peddle as the cure for everything the way some Republicans peddle tax cuts, is that ousting sexual mo-lesters simply cannot wait for a global church to get around to such an adjustment...
...No doubt they mean it...
...Yet it seems incontrovertible that the Catholic clerical cul-ture has impeded efforts to detect and remove priest mo-lesters...
...Leading bishops, cho-sen by the bishops' conference, should be the primary mem-bers, joined by lay Catholics, especially women, of inde-pendent stature and possibly non-Catholics as well...
...Furthermore, the bishops have not created any central source of reliable numbers (a failure that has caused untold dam-age in itself...
...Restoring confidence in church leadership will not be ac-complished by apologies or exhortations, no matter how heartfelt...
...Should have known, perhaps, but actually did...
...If the church is the people of God, body of Christ, sacrament of the world, instrument of communion, then the Spirit is somewhere in this scandal...
...by exposing them, we learn im-portant, lasting lessons about our institutions, ideologies, politics, and economics, and sometimes about human na-ture itself...
...Un-ethical or criminal instances of medical experimentation or drug testing should be uncovered and publicized even when they occurred years ago...
...Different news sto-ries, relying on different sources or using different time frames, report different numbers...
...Settlements & secrecy The effect of endless news coverage is not the whole story, however...
...After 1993 the momentum that had finally built up was lost...
...I have read hundreds of news stories on this topic since the Boston Globe began its reporting blitz about the serial mo-lester and former priest, John Geoghan, in January...
...It is irresponsible to concerned parents, dismayed Catholics, innocent priests, and quite simply to truth itself...
...The solid, informative documents, for ex-ample reviewing the evolving sexual abuse policies of local dioceses, were inevitably written in the diplomatic prose of a body that can only coax and must never offend...
...comply with civil law and cooperate with criminal investigations...
...I asked in return...
...Marriage is not known to prevent sexual abuse as much as to keep it in the family...
...But Time's argument is not illogical, and it would be nice if my own conclusions above did not include the words "almost," "nearly," and "guess...
...Other dioceses avoided the topic altogether, their policies scarcely more accessible to the laity than if they had been written in Latin...
...But each has weaknesses, and each overlooks a necessary prior step if the current scandal is not to extend almost endlessly the present devastation...
...It should be capable of exerting moral pressure on dioceses so that the bishops' conference could provide full, accurate numbers about past and current cases of abuse around the country, information on their dates and disposition, and details about diocesan policies...
...immediately suspend anyone reasonably suspected while proceeding with an investigation and making use of "appro-priate medical evaluation and intervention...
...As fam-ily members, employees, and citizens, most Catholics know very well that not everything can be made public and some things must be taken on trust...
...My God, why haven't they taken care of the problem...
...Leaders who have been happy to scrape along, keeping to their immediate tasks with heads down and eyes averted as much as possible, are taken unawares...
...It was in 1985 that the pioneering articles by Jason Berry chronicling the case of the the Reverend Gilbert Gauthe in Louisana , backed up by Tom Fox's editorials, sounded the alarm bell in the National Catholic Reporter...
...Grievances long sim-mering below the surface, abetted by new social arrange-ments, boil over...
...Yet step by step, workshop by workshop, meeting by meeting, the bishops' conference nationally and many bishops locally did take action...
...Other initiatives followed, but, for reasons that historians will no doubt probe, none caught fire...
...The argument is tricky-it is hard to disprove a negative- and runs up against the fact that the 1985-93 scandals pro-duced accusations not only of long-past abuse from adults but of relatively recent abuse from young people and their parents...
...Yet the sense that the church operates by a norm of secrecy is not the whole story either...
...That misperception may have given the present scandal a cumulative character it doesn't deserve: "Didn't we go through this ten years ago...
...These are vaguely past practices, in other words, that have continued more or less unabated to the present...
...Conservatives and liberals have different lists of complaints, to be sure...
...Catholics have to see and know that these terri-ble matters are being addressed openly, honestly, and de-cisively...
...There was no publicity, no record, no legal action, no compensation, no therapy...
...I state these propositions with trepidation, for two reasons...
...military interventions are long over...
...Bish-ops in states where clergy working with minors are not cov-ered by such laws should seriously consider pressing for a change...
...He is right to point out that many settlements have been sealed to protect the victim's reputation rather than the church's...
...All the matters that the Vatican and its supporters in the United States have con-sidered perils to the faith-theologians without mandates, gender-neutral language in the liturgy, the casual relativism that equates all world religions-are like so many tempests compared to this tsunami...
...Embarrassment at CNN's and Rubi-no's manipulations undoubtedly sobered the media...
...Church authori-ties cannot escape the responsibility of making their own decisions about suspension, treatment, reassignment, or re-tirement, which may now be complicated because the ac-cused has, to some extent, been "let off" by the law...
...My own model would be more like the Kerner Commission that ad-dressed America's racial divide in the wake of urban riots in the sixties: a panel of public figures respected for good judgment, experience, and probity...
...On the con-trary, it may show that the crisis the church now faces goes even deeper than we imagine...
...There was probably no obstacle to the accused finding work at other camps, even Boy Scout camps, just as he had bounced, I subsequently learned, from teaching at one suburban school after another...
...Even the best coverage has nonetheless often conveyed a seriously inaccurate picture through a more subtle process...
...It has been de-liberately created by years of episcopal ap-pointments and Vatican interventions designed to prevent the American church from taking national initiatives that might conflict with Rome's...
...Some leading critics of the bishops' previous in-action badly injured their credibility by precipitously hailing the Cook charges...
...Still, a great deal of news cov-erage, while aggressive, has been accurate, even restrained, within the normal limits...
...Two overwhelming things emerge...
...deal with the issue "as openly as possible...
...Another possibility is that the analysis above will prove wrong: the changes in-stituted by the bishops in the nineties will prove to have been inadequate or inadequately implemented, and not the inevitable few but an undiminished number of molestation cases will surface from the years since then...
...Time is faced with a fact it cannot ignore: "Almost every case on record happened years ago...
...The same year Cardinal Law moved Geoghan from Saint Bren-dan's to Saint Julia's...
...One is left only with a general impression of betrayal and malfeasance on a grand scale and with a general reaction of disgust...
...Most organizations want to hide their dirty linen...
...Marriage does not automatically eradicate cler-ical culture: Historically, Protestant, Anglican, and Ortho-dox married clergy have maintained a variety of clerical cultures, both attractive and uninspiring...
...No responsi-ble report on unethical medical experiments or fraudulent drug testing would fail to highlight for the concerned read-er whether the experiments were continuing or the ques-tionable drugs still in use...
...The Chicago model was imitated or at least adapted elsewhere...
...First, in this matter, there is no monolithic "the church" but 195 separate and autonomous dio-ceses operating over many years under any number of different bishops...
...Third, that the church has been rebuffing victims with courtroom tactics instead of offering pastoral care...
...The inexplicable leniency before 1993 toward Shan-ley, who had publicly defended sexual relations between men and boys, and the tributes or references given him until 1997 have renewed demands for Cardinal Law's resignation...
...If secrecy remains the church's norm, then, who can really know whether newer policies are operating or whether other Geoghans aren't as free to pursue their prey as ever...
...April 9, 2002...
...As for the criminal-law solution, not a few bishops con-sider themselves blessed by mandatory reporting laws, which require allegations of molestation to be promptly reported to civil authorities for investigation and prosecution...
...When credible allegations have emerged in more recent years, the accused priests have not been reassigned...
...The Rev-erend Paul Shanley was another...
...The first is the shocking char-acter-in some instances the scarcely believable character- of the conduct alleged and often admitted, whether by abusing priests or accommodating church officials...
...The vast majority of the offenders have long since retired, resigned, died, or otherwise been removed from the active priesthood...
...Devout Christians had been denouncing the indulgence racket and the associated power of the clergy for centuries before Johann Tetzel's crass fundraising appalled Martin Luther...
...To some extent, the recognition that most priest offenders have targeted male adolescents and not, like true pedophiles, chil-dren, has already turned attention to the extent of sexually active homosexuals in the clergy (or among seminarians) and may eventually turn attention to patterns of consensu-al violations of celibacy, whether heterosexual or homosex-ual (consensual frequently being an adjective open to dispute...
...One, gen-erally advanced by conservatives, is a strengthening of hi-erarchical and sexual discipline, with a renewed emphasis on clerical obedience and asceticism...
...The scan-dals of those years also produced cover stories in the newsweek-lies, bone-chilling exposes on prime time, public apologies from bishops, and impassioned exchanges among Catholics about celibacy, patriarchy, authoritarianism, and sexual re-pression...
...It remains almost impossible to fathom the way church authorities regularly mishandled abuse cases before that time...
...The New York Times was typ-ical in taking no note of Gauthe until June 1985, more than six months after Geoghan's reassignment...
...It took the drumbeat of widely publicized cases, the threat of huge financial losses plus the growing effectiveness of victims' groups, and the biting criticism of a few prophetic souls like the Reverend Andrew Greeley to overcome the inertia...
...But whatever the shading, the situation since 1993 has certainly been better than it was before...
...That does not mean nothing has changed...
...First, that a large number of priests have been vi-ciously preying on minors...
...facilitating...
...And then there is the fact that we scarcely know how to absorb-the forest rather than the trees-smack in front of our eyes and yet so much at odds with what has now become an almost reflex-ive fear of the worst...
...A celibacy wholeheartedly placed in a larger spiritual framework and positively affirmed by fel-low clergy might brace some priests in times of stress and weakness...
...To say that 1985 began the transition and that 1992-93 was a watershed excuses neither the earlier blindness to complaints and indifference to victims nor the sanctimony, secrecy, and deception that sometimes accompanied the process of easing priests out...
...The bishops' conference announced five general principles for dealing with accusations: respond to allegations promptly...
...embarrassed acquiescence at lower levels...
...Diocesan papers have often reported new cases matter-of-factly when they became public, but seldom provided a forum for discussing causes...
...It is irresponsible to skirt that examination out of anger or carelessness-or because undertaking it would weaken a brief for reform or unduly complicate a dramatic narrative...
...Rather than wait for the demise of a clerical culture which may, in fact, contain elements worth preserving, the church should instead counter its inevitable self-protective tendencies with devices like the lay-dominated review boards already created by many dioceses and greater roles for parish-ioners in the assignment of pastors and associates...
...Under the best of circum-stances, reorienting an or-ganism as large as the Catholic Church is like turning around the proverbial ocean liner...
...He and they will not be seen as disinterested...
...There has been a certain sloppiness about terminology: three months into its coverage the Boston Globe ran a story saying that ac-tually only a small number of the sex offenders were, like Geoghan, true pedophiles in the clinical sense, a point that does not lessen culpability but has significant consequences for treatment and prevention...
...According to canon law, the powers of the bishops' conference, except in matters liturgical, are almost entirely advisory...
...Moreover, the minority of these earlier offenders still ac-tive in the priesthood have largely been assigned, rightly or wrongly but almost always after what church authorities believed to be thoroughgoing evaluations and treatment, to posts away from young people...
...Some coverage has been extraor-dinary balanced and informative...
...Latin-rite dioceses, man-aging to get replies from more than two-thirds...
...As a Catholic I must struggle with the fact that pious church leaders and some of its best thinkers once believed that the faith of Jesus was served by burning people alive...
...Whether this was wise, or not, is a fair question...
...But that rock-bottom confidence does not reflect the continuing tensions between faith and doubt that are now the daily reality for millions of religiously thoughtful Catholics...
...I mean the fact that the vast majority of incidents we have been reading about are at least a decade old, many much older, and were dealt with in the early 1990s...
...No, they do not...
...church over the time period under investigation are not the forty-six thousand cur-rently active priests but a num-ber more like one hundred thousand...
...So while the past sins and crimes of priest molesters and the delinquencies of church authorities cannot be set aside as though they had nothing to tell us, it is flatly irresponsi-ble to assume without examination that the situation is the same today as it was, say, a decade ago or a quarter centu-ry ago...
...Some facts that are right are being jammed, consciously or unconsciously, into a framework where they don't quite fit...
...The proposed solutions are not mutually exclusive, and they are all worth discussing...
...One reflex in the face of such a question is to blame the media, a reflex most church offi-cials have wisely repressed...
...A number of colum-nists, suddenly flaunting their previously invisible links to the church, have given vent to vitriolic denunciation...
...What today's scandal makes plain is the underlying and pervasive erosion of trust that has come to characterize the relationship between large por-tions of the Catholic laity and their bishops...
...A second, generally advanced by liberals, is the opening of the Latin-rite priest-hood to married men (and women), with a concomitant dis-solution of the clerical culture currently set apart by celibacy...
...Generalizations about treatment of victims are harder to make-each case is so different and it is mainly the most contested that become visible...
...And isn't that sufficient...
...The survey shows that at least four-fifths of the dioceses responding rely on lay committees, not the church hierarchy alone, to assess allegations of sex abuse," Jon Sawyer, the paper's Wash-ington bureau chief, wrote on March 24...
...church has known all about...how deep sexual misconduct ran, how widespread, how frequent...
...The precise dates, which the cur-rent news blitz has tended either to ignore or fudge, are im-portant...
...My guess is that the overall pattern has unquestionably been for the church to be far more pastoral and less legalistic than before...
...After all, the faith of Catholics has survived a lot of shaking in the past four decades...
...We not only hold individuals re-sponsible for such past acts...
...For years these Catholics have felt, rightly or wrong-ly (and I believe, for the most part, rightly) that many high church leaders harbor an incomprehension bordering on contempt for this outlook...
...Don't the facts speak for themselves...
...That estrangement, so manifest in the reaction to the sexual abuse stories, reveals the true condition of the American church: not a hothouse of sexu-al secrets, but a church tragical-ly devoid of leadership and seem-ingly indifferent to squandering the gifts of the best-educated and most fully engaged Catholic laity in the church's history...
Vol. 129 • April 2002 • No. 8
