Added to earlier settlements, the amount totals US$1.5 billion, reportedly the largest single child sex abuse settlement by a Catholic archdiocese.
In contrast, a deafening silence envelops CSA in Asia.
Bishops in Asia have not yet acknowledged CSA as an issue to be tackled. Those who worked closely with the bishops say in most cases, bishops cover each other’s backs and silence survivors and their supporters.
According to woman theologian Virginia Saldanha, former executive secretary of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India Women’s Commission, the Indian Church exemplifies how bishops stifle discussion about gender equality and CSA.
During her time with the bishops' conference, she said she "tried to speak up about CSA, but was terminated after my first term. A nun who would not stand up to the bishops was appointed in my place.”
Virginia said that after three consultations on ‘Gender Relations in the Church,’ Catholic women, including theologians and lawyers, drafted a ‘Code of Conduct for Church Personnel’ and offered it to bishops in 2012. “After much follow-up, the bishops brought out a gender-neutral policy in 2017 — circulated privately, but never published,” she said.
Local evidence and global media reports show that CSA is pervasive in Asia. Survivors include lay/religious women, seminarians, and minors from religious families in the Church’s pastoral and socio-economic institutional care; those in active Church service; nuns in convents, especially diocesan congregations tightly controlled by diocesan clergy; those trapped in economic need, substance abuse, dysfunctional marriages and families, emotional, moral, and faith crises, and seeking routine spiritual renewal.
Socio-cultural, religious, economic, and political diversity notwithstanding, many Asian countries have restricted democratic space, rights, and freedoms. This was reinforced by feudal/semi-feudal systems and colonial pasts, replaced by socialist or military governance post-independence.
Although gender equality has gained ground in much of Asia, many countries still fare poorly, including with pervasive violence against women and children. This often manifests in subtle and abusive forms of sexual management and institutionalized appropriation of women’s and girls’ sexualities in which sex is ironically also a taboo issue, especially for females.
This cultural inheritance, coupled with the Catholic Church’s male-centered clericalism and hierarchical leadership, has contributed to CSA in Asian churches. As elsewhere, this manifests in male power and control of victims’ sexualities bolstered by male clerical leadership and decision-making via a monopoly of theological and judicial knowledge, interpretation and processes to grant or deny victims’ rights and protections on CSA.
Given their powers as sacramental ministers, the spiritual power that elevates clerics over the laity combines with economic and political influence within the Church and with civil authorities, allowing CSA to flourish with impunity.
The preservation of the Church’s power, image, and assets, a desire to retain ordained priests, increase priestly vocations, preserve the laity’s faith in the institutional Church, Christianity’s status as a minority religion that is often under attack in many Asian countries, and siloed Church functioning drive institutional silence on CSA. Survivor silence for other reasons, converges to seal this secrecy.
Personal interviews and media reports confirm that the abused, caught in an emotional swirl, try to divine the happenings as boundaries are gradually or abruptly crossed — contradicting indoctrination on obedience and trust in the integrity, selfless stewardship, and spiritual wisdom of clerics, God’s earthly representatives, who they naively turn to as mentors, confessors, and spiritual guides.
They feel numb, ashamed, guilty, and sullied that their integrity is violated, the lines of monogamous conjugal sexuality, the premium on virginity for unmarried women and religious vows of chastity have been crossed; guilty about pregnancy, secret births, abandoning babies to orphanages, ‘murder’ due to forced abortions — contradicting ideal Asian-Christian femininity.
They are confused and conflicted about whether celibate priests could so behave unless triggered by them, about enjoying the abuser’s attention or fleeting pleasure, defying a cleric after taking religious vows of obedience and silent service for Christ.
They fear embarrassing and angering an authority figure; fear the abuser’s continuing abuse, control, and improper use of secret knowledge; sin and its implications; and the fall-out of others knowing and not believing. They are angry because of their inability to resist and at the abuser for whom life is business-as-usual.
Consequently, and because they lack knowledge of canon law or secular legal processes, they do not report, or delay reporting CSA, compromising their interests. Many bury the abuse silently in their deepest psychological recesses. Others cannot break from active memories or flashbacks. This has long-term adverse physical, sexual, psychological, spiritual, and socio-economic impacts on survivors.
Some Asian survivors have dared to take public action yielding positive impacts e.g., Church penalties to clergy even if temporary, and successful court outcomes. Others have been re-victimized, branded by congregations and local communities as provocateurs, traitors to the order, and satanic.
Church authorities have been unresponsive or silenced complainants. Congregations have tried to break survivor identity by cutting off all reference points to maintain it and survive — pressure to leave order and residence, withdrawing sustenance, and isolation from the religious community. Poor employability has reduced them to penury, with their survival ensured by their resilience and a supportive sisterhood.
Secular justice systems use the defendant’s claims about the survivor’s past sexual history or her “malicious” character to show that she is capable of consensual sex and is framing the clergyman. Offenders often go free on technical grounds or insufficient evidence.
The People of God in Asia must act collectively to make freedom from CSA and sexual abuse by anyone in the Church and society a living reality:
* Raise consciousness on CSA that fractures male clericalism. Target church-going laity, especially youth, on the drivers of CSA, its dynamics, and impacts on the whole Church via secular and Catholic media that these groups use.
* Promote Catholic women’s leadership/decision-making in Church and secular life.
* Provide platforms for the survivor and Asian feminist theologian perspectives on addressing CSA.
* Promote humane conceptions of sexuality, masculinity, femininity, and other gender identities and reform canon law to delink celibacy from the priesthood.
* Forge alliances between lay/religious Christian women, including survivors, with the secular women’s movement, including filing complaints under secular systems, further reforms to sexual harassment/rape laws, and survivor support.
* Enhance Church accountability to survivors through improved cooperation with civil authorities, rights-based review/re-design and implementation of canon law that centers survivor priorities and ensures robust penalties and psychological services for all sexual abusers — male/female, religious/lay.