We now know there were two stunning scandals in the American Catholic church: priests committing child sex abuse offenses and bishops illegally covering up these crimes.The rate at which accusations of child and youth abuse were brought against priests was, by my calculations based on available figures, 74 times higher than the rate of such accusations among the American male population as a whole.
As for the bishops, it appears from our present knowledge that nearly all American bishops and cardinals in charge of dioceses participated in illegal cover-ups.
All of this points to a systemic problem that still begs to be analyzed. What is there in the recruitment, education and deployment of priests, or in the mindset of the church, that could explain these two humiliating fin de siecle phenomena?
The bishops failed to report priestly abuse cases to civil authorities, as they were legally required to do in every jurisdiction in America. They re-assigned abusive priests to other positions or other dioceses where they might strike again. In some cases, they gave the abusive priests excellent recommendations as they sought to get rid of them.
The monetary damage to the American Catholic Church included huge sums, with estimates ranging from $600 million to $3 billion paid to the accusers and to the church's legal defenses, and to counsel priests. Five dioceses were bankrupt. The average payment to a credible accuser was $322,000. The collateral damage — to reputation, to faith, to loyalty — is incalculable.
The bishops' bad judgments and their cover-up misdeeds were partly in response to a strict mandate in a 1962 letter to bishops from the Vatican's Office of the Propagation of the Faith. The letter was called, Crimen Solicitationis (The Crime of Solicitation). It called so forcefully — and ludicrously - -for utmost secrecy on clerical sex abuse cases that it was interpreted by the bishops to mean cover-up. Solicitation is the church's name for sexual seduction by a priest of a victim over whom he is considered to have moral authority, like a penitent or a child in a parish school.
In 2005, Josef Cardinal Ratzinger, a few days before he became Pope Benedict XVI, resurrected Crimen Solicitationis from well-deserved obscurity and ordered again that its dictates be observed. At the time he was Dean of the College of Cardinals and the highest authority in the church during the interregnum after the death of John Paul II. Later, as he traveled to the United States as pope in May 2008, Benedict criticized the American bishops for their cover-ups but he did not acknowledge his own role as the enforcer of Crimen Solicitationis.
The two criminal sprees are over, partly because of publicity. The rate of accusations in the present decade is lower than in any previous decade back to 1950. The question of why the two kinds of abuses — those of the priests and those of the bishops -- occurred has not been fully answered.
To the bishops' credit, they commissioned an independent and comprehensive study of the scope and the causes of the problem, to be awarded by bid. Ironically, the contract was won by the faculty of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, whose namesake was the co-author of the Federalist Papers, President of The Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and a lifelong anti-Catholic who repeatedly proposed legislation to prevent Catholics from voting.
The study's first results are now available — and they are impeccable They shed light, competently and thoroughly, on the scope (not the causes) of the priest abuse problem. A second study — on the causes — is due next year. Ohio Judge Michael R. Merz, the present chairman of the National Review Board (a group of bishop-appointed Catholic laypersons whose task is to observe the bishops' handling of the scandal), says that the second study will examine the causes of both the priestly abuses and the bishops' responses to them.
The bishops apologized for the priestly sex crimes. But there has been no public apology yet by the bishops for their own cover-ups.
So, six years after the explosive details of the scandals became public, the incidents of sex abuse are down and the bishops have proven worthy of commendations for their new controls. But it seems likely that one long-term response of the Catholic laity to the two scandals will be to insert themselves to a much greater extent into the process of formulating church doctrine and practice.
The bishops have already given the laity the oversight authority of the National Review Board and its counterparts in the individual dioceses. That is an amazing and unprecedented bestowal of oversight authority on the laity.
Worked carefully, the lay review boards might be an instrument for bringing lay concerns on all church issues forward. That would be the best possible outcome of the dual scandals, and would go far to assure that such events never recur. It would also alter the balance of power in the church, however slightly.
Alas, in my own diocese of Portland, OR, the board's activities are secret, and even the membership of the board is secret.
That has a tinge of medievalism to it, and is hardly a good start.
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Sotto Voce
(Source: SJ.com)