Darkness visible

Catholic Church skirts real authority by being its own authority in sex abuse scandal

As sexual abuse scandals continue to shock the public and mar the reputation of the Catholic Church, new Vatican rules for investigating such cases lack any real external oversight and put bishops themselves in charge of investigating other bishops, which sounds like a recipe for more injustice than justice.

According to the rules, unironically titled, “You are the light of the world,” or, “Vos Estis,” lay Catholic organizations have the same policing and investigative duties over its members as do bishops over their own clergymen. The church also recognized that adults, not just minors, can be considered victims of abuse for the purposes of investigation.

These are supposed to be the improved rules?

‘Culture of impunity is over’?

During an interview with Catholic News Service when the rules were published this past spring, Oblate Father Andrew Small, secretary of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, said regulations increasing the number of protected people was a “welcomed” change.

He said another positive was that dioceses must have “organisms or offices easily accessible to the public” and that a “well known and publicly accessible (investigation) is part of justice.”

Noting that “Vos Estis” was now “definitive” and no longer “experimental,” he admitted that the church still had work to do in holding abusers and those who cover up for abusers accountable. He said the rules were, nonetheless, “a clear sign that a culture of impunity is over in the church.”

On the contrary, this isn’t quite the watershed declaration that church leaders make it out to be.

In 2019, the pope issued what Reuters dubbed a “landmark decree, making it obligatory for all priests and members of religious orders to report any suspicions of abuse, and holding bishops directly accountable for any abuse they commit themselves or cover up.”

First, why wasn’t it already mandatory that priests report suspicions of abuse and that bishops be held accountable for abuses that they commit or cover up?

Second, I don’t know how many priests and bishops will be standing in line to report crimes that they, themselves or their friends commit, but no matter how many tacit nods the church makes to internal reform, until it becomes committed to outside, secular accountability, the scandals, the criminal allegations and charges of nepotism and corruption will persist.

… until (the church) becomes committed to outside, secular accountability, the scandals, the criminal allegations, the charges of nepotism and corruption will persist.

BishopAccountability.org, an organization that documents abuse within the church, called the new rules a “disappointment” and did not meet “extensive revamping” that was needed for actual reform.

‘Self-policing packaged as accountability’

Co-director of the organization, Anne Barrett Doyle, said the document amounts to “self-policing packaged as accountability.”

Given the sheer volume and scope of the church’s sexual abuse scandal, one would think bishops and the pope himself would be more eager to get out in front of the allegations, deliver swift justice and work to repair the church’s battered image, but as we have seen in recent years, the church’s problems are deeply entrenched and beyond the scope of even the Holy See to fix.

The church has more than 221,000 parishes worldwide. Taking the example of just three nations, France, Germany and the United States, the number of reported abuses is staggering.

According to a report from the Bishops' Conference of France, 216,000 children were abused by priests between 1950-2020 in France alone. Add church employees to the mix, and the number balloons to 330,000, mostly boys.

In Germany, the church there found that more than 3,600 children had been abused by priests between 1946-2014.

In the United States between 1950-2002, 4,392 priests had been accused of more than 11,000 instances of abuse, which equals to about 4 percent of those serving during that time period, according to a 2004 report from John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In Illinois alone, an attorney general report found that about 2,000 children had been abused within the state’s six dioceses since 1950.

According to the John Jay study, abuse affected nearly 95 percent of dioceses and 60 percent of religious communities in the U.S.

A full nineteen years ago and before scores of other cases of abuse piled up at the church’s door, researchers called the findings “very disturbing:”

As we at John Jay College pored over the data, we were deeply moved by the recitation of the large numbers of offenses committed against children and the seriousness of their nature. But we are genuinely hopeful that out of this excruciating inquiry will emerge not only a better understanding of the abuse problem but a series of sensible, effective measures to reduce the possibility that other children will suffer the kinds of abuses which we have uncovered.

Unfortunately, this optimism proved to be misplaced and premature.

Church ignores warning

In 2014, Vatican representative to the United Nations, Silvano Tomasi, reported that more than 3,400 cases of abuse against children had been investigated during the previous 10 years after the John Jay study, and 884 priests had been removed as a result. And in the spring of 2017, Pope Francis said the church had a backlog of 2,000 cases that needed to be investigated up to that point.

In 2004 when the John Jay study was released, Karol Wojtyła, aka, John Paul II, was pope, and he, along with the three other popes before him bear no shortage of responsibility for the crimes that took place on their watches. But it wasn’t until the mid-1980s when the scandal broke wide open with the discovery that Gilbert Gauthe, who had entered seminary in Lafeyette, La., and became a priest, admitted to molesting at least 37 children, and according to documents and psychiatric reports, the instances of abuse against young boys could have been in the hundreds.

While Gauthe became the first Catholic priest in the United States to be indicted for repeated sexual abuses against children, multiple people within the church warned of a potential larger, systemic problem that could involve “hundreds of pedophile priests,” according to a 2019 Times-Picayune article. The warning was ignored.

For much of the past three-and-a-half decades since Gauthe’s crimes were exposed, the Catholic hierarchy has bobbed and weaved its way through a barrage of sex abuse complaints highlighted by blockbuster revelations in Boston in 2002 (when the church covered up sexual abuses by clergy) and in Pennsylvania last year (when a grand jury report revealed that 300 “predator priests” had abused more than 1,000 children in the state). Those reports of abuse finally prompted church leaders to take tangible steps to address the deep-seated sins that some believe span much of the church’s long history. — Times-Picayune, Feb. 21, 2019

Whatever well-meaning motives might exist with Pope Francis’ current efforts to address the sexual abuse problem, left to its own devices and without external oversight, the church, or any self-regulated system like it, has too many opportunities for cover-ups and abuse.

A police force that is rotten from the inside can’t, on any ethical or logical grounds, reform itself; likewise, a church with a disturbing number of morally bankrupt people in positions of high authority, some of whom have supervision over children, no less, is ill-equipped to serve as its own judge and jury.

So, if we are still hearing about sexual abuse cases in this age of social media and video surveillance when officials inside the church are painfully aware of the grim situation, “deep-seated sins” almost certainly span much, if not all, of the church’s long history, especially when one considers how much easier it was to get away with crimes decades or centuries ago.

The Catholic Church isn’t just some random nonprofit organization. It’s an organization that claims divine revelation for itself. Its venerated leaders claim to have some idea of right from wrong. They claim to get their notions about right and wrong directly from the Bible and heaven. They hold moral sway with some 1.4 billion people worldwide, yet, despite the darkness and shame being laid bare for all to see, the abuses have continued, seemingly unabated.

To compound the problem, some significant percentage of priests accused of having sexually explicit relationships with children never see jail time because the statute of limitations, which varies by state, passes before they can be tried and convicted. According to CHILD USA, most abuse victims are into their 50s before they come forward, and the statute of limitations has long-since expired.

That means the priest can often move on with their lives, taking new jobs and building new community relationships. — CHILD USA

Absolution

Attempting to bring about swift justice to sexual predators is one thing, and the church can keep swatting at cases, hoping that they just go away and that everyone, nonetheless, maintains a positive view of the organization, that it is a benevolent, force for good in the world, “the light of the world,” if you will, but until sexual abuse against children ceases altogether, whatever moral high ground the church claims for itself will be a tenuous foothold at best.

It feels almost naive to suggest this, but why is it so much to ask for priests to simply stop abusing children?

They are said to serve an all-loving, compassionate god who, presumably, does not approve of his representatives abusing children. If their god does approve, then he’s evil. If their god doesn’t approve and the priests are acting on their volition and desires, then what does that say about the church itself or the dioceses who put the predators in positions of high authority in the first place? What does it say about multiple supposedly “infallible,” god-ordained popes, that, after decades of hand-wringing and half-measures, holy men are still preying on children?

Ten years ago, I wrote in a newspaper column that Joseph Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict XVI, attempted to salvage his legacy for his own part in the church’s sex abuse scandal and other transgressions against humanity by taking the unprecedented measure of retiring from his position.

It’s hard to fathom which subset of people will be happier to see Ratzinger go: women, homosexuals, poverty-stricken Africans who suffered immeasurably from the church’s stance on condom use or the children who were victimized three times over, once for the initial rape, another for the church’s success in looking the other way and third for its failure to mete out swift justice to the accused. — “Pope tries to salvage legacy,” News-Herald, Feb. 13-14, 2013

I then suggested that if he could live long enough — he died in December 2022 — and distance himself from the office, that he might be able to “eke out some absolution.”

But at what point does the church itself answer for decades of ambivalence or outright apathy toward abuse cases, thus allowing evil men to go scot-free with their reputations in tact?

At what point does it answer for the generational misery and trauma that it has heaped on the most vulnerable members of society, children who trusted perverse and dishonest “holy men” to protect them and serve as their moral guides?

At what point does it answer for its darkest of sins, the darkest sin that anyone on Earth is capable of committing?

And is there any absolution for the monsters that lurk inside the gates?